The view that all opinions are equally valid can no more be supported than the view that a small elite do indeed have complete truth.
Any dog in the street is well aware that some opinions are absolute nonsense (or worse, shouldn't be expressed as they only encourage hatred or ignorance) even if they are not prepared to say so in our politically correct climate (which ironically, despite the prevalence of "liberal" views, in reality limits what people can say to a huge degree).
No-one can operate from a position of not believing they are in the right about some things, and others are in the wrong. Even those who say every opinion is valid are themselves putting that forward as "truth" and knocking down opponents as being "wrong".
It is playing ostriche to pretend that people cannot be right or wrong about certain things!
The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than possibly even all the "less civilised" countries too. Even if you consider some countries' reported figures dodgy - there's a huge gap between those and the US rates. At the very best for the US (i.e. wildly inaccurate figures for some "uncivilised" countries), the US is still going to be in the top few countries in the world for incarceration rates!
Nevermind that the US is also way up there in executing people.
The cute voice and broken English (baby talk) is, well, appropriate for babies. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't see the point of talking to someone who can't talk back or entirely (or at all) understand what you are saying.
As you point out though, kids are learning machines. Even a baby responds to how you say things, and even pretty soon what you say (in the case of specific often-repeated words/phrases).
Something that's interesting though is that people do have a mistaken rosy view of the past. There's nothing much new about today's problems. Sure we have kids that aren't learning anything like as much as they should, not just in school knowledge. But that has always been the case, it's just that nowadays in rich western countries they may be in a "middle class" environment. We even still have the lowest class too, even if it is smaller in many countries today. Things are even bleaker at the bottom, just as they were a century ago - kids without enough clothes, heating, food, etc., nevermind learning that which will help them to escape the situation they have been born into.
The point though is that it isn't so important if some kids are smarter than others. The mere fact of people worrying about smart kids underacheiving due to lowest-common-denominator schooling indicates that the issue is not merely someone's ability.
I do agree though that kids, whatever their own abilities, benefit immensely from smarter parents.
However, kids benefit from even such simple things as being breastfed as infants (or rather, one should probably consider it that kids have their development hindered when not breastfed).
Calorie restriction may be harder than exercise, and indeed it may be unrealistic to cut out all "junk" food, but it is sensible to restrict some kinds of food. I don't think it's remotely sensible that people have soft drinks anytime other than occasions where people might be drinking non-alcoholic beverages socially (e.g. a party). Soft drinks are bad bad news, and just not necessary at all.
I think it's of vital importance for parents not to let their kids get a taste for them. That doesn't mean no soft drinks ever, it means not buying them in the weekly shopping, and restrict the kids to one drink if out somewhere (you know, as a treat?), or maybe a couple at a social gathering. Certainly worked for my siblings and I, and we never felt deprived, and all of us would seldom have soft drinks nowadays (I've probably had more beer this year, as someone who even in that regard only has the occasional drink or two).
Soft drink ads on telly should be banned before 9PM - certainly I know there's been discussion here about doing this, but the soft drinks lobby is too strong for it to probably happen.
The Internet is not disconnected from reality, nor are its users miraculously more enlightened than anyone else. Current Internet trends are, now more than ever, merely reflecting the direction different societies are going; whether Western paranoia and increasing authoritarianism or whatever trends there may be elsewhere.
Wikipedia in particular really annoys me for the people who seem to think it can't have all the same problems as a "real-world" project, with a whole whack of new problems too. Really the project, however useful and interesting, is a train wreck. Yet some wiki-evangelists would have you believe that it somehow has moral high ground over traditional sources.
The interesting thing is that we now have "Anglicisation" of English here in Europe; i.e. using all possible British English spelling differences even where the American spelling is allowable as a variant in British English. For example, the propagation of the "ise" endings in British English. This spelling is distinguished from American English, which always uses "ize" endings. Traditionally however, many words can be spelt perfectly correctly in British English with "ize" endings, indeed some have traditionally always used "ize". A British English dictionary of mine from the 1990s has mostly ize spellings, one I bought last year has ise with ize noted as American or variant.
Wikipedia has to be the most fun place though, with its mix of British and American English.
Actually, I've thought about this myself, that it would be a great way to proceed from post-TNG/DS9/VOY timeline. Say instigate things by some event like Vulcan deciding to leave the Federation (as a "logical" course of action) - a wake-up call so to speak, or have an attempt to start a new Federation that bypasses Starfleet, or have the Federation try to rein in/abandon Starfleet and re-orientate itself.
There are problems though as to how you would make it credible. Who leads getting things back on track? Humans? That's too self-centred with so many other worlds. Aliens leading the effort? Misses the point about humans doing better in the future. Some humans with alien allies trying to get Earth back on track? Worst of both worlds and would be kind of a "PC" way to have humans leading the effort.
However, it would indeed be a new scenario direction that could be entertaining to watch.
The problem is that the Roddenberry vision - i.e. the raison d'etre for Star Trek, that at some stage in the future, humans have it sorted - is quite simply not at all credible. It lent itself to nice stories/scenarios in the past that some people were uplifted by, but ultimately the new heights of cynicism in todays world mean that it just isn't what viewers want. Some of the episodes people most appreciate now are the "darker" ones, or where people are not acting according to better morals etc.
From mid-TNG onwards, since Roddenberry's death, Star Trek has lost the quite implausible "in the future humans have it sorted" line and so lost their purpose (an indicator of this direction was the great episode, TNGs "The Drumhead" - where at the end, Picard reflects on reality of the history repeating itself, setting the scene for there being rot in the Federation itself). DS9 for example had it's good points and some episodes were great, but it was just another 90s TV show, set in space. It was more about playing out the problems of today in space, than showing any possibility that we might surpass them in the future.
How could you actually do a successful Star Trek clean break, with the original uplifting spirit, and provide something that viewers of the 2000s would appreciate? It would just look cheesy to todays hardened cynical viewers, as indeed TOS often does, however loved it is.
As an admin myself on Wikipedia - I say that "closing decision based on consensus" is dodgy. First off, it has the weasel word "based on". Secondly - consensus means general agreement. AfDs are regularly closed with deletion if most people are in favour of it, despite it allegedly not being "vote counting". Also, they can even be closed with deletion with the majority against deletion ("oh sure, we don't do things just by vote counting, and the keep arguments are not valid").
Consensus is a meaningful word on Wikipedia only in the sense that it can mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
Actually, a lot of "reliable sources" are ones that do have a bias, but one people are familiar with. Wikipedia on the other hand kids itself that there isn't inherent bias to it despite the modus operandi. This is made all the worse by specific bias of an undetermined nature on a per-article basis, according to who edited last/most etc.
Actually, I think my local supermarkets play football with the boxes. So a significant amount of cereal is reduced to fine dust (i.e. I end up having to chuck out the last of the packet). This week one of the supermarkets reached a new low, many of the boxes had dents and holes in them and a couple were sellotaped closed after having opened.
Supermarkets rank alongside banks and telcos in my personal "leagues of evil" table. The ones here have recently only managed to stock bread that at best will go off in about 2/3 days (i.e. there is even stock out that has a best-before date of that very day). Buyer beware indeed. The fiends even get away with selling meat that has gone off (they just reduce it to half-price, or not even that sometimes).
I'd not be surprised at any retail store here in Ireland selling an empty box nevermind one tiles in it. You still get to pay more than anywhere else in Europe as well!
Even apart from GM foods not likely to become prevalent here soon, they'll be labelled too. Sure this is partly European politians realising it's a great way to acheive the twin results of happy public and protectionism from the GMO-crazy US (just like the hormone beef import ban is only partly a public health concern here, but also protectionism), but I don't really care about the motivation as long as it means the consumer here has more choice and power about what sells here.
Also HFCS isn't that common here. Sure soft drinks are still stupidly suger laden, but it's not usual for it to be HFCS. I mean, we don't have HFCS in our *TOMATO KETCHUP* here for crying out loud! I was seriously wondering last time I was in the US if there was anything there that doesn't have HFCS in it!
Actually, food here is getting better, the producers now have to put % daily intake values on a panel on the front of products (in addition to the standard nutritional tables). I can now see clearly that my breakfast cereal gives me a tenth of the salt that's recommended. Also worryingly things like a pizza giving me 60% of the saturated fat. Though a lot of products are reducing in fat and salt too recently - mostly they taste better in fact - though some have managed to mess up a bit. The food companies were threatened with having Europe-wide regulations brought in if they didn't do something themselves. Seems to have worked, though there was lobbying to have the percentage labels be colour-coded green/yellow/orange/red etc. according to how much of a given allowance was in a serving. Would have been a bit silly for things like cheese though.
Well, I'm happy that here in Europe the companies have to do lots of testing and prove there are no adverse effects.
And *THEN* even so, any food products containing GMO or GMO-derived ingredients have to state it on the packaging - so those who wise to can decide just not to buy products containing GMOs.
I really enjoyed TLJ, but unfortunately the copy of Dreamfall I bought has Starforce on it, and no way am I installing that on my PC. I don't use torrents/cracks/etc. so I've no idea how to get a workaround, plus I'm too lazy to bother.
The reactionaries mostly even out with the apathetic and the establishment. If we had less reactionaries we'd be in a spot of bother, how ever misguided some of them often are.
I for one am glad that people are actually looking at biofuels - even if we had to go through a "biofuels GOOD", "biofuels BAD", "biofuels hmmmm... maybe good maybe bad maybe both somtimes" cycle. Presumably folks will figure it out now that alternative fuel sources are actually being considered.
3G is rubbish here in Ireland, where people desperate for broadband have bought 3G data modems for internet access. The problem is that the system is not very scalable, and it is too expensive and slow for the operator to upgrade capacity to provide more service. The bandwidth they advertise for example (as "up to 3 Mbs") is shared for each cell - so even just two people using it solidly means half the bandwidth - but in city areas it means that the conditions can be worse than fixed-line dial-up.
From what I gather, EDGE is nice and cheap and can be more easily scaled. I believe O2 are now planning to roll it out in Ireland despite having a 3G network already.
Plenty of long-time editors and admins have either left, or scaled back on their amount of contributions. It's too much hassle to take editing Wikipedia seriously anymore.
Wow. Sales tax here in Ireland, VAT (value-added tax), is 21% for most goods. The lower rate for certain goods/services is still 12.5%!
Just to rub it in though, our goods cost more here in the first place too, despite favorable exchange rates for import. Elementary maths should tell you that at $1.40 or so to the euro, our prices should be numerically lower here than in the US despite the VAT rate, we shouldn't have higher numerical prices. I'll tell you what though, it makes it great when over in the US for a trip or whatever - not only do the prices *look* cheap, they're even better than they look! Still not worth the trouble of US immigration to get into the US (that's even with getting it over and done with on Irish soil) and possibly having to deal with Irish customs & excise if bringing much back in obviously new condition.
What's worse? Definitely the endless same old nonsense from the usual suspects. Put it this way, the same outrageous statements over and over again are bad enough that we continue to get just as riled every time. In fact, I'd nearly say that with these same attitudes expressed time and time again, people get even more riled up in response.
There's nothing wrong with people on slashdot continuing to express outrage every single time. It actually encourages me that people aren't entirely apathetic and there are still things that businesspeople, politicians, etc. can say that people are ready to be up in arms about. Mostly people's outrage is just ignored, but it's important for it to expressed each and every time nevertheless. Occasionally it does actually make a difference. At the least, despite pretending to ignore voices of dissent, even the seemingly most impervious and arrogant public figures will eventually be affected to some degree by it. They are still people, hard as it is to believe at times.
This is why I'm rather happy to be in Ireland where we do not have to pay tuition fees for third level for either undergraduate or postgraduate (albeit there are "administration" fees now of about 600 pa). Those whose parents are on low to medium incomes can get grants too that cover maybe a third of what a year of college living costs. Also postgraduate research for a Masters or PhD is usually funded by the University, government, EU or private industry (if you are *really* desperate to do work for a postgrad degree you can theoretically fund yourself and just find a willing supervisor). Sure the stipend is lower than a real salary (maybe €12,000/~$17,000 pa. for masters) - but it's luxury for living as a student, especially better funded research (i.e. not just Uni department funding).
Unfortunately for any US readers, only EU citizens enjoy the free fees benefits. Still probably works out pretty good for postgraduate research here, although cost-of-living is higher than say in the US. Another reason to study here is if you don't like sun during the summer. I can guarantee you won't have problems with that here. You won't have problems with dry skin from lack of humidity either.
Yes, that is what I mean by the same kit. It was the Nedap voting machines. We had some news articles even more recently in our national news about the controversy in the Netherlands. Just right for people to be reminded regularly of how our government wasted millions of euro, and continues to. Our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) complained about our backward use of the pencil and paper even just before the last recent general election. It's preposterous - he's the one running the country - his government is responsible for not implementing a proper e-voting system if they wanted one, and yet he moans as if it's the fault of whingers and morons that we don't have e-voting here. The sheer gall of it is infuriating.
It's the same response about anything here. If you point out the government's failures you're just a trouble-maker (e.g. complaining about one of our cities not having clean drinking water all summer). The worst thing is, there are people who actually don't like our opposition politicans for doing this. No wonder the opposition are luke-warm and ineffective! People actually voted in the same government again who can't actually provide public services in a time of unparalleled prosperity - public services in some cases are worse than when we were poor! I mean really - an entire city without clean water? They manage that in countries that are otherwise a joke.
We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland. There was an initial trial (6 constituencies used the machines in a general election) but afterwards there was a big controversy thrown up. The government set up a committee to investigate, mainly with the intention of keeping people happy, but the committee didn't just rubber-stamp the system. The committee alleged the machines were OK but the software wasn't (things like no secure process to approve updates, collating all the votes in MS Access databases, nonsense like that).
Fortunately this was enough to scupper use of the machines in Ireland (as it was too much effort for the government to try and address even the very lenient concerns of the committee). Unfortunately, we are still storing the machines at a cost of millions of euro a year. Also the politician responsible for the mess got re-elected, cause his own constituency are happy that he's looking out for his area - national e-voting débacle is not in the minds of the locals.
The recommendations of this Dutch committee would be good here in Ireland. There are often spoilt or disputed ballots because we use PR-STV (you number your preferred candidates rather than tick a box). Also counting takes a long time - up to a week including recounts sometimes till the last constituency is declared. So machine filled-out ballot papers and machine counted ballots would be great - especially if manual processing of the ballots is allowed in parallel, or for a certain no. of randomly chosen constituencies, or in any case of a challenge.
But it's not likely the powers that be here would succeed in implementing it. Last time around they nearly ended up not being ready with enough simple partitions for the ordinary bog standard voting!
Slashdot Mirror
The view that all opinions are equally valid can no more be supported than the view that a small elite do indeed have complete truth.
Any dog in the street is well aware that some opinions are absolute nonsense (or worse, shouldn't be expressed as they only encourage hatred or ignorance) even if they are not prepared to say so in our politically correct climate (which ironically, despite the prevalence of "liberal" views, in reality limits what people can say to a huge degree).
No-one can operate from a position of not believing they are in the right about some things, and others are in the wrong. Even those who say every opinion is valid are themselves putting that forward as "truth" and knocking down opponents as being "wrong".
It is playing ostriche to pretend that people cannot be right or wrong about certain things!
The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than possibly even all the "less civilised" countries too. Even if you consider some countries' reported figures dodgy - there's a huge gap between those and the US rates. At the very best for the US (i.e. wildly inaccurate figures for some "uncivilised" countries), the US is still going to be in the top few countries in the world for incarceration rates!
Nevermind that the US is also way up there in executing people.
The cute voice and broken English (baby talk) is, well, appropriate for babies. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't see the point of talking to someone who can't talk back or entirely (or at all) understand what you are saying.
As you point out though, kids are learning machines. Even a baby responds to how you say things, and even pretty soon what you say (in the case of specific often-repeated words/phrases).
Something that's interesting though is that people do have a mistaken rosy view of the past. There's nothing much new about today's problems. Sure we have kids that aren't learning anything like as much as they should, not just in school knowledge. But that has always been the case, it's just that nowadays in rich western countries they may be in a "middle class" environment. We even still have the lowest class too, even if it is smaller in many countries today. Things are even bleaker at the bottom, just as they were a century ago - kids without enough clothes, heating, food, etc., nevermind learning that which will help them to escape the situation they have been born into.
The point though is that it isn't so important if some kids are smarter than others. The mere fact of people worrying about smart kids underacheiving due to lowest-common-denominator schooling indicates that the issue is not merely someone's ability.
I do agree though that kids, whatever their own abilities, benefit immensely from smarter parents.
However, kids benefit from even such simple things as being breastfed as infants (or rather, one should probably consider it that kids have their development hindered when not breastfed).
Calorie restriction may be harder than exercise, and indeed it may be unrealistic to cut out all "junk" food, but it is sensible to restrict some kinds of food. I don't think it's remotely sensible that people have soft drinks anytime other than occasions where people might be drinking non-alcoholic beverages socially (e.g. a party). Soft drinks are bad bad news, and just not necessary at all.
I think it's of vital importance for parents not to let their kids get a taste for them. That doesn't mean no soft drinks ever, it means not buying them in the weekly shopping, and restrict the kids to one drink if out somewhere (you know, as a treat?), or maybe a couple at a social gathering. Certainly worked for my siblings and I, and we never felt deprived, and all of us would seldom have soft drinks nowadays (I've probably had more beer this year, as someone who even in that regard only has the occasional drink or two).
Soft drink ads on telly should be banned before 9PM - certainly I know there's been discussion here about doing this, but the soft drinks lobby is too strong for it to probably happen.
The Internet is not disconnected from reality, nor are its users miraculously more enlightened than anyone else. Current Internet trends are, now more than ever, merely reflecting the direction different societies are going; whether Western paranoia and increasing authoritarianism or whatever trends there may be elsewhere.
Wikipedia in particular really annoys me for the people who seem to think it can't have all the same problems as a "real-world" project, with a whole whack of new problems too. Really the project, however useful and interesting, is a train wreck. Yet some wiki-evangelists would have you believe that it somehow has moral high ground over traditional sources.
The interesting thing is that we now have "Anglicisation" of English here in Europe; i.e. using all possible British English spelling differences even where the American spelling is allowable as a variant in British English. For example, the propagation of the "ise" endings in British English. This spelling is distinguished from American English, which always uses "ize" endings. Traditionally however, many words can be spelt perfectly correctly in British English with "ize" endings, indeed some have traditionally always used "ize". A British English dictionary of mine from the 1990s has mostly ize spellings, one I bought last year has ise with ize noted as American or variant.
Wikipedia has to be the most fun place though, with its mix of British and American English.
Actually, I've thought about this myself, that it would be a great way to proceed from post-TNG/DS9/VOY timeline. Say instigate things by some event like Vulcan deciding to leave the Federation (as a "logical" course of action) - a wake-up call so to speak, or have an attempt to start a new Federation that bypasses Starfleet, or have the Federation try to rein in/abandon Starfleet and re-orientate itself.
There are problems though as to how you would make it credible. Who leads getting things back on track? Humans? That's too self-centred with so many other worlds. Aliens leading the effort? Misses the point about humans doing better in the future. Some humans with alien allies trying to get Earth back on track? Worst of both worlds and would be kind of a "PC" way to have humans leading the effort.
However, it would indeed be a new scenario direction that could be entertaining to watch.
The problem is that the Roddenberry vision - i.e. the raison d'etre for Star Trek, that at some stage in the future, humans have it sorted - is quite simply not at all credible. It lent itself to nice stories/scenarios in the past that some people were uplifted by, but ultimately the new heights of cynicism in todays world mean that it just isn't what viewers want. Some of the episodes people most appreciate now are the "darker" ones, or where people are not acting according to better morals etc.
From mid-TNG onwards, since Roddenberry's death, Star Trek has lost the quite implausible "in the future humans have it sorted" line and so lost their purpose (an indicator of this direction was the great episode, TNGs "The Drumhead" - where at the end, Picard reflects on reality of the history repeating itself, setting the scene for there being rot in the Federation itself). DS9 for example had it's good points and some episodes were great, but it was just another 90s TV show, set in space. It was more about playing out the problems of today in space, than showing any possibility that we might surpass them in the future.
How could you actually do a successful Star Trek clean break, with the original uplifting spirit, and provide something that viewers of the 2000s would appreciate? It would just look cheesy to todays hardened cynical viewers, as indeed TOS often does, however loved it is.
Eh... people are still having kids? Most kids don't start out with a PS2 right away from birth!
As an admin myself on Wikipedia - I say that "closing decision based on consensus" is dodgy. First off, it has the weasel word "based on". Secondly - consensus means general agreement. AfDs are regularly closed with deletion if most people are in favour of it, despite it allegedly not being "vote counting". Also, they can even be closed with deletion with the majority against deletion ("oh sure, we don't do things just by vote counting, and the keep arguments are not valid").
Consensus is a meaningful word on Wikipedia only in the sense that it can mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
Actually, a lot of "reliable sources" are ones that do have a bias, but one people are familiar with. Wikipedia on the other hand kids itself that there isn't inherent bias to it despite the modus operandi. This is made all the worse by specific bias of an undetermined nature on a per-article basis, according to who edited last/most etc.
Actually, I think my local supermarkets play football with the boxes. So a significant amount of cereal is reduced to fine dust (i.e. I end up having to chuck out the last of the packet). This week one of the supermarkets reached a new low, many of the boxes had dents and holes in them and a couple were sellotaped closed after having opened.
Supermarkets rank alongside banks and telcos in my personal "leagues of evil" table. The ones here have recently only managed to stock bread that at best will go off in about 2/3 days (i.e. there is even stock out that has a best-before date of that very day). Buyer beware indeed. The fiends even get away with selling meat that has gone off (they just reduce it to half-price, or not even that sometimes).
I'd not be surprised at any retail store here in Ireland selling an empty box nevermind one tiles in it. You still get to pay more than anywhere else in Europe as well!
Or move to Europe.
Even apart from GM foods not likely to become prevalent here soon, they'll be labelled too. Sure this is partly European politians realising it's a great way to acheive the twin results of happy public and protectionism from the GMO-crazy US (just like the hormone beef import ban is only partly a public health concern here, but also protectionism), but I don't really care about the motivation as long as it means the consumer here has more choice and power about what sells here.
Also HFCS isn't that common here. Sure soft drinks are still stupidly suger laden, but it's not usual for it to be HFCS. I mean, we don't have HFCS in our *TOMATO KETCHUP* here for crying out loud! I was seriously wondering last time I was in the US if there was anything there that doesn't have HFCS in it!
Actually, food here is getting better, the producers now have to put % daily intake values on a panel on the front of products (in addition to the standard nutritional tables). I can now see clearly that my breakfast cereal gives me a tenth of the salt that's recommended. Also worryingly things like a pizza giving me 60% of the saturated fat. Though a lot of products are reducing in fat and salt too recently - mostly they taste better in fact - though some have managed to mess up a bit. The food companies were threatened with having Europe-wide regulations brought in if they didn't do something themselves. Seems to have worked, though there was lobbying to have the percentage labels be colour-coded green/yellow/orange/red etc. according to how much of a given allowance was in a serving. Would have been a bit silly for things like cheese though.
Well, I'm happy that here in Europe the companies have to do lots of testing and prove there are no adverse effects.
And *THEN* even so, any food products containing GMO or GMO-derived ingredients have to state it on the packaging - so those who wise to can decide just not to buy products containing GMOs.
I really enjoyed TLJ, but unfortunately the copy of Dreamfall I bought has Starforce on it, and no way am I installing that on my PC. I don't use torrents/cracks/etc. so I've no idea how to get a workaround, plus I'm too lazy to bother.
The reactionaries mostly even out with the apathetic and the establishment. If we had less reactionaries we'd be in a spot of bother, how ever misguided some of them often are.
I for one am glad that people are actually looking at biofuels - even if we had to go through a "biofuels GOOD", "biofuels BAD", "biofuels hmmmm... maybe good maybe bad maybe both somtimes" cycle. Presumably folks will figure it out now that alternative fuel sources are actually being considered.
3G is rubbish here in Ireland, where people desperate for broadband have bought 3G data modems for internet access. The problem is that the system is not very scalable, and it is too expensive and slow for the operator to upgrade capacity to provide more service. The bandwidth they advertise for example (as "up to 3 Mbs") is shared for each cell - so even just two people using it solidly means half the bandwidth - but in city areas it means that the conditions can be worse than fixed-line dial-up.
From what I gather, EDGE is nice and cheap and can be more easily scaled. I believe O2 are now planning to roll it out in Ireland despite having a 3G network already.
Plenty of long-time editors and admins have either left, or scaled back on their amount of contributions. It's too much hassle to take editing Wikipedia seriously anymore.
Wow. Sales tax here in Ireland, VAT (value-added tax), is 21% for most goods. The lower rate for certain goods/services is still 12.5%!
Just to rub it in though, our goods cost more here in the first place too, despite favorable exchange rates for import. Elementary maths should tell you that at $1.40 or so to the euro, our prices should be numerically lower here than in the US despite the VAT rate, we shouldn't have higher numerical prices. I'll tell you what though, it makes it great when over in the US for a trip or whatever - not only do the prices *look* cheap, they're even better than they look! Still not worth the trouble of US immigration to get into the US (that's even with getting it over and done with on Irish soil) and possibly having to deal with Irish customs & excise if bringing much back in obviously new condition.
What's worse? Definitely the endless same old nonsense from the usual suspects. Put it this way, the same outrageous statements over and over again are bad enough that we continue to get just as riled every time. In fact, I'd nearly say that with these same attitudes expressed time and time again, people get even more riled up in response.
There's nothing wrong with people on slashdot continuing to express outrage every single time. It actually encourages me that people aren't entirely apathetic and there are still things that businesspeople, politicians, etc. can say that people are ready to be up in arms about. Mostly people's outrage is just ignored, but it's important for it to expressed each and every time nevertheless. Occasionally it does actually make a difference. At the least, despite pretending to ignore voices of dissent, even the seemingly most impervious and arrogant public figures will eventually be affected to some degree by it. They are still people, hard as it is to believe at times.
This is why I'm rather happy to be in Ireland where we do not have to pay tuition fees for third level for either undergraduate or postgraduate (albeit there are "administration" fees now of about 600 pa). Those whose parents are on low to medium incomes can get grants too that cover maybe a third of what a year of college living costs. Also postgraduate research for a Masters or PhD is usually funded by the University, government, EU or private industry (if you are *really* desperate to do work for a postgrad degree you can theoretically fund yourself and just find a willing supervisor). Sure the stipend is lower than a real salary (maybe €12,000/~$17,000 pa. for masters) - but it's luxury for living as a student, especially better funded research (i.e. not just Uni department funding).
Unfortunately for any US readers, only EU citizens enjoy the free fees benefits. Still probably works out pretty good for postgraduate research here, although cost-of-living is higher than say in the US. Another reason to study here is if you don't like sun during the summer. I can guarantee you won't have problems with that here. You won't have problems with dry skin from lack of humidity either.
Yes, that is what I mean by the same kit. It was the Nedap voting machines. We had some news articles even more recently in our national news about the controversy in the Netherlands. Just right for people to be reminded regularly of how our government wasted millions of euro, and continues to. Our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) complained about our backward use of the pencil and paper even just before the last recent general election. It's preposterous - he's the one running the country - his government is responsible for not implementing a proper e-voting system if they wanted one, and yet he moans as if it's the fault of whingers and morons that we don't have e-voting here. The sheer gall of it is infuriating.
It's the same response about anything here. If you point out the government's failures you're just a trouble-maker (e.g. complaining about one of our cities not having clean drinking water all summer). The worst thing is, there are people who actually don't like our opposition politicans for doing this. No wonder the opposition are luke-warm and ineffective! People actually voted in the same government again who can't actually provide public services in a time of unparalleled prosperity - public services in some cases are worse than when we were poor! I mean really - an entire city without clean water? They manage that in countries that are otherwise a joke.
We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland. There was an initial trial (6 constituencies used the machines in a general election) but afterwards there was a big controversy thrown up. The government set up a committee to investigate, mainly with the intention of keeping people happy, but the committee didn't just rubber-stamp the system. The committee alleged the machines were OK but the software wasn't (things like no secure process to approve updates, collating all the votes in MS Access databases, nonsense like that).
Fortunately this was enough to scupper use of the machines in Ireland (as it was too much effort for the government to try and address even the very lenient concerns of the committee). Unfortunately, we are still storing the machines at a cost of millions of euro a year. Also the politician responsible for the mess got re-elected, cause his own constituency are happy that he's looking out for his area - national e-voting débacle is not in the minds of the locals.
The recommendations of this Dutch committee would be good here in Ireland. There are often spoilt or disputed ballots because we use PR-STV (you number your preferred candidates rather than tick a box). Also counting takes a long time - up to a week including recounts sometimes till the last constituency is declared. So machine filled-out ballot papers and machine counted ballots would be great - especially if manual processing of the ballots is allowed in parallel, or for a certain no. of randomly chosen constituencies, or in any case of a challenge.
But it's not likely the powers that be here would succeed in implementing it. Last time around they nearly ended up not being ready with enough simple partitions for the ordinary bog standard voting!
For me, it's more a question of explaining why exactly it makes sense for anyone to switch from XP to Vista.