The two-party system exists because it is implicit to our Constitution. Period. If you don't get past this fact we are lost.
Really? Back this up. I think you have problems with reading comprehension.
Rampant gerrymandering.
Certainly a problem.
The primary system
What do you find wrong with this?
Lack of "Ranked Voting".
Not sure how this would help..
The electoral college.
So you say the constitution supports only two parties, then turn around and bash it. Sorry, but you can't pick and choose.. The electoral college is there for a very good reason: to help undermine mob rule.
The unrepresentative Senate.
The Senates original purpose was to represent the STATE GOVERNMENTS. For that purpose, it is fine. If you look back in history, you'll see the feds started grabbing way more power than they were supposed to. The fed government was supposed to be weak.
The weak party system.
I don't think any kind of 'party system' is dicated anywhere in law.
Lack of a modern parliamentary system.
Not sure what you mean by this..
Buckley v Valeo (money = free speech).
I'm not sure you understand the purpose behind the ruling in that case..
The removal of only one or two of these structural problem would likely be a catalyst for much greater change.
I would like to think so, but I don't think that those problems alone will fix things.
First, you assume that everyone always votes on party lines. A pretty bad assumption. Second, just because side A managed to get side C to agree does not mean that C is ruling everything. C didn't override A's vote, A still has to vote as well. Finally, you seem to think that the majority SHOULD always win. That basically boils down to mob rule. No thanks.
Next time I shall endeavor to use my [sarcasim] tag. My apologies.
Ahh.. easy to miss sarcasm in text. I apologize also.
Actually, I believe the burden of proof would be on you to prove there there are NO environmentalists that call for a reduction in economic activity.
Again, that's NOT what I said. I said their main objective is not a reducting in economic activity, which is what the OP was said. If they are calling for a reduction in economic activity, its a means to a goal, not their goal in and of itself.
Its not really possible to prove something doesn't exist either (which is why innocent until proven guilty is good). It is VERY possible though to prove something does exist. I'd say the burden of proof is you and / or the OP.
Just as the burden of proof would be on the grand poster for his equally unsubstantiated claim. I just wanted to point out the difficulty of disproving an unsubstantiated claim with yet another unsubstantiated claim.
My claim isn't unsubstanciated. I've actually heard quite a few environmentalists. If they call for an economic reduction, its for a means to an end, not an end unto itself. That's what I was pointing out as incorrect, and if you read the post, I think you'll see that the poster was saying environmentalists just want to stop economic growth.
Calling a thought out(if not logical) statement stupid means that you are calling their thought process stupid. If you assume that people are smart/stupid based upon their cognative ability, you did call the GP stupid, wether or not that was you intention.
One stupid thought process does not a stupid person make. Yes, I think the line of reasoning is stupid or silly. I honestly don't think the OP IS a stupid person though. Just uninformed and / or following faulting logic. Please don't read between the lines; read only what I wrote. I try very hard to follow the saying "say what you mean and mean what you say." I don't always do that, but I try my best.
Ruby is type safe, but not statically typed. And it's polymorphic, which further complicates the question.
Heh.. dynamic typing has been a bane for quite a while.. at least for me and co-workers. As a disclaimer, I've come to hate building anything complex in script because I spent a good deal of time in ASP / VBscript. Its been my experience that as complexity of the application grows, dynamic typing leads to very difficult to find bugs, which can only be detected at runtime. All of my (former) co-workers would agree, as no one wants to do ASP because Asp.Net is so much easier in these terms.
But the point of the post to which I was responding was doing "script like things" (e.g. Perl-like) in Ruby, so yes, the example I gave was scripting language-like.
See above about my dislike of doing anything important in scripts.:-)
And I disagree with you about what is or isn't harder to read. Your example, at eight lines, appears to do what in Ruby would be one line:
And what if later you type rsults instead? Do you get a warning or error? Or will it suddenly 'appear' out of nowhere? I assume the latter, because some of the lines in C# are to allocate the resources you'll be using. Personally I look at these lines, skip the lines which create the objects and look at the methods. Of course that's how I set up my DAL; I'm certain I could change the API of the DAL so that it can occur in one line (minus the declarations of course).
The extra lines are all administrative overhead, and don't have anything to do with what you are trying to accomplish. In fact they obscure some of the interesting details, such as where the items being searched are coming from (at least, I can't tell were they're coming from from looking at this code). In the ruby version, the data is coming from the object "my_data", as should be obvious.
The overhead provides a safety net. ASP didn't require that much overhead either. The problem was that because it was so lax there ended up being a huge number of runtime errors. Again, more effort upfront lead to less effort later. I'd rather write the code correct the first time, instead of writing it and finding out later there are bugs in it and then trying to fix those bugs. Something as simple as a compile finds errors right away, without even running the code. Doesn't sound like Ruby provides that level of safety.
I imagine that the analogous changes to your code would be...bulky.
Again, that's simply because of how I designed the API. I actually could add a method so that adding criteria becomes something along these lines:
Alternately, results = seacher.Find( new SelectionCriteria( "MyProperty", Operator.Equals, "myVal" ), new SelectionCriteria( "MyProperty2", Operator.Like, "*myVal" ) );
Down to one line (excluding allocating resources). Of course that one line, much like your Ruby example, is getting longer and longer, which for me becomes unreadable. I'd rather have multiple short lines over a single long line.
Please find that context in this statement, to which I was replying: "Java never cought on.NET will not either. It's just too stodgy and "enterprisey" and complex, and verbose and tries to do too much."
Also, please feel free to click Parent until you reach the top message, to which I also replied. No where in the thread exists the 'context' you claim. To say 'Internet application' is limited only to what is in a web browser is stupid, because its not. Where does it say 'internet application' be hosted on a browser? It doesn't.
When did finding a screaming baby annoying become being an asshole? Would it be acceptable if an adult was constantly screaming in the restraunt? Would that not annoy the other diners? Funny, I always though those that were bothering others were being assholes, not the ones being bothered.
Having said that though, there are certain places where people should expect for their to be noise, whether it be from the overly amplified TV sound or the conversation of the other 300 people eating at the restaurant, that a baby's cry or a small child's unruliness should be tolerated for the few moments that they could occur.
A baby's screams are magintudes more annoying than an overly loud tv or 300 people having a converstation. The fact that you CAN hear the screams over 300 people talking should be a clue. Also, there is some reseach that suggests that a baby's screams are at a certain frequency which is MEANT to cause irriatation to us (so that we try to mollify the child).
People talking at normal volume is not annoying. A child screaming or a kid running out of control IS exteremly annoying, and ruins my experience. Why should I have to put up with a poorer experience because YOU chose to bring your child? I'm not talking about McDonalds, I'm talking about fancier places, where steaks start at $20 a pop. You know, places where two people can easily drop $50 or more on a meal.
ou can't put a sign on the door that says "No Shirt, No Shoes, Kids, No Service" and expect that no one is going to say anything or that every parent group in the area is going to crush you with protestors and paperwork. Generally, the restaurants or establishments that kids don't belong in are pretty well identified.
Why not? If someone does, why should people with kids care? Why the protests? How about just accepting it and not going? After all, the restraunt owner can keep out whoever he wants. People need to shut the hell up, really. A restraunt that bans kids may gain some publicity, but there is zero reason for protests and paperwork. If enough people like it, it will survive. If not enough do, it will go under. But to claim you have a RIGHT to eat their with your kid?
Don't generalize to exclude everyone because of one parent who hasn't taught their child manners.
First, its not excluding every. Its excluding people with kids. Second, did you ever stop to think that the generalization came about because screaming kids is becoming more and more of a problem for those of us that want a nice dining experience? My wife and I have given up on movies, because its now COMMON for the stupid teens (and even a large number of adults) who can't keep their mouth shut for an hour and twenty minutes to be there.
Bull. I think they should be banned, but I've done to the Olive Garden and had 5 year olds sitting at the bar. Also many bars do actually serve food, and kids are still allowed there.
Most Environmentalists are socialist types. They hate the fact that we are not all "sacrificing for the greater good."
And all Germans are Nazis, and all blacks are violent, etc. etc. Thanks, good point.
Global warming is just another form of political correctness, where if you say anything against it you get shouted down by bitter people who want to control other people. It's the left's equivalent of the church lady. Kyoto was just a way for socialist countries to control us.
Global warming is heavily politisied, yes. That doesn't mean its not a valid theory. That doesn't change that fact that pretty much all relevent scientists believe it to be true. That also doesn't mean that people supporting the theory want to "control others" either. Perhaps it simply means they want to breath. You could argue that those that which to stop genocide are attempting to "control others" too. That doesn't mean you're right.
We are no longer in an ice age, so of course global warming is real. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the glaciers have been slowly melting for the past 10,000 years. Has it been sped up? I don't think anyone thought that the warming that has taken place on average for the past 10,000 years has always been linear. Are we contributing? Yes, we breathe out CO2. We have not had a good world war in about 50 years to cut down on the population.
So if the tempurate is not cold, it must always be climbing? Is that your argument? You also ignore that the ice caps have been melting faster than ever given the evidence we have now. No one is saying its your breathing that is creating a CO2 problem, its factories and cars. You know, the unnatural stuff caused by our use of nature.
Fortunately, plants love CO2. We have more plants than we've ever had, and some more will soon spring up from the melting permafrost and ice caps.
Unfortunately, the plants best at processing CO2 are also being cut down at an alarming rate. I'm not sure where you get this idea that there are more plants. We have less and less area taken up by forests every year. A little flower doesn't help as much as a 100 year old tree does.
Of course, we've recently found that it is possible that live plants are giving off methane, a greenhouse gas.
And its not the methane levels that the scientists are worried about.
Animals give off CO2 and methane too. In fact, it's probably a good thing we aren't driving around in horse and buggy any more, as I think those horses were aweful polluters. You don't think that their waste got into the ground water?
A car or factory put out significantly more CO2 than a horse. Horse waste usually decays on the ground, and is not dumped wholesale into rivers.
Water vapor is also a huge greenhouse 'gas'. The more the ice caps melt, the more water vapor gets into the atmosphere and the more stored methane and CO2 get into the atmosphere. There's probably not a whole lot we tiny humans can (or should) do about it. We can try to "use as much as we lose" and keep balance, but that's just common sense. We don't need some bitter activist, some welfare scientist, or some corrupt U.N. "Hall of Justice League" to tell us that.
Again, its not water vapor levels which the scienists are worried about. No one said to stop ice caps from melting, they are saying not to speed up the process by putting out more than can be absorbed back into the system. We aren't keeping balance, and that's the argument. You seem particually dense. If your post was an attempt at humor, it failed miserably..
Heh.. well I guess I spoke too soon. I was gauging my opinion on how often I hear about the banned books topic, which I suppose isn't a very good way to gauge how much this is going on..
So I guess what your saying is that the rich nations purposefully signed something which requires them to give away their wealth. Clearly you must think the rich nations stupid..
I believe that you should read his post more closely. You missed by a few years. And of course, the reason for everyone to go to school is so that they can learn how not to think critically and no one with a political agenda ever lies.
My point was that the theory has been around going on 20 to 30 years now, unchanged. Unfortunately the OP never said how long they had been discussing global cooling. Funny your quipe about school; they actually DID instill critical thinking skills in us. As I said in another thread, many of the banned books were actually required reading.
As I was once told in a logic class. For logic to work, you have to show that each step in your reasoning is true. Starting from a fallacy, you can prove anything. Also, it's a major jump to go from "seems to coniencide" to "causes". Based on that, it "stands to reason" that the rest of this statement should be viewed as an opinion, not a logical deduction.
Well fine, but last I heard they had ice cores dating back millions of years. I guess millions of years of history can be discounted as not proven, but you'd have to throw away everything where we don't have that much evidience too.
Reacting to a statement you see as outrageously false doesn't mean that you can reply and calling someone "stupid." His opinion is just as valid as yours, espescially since neither it firmly rooted in hard evidence.
Fine. Prove my statement wrong. Find me one environmentalist who's stated goal was to stop or reduce economic growth. Until you do, I'll stand by my statement that the comment was stupid. And I'll call YOU stupid (and a hippocrate as well; before you tell someone else to read a post carefully, make sure you have) for not knowing the difference between my calling a statement stupid and calling a person stupid.
He's never written anything contraversial. Never challanged any established ideas. IT was entertaining, but it doesn't have a political message or force us to re-evaluate how we define 'crazy.' It doesn't warn us of the dangers of certain ways of thinking like 1984 does or Brave New World.
Honestly, how could someone even think any of King's books are even in the same league.
Banned from doing a book report on said book. Thats what they mean when they say banned or challanged.
There was an episode of that sitcom MJF was in that dealt with this; his characters sister was told she couldn't do a book report on a certain book, but she did anyway and presented it.
Fortunately I think that crap has died out, but I remember it being a hot topic in the 80s. My HS required us to read several of the books on that list. I wish F451 got more attention; similar to 1984 and addresses this topic exactly.
Back in the '70's the big scare was Global Cooling. We were told that we would all freeze to death. Now the big scare is Global Warming. We're all going to overheat, melt the icecaps, and drown.
Weird, because when I was in school in the 80s, they were telling us about global warming (and the ozone hole). Of course global warming has been warned about since then, non-stop.
These are all part of nature's climate cycles of cooling and warming trends. To say that man's activity is warming the earth is unproven.
Yes there are natural cycles, although the amount of carbon in the atmosphere seems to coniencide with global warming treads (as CO2 amounts rise, so does the temp). We're now pumping carbon into the atmosphere, more than has ever been present in the atmosphere. It stands to reason that more carbon will help warm the earth. To deny that is foolish.
However, under the name of "Global Warming", there are large power-grabs between nations. Notice that China, the world's largest polluter, is excluded from the Kyoto agreement, yet the US is supposed to follow it.
I can't speak to China and the Kyoto agreement, but just because one big polluter doesn't follow doesn't mean the other big one shouldn't. A reduction is a reduction. FWIW, nations have to agree to sign the Kyoto agreement. I doubt they'd not ask China. The US refused to sign.
I'm a conservationist. There are many ways to conserve the environment and have full economic activity. That is in stark contrast to the environmentalists and Global Warming theorists who want us to reduce and/or stop our economic growth.
This is perhaps one of the stupidist comments I've ever heard. They aren't trying to stop / reduce economic growth, they want that growth to happen in an environmentally friendly way. You seem to forget that something which slows growth in one area may trigger larger growth in others. For example, if you need some kind of filter on your smoke stacks, someone needs to build those.
You want to conserve only when it doesn't inconvience you in some way. I assume you have similar attitudes as those that tried to justify dumping any chemical waste into rivers. We've cleaned those up, and the economy hasn't tanked. Get a grip.
Spoken like someone that doesn't have a job in the real world, or a clue. There are tons of jobs for both Java and.Net developers. Not nearly as many for other languages.
To say that Java isn't huge in the world is stupid. As far as.Net goes... well,.Net today is what Win32s was in Windows 3.1x. In other words,.Net is the replacement for the Win32 API, the prefered way to talk to the kernel. Going forward, if you develop on Windows, you'll be using.Net.
The thing I like about Ruby is how easy it is to do things like this "on the fly," without a lot of clutter for "creating objects" and "setting parameters";
On the fly.. I'm going to assume that means Ruby is not type safe and more akin to script. Not having type safety was a HUGE problem in developing classic ASP sites and JavaScript. Not having to define your variable was also a huge problem. One typo and bam, you've got bugs.
it isn't that the other way is harder to write per se, but that the total effort (thinking it up, typing, reading it later, and figuring out what it does) seems to be less. But it's a cumulative thing, an effect you can really feel as you're working even when the individual steps aren't that much harder.
More effort up front in my experience leads to less effort later. Its not hard to read either. Here's a search in my DAL.
DataSearcher searcher; SelectionCriteria crit; List results;
searcher = new DataSearcher();
crit = new SelectionCriteria( "MyProperty", Operator.Equals ); crit.Values.Add( "someVal" );
searcher.AddSelectionCriteria( crit );
results = searcher.Find();
Is it more lines? Sure. Harder to read? I don't think so.
More lines does not mean harder to maintain or read. With Intellisense, I usually only type a few characters before what I want to type appears in a list.. then I press space and the rest is inserted. For larger repetitive things, you have code generation.
Most people don't have enough room for five different consoles hooked up at once. Most also will not hookup / unhookup to switch consoles. I'm sure you're a minority.
Depends on how you define harder. I have a custom DAL i created which makes searching as easy as your example. Its a few more lines of code to create the objects and set the desired values / operators, but its not 'harder' by any stretch.
Personally I'm hoping the.Net framework takes off. ClickOnce gives you a rich client with the ease of web deployment. As the framework install base becomes larger (I think Vista will ship with it) developing and deploying rich applications becomes very easy.
I also really hope more people get involved in Mono. Then you can target any platform you like.
I like Ruby because I found it easy to tranlate over and I can do the crazy wierd Perl-like stuff that I cannot do in C# or Java (or have to jump through a lot of hoops to do).
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The two-party system exists because it is implicit to our Constitution. Period. If you don't get past this fact we are lost.
Really? Back this up. I think you have problems with reading comprehension.
Rampant gerrymandering.
Certainly a problem.
The primary system
What do you find wrong with this?
Lack of "Ranked Voting".
Not sure how this would help..
The electoral college.
So you say the constitution supports only two parties, then turn around and bash it. Sorry, but you can't pick and choose.. The electoral college is there for a very good reason: to help undermine mob rule.
The unrepresentative Senate.
The Senates original purpose was to represent the STATE GOVERNMENTS. For that purpose, it is fine. If you look back in history, you'll see the feds started grabbing way more power than they were supposed to. The fed government was supposed to be weak.
The weak party system.
I don't think any kind of 'party system' is dicated anywhere in law.
Lack of a modern parliamentary system.
Not sure what you mean by this..
Buckley v Valeo (money = free speech).
I'm not sure you understand the purpose behind the ruling in that case..
The removal of only one or two of these structural problem would likely be a catalyst for much greater change.
I would like to think so, but I don't think that those problems alone will fix things.
Wow, that a load of crap.
First, you assume that everyone always votes on party lines. A pretty bad assumption. Second, just because side A managed to get side C to agree does not mean that C is ruling everything. C didn't override A's vote, A still has to vote as well. Finally, you seem to think that the majority SHOULD always win. That basically boils down to mob rule. No thanks.
Next time I shall endeavor to use my [sarcasim] tag. My apologies.
Ahh.. easy to miss sarcasm in text. I apologize also.
Actually, I believe the burden of proof would be on you to prove there there are NO environmentalists that call for a reduction in economic activity.
Again, that's NOT what I said. I said their main objective is not a reducting in economic activity, which is what the OP was said. If they are calling for a reduction in economic activity, its a means to a goal, not their goal in and of itself.
Its not really possible to prove something doesn't exist either (which is why innocent until proven guilty is good). It is VERY possible though to prove something does exist. I'd say the burden of proof is you and / or the OP.
Just as the burden of proof would be on the grand poster for his equally unsubstantiated claim. I just wanted to point out the difficulty of disproving an unsubstantiated claim with yet another unsubstantiated claim.
My claim isn't unsubstanciated. I've actually heard quite a few environmentalists. If they call for an economic reduction, its for a means to an end, not an end unto itself. That's what I was pointing out as incorrect, and if you read the post, I think you'll see that the poster was saying environmentalists just want to stop economic growth.
Calling a thought out(if not logical) statement stupid means that you are calling their thought process stupid. If you assume that people are smart/stupid based upon their cognative ability, you did call the GP stupid, wether or not that was you intention.
One stupid thought process does not a stupid person make. Yes, I think the line of reasoning is stupid or silly. I honestly don't think the OP IS a stupid person though. Just uninformed and / or following faulting logic. Please don't read between the lines; read only what I wrote. I try very hard to follow the saying "say what you mean and mean what you say." I don't always do that, but I try my best.
Ruby is type safe, but not statically typed. And it's polymorphic, which further complicates the question.
:-)
Heh.. dynamic typing has been a bane for quite a while.. at least for me and co-workers. As a disclaimer, I've come to hate building anything complex in script because I spent a good deal of time in ASP / VBscript. Its been my experience that as complexity of the application grows, dynamic typing leads to very difficult to find bugs, which can only be detected at runtime. All of my (former) co-workers would agree, as no one wants to do ASP because Asp.Net is so much easier in these terms.
But the point of the post to which I was responding was doing "script like things" (e.g. Perl-like) in Ruby, so yes, the example I gave was scripting language-like.
See above about my dislike of doing anything important in scripts.
And I disagree with you about what is or isn't harder to read. Your example, at eight lines, appears to do what in Ruby would be one line:
results = my_data.find_all { |item| item.my_property == 'someVal' }
And what if later you type rsults instead? Do you get a warning or error? Or will it suddenly 'appear' out of nowhere? I assume the latter, because some of the lines in C# are to allocate the resources you'll be using. Personally I look at these lines, skip the lines which create the objects and look at the methods. Of course that's how I set up my DAL; I'm certain I could change the API of the DAL so that it can occur in one line (minus the declarations of course).
The extra lines are all administrative overhead, and don't have anything to do with what you are trying to accomplish. In fact they obscure some of the interesting details, such as where the items being searched are coming from (at least, I can't tell were they're coming from from looking at this code). In the ruby version, the data is coming from the object "my_data", as should be obvious.
The overhead provides a safety net. ASP didn't require that much overhead either. The problem was that because it was so lax there ended up being a huge number of runtime errors. Again, more effort upfront lead to less effort later. I'd rather write the code correct the first time, instead of writing it and finding out later there are bugs in it and then trying to fix those bugs. Something as simple as a compile finds errors right away, without even running the code. Doesn't sound like Ruby provides that level of safety.
I imagine that the analogous changes to your code would be...bulky.
Again, that's simply because of how I designed the API. I actually could add a method so that adding criteria becomes something along these lines:
searcher.AddSelectionCriteria( "MyProperty", Operator.Equals, "myVal" );
Alternately,
results = seacher.Find( new SelectionCriteria( "MyProperty", Operator.Equals, "myVal" ), new SelectionCriteria( "MyProperty2", Operator.Like, "*myVal" ) );
Down to one line (excluding allocating resources). Of course that one line, much like your Ruby example, is getting longer and longer, which for me becomes unreadable. I'd rather have multiple short lines over a single long line.
Please find that context in this statement, to which I was replying: "Java never cought on .NET will not either. It's just too stodgy and "enterprisey" and complex, and verbose and tries to do too much."
Also, please feel free to click Parent until you reach the top message, to which I also replied. No where in the thread exists the 'context' you claim. To say 'Internet application' is limited only to what is in a web browser is stupid, because its not. Where does it say 'internet application' be hosted on a browser? It doesn't.
When did finding a screaming baby annoying become being an asshole? Would it be acceptable if an adult was constantly screaming in the restraunt? Would that not annoy the other diners? Funny, I always though those that were bothering others were being assholes, not the ones being bothered.
Having said that though, there are certain places where people should expect for their to be noise, whether it be from the overly amplified TV sound or the conversation of the other 300 people eating at the restaurant, that a baby's cry or a small child's unruliness should be tolerated for the few moments that they could occur.
A baby's screams are magintudes more annoying than an overly loud tv or 300 people having a converstation. The fact that you CAN hear the screams over 300 people talking should be a clue. Also, there is some reseach that suggests that a baby's screams are at a certain frequency which is MEANT to cause irriatation to us (so that we try to mollify the child).
People talking at normal volume is not annoying. A child screaming or a kid running out of control IS exteremly annoying, and ruins my experience. Why should I have to put up with a poorer experience because YOU chose to bring your child? I'm not talking about McDonalds, I'm talking about fancier places, where steaks start at $20 a pop. You know, places where two people can easily drop $50 or more on a meal.
ou can't put a sign on the door that says "No Shirt, No Shoes, Kids, No Service" and expect that no one is going to say anything or that every parent group in the area is going to crush you with protestors and paperwork. Generally, the restaurants or establishments that kids don't belong in are pretty well identified.
Why not? If someone does, why should people with kids care? Why the protests? How about just accepting it and not going? After all, the restraunt owner can keep out whoever he wants. People need to shut the hell up, really. A restraunt that bans kids may gain some publicity, but there is zero reason for protests and paperwork. If enough people like it, it will survive. If not enough do, it will go under. But to claim you have a RIGHT to eat their with your kid?
Don't generalize to exclude everyone because of one parent who hasn't taught their child manners.
First, its not excluding every. Its excluding people with kids. Second, did you ever stop to think that the generalization came about because screaming kids is becoming more and more of a problem for those of us that want a nice dining experience? My wife and I have given up on movies, because its now COMMON for the stupid teens (and even a large number of adults) who can't keep their mouth shut for an hour and twenty minutes to be there.
Bull. I think they should be banned, but I've done to the Olive Garden and had 5 year olds sitting at the bar. Also many bars do actually serve food, and kids are still allowed there.
Most Environmentalists are socialist types. They hate the fact that we are not all "sacrificing for the greater good."
And all Germans are Nazis, and all blacks are violent, etc. etc. Thanks, good point.
Global warming is just another form of political correctness, where if you say anything against it you get shouted down by bitter people who want to control other people. It's the left's equivalent of the church lady. Kyoto was just a way for socialist countries to control us.
Global warming is heavily politisied, yes. That doesn't mean its not a valid theory. That doesn't change that fact that pretty much all relevent scientists believe it to be true. That also doesn't mean that people supporting the theory want to "control others" either. Perhaps it simply means they want to breath. You could argue that those that which to stop genocide are attempting to "control others" too. That doesn't mean you're right.
We are no longer in an ice age, so of course global warming is real. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the glaciers have been slowly melting for the past 10,000 years. Has it been sped up? I don't think anyone thought that the warming that has taken place on average for the past 10,000 years has always been linear. Are we contributing? Yes, we breathe out CO2. We have not had a good world war in about 50 years to cut down on the population.
So if the tempurate is not cold, it must always be climbing? Is that your argument? You also ignore that the ice caps have been melting faster than ever given the evidence we have now. No one is saying its your breathing that is creating a CO2 problem, its factories and cars. You know, the unnatural stuff caused by our use of nature.
Fortunately, plants love CO2. We have more plants than we've ever had, and some more will soon spring up from the melting permafrost and ice caps.
Unfortunately, the plants best at processing CO2 are also being cut down at an alarming rate. I'm not sure where you get this idea that there are more plants. We have less and less area taken up by forests every year. A little flower doesn't help as much as a 100 year old tree does.
Of course, we've recently found that it is possible that live plants are giving off methane, a greenhouse gas.
And its not the methane levels that the scientists are worried about.
Animals give off CO2 and methane too. In fact, it's probably a good thing we aren't driving around in horse and buggy any more, as I think those horses were aweful polluters. You don't think that their waste got into the ground water?
A car or factory put out significantly more CO2 than a horse. Horse waste usually decays on the ground, and is not dumped wholesale into rivers.
Water vapor is also a huge greenhouse 'gas'. The more the ice caps melt, the more water vapor gets into the atmosphere and the more stored methane and CO2 get into the atmosphere. There's probably not a whole lot we tiny humans can (or should) do about it. We can try to "use as much as we lose" and keep balance, but that's just common sense. We don't need some bitter activist, some welfare scientist, or some corrupt U.N. "Hall of Justice League" to tell us that.
Again, its not water vapor levels which the scienists are worried about. No one said to stop ice caps from melting, they are saying not to speed up the process by putting out more than can be absorbed back into the system. We aren't keeping balance, and that's the argument. You seem particually dense. If your post was an attempt at humor, it failed miserably..
Heh.. well I guess I spoke too soon. I was gauging my opinion on how often I hear about the banned books topic, which I suppose isn't a very good way to gauge how much this is going on..
So I guess what your saying is that the rich nations purposefully signed something which requires them to give away their wealth. Clearly you must think the rich nations stupid..
I believe that you should read his post more closely. You missed by a few years. And of course, the reason for everyone to go to school is so that they can learn how not to think critically and no one with a political agenda ever lies.
My point was that the theory has been around going on 20 to 30 years now, unchanged. Unfortunately the OP never said how long they had been discussing global cooling. Funny your quipe about school; they actually DID instill critical thinking skills in us. As I said in another thread, many of the banned books were actually required reading.
As I was once told in a logic class. For logic to work, you have to show that each step in your reasoning is true. Starting from a fallacy, you can prove anything. Also, it's a major jump to go from "seems to coniencide" to "causes". Based on that, it "stands to reason" that the rest of this statement should be viewed as an opinion, not a logical deduction.
Well fine, but last I heard they had ice cores dating back millions of years. I guess millions of years of history can be discounted as not proven, but you'd have to throw away everything where we don't have that much evidience too.
Reacting to a statement you see as outrageously false doesn't mean that you can reply and calling someone "stupid." His opinion is just as valid as yours, espescially since neither it firmly rooted in hard evidence.
Fine. Prove my statement wrong. Find me one environmentalist who's stated goal was to stop or reduce economic growth. Until you do, I'll stand by my statement that the comment was stupid. And I'll call YOU stupid (and a hippocrate as well; before you tell someone else to read a post carefully, make sure you have) for not knowing the difference between my calling a statement stupid and calling a person stupid.
Please. I'm sure Apple would do that; the iPods firmware may even be updatable as soon as they connect it to their computer.
Why would Stephen King be banned?
He's never written anything contraversial. Never challanged any established ideas. IT was entertaining, but it doesn't have a political message or force us to re-evaluate how we define 'crazy.' It doesn't warn us of the dangers of certain ways of thinking like 1984 does or Brave New World.
Honestly, how could someone even think any of King's books are even in the same league.
Banned from doing a book report on said book. Thats what they mean when they say banned or challanged.
There was an episode of that sitcom MJF was in that dealt with this; his characters sister was told she couldn't do a book report on a certain book, but she did anyway and presented it.
Fortunately I think that crap has died out, but I remember it being a hot topic in the 80s. My HS required us to read several of the books on that list. I wish F451 got more attention; similar to 1984 and addresses this topic exactly.
Back in the '70's the big scare was Global Cooling. We were told that we would all freeze to death. Now the big scare is Global Warming. We're all going to overheat, melt the icecaps, and drown.
Weird, because when I was in school in the 80s, they were telling us about global warming (and the ozone hole). Of course global warming has been warned about since then, non-stop.
These are all part of nature's climate cycles of cooling and warming trends. To say that man's activity is warming the earth is unproven.
Yes there are natural cycles, although the amount of carbon in the atmosphere seems to coniencide with global warming treads (as CO2 amounts rise, so does the temp). We're now pumping carbon into the atmosphere, more than has ever been present in the atmosphere. It stands to reason that more carbon will help warm the earth. To deny that is foolish.
However, under the name of "Global Warming", there are large power-grabs between nations. Notice that China, the world's largest polluter, is excluded from the Kyoto agreement, yet the US is supposed to follow it.
I can't speak to China and the Kyoto agreement, but just because one big polluter doesn't follow doesn't mean the other big one shouldn't. A reduction is a reduction. FWIW, nations have to agree to sign the Kyoto agreement. I doubt they'd not ask China. The US refused to sign.
I'm a conservationist. There are many ways to conserve the environment and have full economic activity. That is in stark contrast to the environmentalists and Global Warming theorists who want us to reduce and/or stop our economic growth.
This is perhaps one of the stupidist comments I've ever heard. They aren't trying to stop / reduce economic growth, they want that growth to happen in an environmentally friendly way. You seem to forget that something which slows growth in one area may trigger larger growth in others. For example, if you need some kind of filter on your smoke stacks, someone needs to build those.
You want to conserve only when it doesn't inconvience you in some way. I assume you have similar attitudes as those that tried to justify dumping any chemical waste into rivers. We've cleaned those up, and the economy hasn't tanked. Get a grip.
Spoken like someone that doesn't have a job in the real world, or a clue. There are tons of jobs for both Java and .Net developers. Not nearly as many for other languages.
.Net goes... well, .Net today is what Win32s was in Windows 3.1x. In other words, .Net is the replacement for the Win32 API, the prefered way to talk to the kernel. Going forward, if you develop on Windows, you'll be using .Net.
To say that Java isn't huge in the world is stupid. As far as
The thing I like about Ruby is how easy it is to do things like this "on the fly," without a lot of clutter for "creating objects" and "setting parameters";
On the fly.. I'm going to assume that means Ruby is not type safe and more akin to script. Not having type safety was a HUGE problem in developing classic ASP sites and JavaScript. Not having to define your variable was also a huge problem. One typo and bam, you've got bugs.
it isn't that the other way is harder to write per se, but that the total effort (thinking it up, typing, reading it later, and figuring out what it does) seems to be less. But it's a cumulative thing, an effect you can really feel as you're working even when the individual steps aren't that much harder.
More effort up front in my experience leads to less effort later. Its not hard to read either. Here's a search in my DAL.
DataSearcher searcher;
SelectionCriteria crit;
List results;
searcher = new DataSearcher();
crit = new SelectionCriteria( "MyProperty", Operator.Equals );
crit.Values.Add( "someVal" );
searcher.AddSelectionCriteria( crit );
results = searcher.Find();
Is it more lines? Sure. Harder to read? I don't think so.
More lines does not mean harder to maintain or read. With Intellisense, I usually only type a few characters before what I want to type appears in a list.. then I press space and the rest is inserted. For larger repetitive things, you have code generation.
Most people don't have enough room for five different consoles hooked up at once. Most also will not hookup / unhookup to switch consoles. I'm sure you're a minority.
Depends on how you define harder. I have a custom DAL i created which makes searching as easy as your example. Its a few more lines of code to create the objects and set the desired values / operators, but its not 'harder' by any stretch.
Personally I'm hoping the .Net framework takes off. ClickOnce gives you a rich client with the ease of web deployment. As the framework install base becomes larger (I think Vista will ship with it) developing and deploying rich applications becomes very easy.
I also really hope more people get involved in Mono. Then you can target any platform you like.
I like Ruby because I found it easy to tranlate over and I can do the crazy wierd Perl-like stuff that I cannot do in C# or Java (or have to jump through a lot of hoops to do).
Examples please?
So you'd rather us still dependant soley on IBM for computer hardware and software? You don't think they would have leveraged that to their advantage?
(Actually, these days both are plastic anyways, so neither will carry an internet signal very far.)
Actually in my city both are still steel.
Won't somebody think of my cottage.
We have. We decided that if you really want broadband, you should move to a more urban area.