Do you honestly feel that your information, and the Internet, is safer in the hands of a private unregulated "not for profit" US registered company that is given it's power by the US government and gives most (if not all) of it's contracts for vital services to US for-profit companies?
Yes. History bears out that our data is safer in private hands than public hands.
How many times has the U.S. government suppressed information from the public? It is doing so today, on a regular basis; witness the increasing tendency towards limiting the output of FOIA requests, for example.
The U.S. government is incompetent, and in fact, outright hostile -- particularly under the existing Bush administration, but this much is true regardless of who is President -- towards the free speech rights of the citizenry which our Constitution guarantees that the government may not infringe.
Put aside your opinions on the UN and how they don't agree with everything the US says for a minute and realise that in an ideal world, an international democractic UN backed organisation to control the future of an international network is the way things should be.
You're asking readers to put aside facts and reality for an ideological dream? This is stupid.
Feel free to join the reality-based Internet sometime; it's really quite nice here.
This would be infinitely better than the current US private company having full control over the world's Internet experience.
I find this laughable, particularly in light of your own admission that the UN "aren't perfect" (that's putting it mildly - the UN is fraught with incompetence and corruption, in case you missed the UN's oil-for-fraud scandal) yet I'll take the bait and ask: why?
Why would you support an organization that would (inevitably) seek to limit speech on the Internet?
The Internet, by all non-political (i.e. non-vested) accounts, has grown as fast as it has without government intervention. It has grown because it is an anarchy of information. Better we leave it that way than leave it to faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats thousands of miles away.
This is the government that Americans trust with a significant portion of their retirement (Social Security), their railroad system (Amtrak), their postal system (USPS), education, law enforcement, and so on?
Bill Clinton lied (about sex w/ Monica), Bush Jr. lied (about WMDs in Iraq), the FBI lied in a secret court (to get wiretaps), the TSA lied (about protecting passenger privacy)... where does it end? (especially given the record of older agencies like the FBI and CIA lying to the public)
At least when Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers lie, their companies go bankrupt and they (at least in Ebbers case, most likely, though probably Ken Lay too eventually) go to prison.
But when government fails, what happens? Generally, nothing.
Mod me as troll/flamebait/overrated now for not promoting heavy doses of socialism (a necessary precondition for a large government to exist, so it can accomplish such abuses as this one)...
DevSource: Where do you see scripting languages going? Where will scripting be in five years? Do you see it being replaced by compiled languages?
Thomas: I see a definite trend among the leaders in the industry away from compiled languages and towards dynamic ones. A lot of Java developers, for example, are experimenting with a Ruby web framework called Rails.
The distinction isn't really compiled languages vs. interpreted languages. All languages are at some point interpreted (given the complexity of today's processor architectures). The issue is really one of language style.
(emphasis mine)
His point about all languages being interpreted at some point doesn't make sense to me, even with the parenthetical note about processor architecture. What about CPU architecture these days makes a language interpreted? Would this include ASM then (which is really just a human-readable version of machine code)?
I thought compiled languages compile once to, you know, machine code prior to execution, whereas interpreted languages compile code on-the-fly for every program execution? Yet Thomas is suggesting that if I write "hello world" in C, the machine code compiled from that will in reality be interpreted by the CPU?
If you condense the statistics down to one average American and one average Swede, you ignore that there are lots of poor Americans who are made up for by the top 1% Americans who have 1/3 of the wealth.
True enough. Maybe that's why the post used median values instead? As from the blog:
Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said. . ..
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.
This meant that Swedes stood "below groups which in the Swedish debate are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over six percent while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
That's funny -- under American law, cops can't commit crimes either.
Yet, tell me what the Rodney King beating was if not criminal. Or the Kent State shootings by the National Guard (not police, but reserve military). Or the infinite examples of cops flipping on their lights to blow through red-light intersections, then flip the lights off immediately afterwards (abuse of police power).
Not to mention the cases of torture that have occurred involving anal rape via nightsticks, torture with Taser stun guns, and so forth.
if a render character in a game is standing over the rendered corpse of another character and you see rendered poop on the ground (that occoured as a direct result of the former of the two characters) that constitutes pooping in the game.
And in which game does this occur?
The "problem" of person-on-person defecation in video games requires at least 3 entities in the scene for the scene to occur:
* Player 1 * Poop * Player 2
In each of your examples, you were missing one of those elements. Again, you wrote:
The "Bubblegum" crew on CounterStrike (mostly on the Tokyo servers) will spraypaint their balls (an actual, hi-rez, digital picture of each player's manberries) on your corpse. I've seen these guys actually sacrifice themselves to jump across a level and spray balls on me.
Balls != poop. Thus, poop is the missing entity from this example.
Your second example was:
Another crew has a pic of poop in a urinal (WTF people) as their spray.
Here you have the poop. But you are missing the other 2 entities (the 2 players) from the scene. Moreover, the poop is not being placed on other players, but rather, it is placed in a urinal, and further, this scene is contained in a spraypaint picture -- *not* as a set of character animations within Counterstrike.
Thus, when you use those 2 examples as claims of people pooping on each other in video games, as you did in the following:
So, yes, people do deficate on each other.
I can't help but think you are incapable of accurately relating objects in a given scene. God help us all if you ever take the witness stand in a jury trial, because if your understanding of object relationships and your reasoning ability were as bad as you've demonstrated here, the chain of case law would be FUBAR (were it not, thankfully, for lawyers and judges who are trained to sort out nonsensical thought such as that which you've described).
Of course, inflation varies by market -- home price inflation has been higher than the overall inflation rate, for example, as was inflation on some grocery goods last year (e.g. milk).
Also, although you're right about most banks' savings accounts, if you shop around, it is possible to beat that current inflation rate using a mere savings account (although, this was not the case about 2 years ago). EmigrantDirect, for example, currently has a 3.25% APY (though note that only a few weeks ago, they were offering only a 3.00% APY, while inflation was at 3.26%).
But overall, you're right... Month-to-month variations show that savings accounts and MMAs, even the highest-returning ones, are not a smart way to beat inflation, assuming it's possible at all without major micromanagement. Using one's savings as investments (bonds, stocks, index funds, etc.) is a much better idea...
Are you retarded? You did not cite an example of 1 person defecating on another. Re-read your own statements:
The "Bubblegum" crew on CounterStrike (mostly on the Tokyo servers) will spraypaint their balls (an actual, hi-rez, digital picture of each player's manberries) on your corpse. I've seen these guys actually sacrifice themselves to jump across a level and spray balls on me.
Pictures of men's balls are not pictures of shit. There is thus no poop contained in the picture, negating the possibility of person-on-person defecation.
Another crew has a pic of poop in a urinal (WTF people) as their spray.
Here you cite an example of poop in the picture, but there are no people in the picture -- again, without both entities in the picture, you cannot logically say that there is person-on-person defecation.
So, yes, people do deficate on each other.
According to your own 2 cited Counterstrike examples, no, this does not occur.
Find an example of person-on-person shitting in a video game, then I'll agree. Until then, you haven't proven anything.
It's worth noting that the Serious Sam games were developed by a company located in Croatia -- a nation with considerably-lower costs of living than in the U.S.. They didn't need to charge as much as we do here because they don't need as much money to live on...
Hence, they sold a high-quality game at a price that is half that (or less) than most games you find today. Such is the benefit of international trade, really...
is it just me, or is this just a little irresponsible to both build in the first place, then publish instructions for it?
Why would that be irresponsible? The person built a device which sends/receives radio signals via the Bluetooth protocol.
Nothing new here for nearly a century, except that this uses Bluetooth and is not-so-cleverly designed to resemble a sniper rifle (a big fat one, at that).
How is it irresponsible to build something (*anything*), then post instructions about it?
As with all things -- guns, cars, bombs, computers, planes, trains, automobiles, books, rap music -- irresponsibility is in the hands of the user, not the creator.
You're doing a K-5 presentation. Think about that range for a moment.
In Kindergarten, children cannot even yet add 1+1 (at least at my public elementary school we could not). On the other hand, 5th graders who've paid some attention to their study can handle the 4 basic arithmetic operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide).
There is no way you can illustrate a loop to a Kindergarten child using any sort of the simple arithmetic that for() and while() loops use. But to the 5th grader, you could.
Moreover, there are issues of attention spans. The attention span of the Kindergartener is much much shorter than that of the 5th grader (which in turn is still nowhere near as large as a high school kid's).
Hence, to the Kindergartener, you'd need some other sort of presentation; one that is extremely-simple, like a game, or a 3D graphics program. Don't expect to show them code, because in K-1 or so, many students still cannot read -- certainly they can't read complex texts like code (in any language, even BASIC, and obviously not ASM!).
You may have more luck with the 3rd-5th graders though. They can read and perform basic arithmetic, so they could probably understand BASIC if you showed them an extremely short (< 10 lines) program. But you're still going to have to show them that "code can do cool things!" Do as much graphics as you can in as few lines of code as you can, and show them that.
The first "programming" I ever did was on Hypercard on the Mac way back in 6th grade, around 12 years ago. Consider the simplicity of Hypercard, and the fact that that too will confuse many 6th grade students when they first see it...
Otherwise, I sarcastically echo the other comments about "teach them Hindi" and "juice them up on coffee and yell 'code faster!' at them" and "don't shower, don't shave", etc.:-)
You're mixing the terms of value and cost. They're quite different.
Indeed they are quite different. But I am not confusing them. Re-read what I wrote which you quoted:
Until then, if you don't want anything for your work, I won't give you anything for it.
That is to say, if you don't value your work sufficiently to demand a price to cover the cost of your labors, then I will not voluntarily pay any non-zero price for your software.
As I mentioned with id software, they give away for free their software a few years after its commercial run. For them, it is a sustainable business model to sell video games that people can get for free elsewhere (in time).
Your argument against giving away software for free completely ignores this point.
Does it? Re-read my post, and note where I wrote the following:
They have to change the terms of the source's release somehow, either by shifting it's release by time (as id does by releaseing the source a few years after a game's release) or by space in the market (as TrollTech does w/ their dual-license scheme).
A business image is different than a cultural image - again you mixed terms to make your point. "Air Jordan" is about 1e14 times more valuable than "Air Gates," even if Gates is more solvent.
Indeed. But the market for shoes extends far beyond the image-based shoes of the world; many people are content to wear a pair of cheap no-name dress shoes, tennis shoes, etc. so long as they are comfortable and don't look "bad" (however they may define "bad") -- those shoes needn't be the vastly overhyped Nikes at Foot Locker.
Some people wear the more-mundane Skechers, or Birkenstocks, or one of the various shoe companies whose names are so poorly marketed that I don't remember them...
Have you met a Mac user? =)
Yes, and they are largely irrelevant, making up, IIRC, less than 3% of the desktop computing market. Mac users are what we armchair economists call a "niche market." They are not a sample which is representative of the larger population (as was all too clear to me when I went to the MacWorld Expo this year).
Or a gamer?
I am one, and have been since I was 3 years old, though admittedly have strayed somewhat from video gaming as I've matured through college (but have recently been finding a reborn interest in them; I am a diehard fan of the Metal Gear series, for example).
Games are fads. Here today, gone tomorrow. Who plays the original Street Fighter II anymore, except for the occasional nostalgia for us old-school gamers who grew up on Atari and NES?
Sure, games sell image -- "look how awesome DOOM3's graphics are!!!" But there are plenty of people like me who don't buy on image, but buy on *content*. And DOOM3, if the demo I played was any indication, proved to me that DOOM3 was lacking in content - it followed a formulaic "walk into a room, room goes dark, and some scary well-rendered monster comes out of nowhere and attacks you" gameplay flow.
The hype and image does work -- but only for a while. Abe Lincoln recognized this some 150 years ago in his quote "you can fool some people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." That said, he might've considered adding another part: "but you can fool new generations of people all of the time as they come into the world lacking the knowledge they need to realize you are fooling them"...
Haven't you seen holy wars over software?
Seen 'em, posted hundreds of thousands of words in them, left 'em years ago. And again, you're taking what is essentially a niche market
Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."
Why? What do OSS developers owe you? They already work for free -- you think they are *responsible* for listening to you?
No.
They will listen to you if they want to. You are not paying them. You are not their boss. You have no rights to their software except those which they, as the producers, have granted you.
You want responsibility? Start with yourself by not trying to take a mile when given an inch.
My biggest problem with fans is not that they're noisy, although they can be if you let dust build up in them and run them for too long (as is the case on my 14 month-old Toshiba laptop, in which the fan recently slowed down enough that the system shut down in preparation for impending overheating -- it's the only time that has ever happened).
My problem is that they are moving parts, and thus, more prone to failure than non-moving parts. I could run my old 486DX2/66 with a dead CPU fan at full-usage without damaging the CPU (at least not to the point where I noticed any problems while running Slackware on it) or overheating the system.
But I described my laptop's fan earlier. Also consider my desktop's Geforce4 Ti 4200 card. I replaced that sucker twice in 18 months (it literally happened both times in 9 month intervals!). Fortunately, PNY has a "lifetime warranty" on it, which I've been happy to make use of...
Yet, without a fan at all but some other no-moving-parts cooling system, PNY wouldn't have had to replace the whole card due to overheated chips.
What cooling system could that be? I have no idea; I'm not an expert on such things...:( But I'm all ears regardless, and I know I'm not alone...
President Bush didn't wield his veto pen for the first 4 years he was in office. Not once! No president since Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) has such a spending-bill veto record -- not even that socialist pinko FDR.
Blame Congress all you like (and they certainly deserve a LOT of blame for not doing a damn thing to shrink the size of govn't spending), but regardless, the bills must still pass the President's approval.
You think the poorest of the poor have AC and TVs? I'm sitting here with a broadbard internet connection from my house a couple miles from where I'm going to college in a place where AC would be very nice during a month or so in summer, and we don't have AC.
Well, certainly many (or even most) poor people don't have AC, but as your post notes, many of America's "poor" are college students (like myself - I too remember not having A/C in the dorm a few years ago) -- however, they are removed from labor force calculations...
TV, however, is close to universal, much like the telephone.
And regardless, 100 years ago, *nobody* had A/C or TV at all, not even the rich -- because it hadn't been invented yet.:-) Even John D. Rockefeller didn't have such things.
Did the free market eliminate poverty? (Of any type.) No? Try again.
In America, for practical purposes, yes it has.
Are there still people begging for money for food and eating out of dumpsters? Sure. But even those people -- those in the bottom 20%, the bottom 10%, the bottom 5% -- do not suffer the levels of starvation found elsewhere in the world, such as in Africa.
That isn't to say more can't or shouldn't be done to bring them out of the dumpsters and to a cheap, clean table (and indeed, even *I* am not fully-ready to dump all forms of welfare, particularly in urban areas where the culture of "helping others" is essentially a failure, even while the poor remain (and always will remain, to some degree) in society. I would prefer a restructuring of welfare though such that it became a negative income tax), but compared to even just 70 years ago during the Great Depression (when people really *were* dying of starvation), today's "poor" are not as poor as they are made out to be.
Has the free-market solved Africa's poverty? Not yet, for a variety of reasons economic, political, historical, and geographic. But in eastern Asia, it is presently doing so (again, read Jeffrey Sachs' article in this week's Time magazine on ending global poverty, as he mentions this trend).
The other economic alternatives of socialism and communism (separate systems, mind you: socialism = government owns/controls all property, whereas communism = the people, without a government, own/control all property collectively (rather than individually or via private collective agreement, as under capitalism)), have also failed to end poverty, communism in particular.
Though the number of *true* implementations of communism is relatively very small, it happened briefly here in America, long before the American Revolution (until communism was abandoned because people discovered it failed to provide for anybody's well-being because nobody had any incentive to do anything).
Communism was also implemented more-visibly and better-known, in China, during Chairman Mao's "Great Leap Forward", in which he created several rural cities which were to operate in a fashion free of government interference such that the property and food and so on was owned collectivey. It was a social experiment on Mao's part, and the result of the experiment was that the people in those cities began starving -- badly. Millions died as a result. In that regard, the experiment of communism was a clear failure.
Socialism has had more success than communism -- looking at Soviet Russia and the rest of pre-1978 China which was not communist although people were still very poor, most did not die of starvation (they died instead of the brutality of their leaders/planners). Socialism works even better when it's not pure socialism, i.e., when it is combined with significant elements of capitalism, such as is the case in the "market socialist" nations of western European nations, which have largely eliminated poverty as well.
Some 40 million to 50 million children in rich countries live in relative poverty, UNICEF estimates.
This is idiotic. Read this week's Time magazine, in which Jeffrey Sachs, an economist focused on ending extreme poverty, defines 3 types of poverty: * extreme poverty -- living on < $1/day * moderate poverty -- living on $1 to $2/day * relative poverty -- the people who are living below the average income level of a nation, which hence means that fully half of EVERY nation lives in "relative poverty"
Read the term "relative" and consider its meaning. Relative to whom, and to what? Relative to people 100 years ago, even the poorest of the poor in America live rather well, what with air conditioning and TVs around for comfort and entertainment. But compared to the present-day rich? No, of course not. They never have, and never will. There will ALWAYS remain people who are "relatively" poor and "relatively" rich.
So for UNICEF to claim that 40-50m children live in "relative poverty" in developed nations is, at best, a deliberate and self-interested misrepresentation of the realities of economic life.
The report acknowledged difficulty in setting a global standard for poverty because it varies from country to country. It said it based its findings on the number of children growing up in households with an income less than half the national median.
So the very definition of who lives in poverty is one which necessarily promotes equalization of income -- or, communism. After all, "less than half the national median" must always produce values of around 25% of the population, no matter what the actual incomes of the "poor" are. Hence, they can continue reporting, until all incomes are equivalent, that "25% of people live in poverty." It's a bullshit calculation on UNICEF's part.
Then there's this gem of contradiction:
"It cannot just be left to market forces alone," O'Brien said.
But only 2 sentences later, the article notes:
In the United States, child poverty "dropped significantly" in the 1990s, when many families benefited from an employment boom and higher wages for single mothers, but the problem continues there, the report said.
So let me get this straight -- we can't rely on the free market, and yet, child poverty dropped in the U.S. in the 1990s when we relied on the free market to provide better employment and higher wages to people? Ummm...
And to tie back into your question about "Reaganomics", which jelly-bean-loving President was it who initiated the economic reforms in the U.S. which set the stage for that economic boom which decreased the child poverty level noted in the article you pointed out? Hint: his son by the same name (but considerably different political stripes) is now a talking-head on MSNBC...
"There is a close correlation between growing up in poverty and the likelihood of educational underachievement, poor health, teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, criminal and anti-social behavior, low pay, unemployment, and long-term welfare dependence," the study found.
This much is true. But the problem does not automatically therefore require government intervention. Economic growth, along with the support of private charity, given a culture which supports it sufficiently, can work as well or better than government in supporting those in need.
The real problem is our culture -- we have a culture that for the last 10 years or so has been spending literally 99% of its paychecks, rather than saving with some 8% or so as has been historically the case. People have become individually fiscally less-responsible, and that is with regards to not only saving for retirement and their childrens' college (at perhaps the oh-so-horrible deprivation of not being able to have an 80" plasma TV), but giving to charity as they see fit.
President Bush himself in the last 5 years has added 10,000 pages to what currently sits at 60,000 pages of tax code. And this is somehow "tax simplification"?
The U.S. federal income tax started out with only 14 pages of code, total. My what a mess we've written our way into today.
I disagree w/ your assessment of a flat tax, but that's another story. Regarding your comment on the validity of a simple flat tax based on its complexity, consider this: there's a variety of ways you can write "hello world" in C++ -- you can simply write it as:
#include <iostream> using namespace std;
int main {
cout << "hello world" << endl;
return 0; }
Or you can create a class or two, then instantiate some objects of that class, then print "hello world" using one of the class functions you've written to do it.
One is more complex than the other, but that doesn't mean it works any better (in fact, it works worse, because it's more inefficient and takes longer to code). Complexity does not necessarily imply correctness.
Most of the tax breaks in our tax code go to businesses and the wealthy anyway; how fair is that to the poor? A flat tax taxes everybody equally.
Ultimately, the *real* solution to mitigating the problem of taxes' regressive nature against the poor is to cut taxes as much as possible and eliminate as many govn't services as possible, leaving more of the the money in the pockets of private individuals, not politicians... Ronald Reagan realized this (though he wasn't as successful as he or his followers had hoped in cutting govn't services), and his cut of the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%, along with the rapidly-developing financial and IT sectors, spurred the one of the longest and strongest economic booms in American history. Call it the "Revenge of the Laffer Curve."
(No, seriously, I do my taxes with a calculator, pencil and paper. It's not hard, it's just time-consuming. Also, FYI, last I heard TurboTax was requiring you to submit your personal financial information, tax info, etc. to their company. I don't know about you, but I see absolutely no reason why TurboTax needs to know my financial life, and thus refuse to touch TT.)
While a bullet on its own won't kill, it is the only truly necessary object involved in a shooting.
Well, even you note that somewhere along the way, somebody, somehow has to initiate the action which causes a spark inside the bullet which causes the rapid expansion of gas to propel the bullet through the air. The bullet still, even without a gun (say you're using a hammer and screwdriver or something), requires intervention on the part of a living being to cause it to accelerate.
Whether that intervention comes from a dog, a monkey, or a person, it still requires action on the part of a living being (at least, until we allow robots to decide (via some decision-making software, probably an AI) whether a gun should be fired, ala Terminator-style).
The bullet may be the object which penetrates skin of human B and does the damage, but human A (I'm assuming a human here) is still, above all, the entity which still causes that bullet's acceleration in the first place. The action is still caused by human A, no matter how you slice it.
We do not place liability on inanimate objects -- after all, your vaccuum cleaner, your car, your lightbulbs, your TV, and yes - bullets - do not operate themselves. Somebody, somehow, somewhere, must operate them. And thus, we place the liability on that person.
Hence, we do not say "the bullet killed human B", we say "human A killed human B with a bullet." The responsibility necessarily lies with human A -- and it is that person who ought to be dealt with accordingly by the law (whatever the case may be, be it life in prison or the death sentence for human A going on a shooting spree and killing humans B, C, and D, or be it an innocent ruling for human A's killing of human B in self-defense).
You can wordplay all day if you like,:-) but you will never get around the fact that a human or other animate being *must* be on the controlling end of that bullet (but whether another human is on the receiving end of the bullet is an entirely situation-dependent question. One might be shooting cans or squirrels or walnuts or deer or birds - not necessarily humans by any means).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. History bears out that our data is safer in private hands than public hands.
How many times has the U.S. government suppressed information from the public? It is doing so today, on a regular basis; witness the increasing tendency towards limiting the output of FOIA requests, for example.
The U.S. government is incompetent, and in fact, outright hostile -- particularly under the existing Bush administration, but this much is true regardless of who is President -- towards the free speech rights of the citizenry which our Constitution guarantees that the government may not infringe.
You're asking readers to put aside facts and reality for an ideological dream? This is stupid.
Feel free to join the reality-based Internet sometime; it's really quite nice here.
I find this laughable, particularly in light of your own admission that the UN "aren't perfect" (that's putting it mildly - the UN is fraught with incompetence and corruption, in case you missed the UN's oil-for-fraud scandal) yet I'll take the bait and ask: why?
Why would you support an organization that would (inevitably) seek to limit speech on the Internet?
The Internet, by all non-political (i.e. non-vested) accounts, has grown as fast as it has without government intervention. It has grown because it is an anarchy of information. Better we leave it that way than leave it to faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats thousands of miles away.
Indeed. Capital One allows a maximum of 15 char passwords, all alphanumeric.
One would think that a financial company, of all businesses, would be more concerned about password security than this, but no...
Just one more reason I intend to stop using their Visa as soon as I have an income and can get one from elsewhere that pays cash back.
This is the government that Americans trust with a significant portion of their retirement (Social Security), their railroad system (Amtrak), their postal system (USPS), education, law enforcement, and so on?
Bill Clinton lied (about sex w/ Monica), Bush Jr. lied (about WMDs in Iraq), the FBI lied in a secret court (to get wiretaps), the TSA lied (about protecting passenger privacy)... where does it end? (especially given the record of older agencies like the FBI and CIA lying to the public)
At least when Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers lie, their companies go bankrupt and they (at least in Ebbers case, most likely, though probably Ken Lay too eventually) go to prison.
But when government fails, what happens? Generally, nothing.
Mod me as troll/flamebait/overrated now for not promoting heavy doses of socialism (a necessary precondition for a large government to exist, so it can accomplish such abuses as this one)...
Do you have a link to "vcn2swf"? I googled it and turned up nothing.
Also, SWF is not Flash, and is not an entirely-open format although Macromedia makes the standard available to interested developers. So, AFAIK, my initial criticism still stands, although, I'm *far* from knowledgeable about Flash, SWF, etc. development...
Does anybody else see the irony in developing a demo of a Linux app using a format that cannot be developed natively on Linux?
Next thing you know, they'll be writing a VB interface to autopackage...
COBOL.
Welcome to 1959!
(emphasis mine)
His point about all languages being interpreted at some point doesn't make sense to me, even with the parenthetical note about processor architecture. What about CPU architecture these days makes a language interpreted? Would this include ASM then (which is really just a human-readable version of machine code)?
I thought compiled languages compile once to, you know, machine code prior to execution, whereas interpreted languages compile code on-the-fly for every program execution? Yet Thomas is suggesting that if I write "hello world" in C, the machine code compiled from that will in reality be interpreted by the CPU?
My CS profs didn't cover this!
"They that would give up essential file-liberty for temporary copyright owner security deserve neither."
True enough. Maybe that's why the post used median values instead? As from the blog:
(emphasis mine)
That's funny -- under American law, cops can't commit crimes either.
Yet, tell me what the Rodney King beating was if not criminal. Or the Kent State shootings by the National Guard (not police, but reserve military). Or the infinite examples of cops flipping on their lights to blow through red-light intersections, then flip the lights off immediately afterwards (abuse of police power).
Not to mention the cases of torture that have occurred involving anal rape via nightsticks, torture with Taser stun guns, and so forth.
Yeah dude, cops NEVER commit crimes... Bullshit.
And in which game does this occur?
The "problem" of person-on-person defecation in video games requires at least 3 entities in the scene for the scene to occur:
* Player 1
* Poop
* Player 2
In each of your examples, you were missing one of those elements. Again, you wrote:
Balls != poop. Thus, poop is the missing entity from this example.
Your second example was:
Here you have the poop. But you are missing the other 2 entities (the 2 players) from the scene. Moreover, the poop is not being placed on other players, but rather, it is placed in a urinal, and further, this scene is contained in a spraypaint picture -- *not* as a set of character animations within Counterstrike.
Thus, when you use those 2 examples as claims of people pooping on each other in video games, as you did in the following:
I can't help but think you are incapable of accurately relating objects in a given scene. God help us all if you ever take the witness stand in a jury trial, because if your understanding of object relationships and your reasoning ability were as bad as you've demonstrated here, the chain of case law would be FUBAR (were it not, thankfully, for lawyers and judges who are trained to sort out nonsensical thought such as that which you've described).
Actually, core inflation is closer to 3% or so.
Of course, inflation varies by market -- home price inflation has been higher than the overall inflation rate, for example, as was inflation on some grocery goods last year (e.g. milk).
Also, although you're right about most banks' savings accounts, if you shop around, it is possible to beat that current inflation rate using a mere savings account (although, this was not the case about 2 years ago). EmigrantDirect, for example, currently has a 3.25% APY (though note that only a few weeks ago, they were offering only a 3.00% APY, while inflation was at 3.26%).
But overall, you're right... Month-to-month variations show that savings accounts and MMAs, even the highest-returning ones, are not a smart way to beat inflation, assuming it's possible at all without major micromanagement. Using one's savings as investments (bonds, stocks, index funds, etc.) is a much better idea...
Pictures of men's balls are not pictures of shit. There is thus no poop contained in the picture, negating the possibility of person-on-person defecation.
Here you cite an example of poop in the picture, but there are no people in the picture -- again, without both entities in the picture, you cannot logically say that there is person-on-person defecation.
According to your own 2 cited Counterstrike examples, no, this does not occur.
Find an example of person-on-person shitting in a video game, then I'll agree. Until then, you haven't proven anything.
It's worth noting that the Serious Sam games were developed by a company located in Croatia -- a nation with considerably-lower costs of living than in the U.S.. They didn't need to charge as much as we do here because they don't need as much money to live on...
Hence, they sold a high-quality game at a price that is half that (or less) than most games you find today. Such is the benefit of international trade, really...
Why would that be irresponsible? The person built a device which sends/receives radio signals via the Bluetooth protocol.
Nothing new here for nearly a century, except that this uses Bluetooth and is not-so-cleverly designed to resemble a sniper rifle (a big fat one, at that).
How is it irresponsible to build something (*anything*), then post instructions about it?
As with all things -- guns, cars, bombs, computers, planes, trains, automobiles, books, rap music -- irresponsibility is in the hands of the user, not the creator.
You're doing a K-5 presentation. Think about that range for a moment.
:-)
In Kindergarten, children cannot even yet add 1+1 (at least at my public elementary school we could not). On the other hand, 5th graders who've paid some attention to their study can handle the 4 basic arithmetic operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide).
There is no way you can illustrate a loop to a Kindergarten child using any sort of the simple arithmetic that for() and while() loops use. But to the 5th grader, you could.
Moreover, there are issues of attention spans. The attention span of the Kindergartener is much much shorter than that of the 5th grader (which in turn is still nowhere near as large as a high school kid's).
Hence, to the Kindergartener, you'd need some other sort of presentation; one that is extremely-simple, like a game, or a 3D graphics program. Don't expect to show them code, because in K-1 or so, many students still cannot read -- certainly they can't read complex texts like code (in any language, even BASIC, and obviously not ASM!).
You may have more luck with the 3rd-5th graders though. They can read and perform basic arithmetic, so they could probably understand BASIC if you showed them an extremely short (< 10 lines) program. But you're still going to have to show them that "code can do cool things!" Do as much graphics as you can in as few lines of code as you can, and show them that.
The first "programming" I ever did was on Hypercard on the Mac way back in 6th grade, around 12 years ago. Consider the simplicity of Hypercard, and the fact that that too will confuse many 6th grade students when they first see it...
Otherwise, I sarcastically echo the other comments about "teach them Hindi" and "juice them up on coffee and yell 'code faster!' at them" and "don't shower, don't shave", etc.
Indeed they are quite different. But I am not confusing them. Re-read what I wrote which you quoted:
That is to say, if you don't value your work sufficiently to demand a price to cover the cost of your labors, then I will not voluntarily pay any non-zero price for your software.
Does it? Re-read my post, and note where I wrote the following:
Indeed. But the market for shoes extends far beyond the image-based shoes of the world; many people are content to wear a pair of cheap no-name dress shoes, tennis shoes, etc. so long as they are comfortable and don't look "bad" (however they may define "bad") -- those shoes needn't be the vastly overhyped Nikes at Foot Locker.
Some people wear the more-mundane Skechers, or Birkenstocks, or one of the various shoe companies whose names are so poorly marketed that I don't remember them...
Yes, and they are largely irrelevant, making up, IIRC, less than 3% of the desktop computing market. Mac users are what we armchair economists call a "niche market." They are not a sample which is representative of the larger population (as was all too clear to me when I went to the MacWorld Expo this year).
I am one, and have been since I was 3 years old, though admittedly have strayed somewhat from video gaming as I've matured through college (but have recently been finding a reborn interest in them; I am a diehard fan of the Metal Gear series, for example).
Games are fads. Here today, gone tomorrow. Who plays the original Street Fighter II anymore, except for the occasional nostalgia for us old-school gamers who grew up on Atari and NES?
Sure, games sell image -- "look how awesome DOOM3's graphics are!!!" But there are plenty of people like me who don't buy on image, but buy on *content*. And DOOM3, if the demo I played was any indication, proved to me that DOOM3 was lacking in content - it followed a formulaic "walk into a room, room goes dark, and some scary well-rendered monster comes out of nowhere and attacks you" gameplay flow.
The hype and image does work -- but only for a while. Abe Lincoln recognized this some 150 years ago in his quote "you can fool some people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." That said, he might've considered adding another part: "but you can fool new generations of people all of the time as they come into the world lacking the knowledge they need to realize you are fooling them"...
Seen 'em, posted hundreds of thousands of words in them, left 'em years ago. And again, you're taking what is essentially a niche market
Why? What do OSS developers owe you? They already work for free -- you think they are *responsible* for listening to you?
No.
They will listen to you if they want to. You are not paying them. You are not their boss. You have no rights to their software except those which they, as the producers, have granted you.
You want responsibility? Start with yourself by not trying to take a mile when given an inch.
My biggest problem with fans is not that they're noisy, although they can be if you let dust build up in them and run them for too long (as is the case on my 14 month-old Toshiba laptop, in which the fan recently slowed down enough that the system shut down in preparation for impending overheating -- it's the only time that has ever happened).
:( But I'm all ears regardless, and I know I'm not alone...
My problem is that they are moving parts, and thus, more prone to failure than non-moving parts. I could run my old 486DX2/66 with a dead CPU fan at full-usage without damaging the CPU (at least not to the point where I noticed any problems while running Slackware on it) or overheating the system.
But I described my laptop's fan earlier. Also consider my desktop's Geforce4 Ti 4200 card. I replaced that sucker twice in 18 months (it literally happened both times in 9 month intervals!). Fortunately, PNY has a "lifetime warranty" on it, which I've been happy to make use of...
Yet, without a fan at all but some other no-moving-parts cooling system, PNY wouldn't have had to replace the whole card due to overheated chips.
What cooling system could that be? I have no idea; I'm not an expert on such things...
The President had to sign those bills, didn't he?
President Bush didn't wield his veto pen for the first 4 years he was in office. Not once! No president since Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) has such a spending-bill veto record -- not even that socialist pinko FDR.
Blame Congress all you like (and they certainly deserve a LOT of blame for not doing a damn thing to shrink the size of govn't spending), but regardless, the bills must still pass the President's approval.
Well, certainly many (or even most) poor people don't have AC, but as your post notes, many of America's "poor" are college students (like myself - I too remember not having A/C in the dorm a few years ago) -- however, they are removed from labor force calculations...
:-) Even John D. Rockefeller didn't have such things.
TV, however, is close to universal, much like the telephone.
And regardless, 100 years ago, *nobody* had A/C or TV at all, not even the rich -- because it hadn't been invented yet.
In America, for practical purposes, yes it has.
Are there still people begging for money for food and eating out of dumpsters? Sure. But even those people -- those in the bottom 20%, the bottom 10%, the bottom 5% -- do not suffer the levels of starvation found elsewhere in the world, such as in Africa.
That isn't to say more can't or shouldn't be done to bring them out of the dumpsters and to a cheap, clean table (and indeed, even *I* am not fully-ready to dump all forms of welfare, particularly in urban areas where the culture of "helping others" is essentially a failure, even while the poor remain (and always will remain, to some degree) in society. I would prefer a restructuring of welfare though such that it became a negative income tax), but compared to even just 70 years ago during the Great Depression (when people really *were* dying of starvation), today's "poor" are not as poor as they are made out to be.
Has the free-market solved Africa's poverty? Not yet, for a variety of reasons economic, political, historical, and geographic. But in eastern Asia, it is presently doing so (again, read Jeffrey Sachs' article in this week's Time magazine on ending global poverty, as he mentions this trend).
The other economic alternatives of socialism and communism (separate systems, mind you: socialism = government owns/controls all property, whereas communism = the people, without a government, own/control all property collectively (rather than individually or via private collective agreement, as under capitalism)), have also failed to end poverty, communism in particular.
Though the number of *true* implementations of communism is relatively very small, it happened briefly here in America, long before the American Revolution (until communism was abandoned because people discovered it failed to provide for anybody's well-being because nobody had any incentive to do anything).
Communism was also implemented more-visibly and better-known, in China, during Chairman Mao's "Great Leap Forward", in which he created several rural cities which were to operate in a fashion free of government interference such that the property and food and so on was owned collectivey. It was a social experiment on Mao's part, and the result of the experiment was that the people in those cities began starving -- badly. Millions died as a result. In that regard, the experiment of communism was a clear failure.
Socialism has had more success than communism -- looking at Soviet Russia and the rest of pre-1978 China which was not communist although people were still very poor, most did not die of starvation (they died instead of the brutality of their leaders/planners). Socialism works even better when it's not pure socialism, i.e., when it is combined with significant elements of capitalism, such as is the case in the "market socialist" nations of western European nations, which have largely eliminated poverty as well.
The difference between European nations and
You might also reference the article in my sig...
Now to pick apart your article:
This is idiotic. Read this week's Time magazine, in which Jeffrey Sachs, an economist focused on ending extreme poverty, defines 3 types of poverty:
* extreme poverty -- living on < $1/day
* moderate poverty -- living on $1 to $2/day
* relative poverty -- the people who are living below the average income level of a nation, which hence means that fully half of EVERY nation lives in "relative poverty"
Read the term "relative" and consider its meaning. Relative to whom, and to what? Relative to people 100 years ago, even the poorest of the poor in America live rather well, what with air conditioning and TVs around for comfort and entertainment. But compared to the present-day rich? No, of course not. They never have, and never will. There will ALWAYS remain people who are "relatively" poor and "relatively" rich.
So for UNICEF to claim that 40-50m children live in "relative poverty" in developed nations is, at best, a deliberate and self-interested misrepresentation of the realities of economic life.
So the very definition of who lives in poverty is one which necessarily promotes equalization of income -- or, communism. After all, "less than half the national median" must always produce values of around 25% of the population, no matter what the actual incomes of the "poor" are. Hence, they can continue reporting, until all incomes are equivalent, that "25% of people live in poverty." It's a bullshit calculation on UNICEF's part.
Then there's this gem of contradiction:
But only 2 sentences later, the article notes:
So let me get this straight -- we can't rely on the free market, and yet, child poverty dropped in the U.S. in the 1990s when we relied on the free market to provide better employment and higher wages to people? Ummm...
And to tie back into your question about "Reaganomics", which jelly-bean-loving President was it who initiated the economic reforms in the U.S. which set the stage for that economic boom which decreased the child poverty level noted in the article you pointed out? Hint: his son by the same name (but considerably different political stripes) is now a talking-head on MSNBC...
This much is true. But the problem does not automatically therefore require government intervention. Economic growth, along with the support of private charity, given a culture which supports it sufficiently, can work as well or better than government in supporting those in need.
The real problem is our culture -- we have a culture that for the last 10 years or so has been spending literally 99% of its paychecks, rather than saving with some 8% or so as has been historically the case. People have become individually fiscally less-responsible, and that is with regards to not only saving for retirement and their childrens' college (at perhaps the oh-so-horrible deprivation of not being able to have an 80" plasma TV), but giving to charity as they see fit.
President Bush himself in the last 5 years has added 10,000 pages to what currently sits at 60,000 pages of tax code. And this is somehow "tax simplification"?
The U.S. federal income tax started out with only 14 pages of code, total. My what a mess we've written our way into today.
I disagree w/ your assessment of a flat tax, but that's another story. Regarding your comment on the validity of a simple flat tax based on its complexity, consider this: there's a variety of ways you can write "hello world" in C++ -- you can simply write it as:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main {
cout << "hello world" << endl;
return 0;
}
Or you can create a class or two, then instantiate some objects of that class, then print "hello world" using one of the class functions you've written to do it.
One is more complex than the other, but that doesn't mean it works any better (in fact, it works worse, because it's more inefficient and takes longer to code). Complexity does not necessarily imply correctness.
Most of the tax breaks in our tax code go to businesses and the wealthy anyway; how fair is that to the poor? A flat tax taxes everybody equally.
Ultimately, the *real* solution to mitigating the problem of taxes' regressive nature against the poor is to cut taxes as much as possible and eliminate as many govn't services as possible, leaving more of the the money in the pockets of private individuals, not politicians... Ronald Reagan realized this (though he wasn't as successful as he or his followers had hoped in cutting govn't services), and his cut of the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%, along with the rapidly-developing financial and IT sectors, spurred the one of the longest and strongest economic booms in American history. Call it the "Revenge of the Laffer Curve."
bc and OpenOffice should do the trick! :)
(No, seriously, I do my taxes with a calculator, pencil and paper. It's not hard, it's just time-consuming. Also, FYI, last I heard TurboTax was requiring you to submit your personal financial information, tax info, etc. to their company. I don't know about you, but I see absolutely no reason why TurboTax needs to know my financial life, and thus refuse to touch TT.)
Well, even you note that somewhere along the way, somebody, somehow has to initiate the action which causes a spark inside the bullet which causes the rapid expansion of gas to propel the bullet through the air. The bullet still, even without a gun (say you're using a hammer and screwdriver or something), requires intervention on the part of a living being to cause it to accelerate.
Whether that intervention comes from a dog, a monkey, or a person, it still requires action on the part of a living being (at least, until we allow robots to decide (via some decision-making software, probably an AI) whether a gun should be fired, ala Terminator-style).
The bullet may be the object which penetrates skin of human B and does the damage, but human A (I'm assuming a human here) is still, above all, the entity which still causes that bullet's acceleration in the first place. The action is still caused by human A, no matter how you slice it.
We do not place liability on inanimate objects -- after all, your vaccuum cleaner, your car, your lightbulbs, your TV, and yes - bullets - do not operate themselves. Somebody, somehow, somewhere, must operate them. And thus, we place the liability on that person.
Hence, we do not say "the bullet killed human B", we say "human A killed human B with a bullet." The responsibility necessarily lies with human A -- and it is that person who ought to be dealt with accordingly by the law (whatever the case may be, be it life in prison or the death sentence for human A going on a shooting spree and killing humans B, C, and D, or be it an innocent ruling for human A's killing of human B in self-defense).
You can wordplay all day if you like,