Using fiat debt money to build a super gun is much different than say building a road. If you build the road the economy continues to extract value from its use. The gun on the other hand gets taken off to war and sooner or later destroyed
Though this gun probably isn't an example, many fancy new weapons do go on to make money for the US through sales to allies (and even not-so-allies).
American fighter jets and rifles have been bought up worldwide.
The publishers of the classified portions of the information are clearly committing felonies.
Except they're not, as the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case. Publishers are free to publish leaked material. Now, you might argue that there's something special about this case, and I agree that will take a while to play out, but we're not entering murky legal waters where it's just plain wrong to claim anyone is clearly committing a crime.
A lot of experts have a problem with having no authority on Wikipedia and having to cite sources like anyone else.
It really doesn't matter if you can cite sources. If you're a newbie, and there's a cabal around the article, you have little hope of ensuring the article develops healthily.
I doubt that, Wikipedia has thousands of revisions on even less important topics and mistakes get corrected out pretty quick, of course, if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..
I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.
And you'll find a lot of people disagree with your claim that fixing them is what "any experts in any field should be doing." My own specific branch of linguistics is tiny, it has a handful of experts. Several of them gave Wikipedia a try and then gave up on it pretty fast, as they felt that effecting any real beneficial change was impossible when you have cabals of non-expert editors. Besides, there's an occasional feeling in my field that our research doesn't really concern the public; it benefits them indirectly, but reaching out to the layman ourselves is a waste of time. Experts have a duty to do expert research, not writing popular science.
I've used ATMs all over the Soviet Union, from the metropolises like Moscow and Almaty to provincial capitals hit hard by job loss and economic migration away. I've never experienced theft of my bank card details. The crime carried out in Yakutsk is not a widespread problem in Russia. To be honest, I'd be more worried using my card in the US when stories keep coming out like those gas pumps that had been tampered with, though again that's probably the media just blowing it out of proportion.
Why should minrity arts such as the classical opera, ballet etc get funding when popular art that people WANt to see does not.
Because most first-world countries consider them worth supporting, and they view a decline in the fine arts as a decline in civilization. In Finland, I don't think I've ever met someone who wanted an end to state subsidies of concert and opera halls -- even if people don't personally listen to the music, they recognize its value. Besides, the fine arts filter down into popular music. Radiohead, for example, credit composers you've never heard of, and their last album uses technology originally developed at IRCAM (which is fully, and generously, funded by the French state).
Chances are that some of the art you enjoy was created a least in part through government funding. Do you really want to call some of the great directors incompetent? Even in the US, which has little tradition of a welfare state, filmmakers have gotten tax breaks and other financial incentives from the states they shot the film in.
Just because of a single bad law passed by Congress, would you recommend people vote for parties seeking to undo the Constitution and return the nation to the Articles of Confederation or a band of independent states? While everyone has a few complaints about this or that feature of the EU, support for disbanding it is very low except for a tiny, but loud, minority. That's particularly true among the young, who have gotten used to things like Eramus, EVS, a single currency and not having to change money every 200 km, the freedom to go work in some other European country that tickles their fancy, no more internal passport checks, etc.
Those kids could, you know, just not have a copy of the music. I don't know where this divine right to have stuff comes from.
The fine arts are traditionally considered vital to a society, so much so that most first-world countries massively subsidize production of music and films. Some music labels stay afloat purely through subsidies or patronage even if they don't sell many CDs, and if the bills are already paid to the creators, it's hard to say that people copying CDs are depriving them of a livelihood.
Inded, I was about to bring up Romania. As far back as 2007 people in Cluj were enjoying higher speeds and lower prices than what residents of high-population density locations could dream of. I get 300 Mbps for only about $15/month, and my connection isn't throttled to hell like any of the American ISPs I had the misfortune of dealing with.
The US government used to work hard to keep the NSA out of the public eye. Though the existence of the organization wasn't a total secret, press coverage wasn't welcome at all until after September 11. I remember when I arrived at Defense Language Institute in late 1999 as a fresh Navy recruit, some among my supervisors, old hands in SIGINT and some of whom had served at Ft. Mead itself, were very upset at the recent Baltimore Sun coverage of DLI and the NSA. "The public doesn't need to know any of what we do."
Also, the CIA's spies had to use encryption. Their lives depended on it, and the organization grew out of earlier military units concerned with cryptography and codebreaking.
So when it came to putting up a monument like this, one that would attract the public to figure out its secrets, better to put it outside the CIA's headquarters, because by this point the existence and general purpose of the CIA was known to everyone.
I know exactly what the word means and am using it in a perfectly clear fashion, to say that GNU utils can be ousted from their dominant position across Linux distros.
The use of Dash as the default shell over Bash, the growing preference for cmake over GNU Make, and the speedy progress of Clang against GCC mean that the GNU toolchain is not invulnerable. Even if they still have a few years on the competition in most areas, I think GNU needs to start thinking now about how to maintain its relevance in the long term.
In the developing world you can easily get the lowest-end Nokia phones for 15-20, unlocked of course. Although now I have a Nokia N900 that I love very much, in the past I have often bought those super-cheap Nokias because they are inexpensive to replace if I lose one, and they are well-nigh indestructible (drop one from two meters and see it just bounce).
One could add the Georgian and Armenian translations, the Aramaic translation called the Pesshita, the translation of Ss. Cyril and Methodius and their successors into Slavonic, the translation into Komi by St Stephan of Perm, etc. etc. That the urban myth of "No Christians could ever read the Bible in their native languages, because the big bad Church would kill you" persists is sad.
The New Testament was written in Greek. Fairly amateur translations into Latin came a couple of hundred years later, and then eventually St. Jerome made the standard Latin translation called the Vulgate.
It's funny, yet sad, how you insist that Islamist political parties that enjoy wide support from the people are some kind of aberrant handful of people who don't speak for anyone. The poll numbers for the Muslim Brotherhood and for Ak Parti speak for themselves.
Iran under the shah was basically like Turkey is now: people believed themselves Muslims, but they drank, women didn't always wear the veil, Western culture was cool even if the American-backed government was not. Nonetheless, even if the people didn't strictly live by the precepts of Islamic law, there was paradoxically widespread support for the establishment of Islamic law. It was people who you'd call non-fundamentalists who welcomed back Khomeini and helped him win out over the secular revolutionary forces. True, perhaps individual Muslims are good, decent, harmless people, but at this point in history they tend to usher in harsh religious states when acting as a mass.
All monotheistic religions, including Christianity (dominant in the West), require their followers to follow only one God, and discount the gods of others as false idols. Taken to an extreme they all recommend killing infidels, and even interpreted mildly they imply disrespect and disregard for the beliefs of others. How is this problematic aspect of Islam any different from similar problematic aspects of Christianity (as practiced by fundamentalists)?
The establishment of a Christian theocracy is nowhere near as much of a threat as a Muslim one. It's been hundreds of years since a serious Christian state existed, and there isn't conveniently codified religious law that can be quickly put into force like schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Furthermore, not all theocracies are equal. Sticking with the example of Turkey, even when under the Byzantine Empire there was a beautiful symphonia between Church and State, the practice of other religions was permitted. There were Muslim places of worship within the walls of Constantinople. Compare this to Muslim Turkey: even during its decades of secularism, Turkey has confiscated much land belonging to the Orthodox Church (including shutting down their only seminary), and is cracking down on house churches.
Incidentally, that ancient Christian churches are on display for tourists doesn't mean the country can't go radical. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, once it takes power, intends to keep a lot of ancient religious sites open to sustain the tourist economy even as it institutes a very strict law upon the people.
While not all are admitted to university straight out of secondary school, moving from a higher vocational institute to a university in Finland is fairly easy.
As for the lower amount of graduates, I would ascribe that to the fact that, in order to complete one's degree at a Finnish university, one is pressured to come up with an original contribution to the field for their final thesis, even at the undergraduate level. Not everyone is up to doing original research, and therefore a lot of people give up once they reach the time to write the final thesis, even though they've completed all the necessary coursework. The result may be a society with fewer formal graduates, but nonetheless the amount of educated people is considerably higher than in the US and public discourse is enormously more reasonable than in the US.
I've travelled extensively in Morocco and Turkey (just returned from another journey through the former a week ago) and have got into innumerable discussions with the locals about religion. It is true that those countries are not Wahhabi. However, people who feel that Islam is a key part of their identity and who strive to practice it in their lives do agree with many of the problematic aspects of fundamentalist Islam. They do not believe that other religions or no religion at all should be permitted, and they want the state to silence opponents of Islam.
Turkey especially is tilting towards a situation like in Egypt where a secular state is hanging on to life even as the population goes towards a Muslim Brotherhood-like ideology. My secular friends, representative the ever-decreasing portion of the population who think that Atatürk's attempts to diminish Islam's power were a good thing, are now looking to emigrate so they aren't here when the revolution goes down.
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Really? When has, say, Saudi Arabia used fighter planes against the US?
Though this gun probably isn't an example, many fancy new weapons do go on to make money for the US through sales to allies (and even not-so-allies).
American fighter jets and rifles have been bought up worldwide.
Except they're not, as the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case. Publishers are free to publish leaked material. Now, you might argue that there's something special about this case, and I agree that will take a while to play out, but we're not entering murky legal waters where it's just plain wrong to claim anyone is clearly committing a crime.
It really doesn't matter if you can cite sources. If you're a newbie, and there's a cabal around the article, you have little hope of ensuring the article develops healthily.
I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.
And you'll find a lot of people disagree with your claim that fixing them is what "any experts in any field should be doing." My own specific branch of linguistics is tiny, it has a handful of experts. Several of them gave Wikipedia a try and then gave up on it pretty fast, as they felt that effecting any real beneficial change was impossible when you have cabals of non-expert editors. Besides, there's an occasional feeling in my field that our research doesn't really concern the public; it benefits them indirectly, but reaching out to the layman ourselves is a waste of time. Experts have a duty to do expert research, not writing popular science.
I've used ATMs all over the Soviet Union, from the metropolises like Moscow and Almaty to provincial capitals hit hard by job loss and economic migration away. I've never experienced theft of my bank card details. The crime carried out in Yakutsk is not a widespread problem in Russia. To be honest, I'd be more worried using my card in the US when stories keep coming out like those gas pumps that had been tampered with, though again that's probably the media just blowing it out of proportion.
Security patches for poppler, the library that evince is built upon, are issued fairly regularly.
You could always buy an N900 or the forthcoming Meego phone. They run pretty standard GNU/Linux distributions.
Because most first-world countries consider them worth supporting, and they view a decline in the fine arts as a decline in civilization. In Finland, I don't think I've ever met someone who wanted an end to state subsidies of concert and opera halls -- even if people don't personally listen to the music, they recognize its value. Besides, the fine arts filter down into popular music. Radiohead, for example, credit composers you've never heard of, and their last album uses technology originally developed at IRCAM (which is fully, and generously, funded by the French state).
Chances are that some of the art you enjoy was created a least in part through government funding. Do you really want to call some of the great directors incompetent? Even in the US, which has little tradition of a welfare state, filmmakers have gotten tax breaks and other financial incentives from the states they shot the film in.
Just because of a single bad law passed by Congress, would you recommend people vote for parties seeking to undo the Constitution and return the nation to the Articles of Confederation or a band of independent states? While everyone has a few complaints about this or that feature of the EU, support for disbanding it is very low except for a tiny, but loud, minority. That's particularly true among the young, who have gotten used to things like Eramus, EVS, a single currency and not having to change money every 200 km, the freedom to go work in some other European country that tickles their fancy, no more internal passport checks, etc.
The fine arts are traditionally considered vital to a society, so much so that most first-world countries massively subsidize production of music and films. Some music labels stay afloat purely through subsidies or patronage even if they don't sell many CDs, and if the bills are already paid to the creators, it's hard to say that people copying CDs are depriving them of a livelihood.
Inded, I was about to bring up Romania. As far back as 2007 people in Cluj were enjoying higher speeds and lower prices than what residents of high-population density locations could dream of. I get 300 Mbps for only about $15/month, and my connection isn't throttled to hell like any of the American ISPs I had the misfortune of dealing with.
Tipping is not a common practice in the EU.
The US government used to work hard to keep the NSA out of the public eye. Though the existence of the organization wasn't a total secret, press coverage wasn't welcome at all until after September 11. I remember when I arrived at Defense Language Institute in late 1999 as a fresh Navy recruit, some among my supervisors, old hands in SIGINT and some of whom had served at Ft. Mead itself, were very upset at the recent Baltimore Sun coverage of DLI and the NSA. "The public doesn't need to know any of what we do."
Also, the CIA's spies had to use encryption. Their lives depended on it, and the organization grew out of earlier military units concerned with cryptography and codebreaking.
So when it came to putting up a monument like this, one that would attract the public to figure out its secrets, better to put it outside the CIA's headquarters, because by this point the existence and general purpose of the CIA was known to everyone.
I know exactly what the word means and am using it in a perfectly clear fashion, to say that GNU utils can be ousted from their dominant position across Linux distros.
The use of Dash as the default shell over Bash, the growing preference for cmake over GNU Make, and the speedy progress of Clang against GCC mean that the GNU toolchain is not invulnerable. Even if they still have a few years on the competition in most areas, I think GNU needs to start thinking now about how to maintain its relevance in the long term.
In Soviet Russia, GNU Hurd triumphs over Linux!
In the developing world you can easily get the lowest-end Nokia phones for 15-20, unlocked of course. Although now I have a Nokia N900 that I love very much, in the past I have often bought those super-cheap Nokias because they are inexpensive to replace if I lose one, and they are well-nigh indestructible (drop one from two meters and see it just bounce).
One could add the Georgian and Armenian translations, the Aramaic translation called the Pesshita, the translation of Ss. Cyril and Methodius and their successors into Slavonic, the translation into Komi by St Stephan of Perm, etc. etc. That the urban myth of "No Christians could ever read the Bible in their native languages, because the big bad Church would kill you" persists is sad.
The New Testament was written in Greek. Fairly amateur translations into Latin came a couple of hundred years later, and then eventually St. Jerome made the standard Latin translation called the Vulgate.
It's funny, yet sad, how you insist that Islamist political parties that enjoy wide support from the people are some kind of aberrant handful of people who don't speak for anyone. The poll numbers for the Muslim Brotherhood and for Ak Parti speak for themselves.
Iran under the shah was basically like Turkey is now: people believed themselves Muslims, but they drank, women didn't always wear the veil, Western culture was cool even if the American-backed government was not. Nonetheless, even if the people didn't strictly live by the precepts of Islamic law, there was paradoxically widespread support for the establishment of Islamic law. It was people who you'd call non-fundamentalists who welcomed back Khomeini and helped him win out over the secular revolutionary forces. True, perhaps individual Muslims are good, decent, harmless people, but at this point in history they tend to usher in harsh religious states when acting as a mass.
The establishment of a Christian theocracy is nowhere near as much of a threat as a Muslim one. It's been hundreds of years since a serious Christian state existed, and there isn't conveniently codified religious law that can be quickly put into force like schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Furthermore, not all theocracies are equal. Sticking with the example of Turkey, even when under the Byzantine Empire there was a beautiful symphonia between Church and State, the practice of other religions was permitted. There were Muslim places of worship within the walls of Constantinople. Compare this to Muslim Turkey: even during its decades of secularism, Turkey has confiscated much land belonging to the Orthodox Church (including shutting down their only seminary), and is cracking down on house churches.
Incidentally, that ancient Christian churches are on display for tourists doesn't mean the country can't go radical. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, once it takes power, intends to keep a lot of ancient religious sites open to sustain the tourist economy even as it institutes a very strict law upon the people.
While not all are admitted to university straight out of secondary school, moving from a higher vocational institute to a university in Finland is fairly easy.
As for the lower amount of graduates, I would ascribe that to the fact that, in order to complete one's degree at a Finnish university, one is pressured to come up with an original contribution to the field for their final thesis, even at the undergraduate level. Not everyone is up to doing original research, and therefore a lot of people give up once they reach the time to write the final thesis, even though they've completed all the necessary coursework. The result may be a society with fewer formal graduates, but nonetheless the amount of educated people is considerably higher than in the US and public discourse is enormously more reasonable than in the US.
I've travelled extensively in Morocco and Turkey (just returned from another journey through the former a week ago) and have got into innumerable discussions with the locals about religion. It is true that those countries are not Wahhabi. However, people who feel that Islam is a key part of their identity and who strive to practice it in their lives do agree with many of the problematic aspects of fundamentalist Islam. They do not believe that other religions or no religion at all should be permitted, and they want the state to silence opponents of Islam.
Turkey especially is tilting towards a situation like in Egypt where a secular state is hanging on to life even as the population goes towards a Muslim Brotherhood-like ideology. My secular friends, representative the ever-decreasing portion of the population who think that Atatürk's attempts to diminish Islam's power were a good thing, are now looking to emigrate so they aren't here when the revolution goes down.