I don't know about entry fees to clubs, but all the other things are paid for with cash. Even if I buy a 60 cent package of ramen, it's paid for with card.
People will not give up their cash without a fight, particularly in the current circumstances (not that anyone ever trusted banks, private companies or government).
It's already happened here in Finland. Almost all my purchases and bill payment is done via bank transfer or Visa Electron card. When I get cash from someone, it actually feels like a burden because there are so few bank branches where I can deposit it (many branches only do advisory things now, not teller services), and the queues there are always long. There are instances where it's actually more expensive to pay with cash than with card.
1. Your high ("progressive") taxes on businesses and your welfare state pretty much force anyone who wants to produce anything of value pretty to leave Sweden.
That's a common claim from opponents of the welfare state, but one that is easily debunked. The economies of the Nordic countries actually immproved after the creation of the welfare state. Companies like Nokia might have their differences with the national government, but this is generally over matters other than taxation.
When I visited Sweden I was lucky enough to meet lots of smart and productive people; a decade later, out of a dozen I kept in touch with, all are either 1) working in America/Ireland (about 9)
Immigration from the Nordic countries is negligible now compared to the grim era before the welfare state. A hundred years ago, there was fairly low taxation and laissez faire economics, and people left by the millions to North America.
I flipped through Beginning GIMP in the bookstore, but I ultimately went with GIMP 2 for Photographers because my only real concern is editing photos that I've taken. You're right that game designers use GIMP, but so do people on *nix boxes who just want to retouch less than perfect photos. GIMP is such a multifaceted tool with diverse user communities that a guide to the program can't be everything for everyone.
Apple is not fighting to keep it off the iPod, they just don't care about supporting it.
The establishment of encrypted firmware with the iPod Touch and iPod Classic was an intentional move towards preventing third-party firmware installations like Rockbox. Apple made an effort to ensure you can't install it, so the issue is a lot more than a neutral "lack of support".
I remember 10 years ago that every nerd had a PGP key and Schneier's Applied Cryptography was a standard text for our crowd. Now, the majority of even the hard-core geeks no longer have much interest in encryption. Somewhere along the way we forgot that every step forward on the net demands a way to guarantee privacy. Berners-Lee might regret the lack of privacy now, but he and other luminaries weren't vocal enough about the need for encryption and lots of it.
There's certainly a big break in the very practice reading with the advent of digital media. People growing up today perhaps less concerned about the smell of the paper, the feel of the binding and so forth as you mention. But it's not just that. Traditions of typography have been eroded now that a lot of publishers are allowing layout to be done with word processors like Microsoft Word instead of a real typesetting engine, with IMO a severe loss of readability and aesthetic craft.
Nonetheless, I myself travel most of the year, so carting around a lot of books isn't possible, but reading off my notebook screen isn't so pleasant (and I'm always chasing AC power sources). Now that the Kindle 2 has been released, I may get one. But it sucks to be a member of a generation torn between older traditions and these newfangled devices.
That reminds me of the label on the sealed box for a laptop I bought some years ago. It said something along the lines of "By opening this package, you agree to the terms of the EULA inside". This was so that you could not just install Linux and ask the company for a refund for the Windows license. Ridiculous that you're a position where you have to agree to something you can't even read yet.
Another $2 million is being offered to competitors who are able to beam power to a device climbing a cable at a height of up to one kilometer.
Wouldn't it just make more sense to have solar panels in orbit and transmit the power along the space elevator? If I remember correctly, this is what Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned with the space elevator in his science fiction novel Red Mars. Being able to bring power down would be a nice bonus for a tool to get up to orbit easily.
The artwork for the Virgin Killer album was said to clearly fall under new UK child pornography laws. Therefore, while a law so restrictive that it makes old album covers illegal might be odious, how is it a mistake for the IWF to go along until such a law is overturned?
We're living in the future. The thought of a library fit onto a quarter-sized device makes me think of that scene from Gene Wolfe's science fiction masterwork The Book of the New Sun where the curator of the Earth's largest and most ancient library says:
There is a cube of crystal here --- though I can no longer tell you where --- no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.
The development of such small memory is a significant step forward. Just think about how the writings of the human race can be better preserved if it all fits on a small, lightweight and easily duplicated device. It could be spread all over the solar system as protection against all manner of cataclysms. I wonder how long it stays readable though, before it succumbs to some kind of rot.
For things such as LAN routers where the amount of clients who will connect will be relatively small, don't they typically give the same IPv4 address out again and again to the same MAC address?
France and Germany can afford to do this precisely because the US spends so much on the military and subsidizes & assists Frances' and Germany's defense.
The assertion that Europe has the welfare state only because America is covering their defense doesn't entirely hold water. Finland, for example, has never elected to join in a defense pact with the US. Nonetheless, it has built on its own one of the strongest armies in Europe (defense analysts suggest it could hold off another offense by the Russian army) and a fine welfare state matching in most respects its Nordic neighbors.
As another commentator pointed out here, a microwave beaming system would be seen by other countries as a potential space weapon, spurring a space arms race that we might not want to start right now. I think the only completely unobjectionable method of getting power down from orbit would be transmitting it along a space elevator a la Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars. But I suspect that before a space elevator would be feasible, the human race will have already perfected fusion power, which would rather solve our energy needs, wouldn't it? Indeed, fusion is always 30 years away, but a recent BBC report makes me optimistic.
Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash was named after a supposed phenomenon of the early days of computing where a failure was so bad that the display device went berserk and showed only television-style static. Is this kind of crash real or apocryphal? It does seem unlikely.
Obviously you need a license that matches your values. If you think the same way as Stallman, who has communicated his principles in such places as the biography Free as in Freedom and the Free Software Song, you'll chose his license. If, on the other hand, matters of "hoarding" don't worry you at all, you'll chose another license. The quest for the one true open source license is an unreasonable expectation that human beings all think the same.
The countries with the highest standard of living in the world have tax rates considerably higher than in the US. This is not an argument for simply raising taxes without a total rethink of government activity, but it does suggest that lowering taxes is running in the wrong direction.
Indeed, Sherry Sontag's Blind Man's Bluff tells a lot of interesting stories about Russian-American submarine escapades during the Cold War. Sometimes our Navies seemed less like proud defenders of the motherland and more like dumbass high school kids playing chicken.
Companies are already leaving Asia and taking their manufacturing to Eastern Europe because labor costs and regulation are at even lower levels.
Cite? The only major manufacturing moves to Eastern Europe have been Dell and Nokia, moving from Western Europe. Eastern Europe might be comparatively poor, but the cost of living there is much higher than in rural Asia, and it's unlikely to pull manufacturing out of the very Third World.
Do you want to pay prices for electronics higher by an order of magnitude? You would if you insisted they be made with the same wages and working conditions you're used to in the West.
Slashdot Mirror
One reason we wouldn't see it is because few drivers in the West now would stand for a car without power steering.
I don't know about entry fees to clubs, but all the other things are paid for with cash. Even if I buy a 60 cent package of ramen, it's paid for with card.
That sounds like the perfect setup for a "sup dawg, I herd you like cars" off-topic that I sadly am not talented enough to pen.
It's already happened here in Finland. Almost all my purchases and bill payment is done via bank transfer or Visa Electron card. When I get cash from someone, it actually feels like a burden because there are so few bank branches where I can deposit it (many branches only do advisory things now, not teller services), and the queues there are always long. There are instances where it's actually more expensive to pay with cash than with card.
That's a common claim from opponents of the welfare state, but one that is easily debunked. The economies of the Nordic countries actually immproved after the creation of the welfare state. Companies like Nokia might have their differences with the national government, but this is generally over matters other than taxation.
Immigration from the Nordic countries is negligible now compared to the grim era before the welfare state. A hundred years ago, there was fairly low taxation and laissez faire economics, and people left by the millions to North America.
I flipped through Beginning GIMP in the bookstore, but I ultimately went with GIMP 2 for Photographers because my only real concern is editing photos that I've taken. You're right that game designers use GIMP, but so do people on *nix boxes who just want to retouch less than perfect photos. GIMP is such a multifaceted tool with diverse user communities that a guide to the program can't be everything for everyone.
The establishment of encrypted firmware with the iPod Touch and iPod Classic was an intentional move towards preventing third-party firmware installations like Rockbox. Apple made an effort to ensure you can't install it, so the issue is a lot more than a neutral "lack of support".
I remember 10 years ago that every nerd had a PGP key and Schneier's Applied Cryptography was a standard text for our crowd. Now, the majority of even the hard-core geeks no longer have much interest in encryption. Somewhere along the way we forgot that every step forward on the net demands a way to guarantee privacy. Berners-Lee might regret the lack of privacy now, but he and other luminaries weren't vocal enough about the need for encryption and lots of it.
There's certainly a big break in the very practice reading with the advent of digital media. People growing up today perhaps less concerned about the smell of the paper, the feel of the binding and so forth as you mention. But it's not just that. Traditions of typography have been eroded now that a lot of publishers are allowing layout to be done with word processors like Microsoft Word instead of a real typesetting engine, with IMO a severe loss of readability and aesthetic craft.
Nonetheless, I myself travel most of the year, so carting around a lot of books isn't possible, but reading off my notebook screen isn't so pleasant (and I'm always chasing AC power sources). Now that the Kindle 2 has been released, I may get one. But it sucks to be a member of a generation torn between older traditions and these newfangled devices.
That reminds me of the label on the sealed box for a laptop I bought some years ago. It said something along the lines of "By opening this package, you agree to the terms of the EULA inside". This was so that you could not just install Linux and ask the company for a refund for the Windows license. Ridiculous that you're a position where you have to agree to something you can't even read yet.
Wouldn't it just make more sense to have solar panels in orbit and transmit the power along the space elevator? If I remember correctly, this is what Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned with the space elevator in his science fiction novel Red Mars . Being able to bring power down would be a nice bonus for a tool to get up to orbit easily.
The artwork for the Virgin Killer album was said to clearly fall under new UK child pornography laws. Therefore, while a law so restrictive that it makes old album covers illegal might be odious, how is it a mistake for the IWF to go along until such a law is overturned?
We're living in the future. The thought of a library fit onto a quarter-sized device makes me think of that scene from Gene Wolfe's science fiction masterwork The Book of the New Sun where the curator of the Earth's largest and most ancient library says:
The development of such small memory is a significant step forward. Just think about how the writings of the human race can be better preserved if it all fits on a small, lightweight and easily duplicated device. It could be spread all over the solar system as protection against all manner of cataclysms. I wonder how long it stays readable though, before it succumbs to some kind of rot.
For things such as LAN routers where the amount of clients who will connect will be relatively small, don't they typically give the same IPv4 address out again and again to the same MAC address?
The assertion that Europe has the welfare state only because America is covering their defense doesn't entirely hold water. Finland, for example, has never elected to join in a defense pact with the US. Nonetheless, it has built on its own one of the strongest armies in Europe (defense analysts suggest it could hold off another offense by the Russian army) and a fine welfare state matching in most respects its Nordic neighbors.
As another commentator pointed out here, a microwave beaming system would be seen by other countries as a potential space weapon, spurring a space arms race that we might not want to start right now. I think the only completely unobjectionable method of getting power down from orbit would be transmitting it along a space elevator a la Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars . But I suspect that before a space elevator would be feasible, the human race will have already perfected fusion power, which would rather solve our energy needs, wouldn't it? Indeed, fusion is always 30 years away, but a recent BBC report makes me optimistic.
Apocryphal from Merriam-Webster Online: " of doubtful authenticity : spurious". What's the problem?
Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash was named after a supposed phenomenon of the early days of computing where a failure was so bad that the display device went berserk and showed only television-style static. Is this kind of crash real or apocryphal? It does seem unlikely.
Obviously you need a license that matches your values. If you think the same way as Stallman, who has communicated his principles in such places as the biography Free as in Freedom and the Free Software Song, you'll chose his license. If, on the other hand, matters of "hoarding" don't worry you at all, you'll chose another license. The quest for the one true open source license is an unreasonable expectation that human beings all think the same.
The countries with the highest standard of living in the world have tax rates considerably higher than in the US. This is not an argument for simply raising taxes without a total rethink of government activity, but it does suggest that lowering taxes is running in the wrong direction.
Indeed, Sherry Sontag's Blind Man's Bluff tells a lot of interesting stories about Russian-American submarine escapades during the Cold War. Sometimes our Navies seemed less like proud defenders of the motherland and more like dumbass high school kids playing chicken.
Cite? The only major manufacturing moves to Eastern Europe have been Dell and Nokia, moving from Western Europe. Eastern Europe might be comparatively poor, but the cost of living there is much higher than in rural Asia, and it's unlikely to pull manufacturing out of the very Third World.
Do you want to pay prices for electronics higher by an order of magnitude? You would if you insisted they be made with the same wages and working conditions you're used to in the West.
It's been available at Amazon for a while now, with several different retailers offering it and already over 50 customer reviews posted.
If Obama's church were so hostile towards whites, it wouldn't have a fairly large amount of whites in attendance every Sunday.