I wish all uninformed voters would skip voting. (Er, I guess that would make them uninformed non-voters, then?) Anyway, yeah, if you have no idea what you're voting for, why bother? So you input random factors into the election, which will join with the rest of the "noise" from people who don't mark their ballots properly, or accidently vote for the wrong candidate, or what-not.
Of course, just by the fact that you realize you're uninformed puts you ahead of all the people who believe themselves informed by virtue of watching the political ads that show up during their favorite sitcoms.
Now, although I don't think not voting, or voting randomly, will make any difference, you might want to do what other responders have suggested: vote third-party down the ticket. I'd love to see both the Libertarians and the Greens get some candidates into congress.
You don't pay that much in the U.S.? I guess if you're in one of the lower income brackets you don't - but between federal, state, and city income tax, it adds up pretty close to 50%.
Add on top of that dental, medical, vision, and prescription drug insurance costs (four separate costs for most of us here in the U.S.). Plus, the annual deductible and co-pay if you ever actually use your medical plan, and it's easily over 50%.
Painkillers for a broken leg? I've been in hospitals in four different countries, and the only place I've ever had difficulty getting needed medication was in the United States. It's also where I've had to wait the longest in emergency rooms and the only place where I've had to prove my ability to pay before treatment, or pay in advance for any medical procedures. First find a doctor on your plan, then, for each treatment he suggests, contact your insurance and ask if they cover it. Now do all that while in severe pain and a fever of 103.
There's a lot of great things about this country, but anyone who tells you that our medical care is one of them has either never experienced it here, or never experienced it anywhere else.
We act like global warming caused by humans means the end of days, but surely the earth has undergone far more cataclysmic changes (such as after supervolcanoes), even during the lifespan of humanity, and we've lived to tell the tale?
Some of us have, anyway.
Sure, the earth has seen some big cataclysms in the past, which haven't wiped out all life on the planet. The big ass meteor that made the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago only wiped out about 90% of all species.
But even within, as you say, the lifespan of humanity, there've been some major catastrophes, that haven't wiped us out. A couple of ice ages, we weathered through (so to speak). And even more recently, plagues, war, famine, huge volcanic eruptions. Sure the human species have survived. Villages, towns, cities, nations, even entire civilizations have been wiped out, but humans survive.
Mostly, I just don't want to be part of one of the civilizations that gets wiped out.
The same can be said about population pressure. The more people there are, the greater the chance some big disease will come along to take care of the problem, or some asshole pushes the button and nukes us back to the stoneage. Either way, nature will adjust. She's just not as picky as I'd like about her methods.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine told me about a system that his company had installed on their inbound voice-activated phone system. You know the type, "Please say 'billing' to be tranfered to billing. Please say 'I like this music' to continue to wait on hold, etc." (or whatever the prompts are).
Anyway, the new voice-recognition system included volume and scans for common profanity to move the caller ahead in the queue if they were getting upset. (Because, as anyone who's done tech support or customer service can tell you, angry customers are the most fun).
Since he told me about this, I've been trying it. Pretty much any time I'm in the queue to some company (and not sitting in a cube surrounded by co-workers) I swear at the phone. I haven't done any formal study of course, but it does seem to work for some companies.
It isn't for not pirating, it's for actively opposing piracy:
From TFA:
Scouts will be instructed in the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways copyrighted materials may be stolen.
Scouts also must choose one activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy. They also can create public service announcements urging others not to steal movies or music.
Some of this was also quoted in the summary. Now c'mon, we all sometimes respond without reading the article, but to skip the summary??
I know exactly what you mean. I've mentioned occasionally to people that I don't own a TV. Frequently, a co-worker will ask me if I caught such-and-such a show - I'll reply I don't own a TV, and they immediately go on to ask "well, what about this other show"?
I've actually had one boss who, the fourth of fifth time she asked me about a paticular show and I told her I don't own a TV set, get exasperated and tell me, "Sheesh, Pat, you're an engineer! You can pick up a TV at target for like 50 bucks!" Just couldn't grasp that it would be a choice.
I do watch television, though: I have a projector hooked up to my computer, and a Netflix account and occasionally buy DVDs as well. But, as someone mentioned, it really is a completely different thing. And, I notice that, being able to watch whatever I want, whenever I want, instead of being tied to a schedule, I end up watching far less.
Although I own one now, I've often gone years without owning a car, either, and get similar stares of disbelief.
I think that's the genesis behind the "Kill your television first!" bumber stickers. People see the "Kill your television" bumber stickers and can't imagine that these people actually got rid of their televisions.
"Learn the science not the hype" is always good advice.
But it implies learning the science, rather than just believing what you've been told by a different source that the science is.
Depleted Uranium is certainly more radioactive than common dirt. According to the UNEP report which you referenced, and of which a summary can be found on the WHO web site Depleted Uranium "is weakly radioactive and a radiation dose from it would be about 60% of that from purified natural uranium with the same mass." It's no use in current reactors, though we've been stockpiling it since the 50's for use in some future reactors which could make use of it. So far, none have, but it's still theoretically possible.
According to a pamphlet the US Army published for its troops back in the early 90's, DU can be relatively safe to handle, if all proper precautions are taken.
Unfortunately, I can't find the pamphlet right now, but, some of the interesting bits from it:
DU radiation is almost completely Alpha, with very little Beta, and no Gamma radiation. What this means is that it's very easy to block the radiation. A good lead-based paint (such as those used over the DU tank armor) is 100% effective. If the paint gets scratched (as tanks tend to do), covering the exposed area with duct tape will be safe enough.
It also recommends treatment for DU wounds, including making sure the wound is completely cleaned, and passing a geiger counter over the area to make sure everything was taken out.
The radiation in this case makes it actually safer, as it makes it easier to find, including areas sprayed with microscopic bits, as it has a tendency to powder if it passes through, say, steel.
The dusting is what makes it particularly dangerous to civilians: it passes through tanks on the battlefield, gets powdered, dissolves in rain, sinks into the ground, contaminates crops, and never goes away.
Uranium, whether depleted or not, is also highly toxic, on the level of arsenic, so it's not good to get into the bloodstream. (Of course, being shot with DU bullets will probably kill you long before you have to worry about it's poisonous effects.)
...this law would cover US based gambling sites as well. There's nothing nationalistic going on here.
Not entirely accurate.
The law outlaws online poker and casino games, which are mostly provided by UK companies.
The law still permits online gaming by companies providing horserace betting, "fantasy" games, and lotteries, which are primarily US-owned.
Although I would guess the protectionism in this case is specifically from the state of Nevada, not from the US as a whole. The state has a long history of aggresively lobbying other states to keep gambling illegal.
And, don't forget that just about his very first act in office was to cut foreign aid to any health clinics that wouldn't agreee not to provide, or even discuss, abortion, with their patients.
He hasn't done much about it in the U.S. because he doesn't have that power. Not personally, but if you look at the whole political machine of which he is the figurehead, they've done quite a bit with cutting government funding, passign anti-abortion laws, and shutting down clinics on a regional basis.
What I want is to be able to download a show and watch it on whatever device I want to watch it on. I want to be able to watch it on my PDA while during the train trip to work, or on my TV in my living room, or on my desktop computer in the den, or on a laptop.
I want to be able to back it up, or burn it to DVD to watch at a friend's house or later at any time without losing my entire collection if my hard drive crashes.
I want to download it on my Windows machine and watch it on my Linux laptop. Or vice-versa. I want to be able to download it over a wireless connection if I'm stuck in the airport for several hours longer than I expected and watch it on my laptop, then later transfer it to my TV and watch it again weeks or months later.
Can their service do all that? Because if not, it still lags behind pirate networks. I'm perfectly happy to pay $1.99 per episode, or maybe even more. But not if it locks me into a single vendor's viewer software, even if it's free, and definitely not if I can't make backups of any of content.
There's no such thing as a "temporary" restriction, apparently.
It has been forbidden, in the United States, to take liquids of any kind onto an airplane ever since the so-called "foiled terrorist plot" (another name for it would be "a bunch of guys bragging to each other how they would take down an airplane if they wanted to" since it never got anywhere near the level of "plot". But I digress).
Well damn. I wonder if Intel, Motorola, Cisco, Vodafone, or MCI will ever get "actual" IT departments, as they all currently allow employees to IM to people outside the company, through their firewalls.
Most people... know not to give out their credit card number to someone who calls them on the phone and asks for it, regardless of where they say they're calling from.
Well, you know that, and I know that, but I don't believe that most people know that.
Several years back, while working as a data-entry temp, I spent about three months on a project fixing bad orders in one company's database. This mostly involved calling the person who'd placed the order (often after hunting down a phone number for them) and asking them for the missing information, which was usually a bad credit card number (either the card didn't work, or the number was wrong).
If the person didn't want to give the information over the phone to a person that had called them, we were instructed to give them the company's main 800 number, and a reference number so they could verify that it was legitimate. In three months I did not have to give this information out a single time.
I was constantly surprised at first, but in three months, hundreds of phone calls, not a single person refused to give me their full name, address, alternate phone numbers, and credit card numbers over the phone when I called them. Since some of these orders were many months old, many of the customers didn't even remember placing the order. And at least once a day I got responses along the line of "Oh, I didn't place that. I guess my husband must have. Hold on, I'll go get his card for you."
Of course, it could be just because D&D is older, better known, and much better advertised.
And, as much as D&D lends itself well to the "power gamer" style (in all it's incarnations: d20 even isn't nearly as bad as the older versions), WW is certainly not immune to it at all. Anyone who's interested purely in making their character more powerful is going to be able to do that in any system.
The other strike White Wolf has against it is that, as much as D&D encourages power gaming, WW encourages angsty adolescent whining, which some of us find just as annoying. And this was true long before they came out with Wraith and its infamous "angst" stat.
People's willingness to take risks in online worlds is radically different.
This is true. I almost never try to infiltrate galactic death machines in real life without proper protective gear and never rely on finding all the ammo I need laying around in containers in empty rooms.
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I wish all uninformed voters would skip voting. (Er, I guess that would make them uninformed non-voters, then?) Anyway, yeah, if you have no idea what you're voting for, why bother? So you input random factors into the election, which will join with the rest of the "noise" from people who don't mark their ballots properly, or accidently vote for the wrong candidate, or what-not.
Of course, just by the fact that you realize you're uninformed puts you ahead of all the people who believe themselves informed by virtue of watching the political ads that show up during their favorite sitcoms.
Now, although I don't think not voting, or voting randomly, will make any difference, you might want to do what other responders have suggested: vote third-party down the ticket. I'd love to see both the Libertarians and the Greens get some candidates into congress.
Great. It's bad enough that I just got a $400 ticket issued by a camera, but now my phone is going to be able to give me speeding tickets, too?
I'll tell you in two weeks.
"Almost 50% taxes"?
You don't pay that much in the U.S.? I guess if you're in one of the lower income brackets you don't - but between federal, state, and city income tax, it adds up pretty close to 50%.
Add on top of that dental, medical, vision, and prescription drug insurance costs (four separate costs for most of us here in the U.S.). Plus, the annual deductible and co-pay if you ever actually use your medical plan, and it's easily over 50%.
Painkillers for a broken leg? I've been in hospitals in four different countries, and the only place I've ever had difficulty getting needed medication was in the United States. It's also where I've had to wait the longest in emergency rooms and the only place where I've had to prove my ability to pay before treatment, or pay in advance for any medical procedures. First find a doctor on your plan, then, for each treatment he suggests, contact your insurance and ask if they cover it. Now do all that while in severe pain and a fever of 103.
There's a lot of great things about this country, but anyone who tells you that our medical care is one of them has either never experienced it here, or never experienced it anywhere else.
Some of us have, anyway.
Sure, the earth has seen some big cataclysms in the past, which haven't wiped out all life on the planet. The big ass meteor that made the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago only wiped out about 90% of all species.
But even within, as you say, the lifespan of humanity, there've been some major catastrophes, that haven't wiped us out. A couple of ice ages, we weathered through (so to speak). And even more recently, plagues, war, famine, huge volcanic eruptions. Sure the human species have survived. Villages, towns, cities, nations, even entire civilizations have been wiped out, but humans survive.
Mostly, I just don't want to be part of one of the civilizations that gets wiped out.
The same can be said about population pressure. The more people there are, the greater the chance some big disease will come along to take care of the problem, or some asshole pushes the button and nukes us back to the stoneage. Either way, nature will adjust. She's just not as picky as I'd like about her methods.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine told me about a system that his company had installed on their inbound voice-activated phone system. You know the type, "Please say 'billing' to be tranfered to billing. Please say 'I like this music' to continue to wait on hold, etc." (or whatever the prompts are).
Anyway, the new voice-recognition system included volume and scans for common profanity to move the caller ahead in the queue if they were getting upset. (Because, as anyone who's done tech support or customer service can tell you, angry customers are the most fun).
Since he told me about this, I've been trying it. Pretty much any time I'm in the queue to some company (and not sitting in a cube surrounded by co-workers) I swear at the phone. I haven't done any formal study of course, but it does seem to work for some companies.
Fun, too.
From TFA:
Some of this was also quoted in the summary. Now c'mon, we all sometimes respond without reading the article, but to skip the summary??
I can see it now:
No, mom, I'm not pirating movies, I'm... um... doing research for my MPAA merit badge! Yeah, it's for the Boy Scouts!
I know exactly what you mean. I've mentioned occasionally to people that I don't own a TV. Frequently, a co-worker will ask me if I caught such-and-such a show - I'll reply I don't own a TV, and they immediately go on to ask "well, what about this other show"?
I've actually had one boss who, the fourth of fifth time she asked me about a paticular show and I told her I don't own a TV set, get exasperated and tell me, "Sheesh, Pat, you're an engineer! You can pick up a TV at target for like 50 bucks!" Just couldn't grasp that it would be a choice.
I do watch television, though: I have a projector hooked up to my computer, and a Netflix account and occasionally buy DVDs as well. But, as someone mentioned, it really is a completely different thing. And, I notice that, being able to watch whatever I want, whenever I want, instead of being tied to a schedule, I end up watching far less.
Although I own one now, I've often gone years without owning a car, either, and get similar stares of disbelief.
I think that's the genesis behind the "Kill your television first!" bumber stickers. People see the "Kill your television" bumber stickers and can't imagine that these people actually got rid of their televisions.
Even stranger, Iraq, like most middle-eastern countries, doesn't actually use Arabic numbers themselves.
They use Persian numbers.
But it implies learning the science, rather than just believing what you've been told by a different source that the science is.
Depleted Uranium is certainly more radioactive than common dirt. According to the UNEP report which you referenced, and of which a summary can be found on the WHO web site Depleted Uranium "is weakly radioactive and a radiation dose from it would be about 60% of that from purified natural uranium with the same mass." It's no use in current reactors, though we've been stockpiling it since the 50's for use in some future reactors which could make use of it. So far, none have, but it's still theoretically possible.
According to a pamphlet the US Army published for its troops back in the early 90's, DU can be relatively safe to handle, if all proper precautions are taken.
Unfortunately, I can't find the pamphlet right now, but, some of the interesting bits from it:
DU radiation is almost completely Alpha, with very little Beta, and no Gamma radiation. What this means is that it's very easy to block the radiation. A good lead-based paint (such as those used over the DU tank armor) is 100% effective. If the paint gets scratched (as tanks tend to do), covering the exposed area with duct tape will be safe enough.
It also recommends treatment for DU wounds, including making sure the wound is completely cleaned, and passing a geiger counter over the area to make sure everything was taken out.
The radiation in this case makes it actually safer, as it makes it easier to find, including areas sprayed with microscopic bits, as it has a tendency to powder if it passes through, say, steel.
The dusting is what makes it particularly dangerous to civilians: it passes through tanks on the battlefield, gets powdered, dissolves in rain, sinks into the ground, contaminates crops, and never goes away.
Uranium, whether depleted or not, is also highly toxic, on the level of arsenic, so it's not good to get into the bloodstream. (Of course, being shot with DU bullets will probably kill you long before you have to worry about it's poisonous effects.)
This video game is so intense they're trying to ban it?
Sweet! I gotta get me a copy of that game!
Where can I buy it *right now*??!
That case was an aberration.
Almost every executed criminal since then as stayed dead.
Not entirely accurate.
The law outlaws online poker and casino games, which are mostly provided by UK companies.
The law still permits online gaming by companies providing horserace betting, "fantasy" games, and lotteries, which are primarily US-owned.
Although I would guess the protectionism in this case is specifically from the state of Nevada, not from the US as a whole. The state has a long history of aggresively lobbying other states to keep gambling illegal.
And, don't forget that just about his very first act in office was to cut foreign aid to any health clinics that wouldn't agreee not to provide, or even discuss, abortion, with their patients.
He hasn't done much about it in the U.S. because he doesn't have that power. Not personally, but if you look at the whole political machine of which he is the figurehead, they've done quite a bit with cutting government funding, passign anti-abortion laws, and shutting down clinics on a regional basis.
I'm just glad they didn't have those when I was in college, lived a mile and a half away from the grocery store, and didn't own a car...
Hm. Now that you mentioned it, it got me curious so I tried it.
I entered my SSN into Google.
It replied with "-1635"
Absolutely!
I'm not addicted.
I only use it for legitimate, work-related purposes!
Certainly I wouldn't be reading slashdot in the middle of the day when I'm supposed to be working or anything!
I can quit any time I want.
I don't necessarily want to download to the TV.
What I want is to be able to download a show and watch it on whatever device I want to watch it on. I want to be able to watch it on my PDA while during the train trip to work, or on my TV in my living room, or on my desktop computer in the den, or on a laptop.
I want to be able to back it up, or burn it to DVD to watch at a friend's house or later at any time without losing my entire collection if my hard drive crashes.
I want to download it on my Windows machine and watch it on my Linux laptop. Or vice-versa. I want to be able to download it over a wireless connection if I'm stuck in the airport for several hours longer than I expected and watch it on my laptop, then later transfer it to my TV and watch it again weeks or months later.
Can their service do all that? Because if not, it still lags behind pirate networks. I'm perfectly happy to pay $1.99 per episode, or maybe even more. But not if it locks me into a single vendor's viewer software, even if it's free, and definitely not if I can't make backups of any of content.
It has been forbidden, in the United States, to take liquids of any kind onto an airplane ever since the so-called "foiled terrorist plot" (another name for it would be "a bunch of guys bragging to each other how they would take down an airplane if they wanted to" since it never got anywhere near the level of "plot". But I digress).
The TSA publishes an online list of restricted items.
Well damn. I wonder if Intel, Motorola, Cisco, Vodafone, or MCI will ever get "actual" IT departments, as they all currently allow employees to IM to people outside the company, through their firewalls.
Well, you know that, and I know that, but I don't believe that most people know that.
Several years back, while working as a data-entry temp, I spent about three months on a project fixing bad orders in one company's database. This mostly involved calling the person who'd placed the order (often after hunting down a phone number for them) and asking them for the missing information, which was usually a bad credit card number (either the card didn't work, or the number was wrong).
If the person didn't want to give the information over the phone to a person that had called them, we were instructed to give them the company's main 800 number, and a reference number so they could verify that it was legitimate. In three months I did not have to give this information out a single time.
I was constantly surprised at first, but in three months, hundreds of phone calls, not a single person refused to give me their full name, address, alternate phone numbers, and credit card numbers over the phone when I called them. Since some of these orders were many months old, many of the customers didn't even remember placing the order. And at least once a day I got responses along the line of "Oh, I didn't place that. I guess my husband must have. Hold on, I'll go get his card for you."
I also had good luck once though accessdenied.net
Of course, it could be just because D&D is older, better known, and much better advertised.
And, as much as D&D lends itself well to the "power gamer" style (in all it's incarnations: d20 even isn't nearly as bad as the older versions), WW is certainly not immune to it at all. Anyone who's interested purely in making their character more powerful is going to be able to do that in any system.
The other strike White Wolf has against it is that, as much as D&D encourages power gaming, WW encourages angsty adolescent whining, which some of us find just as annoying. And this was true long before they came out with Wraith and its infamous "angst" stat.
This is true. I almost never try to infiltrate galactic death machines in real life without proper protective gear and never rely on finding all the ammo I need laying around in containers in empty rooms.