As a Libertarian I say once again the gov't is farking up progress.
911 service sounds like a great feature, and if I had it I'd never, ever, ever use a landline again. As it is I have skype and play around with SkypeOut and SkypeIn, and use my cell phone for most of my calls.
My question, and I have not been able to find an answer to it yet, is how good is this 911 supposed to be? I mean right now with my cell phone that GPS stuff doesn't work particularly well (good enough to get my municipality for sure, but not necessarily my street) so we settle for remembering the address you're at. What will they ask of VOIP providers?
Personally I think they should butt out and let the voip providers warn the consumer that this isn't a replacement for everything. What would the lady have done if she'd been using a softphone and it crashed? Sue Microsoft for crashing? If you need a phone keep a crappy cell phone around with a battery that will last for 5 minutes at least.
Seriously this is going to get really stupid, really fast.
I just picked up a powerbook G4 a week ago. I can't say that it had a whole lot to do with the iPod though. I've been wanting a laptop for a long time and finally got a side job that was willing to pay for it. I just got to the point that I hate dealing with Windows so much that I don't want to touch it.
I guess the biggest change for me has been a decline in how much I game. The less I game the less I'm booting into Win at home. And on the lappy I don't plan to do much gaming at all.
In any case I love the powerbook. The iLife suite is quite nice, and I appreciate the integration. Plus I'm a sucker for things that just are nice to look at. And the Mac is definitely that. And of course there's the cli, Fink, etc. etc.
I got to ride in one of these a few times and I loved it. The coolest part was just how darn quiet the car was. And it didn't hurt that the dashboard made you feel like you were on the bridge of the enterprise.
Also, the fun of the high torque electric engine made 0-60 pretty darn quick. Of course that took about half your battery life right there. =)
That said the car was wicked small and hardly practical for much beyond putting to a very close office and maybe the grocery store. (at least here in Phoenix where density isn't very high). I was really hoping they could get the density up so that range could get to the 200-250 mile range. That would have made it much more practical. Of course it still means long trips would have been broken up, but at least you could drive around on the freeway all day without worrying about your car running out of battery.
Sad to see it go... it was a fun car. But I doubt we've seen the end of electric car experiments.
An MBA isn't a *bad* idea, but personally I think that in economics you learn more of the why of general business principles than your mba counterparts.
I would say the biggest caveat is that economics programs really depend on the professors. Spending 1 or 2 years in an econ program with cruddy profs will be rather painful.
The biggest gain with an econ background (or even MBA or the other general business degress people are throwing around here) is that you can make decisions in your programmer box that will positively affect the business as a whole. Too many programmers are idealogues with no sense of why implementing feature X is a bad idea when it will cost Y but only increase sales by Y - $20,000. The ability to make suggestions about how development can better help the business as a whole will make you more valuable, and probably make for a better working environment.
Ahhh limited government. Smells fresher than morning after snow in the rocky mountains.
I agree completely that the pupose of government isn't to help me plan for retirement. And at the same time we can't just kick government out tomorrow because we'd be screwing over everyone who has already paid in. There's going to have to be a transition.
Further, if we could get rid of income tax and let people see how much they're actually paying in taxes, there might be some more awareness of the folly of Big Government.
In any case, it's a pleasure to read a non-socialist post on/.
It's a concept oriented view of economics without all the graphs and formula. But don't let the lack of marginal utility curves fool you, this book is immensely thorough in the breadth of material it covers. And after you've covered Basic Economics you can pickup Applied Economics and get a more macro-scale economic view.
Sowell is a brilliant writer who's work is clear, easy to read, and easy to understand. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
You're right that there will always be people who abuse other people/environment/etc. on their way to finding more cash.
The question isn't whether or not there will be a problem, it's how do you handle that problem?
The solution shouldn't be to hinder everyone from participating, essentially assuming everyone is likely to be a guilty party and until they prove they're intentions are good we won't let them play. Instead, we should rely on the judicial system to prosecute law-breakers and enforce strict punishments. If anyone is willfully causing damage to others they should be punished. But we shouldn't require every damn bolt to be stamped "US GOV Approved" before launching.
Punish the evil. But give people a chance to prove they're evil before you start limiting everyone's opportunities.
Can you please refer (links preferred if possible) to a study supporting the assertions you have made that "if you compare calories expended in farming and harvesting to calories obtained from the food, stone-age-tech farming is about 3 times as efficient as anything we do today."
You're taking this all far to seriously. Slashdot is not the kind of place you can have reasonable discussion about complex issues, especially when people are so emotionally tied to their views and the slightest misunderstanding detonates the bomb inside them, spewing irrationality everywhere.
Democrat Runs to the shore, takes $5 from everyone's wallets, then buys a line. Ties the line to a post, then swims out to save the man. Realizes he can't swim and drowns on the way out.
Republican (Neo) Takes out a loan by selling sand to the people on the shore, then buys a line and throws it to the man.
Libertarian Isn't walking on the beach because it was privately owned by the drowning man. Didn't anyone teach you to always swim with a buddy?
Socialist Gathers everyone on the shore together to hold arms to make a chain to save the man. When they get there they realize the man was in 3' of water and could have walked back himself. A $5 toll is charged for participating in saving the man. 3 people get eaten by sharks.
Communism The communist gets his SKS and shoots the man. This is a public swimming area afterall and we can't let western media see people drowning.
The thing is if you pull out a nationwide call list and poll about a thousand or so people, almost all the time your sample will be representative. Don't get me wrong you can still skew it, and if you don't ask the obvious questions (race, gender, age) you won't know if you're skewed or not.
The thing is that most polls aren't that far off. Especially in a political poll, you can get easily within 4% Margins by just asking what party affiliate you have.
The bigger modifier is the wording of the questions. If I ask, "If the election were today, who would you vote for?" I will get very different responses (most likely) that I would if I asked, "Given the events of the past week and new about these forged documents and the candidates' service records, who would youvote for if the election were today?"
Statistically speaking if you poll about 1200 people with a statistical representation of the populous (i.e. race balance that reflects the population, party affiliation ratios that match, etc.) you will get within 4% of perfectly accurate. The weird thing about statistics is that if you poll about 1000 or so people at any time you're mostly likely to get that equal balance whether you try to or not.
The real kicker about polls isn't so much who's asked, but what they're asked. Small variations in wording on the surveys result in very different answers by those being polled.
Polls are pretty accurate, but what's reported isn't always an accurate representation of what was queried.
I'm fully aware of the UN survey. I just don't give it any credit because I think it's bullcrap.
Granted quality of life is pretty damn subjective, and that's why you guys are never going to agree with me on this. But here's why I say that norway and other scandanavian countries are not sitting with a better QOL than America.
Taxes, health care, (granted not education. damn awful here. but I'm not entirely privy to education in scandanavia).
And don't give me bullshit about "universal access" to health care. Waiting 6 months for a major operation is not universal access. It's just a different kind of limited access, based on first-come first-served instead of based on price. Not to mention reducing incentives for the best doctors to stick around.
I don't trust any government to take 50% of my income and do something useful with it. Not here, not there, not anywhere.
Wow nice rabbit trail I've made here.
So, all knowing slashdot readers, why do you want to move to Norway?
If we were as humanitarian as you desire, what would that look like? From my perspective this country has been amazingly generous. I'm trying to understand what you see as the ideal.
Here, here. I just wanted to be a non-AC to agree with this post.
Take that you pinko-commie green Kool-aid drinking lefties!
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 1
"In the instance of fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the natives. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there the slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indians?"
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if I scratch the serial number up...
911 service sounds like a great feature, and if I had it I'd never, ever, ever use a landline again. As it is I have skype and play around with SkypeOut and SkypeIn, and use my cell phone for most of my calls.
My question, and I have not been able to find an answer to it yet, is how good is this 911 supposed to be? I mean right now with my cell phone that GPS stuff doesn't work particularly well (good enough to get my municipality for sure, but not necessarily my street) so we settle for remembering the address you're at. What will they ask of VOIP providers?
Personally I think they should butt out and let the voip providers warn the consumer that this isn't a replacement for everything. What would the lady have done if she'd been using a softphone and it crashed? Sue Microsoft for crashing? If you need a phone keep a crappy cell phone around with a battery that will last for 5 minutes at least.
Seriously this is going to get really stupid, really fast.
Sweet! Maybe I will finally have use for those little bubble icons.
So if I thought this was a good thing, does this make me a fundamentalist? =)
I guess the biggest change for me has been a decline in how much I game. The less I game the less I'm booting into Win at home. And on the lappy I don't plan to do much gaming at all.
In any case I love the powerbook. The iLife suite is quite nice, and I appreciate the integration. Plus I'm a sucker for things that just are nice to look at. And the Mac is definitely that. And of course there's the cli, Fink, etc. etc.
Also, the fun of the high torque electric engine made 0-60 pretty darn quick. Of course that took about half your battery life right there. =)
That said the car was wicked small and hardly practical for much beyond putting to a very close office and maybe the grocery store. (at least here in Phoenix where density isn't very high). I was really hoping they could get the density up so that range could get to the 200-250 mile range. That would have made it much more practical. Of course it still means long trips would have been broken up, but at least you could drive around on the freeway all day without worrying about your car running out of battery.
Sad to see it go... it was a fun car. But I doubt we've seen the end of electric car experiments.
I would say the biggest caveat is that economics programs really depend on the professors. Spending 1 or 2 years in an econ program with cruddy profs will be rather painful.
The biggest gain with an econ background (or even MBA or the other general business degress people are throwing around here) is that you can make decisions in your programmer box that will positively affect the business as a whole. Too many programmers are idealogues with no sense of why implementing feature X is a bad idea when it will cost Y but only increase sales by Y - $20,000. The ability to make suggestions about how development can better help the business as a whole will make you more valuable, and probably make for a better working environment.
I think I'll stick with my $40 per month for 4MB down / 512KB up (Cox).
I agree completely that the pupose of government isn't to help me plan for retirement. And at the same time we can't just kick government out tomorrow because we'd be screwing over everyone who has already paid in. There's going to have to be a transition.
Further, if we could get rid of income tax and let people see how much they're actually paying in taxes, there might be some more awareness of the folly of Big Government.
In any case, it's a pleasure to read a non-socialist post on /.
It's a concept oriented view of economics without all the graphs and formula. But don't let the lack of marginal utility curves fool you, this book is immensely thorough in the breadth of material it covers. And after you've covered Basic Economics you can pickup Applied Economics and get a more macro-scale economic view.
Sowell is a brilliant writer who's work is clear, easy to read, and easy to understand. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
The only "ban" (if you can call it that; it's just a refusal to pay) is a "ban" on federally funded stem cell research done by using new embryos.
This has been a minor clarification. Thank you for your patience.
The question isn't whether or not there will be a problem, it's how do you handle that problem?
The solution shouldn't be to hinder everyone from participating, essentially assuming everyone is likely to be a guilty party and until they prove they're intentions are good we won't let them play. Instead, we should rely on the judicial system to prosecute law-breakers and enforce strict punishments. If anyone is willfully causing damage to others they should be punished. But we shouldn't require every damn bolt to be stamped "US GOV Approved" before launching.
Punish the evil. But give people a chance to prove they're evil before you start limiting everyone's opportunities.
2001 Income/Tax Shares
Adjusted gross income share (percentage)
Adjusted income tax share (percentage)
Statistics: http://www.house.gov/jec/tax/09-26-03.pdf
That would be much appreciated.
You're taking this all far to seriously. Slashdot is not the kind of place you can have reasonable discussion about complex issues, especially when people are so emotionally tied to their views and the slightest misunderstanding detonates the bomb inside them, spewing irrationality everywhere.
Thus, we mock, and laugh, and mod down!
Democrat
Runs to the shore, takes $5 from everyone's wallets, then buys a line. Ties the line to a post, then swims out to save the man. Realizes he can't swim and drowns on the way out.
Republican (Neo)
Takes out a loan by selling sand to the people on the shore, then buys a line and throws it to the man.
Libertarian
Isn't walking on the beach because it was privately owned by the drowning man. Didn't anyone teach you to always swim with a buddy?
Socialist
Gathers everyone on the shore together to hold arms to make a chain to save the man. When they get there they realize the man was in 3' of water and could have walked back himself. A $5 toll is charged for participating in saving the man. 3 people get eaten by sharks.
Communism
The communist gets his SKS and shoots the man. This is a public swimming area afterall and we can't let western media see people drowning.
The thing is that most polls aren't that far off. Especially in a political poll, you can get easily within 4% Margins by just asking what party affiliate you have.
The bigger modifier is the wording of the questions. If I ask, "If the election were today, who would you vote for?" I will get very different responses (most likely) that I would if I asked, "Given the events of the past week and new about these forged documents and the candidates' service records, who would youvote for if the election were today?"
The real kicker about polls isn't so much who's asked, but what they're asked. Small variations in wording on the surveys result in very different answers by those being polled.
Polls are pretty accurate, but what's reported isn't always an accurate representation of what was queried.
Granted quality of life is pretty damn subjective, and that's why you guys are never going to agree with me on this. But here's why I say that norway and other scandanavian countries are not sitting with a better QOL than America.
Taxes, health care, (granted not education. damn awful here. but I'm not entirely privy to education in scandanavia).
And don't give me bullshit about "universal access" to health care. Waiting 6 months for a major operation is not universal access. It's just a different kind of limited access, based on first-come first-served instead of based on price. Not to mention reducing incentives for the best doctors to stick around.
I don't trust any government to take 50% of my income and do something useful with it. Not here, not there, not anywhere.
Wow nice rabbit trail I've made here.
So, all knowing slashdot readers, why do you want to move to Norway?
If we were as humanitarian as you desire, what would that look like? From my perspective this country has been amazingly generous. I'm trying to understand what you see as the ideal.
Slashdot: where all the misfits went to find a friend.
I've got $20 for every socialist who can prove to me that they've voted before if they promise to never vote again.
Take that you pinko-commie green Kool-aid drinking lefties!
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
-- Ghandi