I know this is going to be emotionally unpopular but do you really think responsible population management and driving smaller cars are bad things?
Forcing people to do these things would be unconstitutional but you don't have to force people to affect a change. Proper education of the issues, tax incentives, etc can do it just as easily.
The only hard thing would be doing it in a fair way so that it doesn't become only the rich can possibly have a large family or own a large car (aka the tax incentive has to be enough to make you think about it but not so much as to actually affect your ability to live your life).
If I remember the statistics correctly most of the U.S population growth is immigration so things certainly aren't in a bad place population wise. I do think it would be nice to protect our future from having a population explosion by helping people to think a little before having babies. Helping curb oil usage alone by encouraging people to think before buying a car would be worth it, global warming or no global warming.
While what you said is objectively true it's easier just to have some arbitrary cutoff.
People have a lot of emotional investment in babies and there's no good reason that one can't decide to abort within a reasonable time period and make it easier on everyone (outside of a medical condition endangering the life of the mother).
Just look at this pretty list of countries by health expenditure and note the percentage of GDP health care cost for countries that use universal health care.
For further shaming of the US system (and to the benefit of other systems) you can compare with the WHO ranking of health systems though that might be a less objective metric.
My state is a solid republican/red state. All of my state's electoral votes go to the majority winner. If a candidate wins just eleven other states my state doesn't even matter.
Explain to me why I should vote for anything that's not local.
"Our problem, why so many customers are out, this one damaged over 50 large transmission lines and 70 substations." - http://wvgazette.com/News/201207010139
While burying lines helps I can tell you that if millions are without power for a week it's more likely something to do with transmission towers (those big metal things with high voltage lines that you can't really bury) going splat than trees taking out lines.
They are apparently not that easy to fix. Though I imagine those could also be made to better handle heavy wind.
I form this opinion from living in a hurricane prone area.
I live in a hurricane prone area. In my experience with massive power outages like this it's typically high voltage transmission towers going down.
It's not really economical to bury those.
Fixing something like this is apparently not easy and takes time.
In the states you may be able to drink alcohol at any age (depending on state).
The federal law is 21 to purchase alcohol. State and other local laws cover consumption and possession with associated permission (parents) and location (private property) exemptions.
Or at least that's my understanding of the situation, IANAL, etc.
I'm not sure I agree with this soda ban but it's LOCAL GOVERNMENT so I can't really get upset about Nanny State or the government being too large or anything.
And people being dumb and getting fat IN MASS does harm other people. They drain money and time from society for healthcare costs which has all sorts of side effects (how long you wait for an appointment, availability of appointments, insurance prices, etc).
And it's a nudge, not a prevention. I'm actually kind of ok with this kind of law if it is done right. Do a study beforehand that shows that large servings impact how much people eat, try a law to help people not eat as much, and then do another study to see if the law is actually helping and if not let it expire.
Would you rather they did what they typically do when they don't like when people do something: tax it more?
The perfect world scenario would probably be to educate parents and children but then again in a perfect world people would all have perfect self-control.
Historically, as in over the past 100 years, there were periods when women were more encouraged to go into computer and periods where men were.
You have the obvious documented big names in early computing. I couldn't find any historical statistics before the late 60s though.
In the late 60s to 70s you get a rather wide range of (guesses?) that from 20% to 50% of IT workers were women. There were popular magazine articles that featured the female programmer (though they seem pretty sexist, it still shows that women in computing was probably a social norm).
In the 80s something like 40% of IT workers were women (I see various statistics on this, from 37% of comp sci degrees in 1984 to 42% of developers in 1987).
It's only in the last 20 years that there has been this huge drop. More women get bachelor's AND master's degrees than men, they're just going elsewhere and honestly that should be fine with society because that indicates to me that it's mostly a matter of personal choice.
More likely you'd see companies hiring and training gladiator teams and the companies with the best and most popular teams (read: most money) would go about decimating all competition.
You may be old enough to comprehend the risks in high school but still probably not old enough to properly act on them. Young people are stereotypically considered to think themselves invincible for a reason. And "brain damage" is a very vague and hard to appreciate threat, even to a grown adult.
Every benchmark I've seen so far has shown performance increases and power consumption decreases at around the same price. If your statement is true then that suggests a lot of review sites out there are spoofing their results and that's very very bad.
Sure, if you have a sandy bridge chip there isn't a whole lot of reason to upgrade because for most users anything made in the last 5 years or so can handle everything you'd want to throw at it.
Wouldn't it be female volcano gods that you would sacrifice the male virgins to?
Or I guess gay volcano gods. But still, a volcano god that wants males is statistically more likely to be female than gay. Says so right in my volcano god almanac.
I remember 10+ years ago/the CD era that PC games were more of a "standard" $50 at release (with console games being the more expensive $60 or even more in the cartridge period some years before that).
I honestly don't remember what they cost during the floppy years, I was too young and games magically appeared on 10 floppies. The best way to find release prices pre-internet might be historical copies of catalogs (sears, service merchandise, etc). I assume someone somewhere keeps those things.
I'm not really sure one can compare game programming to running a print shop.
And I mean that in the most literal sense possible. I wouldn't try realistically comparing game development to construction work or some form of hard labor either (or working for Foxconn).
In all seriousness 3.6 is pretty rock solid about memory leaks, excluding some extensions of course. I have around 15 extensions installed (not including plugins) and the only one that I've notice cause an active memory leak is firebug (and firebug is REALLY bad about it). Otherwise I can leave 3.6.x running with a hundred tabs pretty much forever without seeing any serious memory increases (I can't remember the last time I saw it go over 400MB).
Now javascript performance and UI responsiveness? The later versions are definitely far better than 3.6 about those things.
My copy of Firefox 3.6.x has comparable memory usage to Chrome when you actually add up what all the Chrome child processes use. And the only memory I've seen in a long time are add-on related (Firebug I'm looking at you).
And I honestly can't think of the last time Chrome or Firefox crashed on me. Maybe once in the last 6 months due to flash? Chrome handles Flash crashes slightly better but they still happen. For me, Chrome's real selling points are the better javascript engine and a smoother GUI (it definitely handles rogue processor hogging tabs better; webkit > gecko/XUL). For me, Chrome's detractors are that it's less customizable/extensible (its versions of adblock/firebug/noscript/etc are still inferior to their Firefox brethren).
but on the whole Open Source is devastating the software development and sell model.
I'm not sure I agree with that at all. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not.
My gut tells me that an Open Source-only developer will probably make (much) less money than his proprietary counterpart, but devastating the software development and sell model? If anything Open Source enables better products, larger markets, and more profits for proprietary corporations. Look at cell phones, android, pretty much any apple product, any DVR, your popular web browsers, almost all of the modern web technologies.
I would posit that a proprietary developer that spends some of his time working (related or not related to his normal work) on Free software is helping increase his pay by making his industry and/or company more successful in the long run.
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I know this is going to be emotionally unpopular but do you really think responsible population management and driving smaller cars are bad things?
Forcing people to do these things would be unconstitutional but you don't have to force people to affect a change.
Proper education of the issues, tax incentives, etc can do it just as easily.
The only hard thing would be doing it in a fair way so that it doesn't become only the rich can possibly have a large family or own a large car (aka the tax incentive has to be enough to make you think about it but not so much as to actually affect your ability to live your life).
If I remember the statistics correctly most of the U.S population growth is immigration so things certainly aren't in a bad place population wise.
I do think it would be nice to protect our future from having a population explosion by helping people to think a little before having babies.
Helping curb oil usage alone by encouraging people to think before buying a car would be worth it, global warming or no global warming.
It'd be really interesting to see what a Bethesda QA person says the game looks like BEFORE release...
While what you said is objectively true it's easier just to have some arbitrary cutoff.
People have a lot of emotional investment in babies and there's no good reason that one can't decide to abort within a reasonable time period and make it easier on everyone (outside of a medical condition endangering the life of the mother).
Just look at this pretty list of countries by health expenditure and note the percentage of GDP health care cost for countries that use universal health care.
For further shaming of the US system (and to the benefit of other systems) you can compare with the WHO ranking of health systems though that might be a less objective metric.
Wait, how does an M.D. or Ph. D get to default on a loan without penalty.
This is relevant to my interests.
My state is a solid republican/red state.
All of my state's electoral votes go to the majority winner.
If a candidate wins just eleven other states my state doesn't even matter.
Explain to me why I should vote for anything that's not local.
"Our problem, why so many customers are out, this one damaged over 50 large transmission lines and 70 substations." - http://wvgazette.com/News/201207010139
http://www.dailymail.com/News/201207020077 for pretty picture
While burying lines helps I can tell you that if millions are without power for a week it's more likely something to do with transmission towers (those big metal things with high voltage lines that you can't really bury) going splat than trees taking out lines.
They are apparently not that easy to fix. Though I imagine those could also be made to better handle heavy wind.
I form this opinion from living in a hurricane prone area.
I live in a hurricane prone area. In my experience with massive power outages like this it's typically high voltage transmission towers going down.
It's not really economical to bury those.
Fixing something like this is apparently not easy and takes time.
In the states you may be able to drink alcohol at any age (depending on state).
The federal law is 21 to purchase alcohol. State and other local laws cover consumption and possession with associated permission (parents) and location (private property) exemptions.
Or at least that's my understanding of the situation, IANAL, etc.
I'm not sure I agree with this soda ban but it's LOCAL GOVERNMENT so I can't really get upset about Nanny State or the government being too large or anything.
And people being dumb and getting fat IN MASS does harm other people. They drain money and time from society for healthcare costs which has all sorts of side effects (how long you wait for an appointment, availability of appointments, insurance prices, etc).
And it's a nudge, not a prevention. I'm actually kind of ok with this kind of law if it is done right. Do a study beforehand that shows that large servings impact how much people eat, try a law to help people not eat as much, and then do another study to see if the law is actually helping and if not let it expire.
Would you rather they did what they typically do when they don't like when people do something: tax it more?
The perfect world scenario would probably be to educate parents and children but then again in a perfect world people would all have perfect self-control.
Some of the above is bullshit.
Historically, as in over the past 100 years, there were periods when women were more encouraged to go into computer and periods where men were.
You have the obvious documented big names in early computing. I couldn't find any historical statistics before the late 60s though.
In the late 60s to 70s you get a rather wide range of (guesses?) that from 20% to 50% of IT workers were women.
There were popular magazine articles that featured the female programmer (though they seem pretty sexist, it still shows that women in computing was probably a social norm).
In the 80s something like 40% of IT workers were women (I see various statistics on this, from 37% of comp sci degrees in 1984 to 42% of developers in 1987).
It's only in the last 20 years that there has been this huge drop.
More women get bachelor's AND master's degrees than men, they're just going elsewhere and honestly that should be fine with society because that indicates to me that it's mostly a matter of personal choice.
More likely you'd see companies hiring and training gladiator teams and the companies with the best and most popular teams (read: most money) would go about decimating all competition.
And nothing changes.
Honestly, headers could be taken out of soccer and the sport wouldn't lose that much.
You may be old enough to comprehend the risks in high school but still probably not old enough to properly act on them.
Young people are stereotypically considered to think themselves invincible for a reason. And "brain damage" is a very vague and hard to appreciate threat, even to a grown adult.
Mainly though, it's traditionally thought that your brain doesn't fully develop the ability to manage risks until about the age of 25.
Source: http://www.hhs.gov/opa/familylife/tech_assistance/etraining/adolescent_brain/Development/prefrontal_cortex/
Of course brain development research is mostly correlation so who really knows.
Is this true or just trolling?
Every benchmark I've seen so far has shown performance increases and power consumption decreases at around the same price.
If your statement is true then that suggests a lot of review sites out there are spoofing their results and that's very very bad.
Sure, if you have a sandy bridge chip there isn't a whole lot of reason to upgrade because for most users anything made in the last 5 years or so can handle everything you'd want to throw at it.
Of course they wouldn't possibly lie to you about what you're helping them smuggle.
Wouldn't it be female volcano gods that you would sacrifice the male virgins to?
Or I guess gay volcano gods. But still, a volcano god that wants males is statistically more likely to be female than gay.
Says so right in my volcano god almanac.
Nah, we're quite safe. We all know that only female virgins are sacrificed.
I remember 10+ years ago/the CD era that PC games were more of a "standard" $50 at release (with console games being the more expensive $60 or even more in the cartridge period some years before that).
I honestly don't remember what they cost during the floppy years, I was too young and games magically appeared on 10 floppies.
The best way to find release prices pre-internet might be historical copies of catalogs (sears, service merchandise, etc).
I assume someone somewhere keeps those things.
I'm not really sure one can compare game programming to running a print shop.
And I mean that in the most literal sense possible.
I wouldn't try realistically comparing game development to construction work or some form of hard labor either (or working for Foxconn).
By the 90s you mean, "Hey, let's record stuff on VHS/CD/cassette tapes from TV/the rental store/CD/whatever and share them with out friends?"
Oh, I do believe one could find stuff on usenet/IRC in the 90s as well but I understand your point.
The 3.6.x branch still gets (security) updates.
In all seriousness 3.6 is pretty rock solid about memory leaks, excluding some extensions of course.
I have around 15 extensions installed (not including plugins) and the only one that I've notice cause an active memory leak is firebug (and firebug is REALLY bad about it).
Otherwise I can leave 3.6.x running with a hundred tabs pretty much forever without seeing any serious memory increases (I can't remember the last time I saw it go over 400MB).
Now javascript performance and UI responsiveness? The later versions are definitely far better than 3.6 about those things.
My copy of Firefox 3.6.x has comparable memory usage to Chrome when you actually add up what all the Chrome child processes use.
And the only memory I've seen in a long time are add-on related (Firebug I'm looking at you).
And I honestly can't think of the last time Chrome or Firefox crashed on me. Maybe once in the last 6 months due to flash?
Chrome handles Flash crashes slightly better but they still happen.
For me, Chrome's real selling points are the better javascript engine and a smoother GUI (it definitely handles rogue processor hogging tabs better; webkit > gecko/XUL).
For me, Chrome's detractors are that it's less customizable/extensible (its versions of adblock/firebug/noscript/etc are still inferior to their Firefox brethren).
Of course, that's only my anecdotal evidence.
but on the whole Open Source is devastating the software development and sell model.
I'm not sure I agree with that at all. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not.
My gut tells me that an Open Source-only developer will probably make (much) less money than his proprietary counterpart, but devastating the software development and sell model?
If anything Open Source enables better products, larger markets, and more profits for proprietary corporations.
Look at cell phones, android, pretty much any apple product, any DVR, your popular web browsers, almost all of the modern web technologies.
I would posit that a proprietary developer that spends some of his time working (related or not related to his normal work) on Free software is helping increase his pay by making his industry and/or company more successful in the long run.