That's my point - I feel guilty big-time. I don't touch anyone except my wife, but I sometimes can't help looking, and regardless of her age I feel guilty, but if she is much younger than me I feel even more guilty than I would otherwise, because something inside me sees any woman much younger than me, regardless of how she looks, as needing protection and nurture, not ogling. And the other thing that's changed is that I no longer see age as an automatic turn-off. Some women in their 40s and even early 50s look really good to me, and further, as I mature (sort of) I appreciate many of the qualities that come with maturity as well, such as wisdom, compassion, and common sense.
Hmm . . . as I get older (early 40s now), I notice that if I see an attractive woman who looks maybe late teens, early 20s, I can't help but think that I have nieces almost that age. If I see her walking down the street alone, my first instinct is no longer "wow, what a hottie" but "oh no, I hope she makes it home OK, and doesn't get harassed by some old perv like me." I frankly feel much more protective than aroused.
My wife is a special case as she is a good bit younger than me, and frankly her youth was, at the time we met, part of what really liked about her. What I appreciate and love the most about her now, however, are the ways in which she has grown since that time. While also growing more and more outwardly beautiful, she has also become far more kind, compassionate, generous, and passionate (about things that matter, like working with children) than I ever could have foreseen when we first met. To me she is the standard; other women are attractive to me, or not, to exactly the degree to which they do or do not resemble her. I'm very lucky and blessed, but I still have no idea why she settled for someone like me.
So it's fine if I want to do WW2-era medical experimentation on you without your consent, so the knowledge thereby gained might help others get medical treatment? My moral code tells me this is wrong, that the end does not always justify an improper means, and that your rights are as absolute as those of the people who would benefit from this knowledge. You seem to suggest that I throw this moral code away. Fortunately for you, I will not.
You also imply that I do not believe in freedom. Actually I believe in freedom for ALL human beings, while you and many others appear to believe in freedom only for those already born.
In the end, it is you and people like you who try to enforce your lack of anything resembling sustainable morals or ethics upon the rest of us. I for one deeply resent it, and fight it every chance I get, knowing full well that in the short term, your views are certainly more popular than mine, and thus more likely to prevail for now, but also knowing that no society without morals lasts long, and that out of the ashes of this declining civilization will arise a better one that will learn from, and at least for a time try not to repeat the mistakes of, this one.
Unfortunately, this promise covers only part of what is needed to implement.NET. This is fairly typical Microsoft behavior IMO. The form of what they appear to be offering is quite acceptable. Unfortunately, the substance is not. Much like their publication of APIs and other specs: at first glance they often appear impressive and even comprehensive, but just a little digging reveals just enough bugs, omissions, and errors to make the whole thing useless.
Several points that may or may not be lost on the parent and may or may not cost what's left of my karma:
Joking aside, I am in fact a creationist, though not of the young-earth variety.
Young earth creationists invented science. Look it up. They were wrong about the age of the earth, but we owe them a great debt nonetheless.
This is not a scientific discussion. If it were, it would be done the way scientific discussions are always done - through observation and experimentation, not ad hominem attacks.
My understanding of the Biblical creation account leaves room for conjecture as to *when* and *how* God created. None of the current findings or beliefs of the scientific establishment is irreconcilably opposed to the biblical account, even though I am quite unconvinced by many of them.
I understand that at least some of what exists today is the result of natural selection (which by some definitions makes me an evolutionist as well). I just am skeptical of the idea of common descent, since that idea is based on conjecture, not evidence. I would accept it if it were proven, or at least demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence. It hasn't been.
Trust must be earned. IBM, the Microsoft of an earlier era, has abandoned many of the anticompetitive and fraudulent actions of its past, and thereby helped to earn trust and respect. Microsoft could do the same, at very little cost or risk to itself, in various ways. For instance, it could agree not to sue reimplementers of.NET (Mono, etc.) and SMBFS/CIFS (Samba, etc.), or list the alleged "patent problems" with Linux that it has claimed in the past. But half-hearted measures such as releasing software under the GPL when it legally was required to do so, or the very limited promises it has made surrounding.NET, don't quite cut it for me.
Are you taking into account that most wartime deaths are not directly from weapons but from the resulting collapse of infrastructure and the subsequent disease and starvation? Or that NYC is one of the world's three major financial hubs? Or that tens of millions of people outside the U.S. depend, for their very lives, on exports to the U.S., which would likely grind to a halt without a functioning NYC? Knocking down buildings and killing large numbers of people in NYC itself would not be necessary in order to devastate the entire Western Hemisphere. It can be argued that the 9/11 attacks have done more than that already.
all the compassion of the Mafia and all the ethics of your typical sewer rat.
The Mafia would at least let you live and even prosper, as long as you gave them "their" cut and didn't do anything to purposely piss them off. And sewer rats generally don't torture and kill their own kind for fun. I wish I could say the same thing about the FDA or any other part of the pharmaceutical-industrial-government complex, but I can't. Frankly, sewer rats and Mafiosi everywhere should be highly offended by the comparison.
I haven't been to India myself but know a number of folks from both places in both places (including Americans of European descent who relocated there) and what they have explained to me is that a moderately above-average developer in India has two options.
One is to stay in India, and if so, he or she will earn vastly better than average wages there, and thus be able to afford a fairly high standard of living, in some respects better than in the West. (For instance, he/she will be able to hire a maid, possibly even a driver, which middle-class people in the Western world typically cannot afford.) There will probably not be raw shit running down his or her street, any more than there would be in Sydney or Los Angeles. Not even in Mumbai or Kolkata, each with millions of people we in the West would consider desperately poor, are all or even most neighborhoods remotely like the slums depicted in Slumdog Millionaire.
But for someone willing to take a risk, it is possible to travel to and work in the more developed world, earn significantly more $$$ at least according to current exchange rates, save a significant portion of that, and then return to India to live like a king (or queen) pretty much forever, or at least until wages, prices and living standards in India rise to achieve parity with the West.
The danger is that one can easily fall into the trap that most of us in the West already have: to assume that the future will always be as lucrative as the present, and therefore to live at or above one's means rather than below it. This can result in the worst of both worlds: being a wage-slave in the U.S. or some other high-cost country, getting into debt, and ultimately returning home with little or nothing to show for one's time here.
I'm a libertarian/anarchist and I mostly agree with you . . . many of the aspects of U.S. urban design and foreign policy are completely unsustainable without institutionalized coercion and violence. Remove these, including the subsidies (but also punitive regulations that discourage e.g. safe nuclear development), and you'll find that market-based solutions work pretty well. Everyone participating in market-based transactions does so voluntarily, but no longer benefits at the expense of externalities imposed on unwilling others. If that means I must pay more for a vehicle big and safe enough to haul around my family, I will, but I would very much appreciate the freedom to make that choice, and the peace of mind to know that people halfway around the world didn't have to die violently in order for me to be able to do so.
It is very important to understand that to pollute resources that you don't own (land, water, air, other people, etc.) is very much a form of coercion and violence, and would be highly discouraged (if not banned completely) in an optimally free society. This would force inherently polluting industries to either become less polluting, to absorb the costs of their pollution (for instance by building or buying ponds or sewage treatment facilities rather than just dumping into rivers), or possibly move offshore. Moving offshore may not sound like a positive development, but in the long run it probably would be. It would provide opportunities elsewhere that don't currently exist, to people who may not have a lot of good options. Eventually those people will escape poverty and will be able to move on to better options, and the societies of which they are a part will eventually decide they want more environmental protections (hopefully implemented through peaceful rather than violent means), and we will continue to make progress toward a cleaner, safer, yet more prosperous world.
Were building. Residential and commercial vacancy and foreclosure rates are very high, among the highest in the nation, throughout the entire region.
There are a few positives, if you can land a job: commuting is tolerable; culture is good for a city its size; cost of living is fairly low. Some of the suburbs (e.g., Lakewood, Cleveland Heights) are quite interesting and livable. Reasonably good healthcare. A handful of great colleges (CWRU, Baldwin Wallace, Oberlin). If you have very marketable skills and can mostly avoid the central city, a great quality of life is possible here.
But the negatives absolutely abound, especially in and near the central city. No large IT shops left. Small and shrinking middle class (consisting mainly of tradespeople; very little gainful employment of knowledge workers). Random violent crime against ordinary people (not just gang violence, and not confined to the inner city). World-class corruption at city, county, and state levels. Pervasive air and water pollution. Among the country's worst schools, in a country not known for good schools to begin with. Little sunlight. High rates of depression, thyroid problems, and various cancers. Low life expectancy. Very low average household income and wealth by developed world standards. Severe racial segregation and very poor race relations in general. Crumbling infrastructure. Bridges that are literally falling into the river, but cannot be closed for lack of any alternative. Public transportation limited to city-to-city or suburb-to-city commutes, while of what few jobs remain very few are in the urban core (most are in suburbs unreachable by transit). Rapidly aging population, well over national average levels of obesity and chronic health problems, mostly caused by pollution and/or poverty. Competes every year to top lists of poverty; always makes top 10 lists for crime. Entire streets boarded up and essentially abandoned. Most inner city neighborhoods ruled by thugs and/or organized crime. I could go on but I think you get the point.
I'm still lucky enough to have an IT job (for now at least) but if not for that job, plus most of my family being here, I'd have left long ago, probably for Eastern Europe where I also have family connections. Cleveland epitomizes just about everything that is wrong with this country. Both the causes (irresponsibility, entitlement mentality, government-worship, racial and economic prejudice, provincialism, anti-intellectualism) and the effects (poverty, disease, ignorance, near total lack of upward mobility, and the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and resignation). It could be fixed, if enough people cared enough to act, but they don't, so the only real chance anyone has to better themselves and their families is to leave if they possibly can.
It is sad, and the state the US educational system is currently in will not allow it to compete in the global market, it will not allow it to be innovate and provide new ideas, but what it will provide is people who are like sheep and are more than willing to follow the crowd and just do it because everyone does. These people will be easy to govern and control since they won't ask questions and least of all will they rebel and fight for their beliefs. In other words, the US education system as it currently stands is making zombies.
I am sorry to say, but this is very much by design. The system was designed to by the powerful to perpetuate their own interests, not those of children. It is designed not to teach children how to think, but to prevent them, insofar as possible, from ever doing so, or even realizing that they can. After all, the easiest way to enslave people is to keep them so ignorant that they don't even realize that they are slaves. And, sad to say, that is exactly what they have done. It is probably among the greatest crimes of all of human history.
I don't know a good way to avoid being called. You can easily avoid being seated however. My experience is that a little knowledge and willingness to think for yourself will make you persona non grata to any good trial lawyer, because said lawyer understands that most people are swayed more easily by their emotions than by reason, and he or she will be trying to make an emotional case, not a rational one. Your presence on a jury would make that case ineffective. Put a copy of the FIJA handbook in your shirt pocket, and you will not be seated on a petit jury. Period.
My understanding, which may be wrong, is that the amount of gold in every 1oz. coin is gold coin is 1oz., irrespective of the amount of alloying material mixed in which varies considerably. Can anyone confirm or deny? (Even if my understanding is correct, the difference in purity might still be sufficient to explain the difference. On the other hand if the differences in the amount of gold were as extreme as 91% vs. 99.99%, that would tend to support a larger price differential than what actually exists.)
But you can refine gold in your basement. It is a very, very old technology that predates written history. Plus, under normal and even considerably less than normal circumstances (including but not limited to all of the wars, hyperinflations, and decaying/collapsing empires of which we have written record), gold is an easily fungible and interchangeable commodity. Even governments that don't hyperinflate hate it for exactly that reason: it makes "money-laundering" almost impossible to trace, and thus enables people (including, but not limited, to criminals) to escape some of the monitoring and tracking that most governments routinely do today.
Platinum is highly valuable and will likely remain so . . but it is neither as liquid, as easily divisible, as easily recognized, or as easily verified as gold. A little bit as a hedge against gold confiscation is not a bad idea, but good luck trying to buy bread, bullets, or booze with it.
Hyperinflation is not inevitable. What makes it seem very likely is that no one knows any other way for the U.S. government and population to deal with their enormous debts and unfunded future liabilities. I don't know of a situation where another country in a similar position did not either hyperinflate, or simply repudiate the debt (which would have civilization-threatening consequences of its own).
Usually it's closer to 7% and it can be much less. Markups are higher than normal right now due to heavy demand, and Canadian Maple Leaves carry a larger than average premium over other gold coins. I'm not sure why . ..probably relates to Canada's better than average economic stability. But Krugerrands are available for a much smaller markup . . I've paid as little as spot plus 2-3% for 1oz. KR in the past, though not recently. I use kitco.com and bulliondirect.com. You can get unmarked gold bars for even less, but they may be less easily recognized and thus less liquid under the circumstances in which one would be most likely to sell them.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet that for smallish transactions silver may be a more practical money than gold. Doesn't hold its value quite as well, and is subject to far more volatility, but sometimes an $8 coin - even if it is $10 on some days and $6 on others - is more practical than a $950 one. Certainly less dangerous to carry around.
I'm a goldbug because for practical reasons (my extreme reluctance to shoot people for one thing) I'm hoping and planning for something LESS than a total destruction of civilization. I do not expect to be able to survive that, nor to be able to help my family to do so by any means short of getting them out of the U.S. However, in the event of a less extreme eventuality, such as hyperinflation, gold will help us to survive and to weather that storm until it passes - which may well take 10-20 years, or more if people do not learn enough from history to avoid repeating it.
No conspiracy; just good old-fashioned self-interest. If gold prices rise precipitously, this signals everyone that the dollar is about to plummet, and a likely result is a very immediate and disorderly (rather than calm and planned) flight away from the dollar and all dollar-denominated assets. This potentially leaves the major holders of such assets - the BRIC countries and oil exporters in particular - in a very, very deep hole. So to the extent possible their central banks do try to stabilize the gold price. Ours does as well, for obvious reasons. This is well-known in gold markets, and it is a temporary phenomenon. Gold is, always has been and probably always will be, for reasons explained by other posters, the money of last resort. When the dollar fails, which it will, gold will be the only safe haven, and it will have to rise in dollar terms for two reasons: the fall of the dollar itself (main reason), plus greatly increasing demand (secondary reason). But while the price ceiling lasts, it represents an amazing buying opportunity that almost certainly won't be repeated during the next few lifetimes.
Disclaimer: like all people who understand economic history and our current place in it, I'm a goldbug.
Is there a compiler that could compile any and all arbitrary Java programs - say, for instance, one with if statements nested several trillion levels deep?
Surely the Linux community can see how nice it would be if a consumer got home and no matter what item they bought there was a "Linux 32/64" driver on the CD that worked no matter if they were in Xandros, Red Hat, Ubuntu, PCLOS, etc, right?
By design, openly, and without apology, Linux uses a different model. It is distributed as SOURCE CODE. You can write drivers that will work on any Linux, but you have to write and distribute them as source code. And yes, that does mean you cannot use obfuscated binary code to hide details about how your hardware works. But it also means you no longer have to write multiple drivers for every possible combination of operating system and host platform. It also means that any programmer can find and fix problems with the driver, or port it to new platforms or environments that may not have even existed at the time the hardware was designed. We don't have perfect compatibility with broken hardware that doesn't come with specs. But we do have great compatibility with hardware that does, and that compatibility is more or less permanent, whereas Windows drivers, where they work at all, tend to work with only one family of Windows operating systems, and not on any other. You can have your "just works, maybe, sorta, at least for now" driver model if you prefer, but I very much prefer mine ("not everything works, but most of it does, and it almost certainly will continue to for the life of the hardware").
Most criminals who get caught are dumb. Smarter folks of a similar mindset come to understand that there are ways to rob, enslave, and even murder people with little or no chance of serious negative repercussions. The slightly smarter ones can go into law enforcement for instance (not implying that all who do are criminals, but many are, and most of the rest will cover for them). Really bright folks can steal all they could possibly dream of, or more, by becoming lawyers, politicians, or white collar criminals. Generally, what we call "society" tends to approve of their actions and therefore their crimes, and does not hold these particular criminals accountable even when their actions do come to light.
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That's my point - I feel guilty big-time. I don't touch anyone except my wife, but I sometimes can't help looking, and regardless of her age I feel guilty, but if she is much younger than me I feel even more guilty than I would otherwise, because something inside me sees any woman much younger than me, regardless of how she looks, as needing protection and nurture, not ogling. And the other thing that's changed is that I no longer see age as an automatic turn-off. Some women in their 40s and even early 50s look really good to me, and further, as I mature (sort of) I appreciate many of the qualities that come with maturity as well, such as wisdom, compassion, and common sense.
Hmm . . . as I get older (early 40s now), I notice that if I see an attractive woman who looks maybe late teens, early 20s, I can't help but think that I have nieces almost that age. If I see her walking down the street alone, my first instinct is no longer "wow, what a hottie" but "oh no, I hope she makes it home OK, and doesn't get harassed by some old perv like me." I frankly feel much more protective than aroused.
My wife is a special case as she is a good bit younger than me, and frankly her youth was, at the time we met, part of what really liked about her. What I appreciate and love the most about her now, however, are the ways in which she has grown since that time. While also growing more and more outwardly beautiful, she has also become far more kind, compassionate, generous, and passionate (about things that matter, like working with children) than I ever could have foreseen when we first met. To me she is the standard; other women are attractive to me, or not, to exactly the degree to which they do or do not resemble her. I'm very lucky and blessed, but I still have no idea why she settled for someone like me.
So it's fine if I want to do WW2-era medical experimentation on you without your consent, so the knowledge thereby gained might help others get medical treatment? My moral code tells me this is wrong, that the end does not always justify an improper means, and that your rights are as absolute as those of the people who would benefit from this knowledge. You seem to suggest that I throw this moral code away. Fortunately for you, I will not.
You also imply that I do not believe in freedom. Actually I believe in freedom for ALL human beings, while you and many others appear to believe in freedom only for those already born.
In the end, it is you and people like you who try to enforce your lack of anything resembling sustainable morals or ethics upon the rest of us. I for one deeply resent it, and fight it every chance I get, knowing full well that in the short term, your views are certainly more popular than mine, and thus more likely to prevail for now, but also knowing that no society without morals lasts long, and that out of the ashes of this declining civilization will arise a better one that will learn from, and at least for a time try not to repeat the mistakes of, this one.
Unfortunately, this promise covers only part of what is needed to implement .NET. This is fairly typical Microsoft behavior IMO. The form of what they appear to be offering is quite acceptable. Unfortunately, the substance is not. Much like their publication of APIs and other specs: at first glance they often appear impressive and even comprehensive, but just a little digging reveals just enough bugs, omissions, and errors to make the whole thing useless.
Several points that may or may not be lost on the parent and may or may not cost what's left of my karma:
Trust must be earned. IBM, the Microsoft of an earlier era, has abandoned many of the anticompetitive and fraudulent actions of its past, and thereby helped to earn trust and respect. Microsoft could do the same, at very little cost or risk to itself, in various ways. For instance, it could agree not to sue reimplementers of .NET (Mono, etc.) and SMBFS/CIFS (Samba, etc.), or list the alleged "patent problems" with Linux that it has claimed in the past. But half-hearted measures such as releasing software under the GPL when it legally was required to do so, or the very limited promises it has made surrounding .NET, don't quite cut it for me.
Since the body took 3+ billion years to come up a couple dozen enzymes to fulfill these purposes
Hey, some of us are young-earth creationists, you insensitive clod!
Are you taking into account that most wartime deaths are not directly from weapons but from the resulting collapse of infrastructure and the subsequent disease and starvation? Or that NYC is one of the world's three major financial hubs? Or that tens of millions of people outside the U.S. depend, for their very lives, on exports to the U.S., which would likely grind to a halt without a functioning NYC? Knocking down buildings and killing large numbers of people in NYC itself would not be necessary in order to devastate the entire Western Hemisphere. It can be argued that the 9/11 attacks have done more than that already.
all the compassion of the Mafia and all the ethics of your typical sewer rat.
The Mafia would at least let you live and even prosper, as long as you gave them "their" cut and didn't do anything to purposely piss them off. And sewer rats generally don't torture and kill their own kind for fun. I wish I could say the same thing about the FDA or any other part of the pharmaceutical-industrial-government complex, but I can't. Frankly, sewer rats and Mafiosi everywhere should be highly offended by the comparison.
I haven't been to India myself but know a number of folks from both places in both places (including Americans of European descent who relocated there) and what they have explained to me is that a moderately above-average developer in India has two options.
One is to stay in India, and if so, he or she will earn vastly better than average wages there, and thus be able to afford a fairly high standard of living, in some respects better than in the West. (For instance, he/she will be able to hire a maid, possibly even a driver, which middle-class people in the Western world typically cannot afford.) There will probably not be raw shit running down his or her street, any more than there would be in Sydney or Los Angeles. Not even in Mumbai or Kolkata, each with millions of people we in the West would consider desperately poor, are all or even most neighborhoods remotely like the slums depicted in Slumdog Millionaire.
But for someone willing to take a risk, it is possible to travel to and work in the more developed world, earn significantly more $$$ at least according to current exchange rates, save a significant portion of that, and then return to India to live like a king (or queen) pretty much forever, or at least until wages, prices and living standards in India rise to achieve parity with the West.
The danger is that one can easily fall into the trap that most of us in the West already have: to assume that the future will always be as lucrative as the present, and therefore to live at or above one's means rather than below it. This can result in the worst of both worlds: being a wage-slave in the U.S. or some other high-cost country, getting into debt, and ultimately returning home with little or nothing to show for one's time here.
I'm a libertarian/anarchist and I mostly agree with you . . . many of the aspects of U.S. urban design and foreign policy are completely unsustainable without institutionalized coercion and violence. Remove these, including the subsidies (but also punitive regulations that discourage e.g. safe nuclear development), and you'll find that market-based solutions work pretty well. Everyone participating in market-based transactions does so voluntarily, but no longer benefits at the expense of externalities imposed on unwilling others. If that means I must pay more for a vehicle big and safe enough to haul around my family, I will, but I would very much appreciate the freedom to make that choice, and the peace of mind to know that people halfway around the world didn't have to die violently in order for me to be able to do so.
It is very important to understand that to pollute resources that you don't own (land, water, air, other people, etc.) is very much a form of coercion and violence, and would be highly discouraged (if not banned completely) in an optimally free society. This would force inherently polluting industries to either become less polluting, to absorb the costs of their pollution (for instance by building or buying ponds or sewage treatment facilities rather than just dumping into rivers), or possibly move offshore. Moving offshore may not sound like a positive development, but in the long run it probably would be. It would provide opportunities elsewhere that don't currently exist, to people who may not have a lot of good options. Eventually those people will escape poverty and will be able to move on to better options, and the societies of which they are a part will eventually decide they want more environmental protections (hopefully implemented through peaceful rather than violent means), and we will continue to make progress toward a cleaner, safer, yet more prosperous world.
Were building. Residential and commercial vacancy and foreclosure rates are very high, among the highest in the nation, throughout the entire region.
There are a few positives, if you can land a job: commuting is tolerable; culture is good for a city its size; cost of living is fairly low. Some of the suburbs (e.g., Lakewood, Cleveland Heights) are quite interesting and livable. Reasonably good healthcare. A handful of great colleges (CWRU, Baldwin Wallace, Oberlin). If you have very marketable skills and can mostly avoid the central city, a great quality of life is possible here.
But the negatives absolutely abound, especially in and near the central city. No large IT shops left. Small and shrinking middle class (consisting mainly of tradespeople; very little gainful employment of knowledge workers). Random violent crime against ordinary people (not just gang violence, and not confined to the inner city). World-class corruption at city, county, and state levels. Pervasive air and water pollution. Among the country's worst schools, in a country not known for good schools to begin with. Little sunlight. High rates of depression, thyroid problems, and various cancers. Low life expectancy. Very low average household income and wealth by developed world standards. Severe racial segregation and very poor race relations in general. Crumbling infrastructure. Bridges that are literally falling into the river, but cannot be closed for lack of any alternative. Public transportation limited to city-to-city or suburb-to-city commutes, while of what few jobs remain very few are in the urban core (most are in suburbs unreachable by transit). Rapidly aging population, well over national average levels of obesity and chronic health problems, mostly caused by pollution and/or poverty. Competes every year to top lists of poverty; always makes top 10 lists for crime. Entire streets boarded up and essentially abandoned. Most inner city neighborhoods ruled by thugs and/or organized crime. I could go on but I think you get the point.
I'm still lucky enough to have an IT job (for now at least) but if not for that job, plus most of my family being here, I'd have left long ago, probably for Eastern Europe where I also have family connections. Cleveland epitomizes just about everything that is wrong with this country. Both the causes (irresponsibility, entitlement mentality, government-worship, racial and economic prejudice, provincialism, anti-intellectualism) and the effects (poverty, disease, ignorance, near total lack of upward mobility, and the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and resignation). It could be fixed, if enough people cared enough to act, but they don't, so the only real chance anyone has to better themselves and their families is to leave if they possibly can.
It is sad, and the state the US educational system is currently in will not allow it to compete in the global market, it will not allow it to be innovate and provide new ideas, but what it will provide is people who are like sheep and are more than willing to follow the crowd and just do it because everyone does. These people will be easy to govern and control since they won't ask questions and least of all will they rebel and fight for their beliefs. In other words, the US education system as it currently stands is making zombies.
I am sorry to say, but this is very much by design. The system was designed to by the powerful to perpetuate their own interests, not those of children. It is designed not to teach children how to think, but to prevent them, insofar as possible, from ever doing so, or even realizing that they can. After all, the easiest way to enslave people is to keep them so ignorant that they don't even realize that they are slaves. And, sad to say, that is exactly what they have done. It is probably among the greatest crimes of all of human history.
I don't know a good way to avoid being called. You can easily avoid being seated however. My experience is that a little knowledge and willingness to think for yourself will make you persona non grata to any good trial lawyer, because said lawyer understands that most people are swayed more easily by their emotions than by reason, and he or she will be trying to make an emotional case, not a rational one. Your presence on a jury would make that case ineffective. Put a copy of the FIJA handbook in your shirt pocket, and you will not be seated on a petit jury. Period.
My understanding, which may be wrong, is that the amount of gold in every 1oz. coin is gold coin is 1oz., irrespective of the amount of alloying material mixed in which varies considerably. Can anyone confirm or deny? (Even if my understanding is correct, the difference in purity might still be sufficient to explain the difference. On the other hand if the differences in the amount of gold were as extreme as 91% vs. 99.99%, that would tend to support a larger price differential than what actually exists.)
But you can refine gold in your basement. It is a very, very old technology that predates written history. Plus, under normal and even considerably less than normal circumstances (including but not limited to all of the wars, hyperinflations, and decaying/collapsing empires of which we have written record), gold is an easily fungible and interchangeable commodity. Even governments that don't hyperinflate hate it for exactly that reason: it makes "money-laundering" almost impossible to trace, and thus enables people (including, but not limited, to criminals) to escape some of the monitoring and tracking that most governments routinely do today.
Platinum is highly valuable and will likely remain so . . but it is neither as liquid, as easily divisible, as easily recognized, or as easily verified as gold. A little bit as a hedge against gold confiscation is not a bad idea, but good luck trying to buy bread, bullets, or booze with it.
Hyperinflation is not inevitable. What makes it seem very likely is that no one knows any other way for the U.S. government and population to deal with their enormous debts and unfunded future liabilities. I don't know of a situation where another country in a similar position did not either hyperinflate, or simply repudiate the debt (which would have civilization-threatening consequences of its own).
Usually it's closer to 7% and it can be much less. Markups are higher than normal right now due to heavy demand, and Canadian Maple Leaves carry a larger than average premium over other gold coins. I'm not sure why . . .probably relates to Canada's better than average economic stability. But Krugerrands are available for a much smaller markup . . I've paid as little as spot plus 2-3% for 1oz. KR in the past, though not recently. I use kitco.com and bulliondirect.com. You can get unmarked gold bars for even less, but they may be less easily recognized and thus less liquid under the circumstances in which one would be most likely to sell them.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet that for smallish transactions silver may be a more practical money than gold. Doesn't hold its value quite as well, and is subject to far more volatility, but sometimes an $8 coin - even if it is $10 on some days and $6 on others - is more practical than a $950 one. Certainly less dangerous to carry around.
I'm a goldbug because for practical reasons (my extreme reluctance to shoot people for one thing) I'm hoping and planning for something LESS than a total destruction of civilization. I do not expect to be able to survive that, nor to be able to help my family to do so by any means short of getting them out of the U.S. However, in the event of a less extreme eventuality, such as hyperinflation, gold will help us to survive and to weather that storm until it passes - which may well take 10-20 years, or more if people do not learn enough from history to avoid repeating it.
No conspiracy; just good old-fashioned self-interest. If gold prices rise precipitously, this signals everyone that the dollar is about to plummet, and a likely result is a very immediate and disorderly (rather than calm and planned) flight away from the dollar and all dollar-denominated assets. This potentially leaves the major holders of such assets - the BRIC countries and oil exporters in particular - in a very, very deep hole. So to the extent possible their central banks do try to stabilize the gold price. Ours does as well, for obvious reasons. This is well-known in gold markets, and it is a temporary phenomenon. Gold is, always has been and probably always will be, for reasons explained by other posters, the money of last resort. When the dollar fails, which it will, gold will be the only safe haven, and it will have to rise in dollar terms for two reasons: the fall of the dollar itself (main reason), plus greatly increasing demand (secondary reason). But while the price ceiling lasts, it represents an amazing buying opportunity that almost certainly won't be repeated during the next few lifetimes.
Disclaimer: like all people who understand economic history and our current place in it, I'm a goldbug.
Is there a compiler that could compile any and all arbitrary Java programs - say, for instance, one with if statements nested several trillion levels deep?
Surely the Linux community can see how nice it would be if a consumer got home and no matter what item they bought there was a "Linux 32/64" driver on the CD that worked no matter if they were in Xandros, Red Hat, Ubuntu, PCLOS, etc, right?
By design, openly, and without apology, Linux uses a different model. It is distributed as SOURCE CODE. You can write drivers that will work on any Linux, but you have to write and distribute them as source code. And yes, that does mean you cannot use obfuscated binary code to hide details about how your hardware works. But it also means you no longer have to write multiple drivers for every possible combination of operating system and host platform. It also means that any programmer can find and fix problems with the driver, or port it to new platforms or environments that may not have even existed at the time the hardware was designed. We don't have perfect compatibility with broken hardware that doesn't come with specs. But we do have great compatibility with hardware that does, and that compatibility is more or less permanent, whereas Windows drivers, where they work at all, tend to work with only one family of Windows operating systems, and not on any other. You can have your "just works, maybe, sorta, at least for now" driver model if you prefer, but I very much prefer mine ("not everything works, but most of it does, and it almost certainly will continue to for the life of the hardware").
Most criminals who get caught are dumb. Smarter folks of a similar mindset come to understand that there are ways to rob, enslave, and even murder people with little or no chance of serious negative repercussions. The slightly smarter ones can go into law enforcement for instance (not implying that all who do are criminals, but many are, and most of the rest will cover for them). Really bright folks can steal all they could possibly dream of, or more, by becoming lawyers, politicians, or white collar criminals. Generally, what we call "society" tends to approve of their actions and therefore their crimes, and does not hold these particular criminals accountable even when their actions do come to light.
It's already tried to repeal the laws of economics; hard to see how this would be any different.