Not everywhere. The whole point of having public education is that every single person in the country is entitled to having a basic education, and everybody graduates from 12th grade with the same basic education. Private schools don't exist everywhere by any stretch of the imagination and home schooling isn't an option for everybody.
Also, voucher or not, everybody pays into the education system the same way helping out with our military expenses isn't optional here (if only it were!).
I'm a freelancer, so I have to pay for my own health insurance, which *sucks*. I'm paying well over double what I was when I was full-time employed and on a company plan. It's hard to imagine a government healthcare system like medicare or VA being more expensive than my current insurance, so if that becomes an option for me I'll probably switch. For the record, I'm not poor, I just don't want to over-pay for health insurance just to show off how much money I have to spare;).
The other thing that bugs me is this argument that something run by the government necessarily has to suck. You're, presumably, a citizen and presumably can vote; this is government for and/by/ the people, so make it not suck! We the people are in control here and we don't have to reelect representatives that screw this up. We can vote for people in whom we have confidence they have the intelligence to create something that will serve us well. Don't even try telling me it's because the government is so huge and there's so much bureaucracy either because there's the same issues in big insurance companies, and those guys/aren't/ elected by the people. They're only beholden to their shareholders in the end, but we're all shareholders in the government.
Basically, quit your bitching and make sure your congresscritters do the right thing here and make a healthcare system we can be proud of rather than the current one which is frankly an absolute disgrace. As one of the wealthiest and most capable nations on the planet it's shameful that we don't take care of our own people.
Totally agreed on the debate getting out of control, though. Healthcare reform is a huuuuuuuuge issue and I feel like it deserves a sane and rational debate, which isn't happening because of fearmongering and childishness. I could be equivocal about this and say the childishness is seen across the board but that'd be a lie; the GOP needs to sit down at the table like adults and hash this out with the rest of the grownups.
Because "queen" when referring to ants has a completely different meaning than "queen" when referring to the ruler of a country? Not all people in the UK are biological children hatched from eggs laid by Queen Elizabeth, although it's been a while since I've cracked open a biology textbook.
I'm guessing the reason they didn't mutate to their environment is that their spread across the globe was assisted by humans accidentally, and thus happened much faster than their evolution would allow. They've only been that widespread fairly recently, in the grand scheme of things (like in the past few hundred years), like humans of any particular widespread ethnicity, they can recognize each other as being similar.
Now, if the different supercolonies across the globe manage to all get along and work together, the ants are ahead of us for sure.
Agreed, and my apologies about the correlation/causation argument; I kinda figured I'm on slashdot and that's one of those/. phrases.
What we really have to protect against is the witch hunt state, where the rules for what's a warning sign and what's protected expression become too arbitrary. It's important when suspicious behaviour is out in the open to recognize it and take note but people's privacy has to be respected. Though I hardly consider myself a threat to the state who's to say the stuff I read mightn't be suspicious to someone who didn't know me?
While this is true, correlation is not causation and just as there are a lot more ordinary people in this country than terrorists (unless you believe the Bushite propaganda), there's probably a lot more ordinary people who dig the Constitution than domestic terrorists.
I don't keep a pocket copy of it on me or anything but I do firmly believe that a well thought out understanding of the Constitution is essential for being a citizen (that goes for other countries, too, with their respective government-establishing documents). It's important to know your rights as well as to know what's expected of you where you live. Your taxes pay for the government, so it's handy to know a little about it.
The real thing that I take issue with here is that mere possession of/any/ readily-available document could be grounds for suspicion. Implicit in our first amendment rights is the right also to consume whatever speech or press we wish. Like the Patriot Act's provision that libraries could spy on what you read. If a book is in a public library, it should be understood that I can pick it up and read it without suspicion.
It may take a little longer than four years to dismantle all the horribly horribly wrong things that have been done in the name of national security in this country.
It's not just incumbents that introduce bad legislation. It's not as though all the junior senators out there are doing nothing.
Of course now is where I would point out poorly thought out legislation a junior senator has proposed but as I really should be working right now I have none. It can't just be the old guys though.
If you're on a laptop either put down two fingers on the trackpad or hold down ctrl then click. If on a desktop just click the right sid of the mouse. Seriously why is this still a reason people make fun of macs for?!
What about a review site that just so happens to have links to the torrents being reviewed? The very notion that it might be open to such a stupid loophole is a good indication that the assisting making available charge is just a little ludicrous.
That's why it's not defined at birth. In most US jurisdictions life is defined to begin when a fetus can survive by itself outside the womb (roughly six months into a pregnancy).
You would have a really good point if all the different linux distros were intended for the same crowd of people, but they're not. A great many of them are meant for niche markets where there are few options. In the grand scheme of things people who are thinking of a transition to linux might have heard of 2-3 distros, which is a manageable number of choices. It's not like you're going to see many ordinary folk trying to choose between some embedded linux and Ubuntu. I do agree with you that it behooves the linux community to have a minimum of distros trying to go mainstream at any given time.
And besides, unlike different distros of linux which oftentimes come with very different goals and processes to create them, the different "versions" of Win 7 are really just different features users might be willing to give up to get a better price.
Really this is what's the most baffling to me. I feel like Microsoft makes a product and then proliferates multiple stripped-down versions of it, whereas it would be so much better for everybody if they just made one single well-rounded product or perhaps two (home and pro) and no more. Kudos to them for only marketing a couple of them but there are still way too many flavours. Is it really necessary to have a media centre version and a tablet pc version? Why not just have drivers or separate software for those things and keep the experience consistent?
Cheap programmers are great for throwaway or non-mission critical software, but make sure you have at least some good programmers around who have the computer science background underlying their software engineering abilities to deal with the tough/complex stuff.
This is a really important point. There's nothing wrong with having inexperienced programmers around if you have a couple of more capable guys to guide them. I would say a programmer is only truly useless if they lack not only the proper background but also the ability to accept direction from more experienced programmers.
If you have a team of cheap programmers and no one to guide them or they're more lone wolf types who don't like direction, no amount of hardware will ever guarantee success.
That's 11lbs in addition to whatever you carry normally. I'm a strong guy and also in the target market (creative professional), but I don't think it makes me any less strong when I say this would be a major pain. I usually carry a sketchbook, pens and pencils, and a couple of small notebooks. I just don't have the capacity and if I'm on the road I don't need a second LCD. Soooooo I'm still wondering how well this thing will sell. Guess we'll see.
Let me start by saying that I'm just as unenthusiastic about Vista as the next guy. If your computer has 1Gb of free RAM then that 1Gb is wasted. It could be used for cacheing frequently used applications and/or documents. If you have all of your RAM being used but enough of it kept volatile so that it can be thrown out quickly, you are fully utilizing the resources given to you.
Okay that being said I still think it's pathetic if Windows Vista can't handle file copying with a bunch of applications open. Which makes me wonder if it's worth fully utilizing RAM if it can't do so responsibly.
This comment is more directed at the original poster, but I absolutely agree. I will add that working for agencies can be fun and profitable if you live near a few. There's a handful of them here in Chicago and it's very good work. The pay is typically pretty good once you get a reputation and enough people know you. That's key: knowing people.
I get most of my work by calling people at agencies where I've worked and letting them know I'm available. Usually within a couple of weeks I hear back from someone that there's a project coming up. Agencies are a good bet because they're accustomed to having freelancers and contractors working for them, and if you're good they will keep you around and if you're especially unlucky put you in their payroll system.
Get to know other web contractors in your area. They're typically good people and they'll have good advice on which places are good to work at and might have some leads too. Knowing a full-time employee at an agency is nearly a guaranteed way to hustle up some work there.
Make no mistake of it though: working for agencies is very difficult. The timelines are always shorter, the hours longer. Also, agencies typically demand absolute perfection for the deliverables that will eventually reach their clients. Every page must look pixel for pixel the same as the layout you get from their designers, in every web browser known to man. Seriously I once had to kludge my super pretty, modern layout into working on IE5 in Windows 2000 once because that's what a client's european division used. This is probably territory well covered by the "not another dreamweaver developer" posts, but it bears repeating: web development is a specialty and like any other specialty requires a lot of special knowledge. It's a skill like any other. Make sure you're up to the challenge before you start seriously working in the business.
My advice is pretty useless if you're looking to avoid working places on-site and if you're only looking for a between real jobs kind of situation. Hopefully it helps someone though.
Definitely an interesting thought, and there's been previous speculation about all viruses being space-borne. But if that were the case, why would it start out in the Congo rather than in Siberia?
Presumably on a PC with Internet Explorer, it looks just like the regular page does, which makes me wonder why they'd even bother to do it in the first place. I don't see any ads nor any information that's any more helpful than the default error page for IE.
Did they only do that specifically so that it would screw up DNS lookups? For laughs? Were they bored one day?
Well, for one, customers like the startup where I used to work before getting laid off in the spring. We used EngineYard for our stuff which was beautiful. Scalability was great and everything worked really well with our ruby on rails application. Only problem was that it was absurdly expensive for the amount of reliability we got.
At one point I got a panicked phone call in the middle of the night that the site was down, and checked my email and it was EngineYard apparently accidentally switching something off (!!!). How do you do that?!?
Splitting between two providers would have been great. Redundancy and all that. Also being as we started as a Chicago-centric site it seemed very bizarre that our only servers were in San Francisco. But how to do the load balancing? For our shop it seemed absurd to me because we weren't really pulling in money at all, but we kept getting more and more unique traffic. Office politics between me and a contractor prevented the right course of action from being taken multiple times. I'm sure it's a story y'all have heard before.
Slashdot Mirror
But parents DO have an option for school.
Not everywhere. The whole point of having public education is that every single person in the country is entitled to having a basic education, and everybody graduates from 12th grade with the same basic education. Private schools don't exist everywhere by any stretch of the imagination and home schooling isn't an option for everybody.
Also, voucher or not, everybody pays into the education system the same way helping out with our military expenses isn't optional here (if only it were!).
I'm a freelancer, so I have to pay for my own health insurance, which *sucks*. I'm paying well over double what I was when I was full-time employed and on a company plan. It's hard to imagine a government healthcare system like medicare or VA being more expensive than my current insurance, so if that becomes an option for me I'll probably switch. For the record, I'm not poor, I just don't want to over-pay for health insurance just to show off how much money I have to spare ;).
The other thing that bugs me is this argument that something run by the government necessarily has to suck. You're, presumably, a citizen and presumably can vote; this is government for and /by/ the people, so make it not suck! We the people are in control here and we don't have to reelect representatives that screw this up. We can vote for people in whom we have confidence they have the intelligence to create something that will serve us well. Don't even try telling me it's because the government is so huge and there's so much bureaucracy either because there's the same issues in big insurance companies, and those guys /aren't/ elected by the people. They're only beholden to their shareholders in the end, but we're all shareholders in the government.
Basically, quit your bitching and make sure your congresscritters do the right thing here and make a healthcare system we can be proud of rather than the current one which is frankly an absolute disgrace. As one of the wealthiest and most capable nations on the planet it's shameful that we don't take care of our own people.
Totally agreed on the debate getting out of control, though. Healthcare reform is a huuuuuuuuge issue and I feel like it deserves a sane and rational debate, which isn't happening because of fearmongering and childishness. I could be equivocal about this and say the childishness is seen across the board but that'd be a lie; the GOP needs to sit down at the table like adults and hash this out with the rest of the grownups.
Then good game, humanity. The battle is already lost.
Because "queen" when referring to ants has a completely different meaning than "queen" when referring to the ruler of a country? Not all people in the UK are biological children hatched from eggs laid by Queen Elizabeth, although it's been a while since I've cracked open a biology textbook.
Too soon!
I'm guessing the reason they didn't mutate to their environment is that their spread across the globe was assisted by humans accidentally, and thus happened much faster than their evolution would allow. They've only been that widespread fairly recently, in the grand scheme of things (like in the past few hundred years), like humans of any particular widespread ethnicity, they can recognize each other as being similar.
Now, if the different supercolonies across the globe manage to all get along and work together, the ants are ahead of us for sure.
Agreed, and my apologies about the correlation/causation argument; I kinda figured I'm on slashdot and that's one of those /. phrases.
What we really have to protect against is the witch hunt state, where the rules for what's a warning sign and what's protected expression become too arbitrary. It's important when suspicious behaviour is out in the open to recognize it and take note but people's privacy has to be respected. Though I hardly consider myself a threat to the state who's to say the stuff I read mightn't be suspicious to someone who didn't know me?
I dunno I just worry is all.
No Government has enough storage space and enough bandwidth to log this entire country's internet traffic. Besides that, how to enforce it?
While this is true, correlation is not causation and just as there are a lot more ordinary people in this country than terrorists (unless you believe the Bushite propaganda), there's probably a lot more ordinary people who dig the Constitution than domestic terrorists.
I don't keep a pocket copy of it on me or anything but I do firmly believe that a well thought out understanding of the Constitution is essential for being a citizen (that goes for other countries, too, with their respective government-establishing documents). It's important to know your rights as well as to know what's expected of you where you live. Your taxes pay for the government, so it's handy to know a little about it.
The real thing that I take issue with here is that mere possession of /any/ readily-available document could be grounds for suspicion. Implicit in our first amendment rights is the right also to consume whatever speech or press we wish. Like the Patriot Act's provision that libraries could spy on what you read. If a book is in a public library, it should be understood that I can pick it up and read it without suspicion.
It may take a little longer than four years to dismantle all the horribly horribly wrong things that have been done in the name of national security in this country.
It's not just incumbents that introduce bad legislation. It's not as though all the junior senators out there are doing nothing.
Of course now is where I would point out poorly thought out legislation a junior senator has proposed but as I really should be working right now I have none. It can't just be the old guys though.
If you're on a laptop either put down two fingers on the trackpad or hold down ctrl then click. If on a desktop just click the right sid of the mouse. Seriously why is this still a reason people make fun of macs for?!
What about a review site that just so happens to have links to the torrents being reviewed? The very notion that it might be open to such a stupid loophole is a good indication that the assisting making available charge is just a little ludicrous.
That's why it's not defined at birth. In most US jurisdictions life is defined to begin when a fetus can survive by itself outside the womb (roughly six months into a pregnancy).
You would have a really good point if all the different linux distros were intended for the same crowd of people, but they're not. A great many of them are meant for niche markets where there are few options. In the grand scheme of things people who are thinking of a transition to linux might have heard of 2-3 distros, which is a manageable number of choices. It's not like you're going to see many ordinary folk trying to choose between some embedded linux and Ubuntu. I do agree with you that it behooves the linux community to have a minimum of distros trying to go mainstream at any given time.
And besides, unlike different distros of linux which oftentimes come with very different goals and processes to create them, the different "versions" of Win 7 are really just different features users might be willing to give up to get a better price.
Really this is what's the most baffling to me. I feel like Microsoft makes a product and then proliferates multiple stripped-down versions of it, whereas it would be so much better for everybody if they just made one single well-rounded product or perhaps two (home and pro) and no more. Kudos to them for only marketing a couple of them but there are still way too many flavours. Is it really necessary to have a media centre version and a tablet pc version? Why not just have drivers or separate software for those things and keep the experience consistent?
This is a really important point. There's nothing wrong with having inexperienced programmers around if you have a couple of more capable guys to guide them. I would say a programmer is only truly useless if they lack not only the proper background but also the ability to accept direction from more experienced programmers.
If you have a team of cheap programmers and no one to guide them or they're more lone wolf types who don't like direction, no amount of hardware will ever guarantee success.
That's 11lbs in addition to whatever you carry normally. I'm a strong guy and also in the target market (creative professional), but I don't think it makes me any less strong when I say this would be a major pain. I usually carry a sketchbook, pens and pencils, and a couple of small notebooks. I just don't have the capacity and if I'm on the road I don't need a second LCD. Soooooo I'm still wondering how well this thing will sell. Guess we'll see.
Burning hot pants sounds kinda sexy. Sign me up!
Let me start by saying that I'm just as unenthusiastic about Vista as the next guy. If your computer has 1Gb of free RAM then that 1Gb is wasted. It could be used for cacheing frequently used applications and/or documents. If you have all of your RAM being used but enough of it kept volatile so that it can be thrown out quickly, you are fully utilizing the resources given to you.
Okay that being said I still think it's pathetic if Windows Vista can't handle file copying with a bunch of applications open. Which makes me wonder if it's worth fully utilizing RAM if it can't do so responsibly.
FINALLY someone on slashdot had the balls to say it.
This comment is more directed at the original poster, but I absolutely agree. I will add that working for agencies can be fun and profitable if you live near a few. There's a handful of them here in Chicago and it's very good work. The pay is typically pretty good once you get a reputation and enough people know you. That's key: knowing people.
I get most of my work by calling people at agencies where I've worked and letting them know I'm available. Usually within a couple of weeks I hear back from someone that there's a project coming up. Agencies are a good bet because they're accustomed to having freelancers and contractors working for them, and if you're good they will keep you around and if you're especially unlucky put you in their payroll system.
Get to know other web contractors in your area. They're typically good people and they'll have good advice on which places are good to work at and might have some leads too. Knowing a full-time employee at an agency is nearly a guaranteed way to hustle up some work there.
Make no mistake of it though: working for agencies is very difficult. The timelines are always shorter, the hours longer. Also, agencies typically demand absolute perfection for the deliverables that will eventually reach their clients. Every page must look pixel for pixel the same as the layout you get from their designers, in every web browser known to man. Seriously I once had to kludge my super pretty, modern layout into working on IE5 in Windows 2000 once because that's what a client's european division used. This is probably territory well covered by the "not another dreamweaver developer" posts, but it bears repeating: web development is a specialty and like any other specialty requires a lot of special knowledge. It's a skill like any other. Make sure you're up to the challenge before you start seriously working in the business.
My advice is pretty useless if you're looking to avoid working places on-site and if you're only looking for a between real jobs kind of situation. Hopefully it helps someone though.
If they continue to waste their money then their vote (by which I mean the "vote with your dollars" vote) will go away in the long run.
Definitely an interesting thought, and there's been previous speculation about all viruses being space-borne. But if that were the case, why would it start out in the Congo rather than in Siberia?
Oh wild. So rather than just leave you alone they give you a chance to opt back in. That's nice of them.
Presumably on a PC with Internet Explorer, it looks just like the regular page does, which makes me wonder why they'd even bother to do it in the first place. I don't see any ads nor any information that's any more helpful than the default error page for IE.
Did they only do that specifically so that it would screw up DNS lookups? For laughs? Were they bored one day?
Well, for one, customers like the startup where I used to work before getting laid off in the spring. We used EngineYard for our stuff which was beautiful. Scalability was great and everything worked really well with our ruby on rails application. Only problem was that it was absurdly expensive for the amount of reliability we got.
At one point I got a panicked phone call in the middle of the night that the site was down, and checked my email and it was EngineYard apparently accidentally switching something off (!!!). How do you do that?!?
Splitting between two providers would have been great. Redundancy and all that. Also being as we started as a Chicago-centric site it seemed very bizarre that our only servers were in San Francisco. But how to do the load balancing? For our shop it seemed absurd to me because we weren't really pulling in money at all, but we kept getting more and more unique traffic. Office politics between me and a contractor prevented the right course of action from being taken multiple times. I'm sure it's a story y'all have heard before.