So, why do people keep believing that "everything else advances at the exact same rate"? Because they hear statements like this in forums, and don't think to check it out themselves, usually. No, because it's true. Just because there's a small percentage chance that rats still appear doesn't mean anything. Okay, once more: Most enemies don't level at all. Rats, boars, crabs, and so forth. In general, there are lists of similar critters, and usually only the most powerful one of the list levels. You seem to agree with this, as you agree that rats don't level. However, other people (including other people who responded to my previous comment, and the person who I responded to) don't realize this.
Now, as I said before, as you gain levels, you encounter harder monsters, in addition to the easier ones. That certainly isn't the same as "everything else advances at the exact same rate".
You purposely didn't mention that all bandits level up to you, It is disappointing that you resort to personal attacks. As I said, a few enemies level. Bandits are one of those few. Why you single those out I don't know.
You didn't mention that Arena combatants are leveled to you, so you can become the Arena Champion (supposedly the greatest fighter in Tamriel) at level 1. Okay, did the person I was responding to mention Arena combatants? No, they didn't. I could hardly respond to something before the topic was brought up, now could I?
Yes, arena combatants are leveled. But, unless you have a really, really strange character build you will certainly get enough experience to gain levels before becoming Arena Champion. So if the game tells you that you should rest to gain a level, and puts an icon on your screen to remind you to do so, it is really perverse to refuse to do so and then complain that you are still level 1!
Except, of course, in Oblivion everything doesn't advance along with you.
Here's how it works: in Oblivion, when you are level 1, you find usually monsters like rats, mudcrabs, and things like that. As you gain levels, you start finding harder monsters: boars and such-like. But you still find rats, and rats are no more powerful than they were before. The first time I saw a boar, it was terrifying! Later, when I got more powerful, I was able to kill them with ease, which was quite satisfying. They were no more powerful than they were back then, and I kept encountering them now and then, even when I was much more powerful. There are, indeed, a few enemies that do gain levels as you do, but there are very few of them. And they hardly advance at the same rate as you do, either.
So, why do people keep believing that "everything else advances at the exact same rate"? Because they hear statements like this in forums, and don't think to check it out themselves, usually. Because it takes longer to explain what Oblivion really does. And, more that that, I think it is because MMO games have led people to expect a certain kind of gameplay. After all, Oblivion uses pretty much the same mechanism as Daggerfall (an earlier game in the series) did. It used to be that this wasn't at all uncommon for RPGs. But, the MMO games have trained people to play games a certain way, and now Oblivion is a shock to them.
But is it really out of line with other sentences?
After all, if a kid goes joy-riding in a car, that's grand theft, (even if the car is recovered undamaged), and that's a major jail sentence. And there was a guy sentenced to 15 years for copying three dvds from a video store. And then there are all the people doing major time for having small amounts of drugs on them, never having harmed a fly (other than themselves).
Perhaps the sexual assault sentences are the ones that are out-of-line?
Do you think if everybody paid the taxes they owe that politicians would just lower the tax rate overall? The government will take all it can get.
Of course, the best argument against this is simply to point out that, in fact, the opposite has happened in history.
Under FDR, the top tax rate was 90%!!! Compare that to now.
Unfortunately, there is a political slimy game going on. Certain groups are trying to convince Americans that they are paying horribly high taxes, and that "politicians will always raise taxes if they can". And, just the opposite is actually happening. The strategy is to get lower and lower taxes (especially for the rich), which means there is less money for services -- like schools. And we already see the effects of this: public schools all over the country are having massive cuts, and university tuition is sky-rocketing. This is fine for the wealthy, but pity the poor child who makes the mistake of choosing a poor or middle-class parent.
The reason that sales taxes are disproporionately hard on poor people is that poor people spend all of the money they get, while the right only spend a small percentage of what they get, and invest the rest (or move it offshore).
This is an example of one of my pet peeves: the "argument via stupid compiler". It's not actually the case that "the usual technique involves pushing the parameters...." -- that's just an explanation of recursion that is often given to first-year undergrads. Any compiler that actually implements a functional language this way would be considered unbelievably broken.
The problem is that not only are compilers much more intelligent than people usually give them credit for, but CPUs these days do so much prefetching and pipelining that it is very hard for a person to predict what instruction sequences would actually be most efficient.
Yes, I've heard this a lot. It sounds nice, and is cutely cynical.
It also makes the problem worse.
"Everyone does it" is one of the classic excuses used by crooks everywhere. "Yeah, I cheated you. But it's okay, 'cause everyone does it." No, it's not okay, and everyone does NOT.
In this case, saying "both parties will screw us" is like saying a rapist is no worse than a shoplifter because, after all, both are criminals.
This article is about new laws that allow the government to spy on everyone. Which party DID put those laws in place? Which party did not when they were in power? Which party is allowing companies to put dangerous chemicals into people's drinking water? Which party, when they were in power, put in laws to prevent this? Which party is gutting worker protection laws, and which party, when they were in power, was strengthening them? And which party is funnelling money to the rich and putting the country into massive debt, and which party, when they were in power, built up a massive surplus?
Yeah, the political system means that if you are a politician, you have to get enough campaign money to have a hope of being elected. This means that every politician will probably have to pay attention to those people who have power and money. However, the record shows that the two parties are NOT the same, and saying that they are just excuses the worst of the lot.
Alas, almost nobody seems to read Slashdot postings after they've been up for more than a couple of hours, so probably nobody will see this. But I thought I'd correct a few mistakes:
"war on terrorism protects everybody" Okay, fighting terrorism is good. But is he doing an effective job? And who is benefiting? Take the Iraq war -- we were told that we had proof that Iraq had WMD, and it turns out that that was false, and the Bush administration knew it. So we are spending US$4 billion dollars a month for a war that hasn't increased security. (see cost of war) And who is making money from the war? Just Cheney's former company, who he is still being paid by. (see Cheney paid by Pentagon contractor).
And, by the way, terrorists tried to murder government officials (Democrats) and media with anthrax. The administration doesn't seem to be making any progress in tracking these people down, now, have they?
"the tax cuts and rebates were for everybody (even people who don't pay taxes):" Okay, first of all, the "people who don't pay taxes" bit. The administration was misleading here. Rebates were given to those who didn't pay INCOME taxes, but those people still paid PAYROLL taxes. And because there is a ceiling for payroll taxes, the working poor pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes than rich people do.
As for the tax cuts and rebates being for everyone, who gets by far the most money? Answer: the rich. Take the dividend tax cut. The rich own lots of stock and therefore highly profit from this. The poor and middle-class don't. The administration tried to claim that more Americans than ever own stocks, but didn't mention that most Americans own stocks IN RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, and this won't be affected by the dividend tax cut. And take the cut in the estate tax. The estate tax only affects people who have more than a million dollars in assets: the rich.
And, by the way, if you want to stimulate the economy by giving people money, then economists agree that you should give the money to the poor, not the rich. Why? Because the poor will spend it on goods (food, clothing, housing...), which in turn will help stores and manufacturers. The rich will just save it, which is not nearly as effective.
"the faith based initiative benefits the downtrodden": How does the faith-based initiative help the downtrodden? All it does is funnel money that would have previously gone to non-church related charities to churches. In fact, it make things worse, because faith-based institutions are free to discriminate against people they don't like.
Gore actually offered a full recount to Bush, but Bush refused. Unfortunately, the required procedures make it difficult to ask for a full recount, so Gore tried to get the most "bang for the buck", as it were.
As to the military absentee ballots, the New York Times had a simply amazing report on them. At the moment, I can't find it on their web site anymore, but here is a link to another news article about it: 680 Military Ballots Invalid. The NYT had pictures of ballots that were accepted and rejected. It was VERY obvious that the Republicans were getting away with counting military ballots that were highly improper -- postmarked far after the election, for example, while the same rules weren't followed for other ballots.
I'm afraid this is not true. The Florida law was intended to punish slow election board members, and contradicts other laws which allow both recount and protests. As was pointed out by the court, when one law says that recounts are permitted, and another law gives no time for which said recounts to be performed, the two laws are in conflict. It is the duty of the court to decide between conflicting laws.
To claim that the law said that there was a certain deadline, but omit that the law also said that recounts must be allowed, is deceptive.
I only partially agree with you. On the one hand, waiting a few hours (or even a few days) to make sure that all the ballots are counted correctly, and so that news about the outcome in one state doesn't affect another, all seem like good things.
However, one function that VNS had was a check against election fraud. In the 2000 elections the only state where the VNS data disagreed with the actual result was in Florida. Sure enough, there was incredible fraud occuring in Florida (most of which only came out after the election was decided).
In the 2002 election there were reports of voting machines which were programmed to count only republican ballots. Were things like this significant? Without VNS, we are missing an independent check.
I have a ReplayTV, one of the very first models. I have been extremely happy with it.
When I bought it I was using a very small cable company for which ReplayTV did not have listings. I called Replay up, and next day my tiny cable company was supported.
When I was deciding between TiVo and ReplayTV, TiVo had a FAQ up which said that they'd never have a 30-second skip because, although it "appealed to the pirate in us all", it just "wasn't sensible." Although they do have an undocumented hack which lets you do this, clearly they want to be seen to be supporting advertisers over their customers. Not only did ReplayTV not do this, but they were quite explicit about protecting their customer's privacy.
To me, supporting companies whose behaviour is more in line with my sense of ethics is important. Of course, your mileage may vary (as well as your definition of what is ethical).
I've a similar question: When I was a kid, I had a wonderful optics lab. It contained bunches of lenses and prisms, and with it you could build not only a telescope and a microscope but an actual, working single-reflex camera!
I've been hoping to find another copy or two of this, or something like it. Alas, I don't remember the manufacturer, or even the name of the kit, and many google searches haven't come up with anything. The optics kits that I've found have all been much more limited, which is disappointing. Anyone have any idea where I could find this kit?
So we should get rid of ways to close programs? I dread to think how much you'd have running if the computer is on for more than an hour or two.
No, he wasn't. (...insert grumbling about that post being modded up to 5....)
And I'm pretty sure that he wasn't thinking of garbage collecting applications either.
Here's an example of what I think he's talking about. When I click on a document in Windows, what often happens is that I end up with two windows on my screen, one for the document and the other for the stupid app. When I am finished with the document, I have to close the document window, then hunt for the application window and close it. Why?
Even worse, say I have two documents open. I want to close the one in the back, in order to unclutter my screen. Often I end up accidently hit the app's close button instead of the document's close button, and WHOOPS, there goes the document I'm actually using.
I think that most of these interfaces are the result of two things: First, once it took absolutely forever for any app to load, so you wanted to keep users from having to do so. (Of course, lots of bloatware still takes forever to load, but that's another gripe.) Secondly, there's programmer megomania to consider. Every stupid program seems to think that it is SO important that every user will always want to have it running. As a result, lots of programs seem to want to make it hard to quit the program.
The claim that Gore said he invented the internet is a lie, spread by the Republican party. What Gore actually said was:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
This is, of course, true. Furthermore, it is not even vaguely close to "I invented the internet."
Source: Snopes.com
Duties and responsibilities are regularly delegated to appointed officials. Again, if the people of Florida don't like that, they can change the law to require elections for third assistant undersecretaries of dog catching, for all I care. But they didn't.
Public officials are supposed to recuse themselves when they have a conflict of interest. For instance, Jeb Bush announced that he was recusing himself. Harris was the co-chair of the Bush's election committee -- if that isn't a conflict of interest, nothing is. Did she recuse herself? No.
And they (or their Supremes) certainly can't legitimately do it after an election. "Oh, wait, now we don't like having an appointed official with these responsibilities." Too bad.
I'm afraid that I don't understand this. The Florida Supreme court did not rule that Harris had to step down. Nor did anyone else. What are you talking about?
You are describing the Florida Supremes again. "The person voted for the most times" did win, and his win was confirmed by the recount required by state law. A ballot with no identity attached to it, that has multiple punches or no punches, is a spoiled ballot, not a vote. How could you sleep at night, if attempting to classify spoiled ballots as votes magically makes votes appear on your tally? Obviously your side has no integrity, if that happens
Firstly, there was NO recount. The Florida Supreme court ruled that a recount could be done, and that November 14th was not an absolute deadline for it. The US Supreme court stopped the recount, then ruled that a recount should be done, but that because it had stopped the counting, there was no longer time for it to be finished.
Now, above you claimed The people of Florida decided what their election law would be, via their elected representatives. And they decided it before the 2000 presidential election. It is the Florida Supreme Court that decided to throw out preexisting law and procedure, and make up their own, after the election, because they didn't like the outcome, and they saw an opportunity to change it
Read "The Betrayal of America" by Vincent Bugliosi.
I'm going to try to summarize a chapter on the fly (bear with me). The job of a court is to resolve ambiguities in the law. In this case it was asked to resolve the fact that the time frame for conducting a manual recount under section 102.166(4) of the Florida Election Code was in conflict with the time frame for submitting returns under section 102.111 and 102.112. A second ambiguity was in the deadlines themselves: Section 102.111 conflicted with 102.112.
A court has principles which it is supposed to follow when doing such resolutions. It is supposed to refer to precident. Also, if two statutory provisions are in conflict, then the specific statue controls the general one. When two statutes are in conflict the most recently enacted one controls the older. Related statutory provisions must be read together in order to acheive a consistent whole (ie, you can't pick and choose phrases out of a provision).
The Florida Supreme court found that applying all of these principles resulted in the same conclusion: a recount could proceed and the November 14th deadline wasn't absolute.
Among the precidents were Boadman v. Esteva, which in 1975 the court said "Ours is a government of, by and for the people....The right to vote is the right to participate; it is also the right to speak, but more importantly the right to be heard....By refusing to recognize an otherwise valid exercise of the right of a citizen to vote for the sake of sacred, unyielding adherence to statutory scripture, we would in effect nullify that right." In 1988, the court said in Chappell v. Martinez "The electorate's effecting its will through its balloting, not the hypertechnical compliance with statues, is the object of holding an election."
Read the book if you want more details. It is quite clear that the Florida Supreme court did not try to make new law, but did its job correctly.
Oh, and lastly, Florida law, Title IX, Ch. 101.5614, says that "No vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter." A ballot which has "Gore" punched out, and "Gore" written in shows clear intent, despite what Bush and Harris maintain. If a voting machine is jammed with chads so that ballot holes can't be punched through, but the voter has managed to use all of his/her strength to detach three corners, then they have made their intent clear.
So, how long before clothes catalogs list both size and resolution? And in high school will girls who wear tops with only 38 dpi be considered social outcasts?
I think there will be quite a demand for hi-res bikinis.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Connie Willis's book "Remake" -- a SF book that raises this issue. In her book, anti-drinking organizations pay people to edit out liquor bottles, etc from "Casablanca" and similar films, and then try to break into film databases in order to substitute their "healthy" versions for the originals. Since the anti-smoking, anti-violence, anti-sex, anti-* groups are all doing the same thing, movies keep being butchered and re-butchered.
I've heard this kind of comment many, many times before. Notice that PacoTaco says that it is important to respect the "many different kinds of intelligence", and then goes on to insult "geeks". Isn't this rather hypocritical? Since PacoTaco says that "a lot of geeks actually want technology to be massively complicated", can he name three?
The fact is, EVERYONE wants technology to be as user-friendly as possible. So why are there so many bad interfaces? One reason is that making good UIs is extremely hard, and many of the people who end up doing it aren't good enough.
The more fundamental reason, however, is that the very concept of "user-friendly" is wrong. All users are not the same. What is friendly to some users will be very hostile to others. If one task is easy to perform, then some other task will be harder. This is an intrinsic problem.
In discussions like this, people usually talk about two groups of people: the "ordinary" folk, as opposed to the technophiles. This, of course, is massively oversimplified, but will do for now. The "ordinary" people want to use computers for "basic" things like word-processing, copying CDs, and browsing the internet. (Notice that what is considered to be basic changes rapidly over time!) The technophiles are doing things like writing programs, constructing custom PVR systems, and so forth. These two groups of people will, of course, have different needs. So far the situation is symmetric.
Notice, however, that the techophiles can, and do, understand what the "ordinary" people want to do -- after all, they do word-processing and browse the internet too. But, "ordinary" people don't write programs, and so don't realize what is involved in doing so. The result, unfortunately, is that many of the "ordinary people" take a look at a system that is designed to help the technophiles, and accuse the technophiles of deliberately making computers hard to use. Needless to say, this is counter-productive -- if you accuse people of deliberately trying to harm others because they get an "ego boost" of doing so, those people are not going to be very willing to help you.
I own a ReplayTV, and the disk is NOT writing "pretty much all of the time." (To be precise, it did when I first bought the machine, but an update soon fixed that behaviour.) It is my understanding that this is one of the differences between Tivo and ReplayTV -- don't assume that what is true for one is not true for the other.
When I was in the market for a PVR, I looked at the Tivo web site, and found that they had a FAQ which said that that commercial skip "appeals to the pirate in us all", but that us adults know that it isn't reasonable. Needless to say, I purchased my ReplayTV the same day.
By making 30 second skip an undocumented magic key sequence, Tivo seems to be trying to play it both ways. The vast majority of users will never find out about it, which will make media companies happy. However, the more technically inclined minority are more likely to care about the issue, and they'll be able to find out about it. Personally, I'd rather support a company which openly defies the advertising industry.
The claim of these professors is that the use of Simpsons in the University classroom motives students, and "encourages deep understanding." Personally, I find this rather doubtful.
I'll go out on a limb, and question the entire point of motivating students at the university level. In high school, students are forced to be introduced to a wide variety of subjects, and part of the rationale behind this is that a student might have talent in an area and never know it without an introduction to it. So, teachers at this level should be encouraging students to give every subject a fair try.
However, does this apply to college courses?
College students are ADULTS, not children, and shouldn't be treated as children. As an adult, I should be able to find any necessary motivation myself, thank you very much. A professor's job should be to present the material clearly. I've endured many attempts at motivation, and have usually come away insulted, as almost all such attempts have been manipulative. This use of the Simpson's certainly falls into this category.
So, a university professor makes a big deal of a few formulas appearing in the Simpsons. Apparently we are supposed to think "Gee, the Simpson's are cool, and the Simpson's mention math, so math must be cool!" Juice companies put cartoon figures on their cartoons to impress five-year olds by this same argument. However, I'm not five any more, and I can't help but be insulted by the assumption that I can be persuaded by this argument.
Furthermore, does anyone really think that the fact that the Simpson's mentions the Pythagorean theorem will cause a college student to say "Oh, wow, mathematics is so much fun that I want to learn all about Abstract Algebra, Galois Theory and Cartesian Manifolds!"? Yes, I'm sure that lots of students like the class, but I'd bet that the real reason that they do is that they've managed to con the teacher into showing them some cartoons, and spend lots of time on something easy.
I'd agree with you if we were talking about high school students, but we aren't -- these are college students that we are talking about.
Apparently these professors show a Simpson's video clip in which the Pythagorean Theorem is misstated, and then proceed to have a class discussion in which the students identify the errors. I didn't do my undergrad in the United States, but do students there really get college credit for this?!! Ay Caramba!
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Now, as I said before, as you gain levels, you encounter harder monsters, in addition to the easier ones. That certainly isn't the same as "everything else advances at the exact same rate". You purposely didn't mention that all bandits level up to you, It is disappointing that you resort to personal attacks. As I said, a few enemies level. Bandits are one of those few. Why you single those out I don't know. You didn't mention that Arena combatants are leveled to you, so you can become the Arena Champion (supposedly the greatest fighter in Tamriel) at level 1. Okay, did the person I was responding to mention Arena combatants? No, they didn't. I could hardly respond to something before the topic was brought up, now could I?
Yes, arena combatants are leveled. But, unless you have a really, really strange character build you will certainly get enough experience to gain levels before becoming Arena Champion. So if the game tells you that you should rest to gain a level, and puts an icon on your screen to remind you to do so, it is really perverse to refuse to do so and then complain that you are still level 1!
Except, of course, in Oblivion everything doesn't advance along with you.
Here's how it works: in Oblivion, when you are level 1, you find usually monsters like rats, mudcrabs, and things like that. As you gain levels, you start finding harder monsters: boars and such-like. But you still find rats, and rats are no more powerful than they were before. The first time I saw a boar, it was terrifying! Later, when I got more powerful, I was able to kill them with ease, which was quite satisfying. They were no more powerful than they were back then, and I kept encountering them now and then, even when I was much more powerful. There are, indeed, a few enemies that do gain levels as you do, but there are very few of them. And they hardly advance at the same rate as you do, either.
So, why do people keep believing that "everything else advances at the exact same rate"? Because they hear statements like this in forums, and don't think to check it out themselves, usually. Because it takes longer to explain what Oblivion really does. And, more that that, I think it is because MMO games have led people to expect a certain kind of gameplay. After all,
Oblivion uses pretty much the same mechanism as Daggerfall (an earlier game in the series) did. It used to be that this wasn't at all uncommon for RPGs. But, the MMO games have trained people to play games a certain way, and now Oblivion is a shock to them.
Pardon me? I never proposed any way to "fix it up"! And, yes, 15 years for copying dvds IS ridiculous, which is exactly why I brought it up!
But is it really out of line with other sentences?
After all, if a kid goes joy-riding in a car, that's grand theft, (even if the car is recovered undamaged), and that's a major jail sentence. And there was a guy sentenced to 15 years for copying three dvds from a video store. And then there are all the people doing major time for having small amounts of drugs on them, never having harmed a fly (other than themselves).
Perhaps the sexual assault sentences are the ones that are out-of-line?
Under FDR, the top tax rate was 90%!!! Compare that to now.
Unfortunately, there is a political slimy game going on. Certain groups are trying to convince Americans that they are paying horribly high taxes, and that "politicians will always raise taxes if they can". And, just the opposite is actually happening. The strategy is to get lower and lower taxes (especially for the rich), which means there is less money for services -- like schools. And we already see the effects of this: public schools all over the country are having massive cuts, and university tuition is sky-rocketing. This is fine for the wealthy, but pity the poor child who makes the mistake of choosing a poor or middle-class parent.
The reason that sales taxes are disproporionately hard on poor people is that poor people spend all of the money they get, while the right only spend a small percentage of what they get, and invest the rest (or move it offshore).
This is an example of one of my pet peeves: the "argument via stupid compiler". It's not actually the case that "the usual technique involves pushing the parameters...." -- that's just an explanation of recursion that is often given to first-year undergrads. Any compiler that actually implements a functional language this way would be considered unbelievably broken.
The problem is that not only are compilers much more intelligent than people usually give them credit for, but CPUs these days do so much prefetching and pipelining that it is very hard for a person to predict what instruction sequences would actually be most efficient.
Yes, I've heard this a lot. It sounds nice, and is cutely cynical.
It also makes the problem worse.
"Everyone does it" is one of the classic excuses used by crooks everywhere. "Yeah, I cheated you. But it's okay, 'cause everyone does it." No, it's not okay, and everyone does NOT.
In this case, saying "both parties will screw us" is like saying a rapist is no worse than a shoplifter because, after all, both are criminals.
This article is about new laws that allow the government to spy on everyone. Which party DID put those laws in place? Which party did not when they were in power? Which party is allowing companies to put dangerous chemicals into people's drinking water? Which party, when they were in power, put in laws to prevent this? Which party is gutting worker protection laws, and which party, when they were in power, was strengthening them? And which party is funnelling money to the rich and putting the country into massive debt, and which party, when they were in power, built up a massive surplus?
Yeah, the political system means that if you are a politician, you have to get enough campaign money to have a hope of being elected. This means that every politician will probably have to pay attention to those people who have power and money. However, the record shows that the two parties are NOT the same, and saying that they are just excuses the worst of the lot.
Okay, fighting terrorism is good. But is he doing an effective job? And who is benefiting? Take the Iraq war -- we were told that we had proof that Iraq had WMD, and it turns out that that was false, and the Bush administration knew it. So we are spending US$4 billion dollars a month for a war that hasn't increased security. (see cost of war) And who is making money from the war? Just Cheney's former company, who he is still being paid by. (see Cheney paid by Pentagon contractor).
And, by the way, terrorists tried to murder government officials (Democrats) and media with anthrax. The administration doesn't seem to be making any progress in tracking these people down, now, have they?
Okay, first of all, the "people who don't pay taxes" bit. The administration was misleading here. Rebates were given to those who didn't pay INCOME taxes, but those people still paid PAYROLL taxes. And because there is a ceiling for payroll taxes, the working poor pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes than rich people do.
As for the tax cuts and rebates being for everyone, who gets by far the most money? Answer: the rich. Take the dividend tax cut. The rich own lots of stock and therefore highly profit from this. The poor and middle-class don't. The administration tried to claim that more Americans than ever own stocks, but didn't mention that most Americans own stocks IN RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, and this won't be affected by the dividend tax cut. And take the cut in the estate tax. The estate tax only affects people who have more than a million dollars in assets: the rich.
And, by the way, if you want to stimulate the economy by giving people money, then economists agree that you should give the money to the poor, not the rich. Why? Because the poor will spend it on goods (food, clothing, housing...), which in turn will help stores and manufacturers. The rich will just save it, which is not nearly as effective.
How does the faith-based initiative help the downtrodden? All it does is funnel money that would have previously gone to non-church related charities to churches. In fact, it make things worse, because faith-based institutions are free to discriminate against people they don't like.
Do I need to go on?
Gore actually offered a full recount to Bush, but Bush refused. Unfortunately, the required procedures make it difficult to ask for a full recount, so Gore tried to get the most "bang for the buck", as it were.
As to the military absentee ballots, the New York Times had a simply amazing report on them. At the moment, I can't find it on their web site anymore, but here is a link to another news article about it: 680 Military Ballots Invalid. The NYT had pictures of ballots that were accepted and rejected. It was VERY obvious that the Republicans were getting away with counting military ballots that were highly improper -- postmarked far after the election, for example, while the same rules weren't followed for other ballots.
I'm afraid this is not true. The Florida law was intended to punish slow election board members, and contradicts other laws which allow both recount and protests. As was pointed out by the court, when one law says that recounts are permitted, and another law gives no time for which said recounts to be performed, the two laws are in conflict. It is the duty of the court to decide between conflicting laws.
To claim that the law said that there was a certain deadline, but omit that the law also said that recounts must be allowed, is deceptive.
I only partially agree with you. On the one hand, waiting a few hours (or even a few days) to make sure that all the ballots are counted correctly, and so that news about the outcome in one state doesn't affect another, all seem like good things.
However, one function that VNS had was a check against election fraud. In the 2000 elections the only state where the VNS data disagreed with the actual result was in Florida. Sure enough, there was incredible fraud occuring in Florida (most of which only came out after the election was decided).
In the 2002 election there were reports of voting machines which were programmed to count only republican ballots. Were things like this significant? Without VNS, we are missing an independent check.
I have a ReplayTV, one of the very first models. I have been extremely happy with it.
When I bought it I was using a very small cable company for which ReplayTV did not have listings. I called Replay up, and next day my tiny cable company was supported.
When I was deciding between TiVo and ReplayTV, TiVo had a FAQ up which said that they'd never have a 30-second skip because, although it "appealed to the pirate in us all", it just "wasn't sensible." Although they do have an undocumented hack which lets you do this, clearly they want to be seen to be supporting advertisers over their customers. Not only did ReplayTV not do this, but they were quite explicit about protecting their customer's privacy.
To me, supporting companies whose behaviour is more in line with my sense of ethics is important. Of course, your mileage may vary (as well as your definition of what is ethical).
I've a similar question: When I was a kid, I had a wonderful optics lab. It contained bunches of lenses and prisms, and with it you could build not only a telescope and a microscope but an actual, working single-reflex camera!
I've been hoping to find another copy or two of this, or something like it. Alas, I don't remember the manufacturer, or even the name of the kit, and many google searches haven't come up with anything. The optics kits that I've found have all been much more limited, which is disappointing. Anyone have any idea where I could find this kit?
No, he wasn't. (...insert grumbling about that post being modded up to 5....)
And I'm pretty sure that he wasn't thinking of garbage collecting applications either.
Here's an example of what I think he's talking about. When I click on a document in Windows, what often happens is that I end up with two windows on my screen, one for the document and the other for the stupid app. When I am finished with the document, I have to close the document window, then hunt for the application window and close it. Why?
Even worse, say I have two documents open. I want to close the one in the back, in order to unclutter my screen. Often I end up accidently hit the app's close button instead of the document's close button, and WHOOPS, there goes the document I'm actually using.
I think that most of these interfaces are the result of two things: First, once it took absolutely forever for any app to load, so you wanted to keep users from having to do so. (Of course, lots of bloatware still takes forever to load, but that's another gripe.) Secondly, there's programmer megomania to consider. Every stupid program seems to think that it is SO important that every user will always want to have it running. As a result, lots of programs seem to want to make it hard to quit the program.
Duties and responsibilities are regularly delegated to appointed officials. Again, if the people of Florida don't like that, they can change the law to require elections for third assistant undersecretaries of dog catching, for all I care. But they didn't.
Public officials are supposed to recuse themselves when they have a conflict of interest. For instance, Jeb Bush announced that he was recusing himself. Harris was the co-chair of the Bush's election committee -- if that isn't a conflict of interest, nothing is. Did she recuse herself? No.
And they (or their Supremes) certainly can't legitimately do it after an election. "Oh, wait, now we don't like having an appointed official with these responsibilities." Too bad.
I'm afraid that I don't understand this. The Florida Supreme court did not rule that Harris had to step down. Nor did anyone else. What are you talking about?
You are describing the Florida Supremes again. "The person voted for the most times" did win, and his win was confirmed by the recount required by state law. A ballot with no identity attached to it, that has multiple punches or no punches, is a spoiled ballot, not a vote. How could you sleep at night, if attempting to classify spoiled ballots as votes magically makes votes appear on your tally? Obviously your side has no integrity, if that happens
Firstly, there was NO recount. The Florida Supreme court ruled that a recount could be done, and that November 14th was not an absolute deadline for it. The US Supreme court stopped the recount, then ruled that a recount should be done, but that because it had stopped the counting, there was no longer time for it to be finished.
Now, above you claimed
The people of Florida decided what their election law would be, via their elected representatives. And they decided it before the 2000 presidential election. It is the Florida Supreme Court that decided to throw out preexisting law and procedure, and make up their own, after the election, because they didn't like the outcome, and they saw an opportunity to change it
Read "The Betrayal of America" by Vincent Bugliosi.
I'm going to try to summarize a chapter on the fly (bear with me). The job of a court is to resolve ambiguities in the law. In this case it was asked to resolve the fact that the time frame for conducting a manual recount under section 102.166(4) of the Florida Election Code was in conflict with the time frame for submitting returns under section 102.111 and 102.112. A second ambiguity was in the deadlines themselves: Section 102.111 conflicted with 102.112.
A court has principles which it is supposed to follow when doing such resolutions. It is supposed to refer to precident. Also, if two statutory provisions are in conflict, then the specific statue controls the general one. When two statutes are in conflict the most recently enacted one controls the older. Related statutory provisions must be read together in order to acheive a consistent whole (ie, you can't pick and choose phrases out of a provision).
The Florida Supreme court found that applying all of these principles resulted in the same conclusion: a recount could proceed and the November 14th deadline wasn't absolute.
Among the precidents were Boadman v. Esteva, which in 1975 the court said "Ours is a government of, by and for the people....The right to vote is the right to participate; it is also the right to speak, but more importantly the right to be heard....By refusing to recognize an otherwise valid exercise of the right of a citizen to vote for the sake of sacred, unyielding adherence to statutory scripture, we would in effect nullify that right." In 1988, the court said in Chappell v. Martinez "The electorate's effecting its will through its balloting, not the hypertechnical compliance with statues, is the object of holding an election."
Read the book if you want more details. It is quite clear that the Florida Supreme court did not try to make new law, but did its job correctly.
Oh, and lastly, Florida law, Title IX, Ch. 101.5614, says that "No vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter." A ballot which has "Gore" punched out, and "Gore" written in shows clear intent, despite what Bush and Harris maintain. If a voting machine is jammed with chads so that ballot holes can't be punched through, but the voter has managed to use all of his/her strength to detach three corners, then they have made their intent clear.
So, how long before clothes catalogs list both size and resolution? And in high school will girls who wear tops with only 38 dpi be considered social outcasts?
I think there will be quite a demand for hi-res bikinis.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Connie Willis's book "Remake" -- a SF book that raises this issue. In her book, anti-drinking organizations pay people to edit out liquor bottles, etc from "Casablanca" and similar films, and then try to break into film databases in order to substitute their "healthy" versions for the originals. Since the anti-smoking, anti-violence, anti-sex, anti-* groups are all doing the same thing, movies keep being butchered and re-butchered.
I've heard this kind of comment many, many times before. Notice that PacoTaco says that it is important to respect the "many different kinds of intelligence", and then goes on to insult "geeks". Isn't this rather hypocritical? Since PacoTaco says that "a lot of geeks actually want technology to be massively complicated", can he name three?
The fact is, EVERYONE wants technology to be as user-friendly as possible. So why are there so many bad interfaces? One reason is that making good UIs is extremely hard, and many of the people who end up doing it aren't good enough.
The more fundamental reason, however, is that the very concept of "user-friendly" is wrong. All users are not the same. What is friendly to some users will be very hostile to others. If one task is easy to perform, then some other task will be harder. This is an intrinsic problem.
In discussions like this, people usually talk about two groups of people: the "ordinary" folk, as opposed to the technophiles. This, of course, is massively oversimplified, but will do for now. The "ordinary" people want to use computers for "basic" things like word-processing, copying CDs, and browsing the internet. (Notice that what is considered to be basic changes rapidly over time!) The technophiles are doing things like writing programs, constructing custom PVR systems, and so forth. These two groups of people will, of course, have different needs. So far the situation is symmetric.
Notice, however, that the techophiles can, and do, understand what the "ordinary" people want to do -- after all, they do word-processing and browse the internet too. But, "ordinary" people don't write programs, and so don't realize what is involved in doing so. The result, unfortunately, is that many of the "ordinary people" take a look at a system that is designed to help the technophiles, and accuse the technophiles of deliberately making computers hard to use. Needless to say, this is counter-productive -- if you accuse people of deliberately trying to harm others because they get an "ego boost" of doing so, those people are not going to be very willing to help you.
I own a ReplayTV, and the disk is NOT writing "pretty much all of the time." (To be precise, it did when I first bought the machine, but an update soon fixed that behaviour.) It is my understanding that this is one of the differences between Tivo and ReplayTV -- don't assume that what is true for one is not true for the other.
When I was in the market for a PVR, I looked at the Tivo web site, and found that they had a FAQ which said that that commercial skip "appeals to the pirate in us all", but that us adults know that it isn't reasonable. Needless to say, I purchased my ReplayTV the same day.
By making 30 second skip an undocumented magic key sequence, Tivo seems to be trying to play it both ways. The vast majority of users will never find out about it, which will make media companies happy. However, the more technically inclined minority are more likely to care about the issue, and they'll be able to find out about it. Personally, I'd rather support a company which openly defies the advertising industry.
Just think, they could do the Teletubby show live!
The claim of these professors is that the use of Simpsons in the University classroom motives students, and "encourages deep understanding." Personally, I find this rather doubtful.
I'll go out on a limb, and question the entire point of motivating students at the university level. In high school, students are forced to be introduced to a wide variety of subjects, and part of the rationale behind this is that a student might have talent in an area and never know it without an introduction to it. So, teachers at this level should be encouraging students to give every subject a fair try.
However, does this apply to college courses?
College students are ADULTS, not children, and shouldn't be treated as children. As an adult, I should be able to find any necessary motivation myself, thank you very much. A professor's job should be to present the material clearly. I've endured many attempts at motivation, and have usually come away insulted, as almost all such attempts have been manipulative. This use of the Simpson's certainly falls into this category.
So, a university professor makes a big deal of a few formulas appearing in the Simpsons. Apparently we are supposed to think "Gee, the Simpson's are cool, and the Simpson's mention math, so math must be cool!" Juice companies put cartoon figures on their cartoons to impress five-year olds by this same argument. However, I'm not five any more, and I can't help but be insulted by the assumption that I can be persuaded by this argument.
Furthermore, does anyone really think that the fact that the Simpson's mentions the Pythagorean theorem will cause a college student to say "Oh, wow, mathematics is so much fun that I want to learn all about Abstract Algebra, Galois Theory and Cartesian Manifolds!"? Yes, I'm sure that lots of students like the class, but I'd bet that the real reason that they do is that they've managed to con the teacher into showing them some cartoons, and spend lots of time on something easy.
I'd agree with you if we were talking about high school students, but we aren't -- these are college students that we are talking about.
Apparently these professors show a Simpson's video clip in which the Pythagorean Theorem is
misstated, and then proceed to have a class discussion in which the students identify the errors. I didn't do my undergrad in the United States, but do students there really get college credit for this?!! Ay Caramba!