Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight. But believe me, even in the early 1980s if you had predicted on TV that the Soviet Union would crumble within a decade, you would've been laughed out of the studio.
Not really, that the Soviet Union was on the brink of economic collapse was pretty much well known and part of Carter's foreign policy. He cut back on defense so the Soviet Union could also cut back and get their economy back into shape. Instead they tried to get ahead in the arms race and continued on their road the destruction. The big unknown was if they would collapse and end the Soviet Union or if they would collapse and try to maintain it via war. Reagan, in getting back into the arms race and letting the Soviet Union dig it's grave with further military spending was taking a risk that instead of dying quietly, they would seek to maintain the Warsaw pact and Soviet Union by sending the tanks into Poland and other countries and even Europe in a effort to do so. No, they wouldn't have won, but they could have gone out fighting if they had wanted to.
Killing someone is cheaper than letting them rot for life in prison, feeding them, housing them, guarding them and perhaps even risking parole at some later date.
Things I've seen say the opposite. Compared to the legal costs involved in mandated procedure for Capitol Crimes, life in prison is cheaper. Furthermore, people up for the death penalty aren't ones capable of being paroled. There is however the chance that the person found guilty could be proven innocent, and if they are still in jail and have not been executed, there is a chance they can be released.
Great. Just great. Zombie apocalypse is a good metaphor. If everything I hear about the Wikipedia editors is even half true, they're more dangerous than the PR people to most articles. They'd be the guys guarding the zombie free compound and when you walk up waving saying "Thank God I made it to safety." they shoot you, possibly for no reason and just announce another zombie killed. There are reasons that the Wikipedia editors get no thanks and a lot of it has to do with them deleting everybodies additions in their own little private domains as well as any sort of zombie reports.
American's "know" a lot of things, but never seem to have the time to take any action to right the wrongs perpetrated on them (and others around the world). Taking no action means agreement. Therefore, why do Americans agree that spending massive amounts of taxpayer monies on illegal spying operations is a Good Thing(tm)? Are you that paranoid and fearful that someone will "get you?" Does this illegal spying help you sleep soundly at night? What? Please explain.
True, but they could with steam ship or train. This effect was seen in WW1 and was in an article about the great flu epidemic and why it was so great. Usually, sick stay home and don't travel while well people do. In the war, the really sick were evacuated out of the trenches and back to cities and sometimes back home, while everybody else stayed.
However, I struggle with the concept that bullying someone amounts to a felony.
Well, bullying somebody doesn't count as a felony. However, bullying somebody even after being talked to by the police about it till they commit suicide and then gloating about it openly appears to be. I suspect that like other harassment, once you are told to stop, especially by the police, it stops being bullying and becomes stalking and harassment.
Apparently anecdotal evidence is now data. Everyone I see has an iPhone. Does my anecdotal evidence trump yours?
By the Rules of the Internet Arguments, no, because he gave his anecdotal evidence first. You must one up his evidence to trump his. In general it goes with things lower of the following list as trumping the things above:
General statement.
Statement supported by 2nd hand anecdotal evidence.
Statement supported by 1st hand anecdotal evidence.
Statement supported by web link.
Statement supported by proper citations.
Statement supported by well reasoned argument and proper citations. (but really, who cares at this point?)
Some versions of the Rules of Internet Arguments allow for authoritative statements when the person making the statement either has professional or academic experience in the field being discussed that sometimes trumps the same level of statement.
So, really to trump the previous statement you would at least either need to claim some sort of professional or academic authority in the field of cell phone purchases, or support your statement with a web link.
- The Tea Party: contrary to the media-industry's tendentious portrayal of the Tea Party, as far as I can tell the Tea Party was formed to protest the ridiculous and ongoing government spending beyond its means.
Yes, and that sounds all nice and good. I was in favor of most of their base statements in what they want to do. Then I started looking on the Tea Party candidates webpages to see how they were going to do that. Besides that they had no unified plan, they all had a bunch of whacked out ideas such as getting rid of things like the Department of Education or the FDA entirely. While I could see reducing their roles in things, minimizing their responsibilities, and scaling them down, there is still the issue that they were created to correct problems that would just reappear again. Furthermore, even getting rid of all the bits of government they didn't like still wouldn't have an affect on the trillions they want to stop spending. Simple matter of the fact is that unless military spending is reduced or taxes raised, there is no cutting our spending or reducing the debt. They seem infatuated with the idea that social programs and welfare queens are where all the money is going, but count out SS and medicare/medicaid which have their own earmarked taxes and social programs get hardly anything, and they aren't talking about getting rid of SS or medicare because they're all old baby boomers that are now getting that money and aren't willing to give it up.
What would it take to translate "Moby Dick" or "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" into such a language?
You wouldn't have another language. You'd just give them a bunch of science books to act as a rosetta stone since they know what they are saying in our language and they'd eventually figure out the rest from context.
There is one key reason why we were able to decipher hieroglyphics. We had a cheat sheet containing a language we understood. Unless we can provide something like that, it will be very difficult. Perhaps we could include a primer with the text.
Ideally, scientific text would be a good start. The numbers and the laws of physics won't change. Give them Pi and some well known equations and they should have our mathmatics system down. If they found a periodic table for example, they should be able to determine fairly easily that that is what it was and thus fill out all the appropriate descriptors. Similarly, diagrams and explainations of electric circuits, physics equations like Maxwell's, or even mechanical engineering texts should be easily recognised and they will know what the accompanying text is trying to say, especially after they fill in all the numbers.
The two states where it is now legal so long as you don't grow enough to draw the attention of the FBI.
Currently, only if you have a medical marijuana card. There are supposed to be licenses by the end of the year, but so far, no information on how to get, what they will cost, or the conditions for them has appeared.
Why was 90+ million dollars budgeted for the development of one freaking website?
Here's a hint, most of that isn't going to the "one freaking website". After data center, server, and coding costs for the website, the other $89.95 million was to go towards the back end application that the website was an interface for. So you have a from scratch coded application that needs to deal with data from dozens of civilian and government systems in real time. That much money doesn't really sound like a bad deal for what they're getting. For perspective, the department I work for has three systems, all turn key from companies like GE, and an upgrade to the new version that involves new hardware for any of them can easily run between $2-$5 million and not even be abnormal for the enterprise world. To be honest, they should have known from the low cost that the price wasn't realisitic.
Government contracting is a bear and adds at least 30% inefficiency to the process for a small project; can't say on a large project but I imagine the percentage remains fairly constant.
What's funny, is that I suspect from working for the government, is that the 30% is all from various laws passed to make sure that the government doesn't waste money. At least that's what it's like at the state level.
Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products.
You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.
Knowledgable people find out about such products how exactly? They scour the ads for such products and do research. At best, they are specifically sent information about new products for review, which is what? Targeted advertising. Not only do you have some idea that knowledgable people have magic they use to discover new products but you also seem lazy in the desire to let other people do everything and never become knowledgable yourself.
Couldn't they just wait till it actually worked? Its not like anyone was racing them to market in those days.
Racing to market, maybe not. Still, people were already upgrading phones fairly often. A late demo would have been six months of people who would have bought an iPhone but couldn't because they already upgraded.
They weren't kidding. During the three weeks I spent in India, our car was bumped into or struck on three separate occasions! (I haven't been involved in that many accidents in 35 years on American streets.)
You've obviously never had to parallel park on the streets of San Francisco.
It wasn't an example of their lack of innovation. It was an example of why their future is in question. It changed the workflow of their entire OS requiring retraining for essentially every business user out there. Even if trainers don't have to be called in, it's still a hit to business workflow in an amount that I bet somebody someplace has put a dollar amount on. What's worse, is that I really don't see any reason for it except for change for the sake of change. Nothing really works any better than it did before, in fact, I've seen cases of it taking longer due to more clicks and window changes than it used to. That impacts business which is their main stronghold. I'd even bring up the Office Ribbon before Metro as change for the sake of change that nobody wanted, they have had to at least partially back out of, and hasn't really aided usability.
Isn't the food safety and inspection program funded by user fees from the agricultural/packing industry?
Possibly, but if it is anything like what almost happened in WA a few months back, such monies go into a fund and then they are redistributed in the budget. Thus, if the budget or spending bill doesn't get passed, the money can't actually be used even if it's been collected and is sitting there waiting to be used. My girlfriend works for a state department that is funded by business fees collected for their required services, but almost got furloughed anyway because the WA budget almost didn't get passed.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight. But believe me, even in the early 1980s if you had predicted on TV that the Soviet Union would crumble within a decade, you would've been laughed out of the studio.
Not really, that the Soviet Union was on the brink of economic collapse was pretty much well known and part of Carter's foreign policy. He cut back on defense so the Soviet Union could also cut back and get their economy back into shape. Instead they tried to get ahead in the arms race and continued on their road the destruction. The big unknown was if they would collapse and end the Soviet Union or if they would collapse and try to maintain it via war. Reagan, in getting back into the arms race and letting the Soviet Union dig it's grave with further military spending was taking a risk that instead of dying quietly, they would seek to maintain the Warsaw pact and Soviet Union by sending the tanks into Poland and other countries and even Europe in a effort to do so. No, they wouldn't have won, but they could have gone out fighting if they had wanted to.
Killing someone is cheaper than letting them rot for life in prison, feeding them, housing them, guarding them and perhaps even risking parole at some later date.
Things I've seen say the opposite. Compared to the legal costs involved in mandated procedure for Capitol Crimes, life in prison is cheaper. Furthermore, people up for the death penalty aren't ones capable of being paroled. There is however the chance that the person found guilty could be proven innocent, and if they are still in jail and have not been executed, there is a chance they can be released.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/23/1643228/wikipedias-participation-problem
Great. Just great. Zombie apocalypse is a good metaphor. If everything I hear about the Wikipedia editors is even half true, they're more dangerous than the PR people to most articles. They'd be the guys guarding the zombie free compound and when you walk up waving saying "Thank God I made it to safety." they shoot you, possibly for no reason and just announce another zombie killed. There are reasons that the Wikipedia editors get no thanks and a lot of it has to do with them deleting everybodies additions in their own little private domains as well as any sort of zombie reports.
American's "know" a lot of things, but never seem to have the time to take any action to right the wrongs perpetrated on them (and others around the world). Taking no action means agreement. Therefore, why do Americans agree that spending massive amounts of taxpayer monies on illegal spying operations is a Good Thing(tm)? Are you that paranoid and fearful that someone will "get you?" Does this illegal spying help you sleep soundly at night? What? Please explain.
Or sick people didn't travel.
True, but they could with steam ship or train. This effect was seen in WW1 and was in an article about the great flu epidemic and why it was so great. Usually, sick stay home and don't travel while well people do. In the war, the really sick were evacuated out of the trenches and back to cities and sometimes back home, while everybody else stayed.
You mean... republicons?
I think he really meant republican'ts.
However, I struggle with the concept that bullying someone amounts to a felony.
Well, bullying somebody doesn't count as a felony. However, bullying somebody even after being talked to by the police about it till they commit suicide and then gloating about it openly appears to be. I suspect that like other harassment, once you are told to stop, especially by the police, it stops being bullying and becomes stalking and harassment.
Apparently anecdotal evidence is now data. Everyone I see has an iPhone. Does my anecdotal evidence trump yours?
By the Rules of the Internet Arguments, no, because he gave his anecdotal evidence first. You must one up his evidence to trump his. In general it goes with things lower of the following list as trumping the things above:
General statement.
Statement supported by 2nd hand anecdotal evidence.
Statement supported by 1st hand anecdotal evidence.
Statement supported by web link.
Statement supported by proper citations.
Statement supported by well reasoned argument and proper citations. (but really, who cares at this point?)
Some versions of the Rules of Internet Arguments allow for authoritative statements when the person making the statement either has professional or academic experience in the field being discussed that sometimes trumps the same level of statement.
So, really to trump the previous statement you would at least either need to claim some sort of professional or academic authority in the field of cell phone purchases, or support your statement with a web link.
Like just before WWI? Sounds awesome.
Nope, the problem that formed WW1 was too many superpowers, then called the "Great Powers"
- The Tea Party: contrary to the media-industry's tendentious portrayal of the Tea Party, as far as I can tell the Tea Party was formed to protest the ridiculous and ongoing government spending beyond its means.
Yes, and that sounds all nice and good. I was in favor of most of their base statements in what they want to do. Then I started looking on the Tea Party candidates webpages to see how they were going to do that. Besides that they had no unified plan, they all had a bunch of whacked out ideas such as getting rid of things like the Department of Education or the FDA entirely. While I could see reducing their roles in things, minimizing their responsibilities, and scaling them down, there is still the issue that they were created to correct problems that would just reappear again. Furthermore, even getting rid of all the bits of government they didn't like still wouldn't have an affect on the trillions they want to stop spending. Simple matter of the fact is that unless military spending is reduced or taxes raised, there is no cutting our spending or reducing the debt. They seem infatuated with the idea that social programs and welfare queens are where all the money is going, but count out SS and medicare/medicaid which have their own earmarked taxes and social programs get hardly anything, and they aren't talking about getting rid of SS or medicare because they're all old baby boomers that are now getting that money and aren't willing to give it up.
What would it take to translate "Moby Dick" or "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" into such a language?
You wouldn't have another language. You'd just give them a bunch of science books to act as a rosetta stone since they know what they are saying in our language and they'd eventually figure out the rest from context.
There is one key reason why we were able to decipher hieroglyphics. We had a cheat sheet containing a language we understood. Unless we can provide something like that, it will be very difficult. Perhaps we could include a primer with the text.
Ideally, scientific text would be a good start. The numbers and the laws of physics won't change. Give them Pi and some well known equations and they should have our mathmatics system down. If they found a periodic table for example, they should be able to determine fairly easily that that is what it was and thus fill out all the appropriate descriptors. Similarly, diagrams and explainations of electric circuits, physics equations like Maxwell's, or even mechanical engineering texts should be easily recognised and they will know what the accompanying text is trying to say, especially after they fill in all the numbers.
...ubiquitous, low cost and robust...
Pick two.
I see the difficulty. I say we lock you both in a cage and let you fight to the death...
After one of them wins, do we have to open the cage again?
The two states where it is now legal so long as you don't grow enough to draw the attention of the FBI.
Currently, only if you have a medical marijuana card. There are supposed to be licenses by the end of the year, but so far, no information on how to get, what they will cost, or the conditions for them has appeared.
Why was 90+ million dollars budgeted for the development of one freaking website?
Here's a hint, most of that isn't going to the "one freaking website". After data center, server, and coding costs for the website, the other $89.95 million was to go towards the back end application that the website was an interface for. So you have a from scratch coded application that needs to deal with data from dozens of civilian and government systems in real time. That much money doesn't really sound like a bad deal for what they're getting. For perspective, the department I work for has three systems, all turn key from companies like GE, and an upgrade to the new version that involves new hardware for any of them can easily run between $2-$5 million and not even be abnormal for the enterprise world. To be honest, they should have known from the low cost that the price wasn't realisitic.
Government contracting is a bear and adds at least 30% inefficiency to the process for a small project; can't say on a large project but I imagine the percentage remains fairly constant.
What's funny, is that I suspect from working for the government, is that the 30% is all from various laws passed to make sure that the government doesn't waste money. At least that's what it's like at the state level.
Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products.
You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.
Knowledgable people find out about such products how exactly? They scour the ads for such products and do research. At best, they are specifically sent information about new products for review, which is what? Targeted advertising. Not only do you have some idea that knowledgable people have magic they use to discover new products but you also seem lazy in the desire to let other people do everything and never become knowledgable yourself.
Please leave the religious stuff elsewhere, slashdot is not a fertile place for fairy tales.
I'd say 'Please don't feed the trolls' but these discussions are why we come to /.
Couldn't they just wait till it actually worked? Its not like anyone was racing them to market in those days.
Racing to market, maybe not. Still, people were already upgrading phones fairly often. A late demo would have been six months of people who would have bought an iPhone but couldn't because they already upgraded.
They weren't kidding. During the three weeks I spent in India, our car was bumped into or struck on three separate occasions! (I haven't been involved in that many accidents in 35 years on American streets.)
You've obviously never had to parallel park on the streets of San Francisco.
How is Metro a lack of innovation?
It wasn't an example of their lack of innovation. It was an example of why their future is in question. It changed the workflow of their entire OS requiring retraining for essentially every business user out there. Even if trainers don't have to be called in, it's still a hit to business workflow in an amount that I bet somebody someplace has put a dollar amount on. What's worse, is that I really don't see any reason for it except for change for the sake of change. Nothing really works any better than it did before, in fact, I've seen cases of it taking longer due to more clicks and window changes than it used to. That impacts business which is their main stronghold. I'd even bring up the Office Ribbon before Metro as change for the sake of change that nobody wanted, they have had to at least partially back out of, and hasn't really aided usability.
Isn't the food safety and inspection program funded by user fees from the agricultural/packing industry?
Possibly, but if it is anything like what almost happened in WA a few months back, such monies go into a fund and then they are redistributed in the budget. Thus, if the budget or spending bill doesn't get passed, the money can't actually be used even if it's been collected and is sitting there waiting to be used. My girlfriend works for a state department that is funded by business fees collected for their required services, but almost got furloughed anyway because the WA budget almost didn't get passed.
They say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
THEY have obviously never sewed and had to thread a needle before.