I'd complain about this tax-free subsidy you mention, but 39 cents a stamp is lower than most other countries. Are you sure you're not just complaining for the sake of complaining?
The 39 cents (USD) required by the USPS to deliver a letter in the U.S. compares favorably with other industrialized countries, such as those of the European Union, where the postage for an ordinary domestic first-class letter is nearly twice that much.from wikipedia
Congress must aprove stamp increases, controlling any obscene profit taking that a private company would normally try.
Besides, they more powers and subsidies than any other delivery corporation out there.
Actually, that's a common misconception. The Postal Service is not subsidized in any way, shape or form. They are fully independent (in financial terms) and operational solely from stamps and postage rates. They do have given monopoly powers of first and third class mail, mainly what everyone considers your standard letters. But as far as your tax money and government spending goes, no money is given to the USPS to help them operate.
The 39 cent stamp is also quite similar and even better than most other country's rates.
I think people just like to "hate" the USPS because they think it's a governmental agency run by our tax money, and stamps are just another way to stick it to us. The reality is just the opposite.
Thanks for the obligatory South bashing. We're all better people because of it. Now everybody, ratchet up those stereotypes one more notch!
In case you miss my sarcasm, this parent should be modded troll, not insightful. I don't care if his base statement is true, it's obviously thrown in to stir up hate over something (and a group of people) that doesn't happen anymore.
I know that in many of the blatantly neoconservative states on the US,
Umm. I'd like to point out that the legislation under discussion is proposed by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. Please remove your biases that everything you dislike comes from the neocons.
I don't really understand this. Why would you switch? You just said you've never been screwed by PayPal, so you'd rather switch to a new program that has never been used and tested... The article itself says google is going to charge a higher rate than paypal, so I really want to know, what is this desire to switch based on? The Google name? The Google buzz? I really don't get it...I guess Google is still riding high on its "look at me I'm cool" factor...
You're safe in the midwest. Tornados are not intensified due to warming. You might be thinking of hurricanes (which climate experts are still debating). Take a read from Dr. Jeff Masters' blog about Al Gore's new movie. He lays out the scientific facts, and mentions Gore's mistatements about tornados, "In particular, the IPCC has not found any evidence that climate change has increased tornado frequency, or is likely to."
I can see why most of you find this pointless for slashdot, but this soda/mentos idea has been going around teachers and science education lesson plans for a while now. It's very popular with science middle school teachers and it gets your average apathetic 12 year old interested in science. So maybe not great for grown up slashdot, but it's still great nonetheless. Would be a great video to show in classrooms.
The author of this article praises ask.com for having fewer ads, but what he didn't realize is that the advertisements they do show are from Google Adwords. Much of the article compares Ask.com to Google and praises the former for being innovative and holding an edge over the others. Unfortunately, that point is somewhat hidden when you realize Google is profiting from their progress.
then they were about Immigration; which came in second to last, exactly as the OP opined.
Really? What are you reading? Immigration was well above energy prices, which the OP opined. And it's far from second to last...
"What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" Open-ended
War in Iraq 28
Economy/Jobs 15
Immigration 12
Gas/Heating oil crisis 6
Terrorism (general) 5
Health care 4
Defense/Military 3
President Bush 3
There's a subtle, but important, difference. Britain's cams look in while Texas's cams look out.
Really? Please give us your source for this amazing insight you have into the direction the cameras are pointing. How do you know they aren't facing the US side of the fence? I hope your knowledge of the camera direction is not from the stock footage of a fence that the BBC has posted... That would be an amazing assumption to make.
Well this will sound like a troll, and maybe it is, but you just have to love the opening quote from this BBC report:
The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.
I like how they slip the word 'apparently' in there, suggesting there are legal crossings that occur as individuals climb the fences, entering a country without permission. Linguistic sleights of hand like this make me chuckle. It's so obvious the writer has a negative view of the subject he is reporting and the editors seem to have skipped filtering this bias out. Remember people, these fences aren't so much rules as they are guidelines...
using redact to mean the adaptation of material by not displaying it, as in censorship (see U.S. Government documents), is fairly acurate.
We may just be mincing meaning here....but the "adaptation of material by not displaying it" is just a fancy way of saying DELETING or REMOVING or RETRACTING. You're not adapting something if you remove it. That's the definition of retract, not redact.
Improper use of the word redact. I'm assuming you got this word from the recent The Office episode where the employees could retract their complaints by "redacting" them. The word redact actually has very little to do with deleting or removing content. The definition is more like "edit" and relates to written publications: "to select or adapt for publication."
It's interesting that a television episode (which was hilarious, by the way) started using a different word, clearly to make it quirky and funny, and now everyone has adopted this new definition. Ok, maybe not surprising, but interesting nonetheless.
And what Gore actually said was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Which was true.
It's true if you believe R&D only happens because of the government. It's true if you believe the government is the creative force behind all its funded projects. It's true if you believe research is not possible without the government.
It was quotes like that that truly drove people (like me) away from Gore. He was (and still is, I think) of the single mind that the government is the sole driving force of the country and in this case, technological innovation. Not the people, not the college grads, not the researchers. The government. Hence, when people lashed back at him about his quote, he was utterly confused. He's probably still confused to this day, but well, that's just conjecture on my part:)
These problems would all go away if we just stopped making everyone's vote private. Attach video cameras to the booths, ask the voters to verbally speak their vote. Easy.
I'm surprised I'm the first one to post this. But it is clearly a monolith, as foretold in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Doom and destruction is sure to follow. Gather your belongings and make for the hills. If you look closely, you can see some apes jumping up and down in front of it.
Also in the article is the factoid that Americans consider Fox News the most trustworthy national news program overall (coming in at 11%)
An interesting and very, very sad tidbit.
Actually, I find this very encouraging for the USA. As the article states, the numbers from each of the major regions polled were: 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News
I'm proud to be in a country without one news source monopolizing all of the channels. The most popular news source in the US only came in at 11%! I think that's pretty surprising...and not something to be sad about. You're sad that 1 in 10 americans like fox news? Give me a break...that's one of the most diverse percentages I've heard about this country in a long time. It's something to cheer about.
It's not a matter of getting smaller. You can't get beyond a certain size because there are only so many inputs on a tongue that the human can differentiate between. If you go too small, the person can't tell left from right. I work with the guy who makes this tongue display, and it needs the full tongue to be effective.
Implanting a chip would depend on an entirely different area of sensory input. The reason they are using the tongue is because of the large number of sensitive inputs on its surface. Embedding a chip would essentially bypass this surface layer as you are now interfacing below the skin. I don't think it would be as effective because you couldn't reach as many input points... The key to this technology is maximizing input locales, not maximizing processing power.
Actually, it's being developed for both the Navy and the Army. The Navy application is more realistic in that divers have no other use for their tongue in that situation, so it provides a great sensory input. For marines or army soldiers, it has a prohibitive side to it in that the soldiers may actually want to speak, but instead find themselves with something on their tongue...
Also, assign credibility inversely proportional to the distance from the source. This guy works there, okay so the only way to describe "work at Microsoft" is to be there, but come on, are we going to get objective information?
Well, yes, if 100% of the people who work at Microsoft state that life is like X, then I would say it is X. Otherwise, you're just fooling yourself and making up stories about a company you know nothing about. Just because the information isn't agreeable to you doesn't mean it is not objective.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd complain about this tax-free subsidy you mention, but 39 cents a stamp is lower than most other countries. Are you sure you're not just complaining for the sake of complaining?
The 39 cents (USD) required by the USPS to deliver a letter in the U.S. compares favorably with other industrialized countries, such as those of the European Union, where the postage for an ordinary domestic first-class letter is nearly twice that much. from wikipedia
Congress must aprove stamp increases, controlling any obscene profit taking that a private company would normally try.
Besides, they more powers and subsidies than any other delivery corporation out there.
Actually, that's a common misconception. The Postal Service is not subsidized in any way, shape or form. They are fully independent (in financial terms) and operational solely from stamps and postage rates. They do have given monopoly powers of first and third class mail, mainly what everyone considers your standard letters. But as far as your tax money and government spending goes, no money is given to the USPS to help them operate.
The 39 cent stamp is also quite similar and even better than most other country's rates.
I think people just like to "hate" the USPS because they think it's a governmental agency run by our tax money, and stamps are just another way to stick it to us. The reality is just the opposite.
Numbers such as these doesn't tell shit anyway
Do riots over unemployment tell sh**?
Thanks for the obligatory South bashing. We're all better people because of it. Now everybody, ratchet up those stereotypes one more notch!
In case you miss my sarcasm, this parent should be modded troll, not insightful. I don't care if his base statement is true, it's obviously thrown in to stir up hate over something (and a group of people) that doesn't happen anymore.
I know that in many of the blatantly neoconservative states on the US,
Umm. I'd like to point out that the legislation under discussion is proposed by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. Please remove your biases that everything you dislike comes from the neocons.
The author of this article praises ask.com for having fewer ads, but what he didn't realize is that the advertisements they do show are from Google Adwords. Much of the article compares Ask.com to Google and praises the former for being innovative and holding an edge over the others. Unfortunately, that point is somewhat hidden when you realize Google is profiting from their progress.
Really? What are you reading? Immigration was well above energy prices, which the OP opined. And it's far from second to last...
"What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" Open-ended
War in Iraq 28
Economy/Jobs 15
Immigration 12
Gas/Heating oil crisis 6
Terrorism (general) 5
Health care 4
Defense/Military 3
President Bush 3
Really? Please give us your source for this amazing insight you have into the direction the cameras are pointing. How do you know they aren't facing the US side of the fence? I hope your knowledge of the camera direction is not from the stock footage of a fence that the BBC has posted... That would be an amazing assumption to make.
The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.
I like how they slip the word 'apparently' in there, suggesting there are legal crossings that occur as individuals climb the fences, entering a country without permission. Linguistic sleights of hand like this make me chuckle. It's so obvious the writer has a negative view of the subject he is reporting and the editors seem to have skipped filtering this bias out. Remember people, these fences aren't so much rules as they are guidelines...
We may just be mincing meaning here....but the "adaptation of material by not displaying it" is just a fancy way of saying DELETING or REMOVING or RETRACTING. You're not adapting something if you remove it. That's the definition of retract, not redact.
It's interesting that a television episode (which was hilarious, by the way) started using a different word, clearly to make it quirky and funny, and now everyone has adopted this new definition. Ok, maybe not surprising, but interesting nonetheless.
No pun intended.
It's true if you believe R&D only happens because of the government. It's true if you believe the government is the creative force behind all its funded projects. It's true if you believe research is not possible without the government.
It was quotes like that that truly drove people (like me) away from Gore. He was (and still is, I think) of the single mind that the government is the sole driving force of the country and in this case, technological innovation. Not the people, not the college grads, not the researchers. The government. Hence, when people lashed back at him about his quote, he was utterly confused. He's probably still confused to this day, but well, that's just conjecture on my part :)
.....kidding
They have visited multiple cities, posed as underage girls on myspace, and invited the men to their staged house. Dozens of men have showed up.
An interesting and very, very sad tidbit.
Actually, I find this very encouraging for the USA. As the article states, the numbers from each of the major regions polled were: 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News
I'm proud to be in a country without one news source monopolizing all of the channels. The most popular news source in the US only came in at 11%! I think that's pretty surprising...and not something to be sad about. You're sad that 1 in 10 americans like fox news? Give me a break...that's one of the most diverse percentages I've heard about this country in a long time. It's something to cheer about.
Well, yes, if 100% of the people who work at Microsoft state that life is like X, then I would say it is X. Otherwise, you're just fooling yourself and making up stories about a company you know nothing about. Just because the information isn't agreeable to you doesn't mean it is not objective.