But look at what the expense is actually covering. And the fact that it's simply renovating an existing structure. Half a billion is absurd. It's not like they're starting out with any materials or employees and doing it all from scratch.
I prefer the argument that if it weren't for the extraordinary taxes (especially when you consider all the taxes you are really gouged for, beyond just income tax - and the increase in the tax rate over, say, when your grandparents were around), think of all the things you could do. In my early thirties, I could have already put my brother and sister through private four year universities and bought our mom a nice house. Or, you know, have covered 1/900,000,000th of the 2010 budget.
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface". Or something.
Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far. How much longer are these guys going to get away with these twenty million dollar Drupal *.gov website projects and other scams?!
Which, of course, is only useful for setting records, since you need a battery to keep you running when you're not directly under the midday sun. Then they'll only need to increase the speed by at least another 50%. And then maintain that when the full weight of a real car. And its passengers. And cargo. And then figure out some way to keep the solar receivers from being damaged by things like regular road debris (rocks, etc) and hail. Or from just losing their efficiency rather quickly over time.
Give us another fifty years and things might start to be useful - as long as there remains incentive for these efforts.
What else are they supposed to do? Go without internet access? I work from home. Having internet access is imperative. You might as well be suggesting that if you don't like high taxes, you should just put your money where your mouth is and be homeless and unemployed, so you can really stick it to them by not having to pay any income tax at all.
I agree, in concept, but do you really believe any broadband companies would have laid all that cable if it hadn't been subsidized by the tax payers? I doubt even one would have, much less enough to generate actual competition. I don't know what alternatives there may have been, given that.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Netflix doesn't cost them a lot of money, because of bandwidth. It costs them a lot of money, because people would rather ditch their cable television service in favor of Netflix.
I don't think it matters. This isn't about scarcity. It's about cash. I have Comcast and as a residential customer, I can't use more than 250gb/mo. Supposedly, because I'd be impacting those around me who also need to use the service. However, for an extra $40/mo, I can get a business account and now I use a couple terabytes and nobody even blinks an eye. Even though it's on the same network, the same pipes, the same address, the same building, and the same neighborhood and supposedly "impacting" the same people.
That's absurd. I easily go through 40gb/day. There are two of us in my house and between netflix, podcasts, video podcasts, sites like GiantBomb and their HD content, streaming radio, off site backup services, VPN to work, videogames, Steam, and so on . . . you consume a lot of data. And again, we're only two people.
The average person watches something like six hours of television a day. If they're watching Netflix, instead, that's twelve gigabytes of content per day. Per person. If you're a family of four, that's 48gb/day just for Netflix.
Hell, I just installed Dragon Age and Team Fortress onto my new box via Steam and that was close to 30gb, combined. And if I had already hit some limit and they were going to charge me $3/gb, that would have cost me $90 on top of the cost of the two games.
Why doesn't anyone call these providers on their bullshit claims of things like "five percent of users consume 95% of the traffic" and "the average user only checks their email and reads the news paper online"? If the average user consumes almost no bandwidth whatsoever, then there should be plenty of bandwidth available for the "few" heavy users to use.
While the government does have tanks and nukes, it would be at least moderately difficult if they had to content with a couple hundred million armed citizens.
Of course, the government doesn't need to fear any of its own people at any rate, because we'll tolerate any violation and abuse of our rights and privacy and humanities -- as long as we can still get a mocha latte, buy in bulk at Costco, drive a mini-van, and watch Jersey Shore.
I seriously have to question the people who go out hunting animals when there's a perfectly good grocery store down the block. They like to talk about how you should kill the food you eat and blah blah blah, but all too often it is so clear that they're just wankers practically ejaculating at the idea of getting to fire a gun -- or even better, kill something! WHOOOOO!
However, I am the last person who wants any kind of gun ban. For one thing, banning guns doesn't restrict their flow. Banning guns doesn't eliminate murders. After all, how is outlawing firearms going to change the mind of someone who is already planning to murder someone (an already existing crime)? Not to mention, you know, the whole Constitutionality of it.
More importantly, a wise man once said something along the lines of how people should not be afraid of their government -- government should be afraid of the people. Kind of hard to do if people only arm themselves with butter knives and baseball bats.
Also, if we're so concerned with the value of human life, why don't we outlaw cars? Automobiles kill FAR more people very year than guns do. If we're not going to start outlawing things based on their true and actual mathematical impact on society, then we're just being disingenuous prigs.
Anyway, the point shouldn't be to strip rights away from the American people. It should be to uphold the rights of all Americans, while finding a way (impossibly difficult as it seems) to protect ourselves. And when it comes down to it, we have to accept that being a truly free society means having to endure some awful outcomes. This means that free speech comes with some truly vile speech. The right to own weapons includes the occasional freak that misuses them (though usually not a legal gun owner, it seems). And as I pointed out, above, we're already willing to make certain sacrifices. We've decided that even though cars kill FAR more people than guns do, the convenience of driving a car to the 7-11 for some nachos far outweighs the value of human life.
As much as I despise Palin, I think we all need to reign ourselves in and apply a little common sense, here. The people responsible for committing heinous acts are the people who commit those heinous acts. Unless we're going to go down the road of holding authors liable for acts committed by readers of their works. Developers liable for acts committed by players of their games, and musicians for acts committed by listeners of their music.
A politician inciting things is certainly a little more direct and abhorrent, no doubt. I don't think that society should overlook it. But it's a dangerous thing to try and associate blame to one person for the actions of another.
This definitely doesn't seem like the actions of someone with true power, however. If you have any real clout in government, you off people who inconvenience you by having them crash into the side of mountains in their small single engine or small prop planes -- or engineering a stroke or cardiac arrest.
Also, I believe you're correct that you can be charged with assault even if you don't physically touch another person. I might be entirely wrong, here, but my understanding is that if I were to pull my fist back and prepare to punch you -- and acted like I was going to and you had an honest fear that I was going to -- it could be construed as an assault. But like you say, that is stretching things to an extreme. An irresponsible politician saying something shitty that a nutjob acts on is hardly criminal behavior by the politician.
More masturbation material for Janet Napolitano and the rest of the government to beat off to as they try to sell us on the whole "give up your liberties and we promise you security!" bullshit. And no, I'm not entirely being sarcastic. I wish I were, but we all know that our government or portions of it aren't beyond manufacturing incidents to promote initiatives.
Anyway, we can expect many days of the same old rhetoric about gun violence blah blah blah and politics blah blah blah and left this and right that yadda yadda yadda. We've gone through this too many times to count, before.
Both the left and the right are full of fucking myopic idiots who aren't capable enough of abstract thought to recognize that their shit stinks just as bad as the people they hate with every ounce of their existence. Maybe one of you stink a lot worse today than the other, but this is an isolated moment in time and come the next polarizing story, the tables will be turned and the other side will be making the same claim that you are.
It's really a shame that the Tea Party (an essentially libertarian movement by Ron Paul) was raped and pillaged by a bunch of nutty right-wingers who took it over right by the side of Palin over the last three or four years and completely perverted it. It must be what real republicans went through when the religious nuts took over their party.
Anyway, we can never truly know the truth behind events like this, even if we get news reports claiming some sort of resolution. Hell, remember the "Portland Xmas Tree Bomber" who was about as dangerous as the van full of saw dust or whatever he had? Entraped and encouraged and supported by law enforcement organizations into perpetrating a supposedly horrid crime (well, non-crime, since there was nothing volatile in his van).
Or, it could truly just be some angry nutjob. We certainly have plenty of them in this country and no diminishing of their numbers in site as idiots continue to fall for the idea that one side is the true path or the other is, rather than standing back and rationally observing that they're both the problem and this bullshit fighting and conflict is just feeding into the gears of the machine.
Faith is a positive assertion of something which can not be proven. You can claim that a jolly race of gnomes lives just under the surface of Mars and have faith that you are right, but my claiming that it isn't so (until evidence and then proof is discovered) is not a claim of 'faith'.
It's a common tactic for religious or supernatural people who make claims about god and ghosts and paranormal activities and all sorts of goofy stuff to try and gain validity for their beliefs by asserting that the point of logic and common sense is on-par with the value of their own beliefs, but it doesn't sucker anyone.
One can believe whatever they wish, but I do hope people stop trying to equate "I believe something" with "therefore it is just as valid as anything derived by scientific method".
I'm not sure what your final comment means, either. His supposed evidence is compelling, unless it interferes with someone's belief system? That doesn't make any sense. That's like saying evidence supporting the theory of evolution is only valid so long as it doesn't clash with someone's belief that the earth is a few thousand years old and that men lived with dinosaurs and rode them around like giant 25-cent K-Mart entrance rides, no?
This reminds me of people who talk about the singularity, which some feel will allow us to essentially live forever through the combination of artificial intelligence and our life history of knowledge and actions. Or, as people like Kurzweil feel, literally actually living forever through medical advancements post-singularity.
I'm unable to grasp the concept that you somehow have eternal life simply because there is an entity out there with all of your information that behaves as you do. People talk about it as a possibility as if it's some great comfort, but I don't get it. If you made an exact copy of me right now and stood us side by side and then you killed me, I would still endure the pain of death. *I* would cease to exist. There would be a duplicate of me that at best seems exactly like me to the rest of the world. And that benefits the rest of the world (and, in some way, perhaps your remaining loved ones) . . . but *I* have still experienced all the horrible agony of death and non-existence.
Anyway, the fortunate thing about being human is that time does solve a great deal and over time you come to be able to cope with even the most horrible atrocities. You may grieve a few weeks or months over a lost relationship. You may grieve months or more over the loss of a loved one. You may grieve for *years* over a particularly tragic loss (a child or truly grisly or dire circumstances, for example). But as long as you can keep your head above water, chances are you'll eventually overcome it and move on.
I think what people would benefit most from understanding is that they barely matter while they're alive, so they're going to matter a fuck of a lot less after they die. You live. You fuck around. You probably breed. You die. All the great and horrible things you did during your life are not going to be remembered by a single soul for long beyond your death. Unless you're Hitler or Manson, maybe.
If you matter to the world, your legacy will be maintained for you. For the other 99.9999 percent of us, maintaining our legacy is irrelevant, because it's unlikely anyone will care after we're dead anymore than they cared while we were alive.
The fact is that the most fortunate among us matter to a few people around us while we are alive and those left alive after we die. The first generation removed from us (the first generation after we die that is not old enough to have known us while we were alive) will barely care and might know our names and a few stories about us from remaining family. Think of how much most of us know about our great grandparents. Chances are, we don't even know what their name was.
By the time that generation reaches adulthood, we'll be nothing more than a name in the family tree that some lonely elderly family member keeps in her spare time and our entire existence will have been forgotten, but for our name to the very few who care to research a family tree (and, frankly, I don't know why anyone wants to since it's hardly relevant).
Minor celebrities will be almost entirely forgotten within a century. Your most significant writers, actors, musicians, criminals, and politicians will remain a part of society for a century. Even most of them will fade away after about a hundred years and people will start to confuse what Edison and Franklin each invented. Presidents will be a meaningless name on a list. After several centuries, hardly anyone will be remembered. Outside of niche historians, we're probably talking a very fine handful. Your Hitlers. Your Mansons. Your JFKs and Churchills, perhaps. Your Edison and Franklin might still be remembered. Maybe your Agatha Christie.
The fact of the matter is that even the brightest and most significant and prevalent among us will fade with time, so why would the rest of us waste our time fooling ourselves into thinking anyone is going to give a fuck about our greatest moments, much less our ramblings and meanderings? If you matter, it'll be taken care of for you. If you don't, you'll quickly have -- for all intents and purposes -- have never existed.
Slashdot Mirror
But look at what the expense is actually covering. And the fact that it's simply renovating an existing structure. Half a billion is absurd. It's not like they're starting out with any materials or employees and doing it all from scratch.
I prefer the argument that if it weren't for the extraordinary taxes (especially when you consider all the taxes you are really gouged for, beyond just income tax - and the increase in the tax rate over, say, when your grandparents were around), think of all the things you could do. In my early thirties, I could have already put my brother and sister through private four year universities and bought our mom a nice house. Or, you know, have covered 1/900,000,000th of the 2010 budget.
More importantly, that's $5 per tax-payer. Anyway, that's not really relevant to the justification of the expense.
Good point. They should invade some other country that nobody cares about and would never notice.
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface". Or something.
Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far. How much longer are these guys going to get away with these twenty million dollar Drupal *.gov website projects and other scams?!
Which, of course, is only useful for setting records, since you need a battery to keep you running when you're not directly under the midday sun. Then they'll only need to increase the speed by at least another 50%. And then maintain that when the full weight of a real car. And its passengers. And cargo. And then figure out some way to keep the solar receivers from being damaged by things like regular road debris (rocks, etc) and hail. Or from just losing their efficiency rather quickly over time.
Give us another fifty years and things might start to be useful - as long as there remains incentive for these efforts.
What else are they supposed to do? Go without internet access? I work from home. Having internet access is imperative. You might as well be suggesting that if you don't like high taxes, you should just put your money where your mouth is and be homeless and unemployed, so you can really stick it to them by not having to pay any income tax at all.
I agree, in concept, but do you really believe any broadband companies would have laid all that cable if it hadn't been subsidized by the tax payers? I doubt even one would have, much less enough to generate actual competition. I don't know what alternatives there may have been, given that.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Netflix doesn't cost them a lot of money, because of bandwidth. It costs them a lot of money, because people would rather ditch their cable television service in favor of Netflix.
I don't think it matters. This isn't about scarcity. It's about cash. I have Comcast and as a residential customer, I can't use more than 250gb/mo. Supposedly, because I'd be impacting those around me who also need to use the service. However, for an extra $40/mo, I can get a business account and now I use a couple terabytes and nobody even blinks an eye. Even though it's on the same network, the same pipes, the same address, the same building, and the same neighborhood and supposedly "impacting" the same people.
That's absurd. I easily go through 40gb/day. There are two of us in my house and between netflix, podcasts, video podcasts, sites like GiantBomb and their HD content, streaming radio, off site backup services, VPN to work, videogames, Steam, and so on . . . you consume a lot of data. And again, we're only two people.
The average person watches something like six hours of television a day. If they're watching Netflix, instead, that's twelve gigabytes of content per day. Per person. If you're a family of four, that's 48gb/day just for Netflix.
Hell, I just installed Dragon Age and Team Fortress onto my new box via Steam and that was close to 30gb, combined. And if I had already hit some limit and they were going to charge me $3/gb, that would have cost me $90 on top of the cost of the two games.
Why doesn't anyone call these providers on their bullshit claims of things like "five percent of users consume 95% of the traffic" and "the average user only checks their email and reads the news paper online"? If the average user consumes almost no bandwidth whatsoever, then there should be plenty of bandwidth available for the "few" heavy users to use.
It's a layer of cheeze whiz!
While the government does have tanks and nukes, it would be at least moderately difficult if they had to content with a couple hundred million armed citizens.
Of course, the government doesn't need to fear any of its own people at any rate, because we'll tolerate any violation and abuse of our rights and privacy and humanities -- as long as we can still get a mocha latte, buy in bulk at Costco, drive a mini-van, and watch Jersey Shore.
I seriously have to question the people who go out hunting animals when there's a perfectly good grocery store down the block. They like to talk about how you should kill the food you eat and blah blah blah, but all too often it is so clear that they're just wankers practically ejaculating at the idea of getting to fire a gun -- or even better, kill something! WHOOOOO!
However, I am the last person who wants any kind of gun ban. For one thing, banning guns doesn't restrict their flow. Banning guns doesn't eliminate murders. After all, how is outlawing firearms going to change the mind of someone who is already planning to murder someone (an already existing crime)? Not to mention, you know, the whole Constitutionality of it.
More importantly, a wise man once said something along the lines of how people should not be afraid of their government -- government should be afraid of the people. Kind of hard to do if people only arm themselves with butter knives and baseball bats.
Also, if we're so concerned with the value of human life, why don't we outlaw cars? Automobiles kill FAR more people very year than guns do. If we're not going to start outlawing things based on their true and actual mathematical impact on society, then we're just being disingenuous prigs.
Anyway, the point shouldn't be to strip rights away from the American people. It should be to uphold the rights of all Americans, while finding a way (impossibly difficult as it seems) to protect ourselves. And when it comes down to it, we have to accept that being a truly free society means having to endure some awful outcomes. This means that free speech comes with some truly vile speech. The right to own weapons includes the occasional freak that misuses them (though usually not a legal gun owner, it seems). And as I pointed out, above, we're already willing to make certain sacrifices. We've decided that even though cars kill FAR more people than guns do, the convenience of driving a car to the 7-11 for some nachos far outweighs the value of human life.
As much as I despise Palin, I think we all need to reign ourselves in and apply a little common sense, here. The people responsible for committing heinous acts are the people who commit those heinous acts. Unless we're going to go down the road of holding authors liable for acts committed by readers of their works. Developers liable for acts committed by players of their games, and musicians for acts committed by listeners of their music.
A politician inciting things is certainly a little more direct and abhorrent, no doubt. I don't think that society should overlook it. But it's a dangerous thing to try and associate blame to one person for the actions of another.
This definitely doesn't seem like the actions of someone with true power, however. If you have any real clout in government, you off people who inconvenience you by having them crash into the side of mountains in their small single engine or small prop planes -- or engineering a stroke or cardiac arrest.
Also, I believe you're correct that you can be charged with assault even if you don't physically touch another person. I might be entirely wrong, here, but my understanding is that if I were to pull my fist back and prepare to punch you -- and acted like I was going to and you had an honest fear that I was going to -- it could be construed as an assault. But like you say, that is stretching things to an extreme. An irresponsible politician saying something shitty that a nutjob acts on is hardly criminal behavior by the politician.
Unless the gunman was a time-traveler with knowledge of events in the future that we couldn't possibly know.
You must be new here. (To this planet.) :/
How in the hell does one guy injure eighteen people and kill five at an event that surely must have had dozens of police and security personnel?
More masturbation material for Janet Napolitano and the rest of the government to beat off to as they try to sell us on the whole "give up your liberties and we promise you security!" bullshit. And no, I'm not entirely being sarcastic. I wish I were, but we all know that our government or portions of it aren't beyond manufacturing incidents to promote initiatives.
Anyway, we can expect many days of the same old rhetoric about gun violence blah blah blah and politics blah blah blah and left this and right that yadda yadda yadda. We've gone through this too many times to count, before.
Both the left and the right are full of fucking myopic idiots who aren't capable enough of abstract thought to recognize that their shit stinks just as bad as the people they hate with every ounce of their existence. Maybe one of you stink a lot worse today than the other, but this is an isolated moment in time and come the next polarizing story, the tables will be turned and the other side will be making the same claim that you are.
It's really a shame that the Tea Party (an essentially libertarian movement by Ron Paul) was raped and pillaged by a bunch of nutty right-wingers who took it over right by the side of Palin over the last three or four years and completely perverted it. It must be what real republicans went through when the religious nuts took over their party.
Anyway, we can never truly know the truth behind events like this, even if we get news reports claiming some sort of resolution. Hell, remember the "Portland Xmas Tree Bomber" who was about as dangerous as the van full of saw dust or whatever he had? Entraped and encouraged and supported by law enforcement organizations into perpetrating a supposedly horrid crime (well, non-crime, since there was nothing volatile in his van).
Or, it could truly just be some angry nutjob. We certainly have plenty of them in this country and no diminishing of their numbers in site as idiots continue to fall for the idea that one side is the true path or the other is, rather than standing back and rationally observing that they're both the problem and this bullshit fighting and conflict is just feeding into the gears of the machine.
Faith is a positive assertion of something which can not be proven. You can claim that a jolly race of gnomes lives just under the surface of Mars and have faith that you are right, but my claiming that it isn't so (until evidence and then proof is discovered) is not a claim of 'faith'.
It's a common tactic for religious or supernatural people who make claims about god and ghosts and paranormal activities and all sorts of goofy stuff to try and gain validity for their beliefs by asserting that the point of logic and common sense is on-par with the value of their own beliefs, but it doesn't sucker anyone.
One can believe whatever they wish, but I do hope people stop trying to equate "I believe something" with "therefore it is just as valid as anything derived by scientific method".
I'm not sure what your final comment means, either. His supposed evidence is compelling, unless it interferes with someone's belief system? That doesn't make any sense. That's like saying evidence supporting the theory of evolution is only valid so long as it doesn't clash with someone's belief that the earth is a few thousand years old and that men lived with dinosaurs and rode them around like giant 25-cent K-Mart entrance rides, no?
This reminds me of people who talk about the singularity, which some feel will allow us to essentially live forever through the combination of artificial intelligence and our life history of knowledge and actions. Or, as people like Kurzweil feel, literally actually living forever through medical advancements post-singularity.
I'm unable to grasp the concept that you somehow have eternal life simply because there is an entity out there with all of your information that behaves as you do. People talk about it as a possibility as if it's some great comfort, but I don't get it. If you made an exact copy of me right now and stood us side by side and then you killed me, I would still endure the pain of death. *I* would cease to exist. There would be a duplicate of me that at best seems exactly like me to the rest of the world. And that benefits the rest of the world (and, in some way, perhaps your remaining loved ones) . . . but *I* have still experienced all the horrible agony of death and non-existence.
Anyway, the fortunate thing about being human is that time does solve a great deal and over time you come to be able to cope with even the most horrible atrocities. You may grieve a few weeks or months over a lost relationship. You may grieve months or more over the loss of a loved one. You may grieve for *years* over a particularly tragic loss (a child or truly grisly or dire circumstances, for example). But as long as you can keep your head above water, chances are you'll eventually overcome it and move on.
I think what people would benefit most from understanding is that they barely matter while they're alive, so they're going to matter a fuck of a lot less after they die. You live. You fuck around. You probably breed. You die. All the great and horrible things you did during your life are not going to be remembered by a single soul for long beyond your death. Unless you're Hitler or Manson, maybe.
If you matter to the world, your legacy will be maintained for you. For the other 99.9999 percent of us, maintaining our legacy is irrelevant, because it's unlikely anyone will care after we're dead anymore than they cared while we were alive.
The fact is that the most fortunate among us matter to a few people around us while we are alive and those left alive after we die. The first generation removed from us (the first generation after we die that is not old enough to have known us while we were alive) will barely care and might know our names and a few stories about us from remaining family. Think of how much most of us know about our great grandparents. Chances are, we don't even know what their name was.
By the time that generation reaches adulthood, we'll be nothing more than a name in the family tree that some lonely elderly family member keeps in her spare time and our entire existence will have been forgotten, but for our name to the very few who care to research a family tree (and, frankly, I don't know why anyone wants to since it's hardly relevant).
Minor celebrities will be almost entirely forgotten within a century. Your most significant writers, actors, musicians, criminals, and politicians will remain a part of society for a century. Even most of them will fade away after about a hundred years and people will start to confuse what Edison and Franklin each invented. Presidents will be a meaningless name on a list. After several centuries, hardly anyone will be remembered. Outside of niche historians, we're probably talking a very fine handful. Your Hitlers. Your Mansons. Your JFKs and Churchills, perhaps. Your Edison and Franklin might still be remembered. Maybe your Agatha Christie.
The fact of the matter is that even the brightest and most significant and prevalent among us will fade with time, so why would the rest of us waste our time fooling ourselves into thinking anyone is going to give a fuck about our greatest moments, much less our ramblings and meanderings? If you matter, it'll be taken care of for you. If you don't, you'll quickly have -- for all intents and purposes -- have never existed.