Um, what makes a language efficient and understandable for white males? I would buy your argument if it said "English speakers" - because absolutely most languages are designed for English speakers using English keywords, etc. But there are plenty of women and minorities that speak English natively, and I would argue that since these tests are all based in the US, most (not all) of the test takers (minorities and women included) probably spoke English as their native language.
So tell me exactly how we're supposed to use a different style for different demographics, and how is that not discrimination? Are you suggesting women are capable of procedural programming, but not object oriented programming? In that case, they're not allowed to work on the same projects. We'd have the object oriented server, written by white men, the procedural client, written by women, and then the functional data services, written by minorities?
This would seem to imply we should also require a different text book written in some kind of stereotypical dialect for the non-white-male in school.
This really comes down to opportunity and desire. Desire is an internal factor, and if they don't want to do it don't force them, as long as they are getting the opportunity (and yes, I realize when it comes to school there are all kinds of socioeconomic issues at play).
Is there a law against using the bus stops? (I don't live there, I truly don't know.)
I get that we're saying they're for public buses, but how are they "specifically" for public buses any more than the roads are only for public transport? Just because no other buses have used it before? It seems to me a bus stop is simply a short term stopping point for drop offs and pick ups that happens to be large enough for buses and sometimes have benches or shelters for people. Private traffic impacts the performance of all kinds of city services. It can slow down fire trucks, ambulances (not always city services, where I live they are privately owned and operated). Some cities deal with these by putting in emergency lanes that actually do have laws that enforce nobody else using them, but unless that law exists for the bus stop I don't see a problem here. Either add more bus stops or enlarge existing ones due to usage patterns, or pass a law (if it's not already passed) stating that the stops are only for publicly operated city buses and then fine accordingly.
I have several one time passwords printed on a protected paper that is stored in a place that is private, yet still something me or my family (in the case of my demise) would be guaranteed to come across when going through my estate (think safe deposit box). It says nothing about what it is, but I have a few key people that know about this paper and what it is. It's not going to be easy to access without my knowledge, and if I awake from a coma I would find it pretty quick (though granted I may not know what it is, that's what my friends are useful for), unless I was like BK and didn't even know where I lived or was from anymore. I hope someone would claim me, but in that situation nothing I could do would help and probably be of little concern anyway.
Another option would be to randomly mail yourself clues, since you never know when this may happen to you. Like a letter with an extra stamp which will get your attention due to the envelope having excess postage. In that stamp under a microscope there are subtle picture alterations with clues. Then it's just a game of connecting the dots!
But the flat tax with a prebate (essentially a variation of fairtax.org) *IS* progressive. With the plan OP proposes, everyone gets $1000/month. Enough to live (depending on area), but not enough for most to not want to do better. You're getting $1,000/month or $12,000/year. At the hypothetical 25% you would have to have an income of $48,000 before your NET tax rate was even 0%. 25% becomes the upper limit of the very wealthy. A $250,000 income pays $62,500 in taxes - $12,000 prebate = $50,500 OR 20%. A person earning $75 pays $18,750 - $12,000 prebate = $6,750 or 9%. Below $48,000 you're essentially getting tax credits / welfare / scholarship / whatever you want to consider it as. It's yours to just stay out of the way and/or invest in yourself.
I know there are problems with this approach too, but it seems like a fairly good approach to me, and it completely eliminates the holes that people constantly encounter now. For instance, I know people that have deliberately sought pay cuts because their last promotion put them over the income limit and they lost financial aid for children / medical / etc. Now, despite bettering themselves and being more productive, they have taken a net loss in income that they cannot sustain. I would also rather unemployment / welfare / etc not punish people for finding work. A prior neighbor did everything in her power to avoid getting hired. Her unemployment required her to look for work, but her unemployment paid better than any jobs in the area during the recession, and was more dependable (most jobs were part time / seasonal around that time as we'd just had a big manufacturing plant shut down and flood the market with workers). As a tax payer, I'd rather her take a job at BK and keep *half* her unemployment, and we'd both win. She'd take less of my tax money AND she'd have more money at the end of the day.
This also prevents the situation of it not being worth it to work. Yes, you already have a minimal lifestyle provided for nothing, and I know people that literally want or need nothing more. But even a minimum wage, part time job that plays, for fun math, $12,000/year, still gives you a $9,000 year gain over not having done anything (in the above scenario). So they now have $21,000/year. Yes, they are taking tax money, but if that's what we do as a society to provide for those that will never and can never do better than wiping tables at McDonalds so they have enough to hopefully not feel the need to mug us in a dark ally, I think everyone could walk away a winner. Automation will destroy the jobs at the bottom, and even if we provide education not everyone can do better, no matter what your second grade teacher said. We can't all be astronauts.
Games are the only thing keeping me from moving. And (as pointed out earlier), NetFlix, but that's less of a problem. Everything else on my linux install is fine. I have used OpenOffice and now Libre nearly exclusively since 2003 (I say nearly because work still requires Office and file formats still don't perfectly interchange, but there's nothing I need out of Office or any other windows apps that aren't available to me in Linux, with the exception of high end gaming support).
You're right, the cards are all the same. They're just a piece of plastic with a magnetic strip that has a bunch of software flags. Considering that the software is the entire way any of this works, yes, changing some flags makes it different.
Only because we would have given the benefit of the doubt to the cop. There would have been an "internal investigation" and he would have been free after his 2 week vacation. . . I mean "administrative leave". Zimmerman stood the trial by jury and was found not guilty. Whether you think he was innocent or not doesn't matter. A jury that saw way more facts than any of us armchair lawyers found him not guilty.
There are more questions in the mind of he public than there would have been with the average copy, but there WERE more questions in court than there would have been with the average cop as well, which was OP's point.
I really don't think technology is causing us to reproduce at such absurd levels. In fact, refusal to use technology, such as numerous forms of birth control, is likely a bigger cause of reproducing at such levels. Now if you're factoring in lowered mortality rates due to technology, that's valid. In the past, people had 10 kids because there was no readily available birth control, kids and large families were necessary to work farms, and mortality rates were higher. Heck, diarrhea used to be a serious life risk.
Now, there are so many ways to avoid pregnancy (yes, I understand they occasionally fail), the kids (mostly) aren't working the family farm, and nearly all of them survive to adulthood. But we still have people that want to have 18 kids so they can get a reality show. I am all for funding any type of birth control a person wants to use. I'd rather my taxes pay for your IUD or surgery (if you want it, not shooting for forced sterilization here), than the kid that you didn't want.
Shouldn't a warrant be required to even get the drives to attempt to decrypt them? Even TFS says he hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, so how do they even HAVE the drives? IANAL, but sounds like a pretty easy case for dismissal of evidence.
The Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 have almost the same resolution despite the screen size difference. The 4 has a higher density. The Nexus 4 also offers 2GB RAM vs 1GB for the Nexus 7, and 4 also includes wireless charging, a Barometer, and Ambient light sensor that are not included on the Nexus 7. 4 has also a Snapdraqon quad core 1.5Ghz processor, compared to the 7's Tegra 3 quad core 1.2 Ghz processor (I am not sure of direct benchmark comparison between these two chips). So, there are other differences, and the Nexus 4 is only $300 for 8Gb / $350 for 16Gb. Though with that said, the Nexus 7 is seen on sale periodically as low as $140 (refurbished).
I'm pro gun, but I do want to correct one common fact about that hammer and club statistic. Hammers and clubs kill far more people than *RIFLES*, including the oh so scary AR-15 and other "assault rifles". Interestingly enough, handguns are still the #1 murder weapon in the US, but they (mostly) don't have the scary high capacity 30 round magazines or selective fire features that everyone seems panicked about. I don't have a statistic off hand, but I believe a significant portion of these handgun murders are gang related. So lets ban gangs and crazy people, that makes more sense!
It's that they removed the old one. The new UI is good for a tablet. This would be the most powerful operating system by far if I could carry it around as a tablet and then dock it as a desktop PC with keyboard and mouse and go back to the traditional UI. Who wouldn't want that? But then they screwed that up by breaking the start menu and multitasking / non-maximized windows.
we might actually get the network back that we originally designed, the network that is full of possibilities, open protocols, and universal access to all of humanities collective knowledge and experience.
I'm guessing in Sweden, you also buy your own phones? In my opinion, the biggest problem with the US market is that phones are included with all your plans (at least from the 4 major carriers). I bought my last phone outright. It was the Google Dev Phone 1 (Unlocked TMobile G1). Did I get a discount for providing my own phone? Nope. Should I have, since I didn't have them pay for it for me? Absolutely.
TMobile I believe finally offers a bring-your-own-phone discounted rate, but they also have weaker coverage than AT&T or Verizon. Since carriers mostly provide the phones (even if you buy them outright from them), they control what's on them. They control whether data tethering is enabled (in my opinion, valid when we had unlimited smart phone data plans, but NOT when I have 200MB or 2GB fixed plans. . . then I get to use it how I want). They control what features are available. (My old Motorola Razr had IMAP e-mail disabled by AT&T, even though the phone was fully capable of it). AND they fill your phone with bloatware crap that you can't remove without voiding the warranty.
I wish they'd be split up. Carriers sell service. They have absolutely no control in the phones. THIS would be better for consumers. They can finance a phone to you, but it has a separate, line item charge for a fixed amount of time. It can be included in the same monthly bill, but it needs to be clear on the bill what is for your service and what is for your phone. My mom is now using my old G1, and my dad is using the same Razr he got 5 years ago, shouldn't they be getting discounts since they haven't taken a new phone from the carrier in 5 years?
Imagine if your ISP had deals like this. If you want a computer that can play all the cool games your friends are playing and share pictures with them, you HAVE to go to Windstream, even though they are terrible. Of course, Windstream may not have service in your area, but that's really not their problem is it? You can buy the computer that Windstream sells used on e-bay, or you can buy it directly from Windstream without a contract by paying full price, but it won't work on any other ISP unless you void the warranty and have some technical skills.
Because it's free. I use Google Voice as my primary number now. Texting would cost me $10/month extra. With Google Voice, I can text all day long for "free" on my included data plan. I get by on the 200MB plan and rarely pass 150MB, even with Trillian for Android on MSN, AOL, Facebook, and Google Talk, Google Voice, and e-mail connected 24/7. Cell phone cost on texting is RIDICULOUS! I have a 900Minute family plan with about 3000 roll over minutes banked, unlimited mobile to mobile, and 200MB data. . . . but they still charge me 10 cents per text message or $10/month, which is outrageous. There should at LEAST be some kind of conversion factor, like 10 text messages per minute, and deduct it from what I'm already paying for. THAT I would accept.
In the US you do. It was accepted on phone calls when cell phones first came out, because the caller does not pay extra to place the call as they do in some countries (if I understand correctly). This was more acceptable since I have the option to not answer a call. With text messages, however, I don't have the option to not get one. In the US, I don't know of any company that doesn't charge for incoming texts, but some do charge less for incoming texts than outgoing.
The science section was more of a reading test than science. I specifically remember one that pissed me off on the practice test, and this was in high school. There was some paragraph about the H2O is something because X, and a bunch of other cause effect patterns, so what is H2O2. Well, H2O2 is Hydrogen Peroxide, which was a choice, so I marked it. Based on all the reading, I was expected to conclude something that was wrong (I don't remember what the "wrong" answer was).
I do well in testing, but that BS just pisses me off. Reading was a poor subject for me, because I'm slow at it, so I never finished in the time provided. Making the science section just another reading test does nothing to test science knowledge. At best, it tests deductive reasoning.
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Um, what makes a language efficient and understandable for white males? I would buy your argument if it said "English speakers" - because absolutely most languages are designed for English speakers using English keywords, etc. But there are plenty of women and minorities that speak English natively, and I would argue that since these tests are all based in the US, most (not all) of the test takers (minorities and women included) probably spoke English as their native language.
So tell me exactly how we're supposed to use a different style for different demographics, and how is that not discrimination? Are you suggesting women are capable of procedural programming, but not object oriented programming? In that case, they're not allowed to work on the same projects. We'd have the object oriented server, written by white men, the procedural client, written by women, and then the functional data services, written by minorities?
This would seem to imply we should also require a different text book written in some kind of stereotypical dialect for the non-white-male in school.
This really comes down to opportunity and desire. Desire is an internal factor, and if they don't want to do it don't force them, as long as they are getting the opportunity (and yes, I realize when it comes to school there are all kinds of socioeconomic issues at play).
Is there a law against using the bus stops? (I don't live there, I truly don't know.)
I get that we're saying they're for public buses, but how are they "specifically" for public buses any more than the roads are only for public transport? Just because no other buses have used it before? It seems to me a bus stop is simply a short term stopping point for drop offs and pick ups that happens to be large enough for buses and sometimes have benches or shelters for people. Private traffic impacts the performance of all kinds of city services. It can slow down fire trucks, ambulances (not always city services, where I live they are privately owned and operated). Some cities deal with these by putting in emergency lanes that actually do have laws that enforce nobody else using them, but unless that law exists for the bus stop I don't see a problem here. Either add more bus stops or enlarge existing ones due to usage patterns, or pass a law (if it's not already passed) stating that the stops are only for publicly operated city buses and then fine accordingly.
I have several one time passwords printed on a protected paper that is stored in a place that is private, yet still something me or my family (in the case of my demise) would be guaranteed to come across when going through my estate (think safe deposit box). It says nothing about what it is, but I have a few key people that know about this paper and what it is. It's not going to be easy to access without my knowledge, and if I awake from a coma I would find it pretty quick (though granted I may not know what it is, that's what my friends are useful for), unless I was like BK and didn't even know where I lived or was from anymore. I hope someone would claim me, but in that situation nothing I could do would help and probably be of little concern anyway.
Another option would be to randomly mail yourself clues, since you never know when this may happen to you. Like a letter with an extra stamp which will get your attention due to the envelope having excess postage. In that stamp under a microscope there are subtle picture alterations with clues. Then it's just a game of connecting the dots!
But the flat tax with a prebate (essentially a variation of fairtax.org) *IS* progressive. With the plan OP proposes, everyone gets $1000/month. Enough to live (depending on area), but not enough for most to not want to do better. You're getting $1,000/month or $12,000/year. At the hypothetical 25% you would have to have an income of $48,000 before your NET tax rate was even 0%. 25% becomes the upper limit of the very wealthy. A $250,000 income pays $62,500 in taxes - $12,000 prebate = $50,500 OR 20%. A person earning $75 pays $18,750 - $12,000 prebate = $6,750 or 9%. Below $48,000 you're essentially getting tax credits / welfare / scholarship / whatever you want to consider it as. It's yours to just stay out of the way and/or invest in yourself.
I know there are problems with this approach too, but it seems like a fairly good approach to me, and it completely eliminates the holes that people constantly encounter now. For instance, I know people that have deliberately sought pay cuts because their last promotion put them over the income limit and they lost financial aid for children / medical / etc. Now, despite bettering themselves and being more productive, they have taken a net loss in income that they cannot sustain. I would also rather unemployment / welfare / etc not punish people for finding work. A prior neighbor did everything in her power to avoid getting hired. Her unemployment required her to look for work, but her unemployment paid better than any jobs in the area during the recession, and was more dependable (most jobs were part time / seasonal around that time as we'd just had a big manufacturing plant shut down and flood the market with workers). As a tax payer, I'd rather her take a job at BK and keep *half* her unemployment, and we'd both win. She'd take less of my tax money AND she'd have more money at the end of the day.
This also prevents the situation of it not being worth it to work. Yes, you already have a minimal lifestyle provided for nothing, and I know people that literally want or need nothing more. But even a minimum wage, part time job that plays, for fun math, $12,000/year, still gives you a $9,000 year gain over not having done anything (in the above scenario). So they now have $21,000/year. Yes, they are taking tax money, but if that's what we do as a society to provide for those that will never and can never do better than wiping tables at McDonalds so they have enough to hopefully not feel the need to mug us in a dark ally, I think everyone could walk away a winner. Automation will destroy the jobs at the bottom, and even if we provide education not everyone can do better, no matter what your second grade teacher said. We can't all be astronauts.
Then who brought the snakes back in? I'm tired of these mother f'in snakes in my mother f'in universe!
Games are the only thing keeping me from moving. And (as pointed out earlier), NetFlix, but that's less of a problem. Everything else on my linux install is fine. I have used OpenOffice and now Libre nearly exclusively since 2003 (I say nearly because work still requires Office and file formats still don't perfectly interchange, but there's nothing I need out of Office or any other windows apps that aren't available to me in Linux, with the exception of high end gaming support).
You're right, the cards are all the same. They're just a piece of plastic with a magnetic strip that has a bunch of software flags. Considering that the software is the entire way any of this works, yes, changing some flags makes it different.
Only because we would have given the benefit of the doubt to the cop. There would have been an "internal investigation" and he would have been free after his 2 week vacation. . . I mean "administrative leave". Zimmerman stood the trial by jury and was found not guilty. Whether you think he was innocent or not doesn't matter. A jury that saw way more facts than any of us armchair lawyers found him not guilty.
There are more questions in the mind of he public than there would have been with the average copy, but there WERE more questions in court than there would have been with the average cop as well, which was OP's point.
I really don't think technology is causing us to reproduce at such absurd levels. In fact, refusal to use technology, such as numerous forms of birth control, is likely a bigger cause of reproducing at such levels. Now if you're factoring in lowered mortality rates due to technology, that's valid. In the past, people had 10 kids because there was no readily available birth control, kids and large families were necessary to work farms, and mortality rates were higher. Heck, diarrhea used to be a serious life risk.
Now, there are so many ways to avoid pregnancy (yes, I understand they occasionally fail), the kids (mostly) aren't working the family farm, and nearly all of them survive to adulthood. But we still have people that want to have 18 kids so they can get a reality show. I am all for funding any type of birth control a person wants to use. I'd rather my taxes pay for your IUD or surgery (if you want it, not shooting for forced sterilization here), than the kid that you didn't want.
Ok, bad day for me. . . . that's pretty obvious now that you point it out. . .
Shouldn't a warrant be required to even get the drives to attempt to decrypt them? Even TFS says he hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, so how do they even HAVE the drives? IANAL, but sounds like a pretty easy case for dismissal of evidence.
The Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 have almost the same resolution despite the screen size difference. The 4 has a higher density. The Nexus 4 also offers 2GB RAM vs 1GB for the Nexus 7, and 4 also includes wireless charging, a Barometer, and Ambient light sensor that are not included on the Nexus 7. 4 has also a Snapdraqon quad core 1.5Ghz processor, compared to the 7's Tegra 3 quad core 1.2 Ghz processor (I am not sure of direct benchmark comparison between these two chips). So, there are other differences, and the Nexus 4 is only $300 for 8Gb / $350 for 16Gb. Though with that said, the Nexus 7 is seen on sale periodically as low as $140 (refurbished).
We've not even been to the deepest depths of the ocean. . . .
Actually, we have.
No mod points, but well put!
I'm pro gun, but I do want to correct one common fact about that hammer and club statistic. Hammers and clubs kill far more people than *RIFLES*, including the oh so scary AR-15 and other "assault rifles". Interestingly enough, handguns are still the #1 murder weapon in the US, but they (mostly) don't have the scary high capacity 30 round magazines or selective fire features that everyone seems panicked about. I don't have a statistic off hand, but I believe a significant portion of these handgun murders are gang related. So lets ban gangs and crazy people, that makes more sense!
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
It's that they removed the old one. The new UI is good for a tablet. This would be the most powerful operating system by far if I could carry it around as a tablet and then dock it as a desktop PC with keyboard and mouse and go back to the traditional UI. Who wouldn't want that? But then they screwed that up by breaking the start menu and multitasking / non-maximized windows.
we might actually get the network back that we originally designed, the network that is full of possibilities, open protocols, and universal access to all of humanities collective knowledge and experience.
And porn! The internet is for porn.
They're already working that exploit. Check out this power strip with wifi, bluetooth, ethernet, and 3G modem built in.
http://www.zdnet.com/power-pwn-this-darpa-funded-power-strip-will-hack-your-network-7000001331/
I use iGoogle ON my phone! It's my default home page in my Android browser. I don't want to maintain a separate "app".
My dog disagrees!
I'm guessing in Sweden, you also buy your own phones? In my opinion, the biggest problem with the US market is that phones are included with all your plans (at least from the 4 major carriers). I bought my last phone outright. It was the Google Dev Phone 1 (Unlocked TMobile G1). Did I get a discount for providing my own phone? Nope. Should I have, since I didn't have them pay for it for me? Absolutely.
TMobile I believe finally offers a bring-your-own-phone discounted rate, but they also have weaker coverage than AT&T or Verizon. Since carriers mostly provide the phones (even if you buy them outright from them), they control what's on them. They control whether data tethering is enabled (in my opinion, valid when we had unlimited smart phone data plans, but NOT when I have 200MB or 2GB fixed plans. . . then I get to use it how I want). They control what features are available. (My old Motorola Razr had IMAP e-mail disabled by AT&T, even though the phone was fully capable of it). AND they fill your phone with bloatware crap that you can't remove without voiding the warranty.
I wish they'd be split up. Carriers sell service. They have absolutely no control in the phones. THIS would be better for consumers. They can finance a phone to you, but it has a separate, line item charge for a fixed amount of time. It can be included in the same monthly bill, but it needs to be clear on the bill what is for your service and what is for your phone. My mom is now using my old G1, and my dad is using the same Razr he got 5 years ago, shouldn't they be getting discounts since they haven't taken a new phone from the carrier in 5 years?
Imagine if your ISP had deals like this. If you want a computer that can play all the cool games your friends are playing and share pictures with them, you HAVE to go to Windstream, even though they are terrible. Of course, Windstream may not have service in your area, but that's really not their problem is it? You can buy the computer that Windstream sells used on e-bay, or you can buy it directly from Windstream without a contract by paying full price, but it won't work on any other ISP unless you void the warranty and have some technical skills.
Because it's free. I use Google Voice as my primary number now. Texting would cost me $10/month extra. With Google Voice, I can text all day long for "free" on my included data plan. I get by on the 200MB plan and rarely pass 150MB, even with Trillian for Android on MSN, AOL, Facebook, and Google Talk, Google Voice, and e-mail connected 24/7. Cell phone cost on texting is RIDICULOUS! I have a 900Minute family plan with about 3000 roll over minutes banked, unlimited mobile to mobile, and 200MB data. . . . but they still charge me 10 cents per text message or $10/month, which is outrageous. There should at LEAST be some kind of conversion factor, like 10 text messages per minute, and deduct it from what I'm already paying for. THAT I would accept.
In the US you do. It was accepted on phone calls when cell phones first came out, because the caller does not pay extra to place the call as they do in some countries (if I understand correctly). This was more acceptable since I have the option to not answer a call. With text messages, however, I don't have the option to not get one. In the US, I don't know of any company that doesn't charge for incoming texts, but some do charge less for incoming texts than outgoing.
The science section was more of a reading test than science. I specifically remember one that pissed me off on the practice test, and this was in high school. There was some paragraph about the H2O is something because X, and a bunch of other cause effect patterns, so what is H2O2. Well, H2O2 is Hydrogen Peroxide, which was a choice, so I marked it. Based on all the reading, I was expected to conclude something that was wrong (I don't remember what the "wrong" answer was).
I do well in testing, but that BS just pisses me off. Reading was a poor subject for me, because I'm slow at it, so I never finished in the time provided. Making the science section just another reading test does nothing to test science knowledge. At best, it tests deductive reasoning.
This is why old people rock! At least that kind of old people!