The reason for the Senate and Electoral college is to protect against tyranny by a minority of states with a higher population against a majority of states with less population.
You're absolutely correct. Damn those tyrants in California for believing their vote should count the same as the vote of any other American. They need to learn that in America the rights don't belong to humans, and we're not all equal before the law. Rights belong to abstract constructs, like corporations or states or, if you're a republican, bank accounts.
To make this clear, what do you think about formalizing it? How about making the votes of people from highly populated states only count as 3/5 of the votes of real Americans? I'm sure you'll find good precedents if you crack open this history book you mention.
Most people will buy whatever they see that is attractively packaged on the front page of Amazon or on the shelves at Home Depot, Target, Best Buy, Office Max or the like.
Heck, even on Slashdot, where you'd expect people to be better informed and more concerned about privacy, lots of posters still have gmail addresses, Android phones (with location services enabled, no less) and use Google search and docs.
Man, I have seen idiocy before, but this takes the cake. The problem with Obama was that he was not vindictive at all - on the contrary, he went much too far in trying to mend fences with the Republicans. After the catastrophe of the Bush administration, what the country needed was a cleansing. The guilty parties (most of the Bush administration, and at least half of the Republicans in Congress) should have been investigated - and many of them should have ended up in jail for lying through their teeth, wasting trillions of dollars, dragging the country into two wars and costing the lives of thousands of Americans, putting loyalty above aptitude, doubling the deficit, and so many other sins. Republicans needed to be slapped hard - it would have saved America lots of pain and suffering since.
Instead, Obama chose not to prosecute any of the Republican malefactors. He was willing to let bygones be bygones, he tried to build consensus, to have a dialogue. He even adopted Republican policies - even Obamacare was based on Mitt Romney's weaker design, to make it palatable to Republicans.
And, after all this effort you call *him* vindictive? I mean, as an obvious Trump supporter, you probably have only a tenuous connection to reality, but really, are you so far gone you can't even understand the meaning of "truth" anymore?
The US can then open its cities to more open telco network builds
I'm not sure which US you're talking about - the one I live in, led by conservatives, passes laws forbidding cities to compete with telcos. When the FCC tries to stop states from enacting such regulation (though of course, when enacted by Republicans it's not called regulation - rolls eyes), conservative states - specifically North Carolina and Tennessee - sue and win the right to block municipal broadband via regulation (sorry, via "competition enhancing legislation").
I don't think listening to device makers is always the best way to go. Until a couple of years ago the Windows computer hardware field was stale, with hardly any innovation. Most makers were engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to pump out the cheapest machine they could, while a few others, like Alienware, were looking at niche areas, like machines optimized for gaming. Microsoft had to jump in with the Surface line, which gave device makers quite a kick in the pants. The new line was quite successful, and it revitalized the field.
George W. has been out of office for eight years. Time to let go and move on.
Yeah, very Republican answer that. Of course it's time to let it go - it was just a war based on lies, only hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted. Not a serious issue, like Pizzagate or Benghazi. And reviewing how we got in such a bad situation, shining a light on the mistakes or bad intentions of the actors, and maybe fixing some issues in the process isn't important to America. What's important is to make sure under no circumstances would the party be put in a bad light.
Why would it be a problem? It's not like Republicans have done anything good for America in the last twenty years or more, and they still got elected. There is no requirement for responsibility in the Republican party. Their strategy for elections is not to deliver solutions, to solve problems - or even to address them. They don't need to. They have instead perfected the art of divide et impera. They whip their voters in a frenzy over all kinds of crazy or made up bullshit, confuse all discussions, blame their own sins on the Democrats and lie, lie, lie and lie again.
See how Bush the second got reelected after some of the most catastrophic policy decisions in the last fifty years. Did Republican politicians care? I haven't heard any of them ask for a review or an independent commission to investigate how and why the whole Iraq debacle happened. I guess for Republicans independent investigators should only be used for important things, like spots on a dress, not for trivial stuff like a war. Did Republican voters care? No, they were distracted with "flip-flopping" and swift boats. I mean, for them it's more important that Kerry changed their mind once or twice than that Bush and his administration created a casus belli out of whole cloth, caused the whole Middle East crisis we're still going through now and cost the lives of thousands of Americans and who knows how many others in the process.
And if you abandon the electoral college then the ONLY states that matter will be the few most populous states.
Yes, it would mean that everybody's vote would be equal and the decision would be based on the will of the majority of the people. Who'd ever want THAT?
Pink Floyd's "Time" starts with a variety of time-related sounds; the tick-tock is still well known, even though modern clocks and watches are electronic, but I don't think many kids today ever heard a mechanical clock alarm sound.
You're assuming everybody subscribes to all the popular channels. At least in my case, that's not true; I'd be interested in at most a couple of them, so even if the total monthly cost is spread over only the top say 10 channels, I'd still save quite a bit.
Your post is just another case of rabid anti-Microsoftism leading to reverse logic. The standard you mention has been written by Google and their pet browser company, Mozilla, so of course it says the default preference should be to allow ads. That's deeply wrong and anti-consumer (but pro-ad companies).
There has been a lot of discussion on Slashdot and everywhere else about opt-in versus opt-out - and the consensus is that opt-in is the correct choice in pretty much all cases. By default, users should always be opted out of things that infringe their privacy. Exactly the same here: only if they specifically opt in should they be tracked. Well, IE does this correctly. Not knowing about do not track (or not being technically savvy enough to disable it) IS NOT AN OPT IN, and people who do want to be a product can disable the do-not-track flag.
Of course, Yahoo and Google profit from the vast number of users who don't know about the intricacies of the do not track standards and options. The fact remains that those users did not specifically opt in, and their privacy is abused. The standard is broken (I believe intentionally), so don't try to make it sound like it's somehow Microsoft's fault.
So please tell me how your going to fit any other language on a microcontroller with 1MB of flash memory. Nah, I'll be nice, how about 2MB of flash memory. Dont forget the roughly 512KB of RAM your going to have. And those specs are just guessing at what most industry will be using in 5-10 years. Most of us are still on ~256KB ROM.
The.Net micro framework matches your requirements pretty well: from the Wikipedia link: The.NET Micro Framework (NETMF) is an open source.NET platform for resource-constrained devices with at least 256 KBytes of flash and 64 KBytes of RAM. You can use Visual Studio and C# for pretty small devices.
they eventually end up charging each individual exactly what it will cost the insurance company to pay each individual's claims plus their profit margin. At that point, the insurance company is a useless middle man and everyone may as well be self-insured.
That doesn't make sense. The only way insurance companies can charge "exactly what it will cost to pay each individual's claims" is if they discover a magic ball that lets them see the future. They know that *on average* the chances for a member of a group to get in an accident are X, but have no way of telling which one of the members of the group will pull the short straw. Improved tracking allows them to define their populations better, and know the value of X more precisely, but even if they trace every move everyone makes, the companies have no way to know beforehand how much a particular individual will cost them.
If you add up the insurance premiums paid by the members of the defined population, you will indeed end up with a bigger amount that the actual costs of accidents etc. But an individual member only pays the premiums, even if he's the one involved in the accident. That's the whole point of insurance.
The problem is different: insurance companies can and do refuse service to people perceived to be high risk - or else, they charge them huge amounts. As they track the customers better, companies will eliminate all members of high risk populations from the pools, so those individuals will have no recourse if something happens to them (which, since they're high risk, very probably will).
This is good advice, but note that it still leaves your vulnerable to traffic analysis; if this level of security matters to you, consider doing regular updates of fixed size to the cloud even if your local data hasn't changed. For example, put your data in a TrueCrypt volume, and run a script to do minor changes on a regular basis and upload the whole file to the cloud. This will cost more bandwidth (obviously) but the attacker will only see your regular daily/weekly/whatever upload of a fixed length binary lump and won't be able to correlate the changes in the churn and size of your data to your other activities.
However I definitely have seen the syndrome of people not acknowledging software not created by Microsoft
Yup, seen that. And I also saw the reverse: people going to insane lengths to refuse to use a Microsoft tool or system, despite it obviously being the best fit for their particular problem. There are quite a few such specimens (of both categories) on Slashdot, and, while the logic contortions can be funny at times, I'm annoyed to see how often misunderstood ideological purity trumps technical arguments.
I wonder about the wisdom of advertising on a site dedicated to a community that has both a very negative view of ads and the technical knowhow to block them...
I don't get this kind of reaction. So what if the one out of the box does this? We'll just learn to jailbreak it (if needed) and install an adblocker
Because the one out of the box does this, and most people won't have the knowledge or time to change it. Google will probably not make it easy either and will add some cheap baubles for users of unmodified glasses, who won't know or care about their privacy. And this will impact you because Google can now argue that many or even most people use their services unmodified and therefore whatever way they destroy your privacy is acceptable under "community values" and should not be legally restricted.
Eh? How is RSA a Diffie-Hellman rip off? One is an asymmetric encryption algorithm, the other one a key-exchange protocol. While there are some things where you could use either of them, their capabitilies don't overlap completely. Or is it because they both work on groups of integers modulo n? But then they're both rip-offs of the table of multiplication!
Dude, the difference is SLAVERY. All large civilizations are built on the backs of slaves...
Not, they aren't; it may be PC to say so, but it's just not true. No large modern civilization was built mainly on slavery, because slavery is just not efficient and productive enough. It's risky and expensive to educate slaves, so you can't build serious industrial capacity on slavery, their mobility as a workforce is minimal, you get lots of extra expenses for security, not to mention motivation.
Even in America, where slavery was much more prevalent and lasted more than in most other world powers, the productivity of the industrialized North (based mostly on immigrant labor) was far ahead of the productivity of the slave-owning South. Look at the 1850 census, especially here http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850c-06.pdf (table CXCV, on page 11) to see how the gross manufacturing production of non-slaveholding states dwarfs the GP of slave-holding states. Though the difference isn't as great, the agricultural production (http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850c-05.pdf) AND productivity was also larger in the North.
Of course, this doesn't mean the slaves didn't contribute, or had it easy, but, if you really want America to have been build on somebody's back, that back would belong to the immigrant laborer.
I have to call you on that: you complain about misinformation but declare Hitler an atheist, while linking to a page that repeatedly states, specifically and clearly, that Hitler was NOT an atheist. If you decide to lie for Jesus, at least don't post links that immediately refute your affirmation - what did you think, nobody was going to check your source?. For Chrissake, there is a whole section in the Wikipedia article named "[Hitler's]Statements against atheism"! Here are some choice quotes from this section:
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith."
"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement"
"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
"For eight months we have been waging a heroic battle against the Communist threat to our Volk, the decomposition of our culture, the subversion of our art, and the poisoning of our public morality. We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion. "
It's beyond me how, after reading this, you can with a straight face declare Hitler an atheist, and avowed, no less.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for the Senate and Electoral college is to protect against tyranny by a minority of states with a higher population against a majority of states with less population.
You're absolutely correct. Damn those tyrants in California for believing their vote should count the same as the vote of any other American. They need to learn that in America the rights don't belong to humans, and we're not all equal before the law. Rights belong to abstract constructs, like corporations or states or, if you're a republican, bank accounts.
To make this clear, what do you think about formalizing it? How about making the votes of people from highly populated states only count as 3/5 of the votes of real Americans? I'm sure you'll find good precedents if you crack open this history book you mention.
Most people will buy whatever they see that is attractively packaged on the front page of Amazon or on the shelves at Home Depot, Target, Best Buy, Office Max or the like.
Heck, even on Slashdot, where you'd expect people to be better informed and more concerned about privacy, lots of posters still have gmail addresses, Android phones (with location services enabled, no less) and use Google search and docs.
Perfect description of Obama.
Man, I have seen idiocy before, but this takes the cake. The problem with Obama was that he was not vindictive at all - on the contrary, he went much too far in trying to mend fences with the Republicans. After the catastrophe of the Bush administration, what the country needed was a cleansing. The guilty parties (most of the Bush administration, and at least half of the Republicans in Congress) should have been investigated - and many of them should have ended up in jail for lying through their teeth, wasting trillions of dollars, dragging the country into two wars and costing the lives of thousands of Americans, putting loyalty above aptitude, doubling the deficit, and so many other sins. Republicans needed to be slapped hard - it would have saved America lots of pain and suffering since.
Instead, Obama chose not to prosecute any of the Republican malefactors. He was willing to let bygones be bygones, he tried to build consensus, to have a dialogue. He even adopted Republican policies - even Obamacare was based on Mitt Romney's weaker design, to make it palatable to Republicans.
And, after all this effort you call *him* vindictive? I mean, as an obvious Trump supporter, you probably have only a tenuous connection to reality, but really, are you so far gone you can't even understand the meaning of "truth" anymore?
The US can then open its cities to more open telco network builds
I'm not sure which US you're talking about - the one I live in, led by conservatives, passes laws forbidding cities to compete with telcos. When the FCC tries to stop states from enacting such regulation (though of course, when enacted by Republicans it's not called regulation - rolls eyes), conservative states - specifically North Carolina and Tennessee - sue and win the right to block municipal broadband via regulation (sorry, via "competition enhancing legislation").
the creator of Javascript
He could have put the company back on the right path
Somehow this doesn't sound right...
I don't think listening to device makers is always the best way to go. Until a couple of years ago the Windows computer hardware field was stale, with hardly any innovation. Most makers were engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to pump out the cheapest machine they could, while a few others, like Alienware, were looking at niche areas, like machines optimized for gaming. Microsoft had to jump in with the Surface line, which gave device makers quite a kick in the pants. The new line was quite successful, and it revitalized the field.
George W. has been out of office for eight years. Time to let go and move on.
Yeah, very Republican answer that. Of course it's time to let it go - it was just a war based on lies, only hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted. Not a serious issue, like Pizzagate or Benghazi. And reviewing how we got in such a bad situation, shining a light on the mistakes or bad intentions of the actors, and maybe fixing some issues in the process isn't important to America. What's important is to make sure under no circumstances would the party be put in a bad light.
That's a big problem for the Republicans.
Why would it be a problem? It's not like Republicans have done anything good for America in the last twenty years or more, and they still got elected. There is no requirement for responsibility in the Republican party. Their strategy for elections is not to deliver solutions, to solve problems - or even to address them. They don't need to. They have instead perfected the art of divide et impera. They whip their voters in a frenzy over all kinds of crazy or made up bullshit, confuse all discussions, blame their own sins on the Democrats and lie, lie, lie and lie again.
See how Bush the second got reelected after some of the most catastrophic policy decisions in the last fifty years. Did Republican politicians care? I haven't heard any of them ask for a review or an independent commission to investigate how and why the whole Iraq debacle happened. I guess for Republicans independent investigators should only be used for important things, like spots on a dress, not for trivial stuff like a war. Did Republican voters care? No, they were distracted with "flip-flopping" and swift boats. I mean, for them it's more important that Kerry changed their mind once or twice than that Bush and his administration created a casus belli out of whole cloth, caused the whole Middle East crisis we're still going through now and cost the lives of thousands of Americans and who knows how many others in the process.
But you know you'll end up with a liquid that's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea...
And if you abandon the electoral college then the ONLY states that matter will be the few most populous states.
Yes, it would mean that everybody's vote would be equal and the decision would be based on the will of the majority of the people. Who'd ever want THAT?
The Left will vote for what they consider the lesser of two evils
Of course, only "The Left" do that. Shouldn't you at least attempt to appear to challenge your own biases from time to time?
No, he's correct - history shows us the Right will consistently vote for the greater of two evils.
Pink Floyd's "Time" starts with a variety of time-related sounds; the tick-tock is still well known, even though modern clocks and watches are electronic, but I don't think many kids today ever heard a mechanical clock alarm sound.
You're assuming everybody subscribes to all the popular channels. At least in my case, that's not true; I'd be interested in at most a couple of them, so even if the total monthly cost is spread over only the top say 10 channels, I'd still save quite a bit.
Your post is just another case of rabid anti-Microsoftism leading to reverse logic. The standard you mention has been written by Google and their pet browser company, Mozilla, so of course it says the default preference should be to allow ads. That's deeply wrong and anti-consumer (but pro-ad companies).
There has been a lot of discussion on Slashdot and everywhere else about opt-in versus opt-out - and the consensus is that opt-in is the correct choice in pretty much all cases. By default, users should always be opted out of things that infringe their privacy. Exactly the same here: only if they specifically opt in should they be tracked. Well, IE does this correctly. Not knowing about do not track (or not being technically savvy enough to disable it) IS NOT AN OPT IN, and people who do want to be a product can disable the do-not-track flag.
Of course, Yahoo and Google profit from the vast number of users who don't know about the intricacies of the do not track standards and options. The fact remains that those users did not specifically opt in, and their privacy is abused. The standard is broken (I believe intentionally), so don't try to make it sound like it's somehow Microsoft's fault.
So please tell me how your going to fit any other language on a microcontroller with 1MB of flash memory. Nah, I'll be nice, how about 2MB of flash memory. Dont forget the roughly 512KB of RAM your going to have. And those specs are just guessing at what most industry will be using in 5-10 years. Most of us are still on ~256KB ROM.
The .Net micro framework matches your requirements pretty well: from the Wikipedia link: The .NET Micro Framework (NETMF) is an open source .NET platform for resource-constrained devices with at least 256 KBytes of flash and 64 KBytes of RAM. You can use Visual Studio and C# for pretty small devices.
they eventually end up charging each individual exactly what it will cost the insurance company to pay each individual's claims plus their profit margin. At that point, the insurance company is a useless middle man and everyone may as well be self-insured.
That doesn't make sense. The only way insurance companies can charge "exactly what it will cost to pay each individual's claims" is if they discover a magic ball that lets them see the future. They know that *on average* the chances for a member of a group to get in an accident are X, but have no way of telling which one of the members of the group will pull the short straw. Improved tracking allows them to define their populations better, and know the value of X more precisely, but even if they trace every move everyone makes, the companies have no way to know beforehand how much a particular individual will cost them.
If you add up the insurance premiums paid by the members of the defined population, you will indeed end up with a bigger amount that the actual costs of accidents etc. But an individual member only pays the premiums, even if he's the one involved in the accident. That's the whole point of insurance.
The problem is different: insurance companies can and do refuse service to people perceived to be high risk - or else, they charge them huge amounts. As they track the customers better, companies will eliminate all members of high risk populations from the pools, so those individuals will have no recourse if something happens to them (which, since they're high risk, very probably will).
This is good advice, but note that it still leaves your vulnerable to traffic analysis; if this level of security matters to you, consider doing regular updates of fixed size to the cloud even if your local data hasn't changed. For example, put your data in a TrueCrypt volume, and run a script to do minor changes on a regular basis and upload the whole file to the cloud. This will cost more bandwidth (obviously) but the attacker will only see your regular daily/weekly/whatever upload of a fixed length binary lump and won't be able to correlate the changes in the churn and size of your data to your other activities.
However I definitely have seen the syndrome of people not acknowledging software not created by Microsoft
Yup, seen that. And I also saw the reverse: people going to insane lengths to refuse to use a Microsoft tool or system, despite it obviously being the best fit for their particular problem. There are quite a few such specimens (of both categories) on Slashdot, and, while the logic contortions can be funny at times, I'm annoyed to see how often misunderstood ideological purity trumps technical arguments.
I wonder about the wisdom of advertising on a site dedicated to a community that has both a very negative view of ads and the technical knowhow to block them...
I don't get this kind of reaction. So what if the one out of the box does this? We'll just learn to jailbreak it (if needed) and install an adblocker
Because the one out of the box does this, and most people won't have the knowledge or time to change it. Google will probably not make it easy either and will add some cheap baubles for users of unmodified glasses, who won't know or care about their privacy. And this will impact you because Google can now argue that many or even most people use their services unmodified and therefore whatever way they destroy your privacy is acceptable under "community values" and should not be legally restricted.
RSA?? You mean that DIFFIE-HELLMAN RIP-OFF?
Eh? How is RSA a Diffie-Hellman rip off? One is an asymmetric encryption algorithm, the other one a key-exchange protocol. While there are some things where you could use either of them, their capabitilies don't overlap completely. Or is it because they both work on groups of integers modulo n? But then they're both rip-offs of the table of multiplication!
Dude, the difference is SLAVERY. All large civilizations are built on the backs of slaves...
Not, they aren't; it may be PC to say so, but it's just not true. No large modern civilization was built mainly on slavery, because slavery is just not efficient and productive enough. It's risky and expensive to educate slaves, so you can't build serious industrial capacity on slavery, their mobility as a workforce is minimal, you get lots of extra expenses for security, not to mention motivation.
Even in America, where slavery was much more prevalent and lasted more than in most other world powers, the productivity of the industrialized North (based mostly on immigrant labor) was far ahead of the productivity of the slave-owning South. Look at the 1850 census, especially here http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850c-06.pdf (table CXCV, on page 11) to see how the gross manufacturing production of non-slaveholding states dwarfs the GP of slave-holding states. Though the difference isn't as great, the agricultural production (http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850c-05.pdf) AND productivity was also larger in the North.
Of course, this doesn't mean the slaves didn't contribute, or had it easy, but, if you really want America to have been build on somebody's back, that back would belong to the immigrant laborer.
Hitler was an avowed atheist. He went to Christian functions as a child, which most Christian parents have their children do.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler
I have to call you on that: you complain about misinformation but declare Hitler an atheist, while linking to a page that repeatedly states, specifically and clearly, that Hitler was NOT an atheist. If you decide to lie for Jesus, at least don't post links that immediately refute your affirmation - what did you think, nobody was going to check your source?. For Chrissake, there is a whole section in the Wikipedia article named "[Hitler's]Statements against atheism"! Here are some choice quotes from this section:
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith."
"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement"
"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
"For eight months we have been waging a heroic battle against the Communist threat to our Volk, the decomposition of our culture, the subversion of our art, and the poisoning of our public morality. We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion. "
It's beyond me how, after reading this, you can with a straight face declare Hitler an atheist, and avowed, no less.
I vaguely remember a saying about those in glass houses
Hmmm... Those living in glass houses shouldn't try nailing their paintings to the walls?
Bah, math failure, 1982 was only 31 years ago. Still more than the 30 the GP asked for.