Citizens group officials on Wednesday abruptly shelved a proposal to overthrow the federal government after government officials displayed a modicum of sanity. The proposal, which had been posted online last week by irate individuals, sought a contractor who could establish a government of the people, founded upon a belief in certain inalienable rights. But in a statement late Wednesday, the group announced a reversal. 'The solicitation, which was posted without the awareness of group leadership, has been canceled,' said spokeswoman Anonymous Coward. 'While we continue to support a range of activities to help meet our freedom-promoting mission, this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.'
[Satire] [Please don't arrest and/or extraordinarily render me] [I'd post anonymously but I'm not sure if that's even possible in a post-9/11 world]
This is a classic tale of activist government run amok — and, too, of the peculiarly suicidal instincts that rich and educated societies exhibit when they reach maturity.
Suicidal. You know, there are those of us that would argue that having concern for non-human life is, while indeed an indication of societal maturity, not quite the same as being suicidal. Some might even say that exclusive preoccupation with human concerns is very small-minded and lacks any rational basis.
You must never have visited Scottsdale. Cruise through some aerial photography in Google Maps and you'll notice a continuous line of golf courses from South Scottsdale, through Scottsdale, and into North Scottsdale. And then you'll notice that immediately to the east (or really any direction away from the urban areas), there's nothing but desert as far as you can see.
Awesome games. If you like Syndicate Wars, you might like its predecessor Syndicate. None of that 3D stuff, but great gameplay. Also, I can't help but recommend Star Control 2 (or its open source remake: The Ur-Quan Masters), which is quite possibly my favorite video game of all time, but has little in common with the games you listed. And... no XCOM?
Due to the nature of population distribution, the issue you described is relevant only to a small minority of users. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas (as of 2010), despite urban land accounting for only 2.65% of the total US land area. In other words, your issue is your issue, and most people don't share your priorities.
While you have my sympathy, you can't expect wireless carriers to ignore the majority of their customer base and start chasing after the long tail.
Much like 4G never took off because not only did it require the deployment of millions of new antennas but also hundreds of millions of new phones.
Wait, what? 4G wasn't dead on arrival due to cost?
The moral of today's story is that new infrastructure is periodically rolled out, and the cost of such rollouts doesn't prevent them from occurring. Additionally, there are considerably fewer cell towers than there are cell phones.
And according to you, the correct response is for Comcast to simply keep selling bandwidth that they don't have? Perhaps they can cut their costs by maybe even decreasing their upstream capacity! Then we can all get 10Gbps* unlimited connections (*: 10Gbps for first 8 bits, 56K thereafter) without any price increase, and Comcast's stock can continue to trend upwards!
The ISPs know they can't provide every subscriber peak bandwidth at the same time. When subscribers used their "promised bandwidth" in 2 second bursts to quickly load a WWW page, the ISPs had no problem providing it. But now that subscribers are demanding their "promised bandwidth" in 2 hour "bursts", the playing field changes dramatically. ISPs, of course, can engineer for that load, but then "somebody" needs to pay for it.
Lame excuse. It's not "promised bandwidth", it's promised bandwidth. I don't see any bullshit quotation marks in any of their advertising, and they're quite explicit in explicitly promising unlimited usage. When you sell me something as "$x mbps, unlimited", that should mean what it says. I understand the rationale behind oversubscribing available bandwidth to make efficient use of resources, and I'm not opposed to it. However, it is an ISP's essential function to properly estimate per-customer usage so as to have sufficient upstream bandwidth to actually be able to deliver the advertised service. If per-customer usage increases, it is the ISP's job to either upgrade their infrastructure to provide sufficient capacity to meet their end of the bargain, or start shedding customers so that total usage does not exceed available upstream capacity. If either of these proposed courses of action results in an unsustainable business model, then some modification to service offering needs to be made. Perhaps increase pricing, perhaps stop offering unlimited service.
What should not happen is exactly what we see happening in the USA today. ISPs chugging along, still selling their bogus "unlimited" service (which necessarily must be limited since bandwidth is finite and the duration of a billing cycle is finite), yet refusing to invest in their infrastructure. They're bitching about how they need to double dip in order to be able to deliver your Netflix, yet streaming video seems to work fine in South Korea and the Netherlands without any of this bullshit. In reality, what has happened is that society has called their bluff. A decade ago, only a tiny proportion of customers would be "problematic" by actually trying to use the bandwidth they were promised, and these people could easily be swept under the rug. It was only a matter of time before everyone and their mother started passing bytes like they were hot potatoes. Now the tried-and-true tactic of cap-and-disconnect isn't looking as effective when the crosshairs envelopes a large swath of their customer base. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and all I can say is that I'm watching with glee.
There's plenty of small eateries that I frequent that don't have the technology to accept credit cards at all. You know, mom&pop restaurants where all they do is make delicious food. No marketing, no interior design, no advanced payment technology.
While it's not unreasonable that maybe one day they'd finally end up getting a magstrip-based card reader, by expecting them to buy into some overly complicated handheld wireless system (presumably with a central processing node, etc.), we'll pretty much guarantee that they stay cash (and check!) only for the foreseeable future.
I have never signed the back of any of my cards. I really don't understand why I should.
Let's say someone manages to get a hold of one of my cards. Do I really want them to have a template to forge my signature from? Wouldn't it be considerably easier for me to dispute charges if signatures that look nothing like my own are found on receipts?
You guys already live from the credit of the rest of the world.
Less than one third of the total US national debt is held by foreigners. When you restrict that to just publicly-held US national debt, it's still less than half.Citation.
Yes, we borrow from foreigners, but we borrow more from ourselves. Sorry about the injection of facts.
But that’s no longer the case. Thanks to demographic shifts, a surge in military spending and other factors, Texas has crossed the break-even line. In six of the past eight years, including the entire tenure of President Barack Obama, Texans got more out of the federal Treasury than they put in.
I know - I live in a country where until almost the end of my high-school career there was no separation of church and state, I went through a school system where evolution was little more than a swear word - and I saw the country that did the world's first heart transplant turn into one that had to import doctors from Cuba just to raise it's healthcare system to the level of "terrible".
Please explain to me how an understanding or lack thereof of evolution impacts my ability to program computers? To be a successful photographer? To be a lawyer? To be a nuclear engineer? Build a bridge? A writer? In fact, any profession other than 'scientist studying evolution'.
The origins of life are not critical knowledge to the vast majority of the population.
I don't think I'm being pedantic when I say that the theory of evolution (via natural selection) makes no claims whatsoever regarding the origins of life.
While I don't believe understanding the theory of evolution is a prerequisite for critical thinking (which should be self-evident, as there were plenty of critical thinkers that predate Darwin and his theory), it's clear that someone here has been slacking. Your statements only perpetuate the perceived correlation between denial of evolution and lack of critical thinking. Conflating evolution with theories regarding the origins of life doesn't make you look too smart.
Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are totally arbitrary. At least Kelvin and Rankine are only half as arbitrary, if that's your primary concern.
i'm just saying that most people use temperature scales to communicate ambient air temperatures, not water temperatures. That being said, if you're going to use an arbitrary scale, you might as well use one that's arbitrary but tied to ambient air temperatures, not water temperatures. People like 0-100 (or 0-10, or 0-1000) scales, as all the SI proponents can't stop reminding us. Fahrenheit stays in the 0-100 range for most of the people on the planet most of the time, whereas that range corresponds to -18 to 38 in Celsius. Are you now saying that powers of 10 aren't inherently awesome, and that -18 and 38 are intuitive values to people?
That doesn't sound accurate; Elvis is known by white people as one of the early pioneers of rockabilly, which is a fusion of country and rhythm-and-blues, and is a forerunner of modern rock.
FTFY.
I'm a whitey myself, but I'm well aware of the fact that Elvis really did rip off a rapidly growing genre that was almost exclusively propelled by black musicians. A large part of the reason you know Elvis as the pioneer (and never heard of the artists he was ripping off) is because he was white, good looking (?!), and appealed to the white recorded-music-buying demographic.
Perhaps. I've been at the sticks (or stick) of a tiny Cessna twice in my life. I'm in love with flying, but there's no way I could justify investing $10k-$15k in a license just to be stuck paying $100/hr for a plane after that. Last I checked, about a decade ago, you could find a used, terribly beat up (but still flying) Cessna for "as little as" $30k. I'd imagine that's only gotten worse since then. I've also been toying with the idea of getting a motorcycle (living in NJ, that really is fucking crazy), but I can't find any used bikes that aren't total overkill for a noob. It's next to impossible to find anything smaller than 250cc that's not a kids bike. Moseying around craigslist is hilarious; people describing 650cc bikes as "great first bike".
Sarcasm aside, I think you'll find that Rakim and Bassnectar (well-known, perhaps pivotal personalities in the rap and [American] dubstep genres, respectively) are more widely known today than virtually any of the people you listed. At least you're boasting about your ignorance of today's music (I use that term loosely, as Rakim's career peaked decades ago) while bragging about your familiarity with obscure folk heroes.
So folk music, which you yourself claim is not perpetuated by known composers or musicians, is not more forgotten than classical music, which is perpetuated by known composers and musicians? Logic, how does it work?
I play slavic folk music, myself. Stuff I inherited from my parents.
Ask the average American to name 3 famous composers of classical music. This being America, I'd imagine many will fail this simple task. But really, I'd imagine you'll get quite a few "Bach, Beethoven, Mozart" responses.
Ask the average American to name 3 famous folk musicians. From at least one century ago. Good luck getting a single response.
I'm not saying that there is no knowledge of the existence of folk music from long ago. I'm merely comparing folk music against classical music. It seems to me that one is considerably more forgotten than the other, generally speaking. I'm not talking about what music historians know, but general knowledge.
You don't need a boat to go fishing, and hunting is as [almost] as accessible today as it was decades ago.
I'm [only?] 31, and I love going outside. I'm an avid hiker/backpacker. I geocache. I like riding my bike (not one of those spandex-demanding road bikes, just a normal fucking bicycle). I ski. I don't own any [functioning] video game consoles. I play video games very rarely. I don't have TV, and I rarely download/stream video content to watch.
If people are abandoning hunting and fishing, it's because there's more fun to be had doing other things. I own guns. I went hunting once, when I lived in Maine. After spending most of the day either silently tiptoeing through the woods or sitting huddled up patiently for hours on end, I hiked home empty-handed. Forgive me if I think shooting holes in paper is a lot more enjoyable than that. Regarding fishing, well... I love the idea of sitting by the water and drinking beers for hours on end. I just don't understand why a fishing rod is required.
Your Fish&Wildlife folks should be glad they're approaching retirement age. It's gonna be a rough industry to be in.
But first show me a better method to prosecute those who would perpetuate suicide bombings than going up to people and asking, "Are you Taliban?" and arresting those who say Yes. Show us a way to be both secure and free, for there are those who desire to eat their cake and have it too.
Why? Will you show me a better method to protect people against lightning strikes? To prevent people from falling and hitting their heads in the bathtub? Because as far as I know, both of these issues pose a considerably more grave threat to the lives of Americans.
I'm saying that we don't particularly need to prosecute those who would perpetuate [sic] suicide bombings. Not only do they not pose any material threat to the safety of these United States, but they're already imposing the death sentence on themselves. We can't really do any better than that, unless you mean to suggest that we start prosecuting thought crime to arrest people not for breaking the law, but for wanting to break the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Citizens group officials on Wednesday abruptly shelved a proposal to overthrow the federal government after government officials displayed a modicum of sanity. The proposal, which had been posted online last week by irate individuals, sought a contractor who could establish a government of the people, founded upon a belief in certain inalienable rights. But in a statement late Wednesday, the group announced a reversal. 'The solicitation, which was posted without the awareness of group leadership, has been canceled,' said spokeswoman Anonymous Coward. 'While we continue to support a range of activities to help meet our freedom-promoting mission, this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.'
[Satire] [Please don't arrest and/or extraordinarily render me] [I'd post anonymously but I'm not sure if that's even possible in a post-9/11 world]
This is a classic tale of activist government run amok — and, too, of the peculiarly suicidal instincts that rich and educated societies exhibit when they reach maturity.
Suicidal. You know, there are those of us that would argue that having concern for non-human life is, while indeed an indication of societal maturity, not quite the same as being suicidal. Some might even say that exclusive preoccupation with human concerns is very small-minded and lacks any rational basis.
You must never have visited Scottsdale. Cruise through some aerial photography in Google Maps and you'll notice a continuous line of golf courses from South Scottsdale, through Scottsdale, and into North Scottsdale. And then you'll notice that immediately to the east (or really any direction away from the urban areas), there's nothing but desert as far as you can see.
Awesome games. If you like Syndicate Wars, you might like its predecessor Syndicate. None of that 3D stuff, but great gameplay. Also, I can't help but recommend Star Control 2 (or its open source remake: The Ur-Quan Masters), which is quite possibly my favorite video game of all time, but has little in common with the games you listed. And... no XCOM?
Due to the nature of population distribution, the issue you described is relevant only to a small minority of users. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas (as of 2010), despite urban land accounting for only 2.65% of the total US land area. In other words, your issue is your issue, and most people don't share your priorities.
While you have my sympathy, you can't expect wireless carriers to ignore the majority of their customer base and start chasing after the long tail.
Much like 4G never took off because not only did it require the deployment of millions of new antennas but also hundreds of millions of new phones.
Wait, what? 4G wasn't dead on arrival due to cost?
The moral of today's story is that new infrastructure is periodically rolled out, and the cost of such rollouts doesn't prevent them from occurring. Additionally, there are considerably fewer cell towers than there are cell phones.
And according to you, the correct response is for Comcast to simply keep selling bandwidth that they don't have? Perhaps they can cut their costs by maybe even decreasing their upstream capacity! Then we can all get 10Gbps* unlimited connections (*: 10Gbps for first 8 bits, 56K thereafter) without any price increase, and Comcast's stock can continue to trend upwards!
The ISPs know they can't provide every subscriber peak bandwidth at the same time. When subscribers used their "promised bandwidth" in 2 second bursts to quickly load a WWW page, the ISPs had no problem providing it. But now that subscribers are demanding their "promised bandwidth" in 2 hour "bursts", the playing field changes dramatically. ISPs, of course, can engineer for that load, but then "somebody" needs to pay for it.
Lame excuse. It's not "promised bandwidth", it's promised bandwidth. I don't see any bullshit quotation marks in any of their advertising, and they're quite explicit in explicitly promising unlimited usage. When you sell me something as "$x mbps, unlimited", that should mean what it says. I understand the rationale behind oversubscribing available bandwidth to make efficient use of resources, and I'm not opposed to it. However, it is an ISP's essential function to properly estimate per-customer usage so as to have sufficient upstream bandwidth to actually be able to deliver the advertised service. If per-customer usage increases, it is the ISP's job to either upgrade their infrastructure to provide sufficient capacity to meet their end of the bargain, or start shedding customers so that total usage does not exceed available upstream capacity. If either of these proposed courses of action results in an unsustainable business model, then some modification to service offering needs to be made. Perhaps increase pricing, perhaps stop offering unlimited service.
What should not happen is exactly what we see happening in the USA today. ISPs chugging along, still selling their bogus "unlimited" service (which necessarily must be limited since bandwidth is finite and the duration of a billing cycle is finite), yet refusing to invest in their infrastructure. They're bitching about how they need to double dip in order to be able to deliver your Netflix, yet streaming video seems to work fine in South Korea and the Netherlands without any of this bullshit. In reality, what has happened is that society has called their bluff. A decade ago, only a tiny proportion of customers would be "problematic" by actually trying to use the bandwidth they were promised, and these people could easily be swept under the rug. It was only a matter of time before everyone and their mother started passing bytes like they were hot potatoes. Now the tried-and-true tactic of cap-and-disconnect isn't looking as effective when the crosshairs envelopes a large swath of their customer base. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and all I can say is that I'm watching with glee.
There's plenty of small eateries that I frequent that don't have the technology to accept credit cards at all. You know, mom&pop restaurants where all they do is make delicious food. No marketing, no interior design, no advanced payment technology.
While it's not unreasonable that maybe one day they'd finally end up getting a magstrip-based card reader, by expecting them to buy into some overly complicated handheld wireless system (presumably with a central processing node, etc.), we'll pretty much guarantee that they stay cash (and check!) only for the foreseeable future.
I have never signed the back of any of my cards. I really don't understand why I should.
Let's say someone manages to get a hold of one of my cards. Do I really want them to have a template to forge my signature from? Wouldn't it be considerably easier for me to dispute charges if signatures that look nothing like my own are found on receipts?
You guys already live from the credit of the rest of the world.
Less than one third of the total US national debt is held by foreigners. When you restrict that to just publicly-held US national debt, it's still less than half.Citation.
Yes, we borrow from foreigners, but we borrow more from ourselves. Sorry about the injection of facts.
So, we call it gas, short for gasoline. Because that's what it is. Gasoline.
You call it petrol, short for petroleum. It's not petroleum, though. Pour some crude oil in your fuel tank and let me know how that works out for you.
But that’s no longer the case. Thanks to demographic shifts, a surge in military spending and other factors, Texas has crossed the break-even line. In six of the past eight years, including the entire tenure of President Barack Obama, Texans got more out of the federal Treasury than they put in.
That's an article from 2012. Thank you google.
I know - I live in a country where until almost the end of my high-school career there was no separation of church and state, I went through a school system where evolution was little more than a swear word - and I saw the country that did the world's first heart transplant turn into one that had to import doctors from Cuba just to raise it's healthcare system to the level of "terrible".
... Florida?
Please explain to me how an understanding or lack thereof of evolution impacts my ability to program computers? To be a successful photographer? To be a lawyer? To be a nuclear engineer? Build a bridge? A writer? In fact, any profession other than 'scientist studying evolution'.
The origins of life are not critical knowledge to the vast majority of the population.
I don't think I'm being pedantic when I say that the theory of evolution (via natural selection) makes no claims whatsoever regarding the origins of life.
While I don't believe understanding the theory of evolution is a prerequisite for critical thinking (which should be self-evident, as there were plenty of critical thinkers that predate Darwin and his theory), it's clear that someone here has been slacking. Your statements only perpetuate the perceived correlation between denial of evolution and lack of critical thinking. Conflating evolution with theories regarding the origins of life doesn't make you look too smart.
Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are totally arbitrary. At least Kelvin and Rankine are only half as arbitrary, if that's your primary concern.
i'm just saying that most people use temperature scales to communicate ambient air temperatures, not water temperatures. That being said, if you're going to use an arbitrary scale, you might as well use one that's arbitrary but tied to ambient air temperatures, not water temperatures. People like 0-100 (or 0-10, or 0-1000) scales, as all the SI proponents can't stop reminding us. Fahrenheit stays in the 0-100 range for most of the people on the planet most of the time, whereas that range corresponds to -18 to 38 in Celsius. Are you now saying that powers of 10 aren't inherently awesome, and that -18 and 38 are intuitive values to people?
That doesn't sound accurate; Elvis is known by white people as one of the early pioneers of rockabilly, which is a fusion of country and rhythm-and-blues, and is a forerunner of modern rock.
FTFY.
I'm a whitey myself, but I'm well aware of the fact that Elvis really did rip off a rapidly growing genre that was almost exclusively propelled by black musicians. A large part of the reason you know Elvis as the pioneer (and never heard of the artists he was ripping off) is because he was white, good looking (?!), and appealed to the white recorded-music-buying demographic.
Can't you round in US Customary units too? I don't get it.
Perhaps. I've been at the sticks (or stick) of a tiny Cessna twice in my life. I'm in love with flying, but there's no way I could justify investing $10k-$15k in a license just to be stuck paying $100/hr for a plane after that. Last I checked, about a decade ago, you could find a used, terribly beat up (but still flying) Cessna for "as little as" $30k. I'd imagine that's only gotten worse since then. I've also been toying with the idea of getting a motorcycle (living in NJ, that really is fucking crazy), but I can't find any used bikes that aren't total overkill for a noob. It's next to impossible to find anything smaller than 250cc that's not a kids bike. Moseying around craigslist is hilarious; people describing 650cc bikes as "great first bike".
Wow, impressive.
Sarcasm aside, I think you'll find that Rakim and Bassnectar (well-known, perhaps pivotal personalities in the rap and [American] dubstep genres, respectively) are more widely known today than virtually any of the people you listed. At least you're boasting about your ignorance of today's music (I use that term loosely, as Rakim's career peaked decades ago) while bragging about your familiarity with obscure folk heroes.
So folk music, which you yourself claim is not perpetuated by known composers or musicians, is not more forgotten than classical music, which is perpetuated by known composers and musicians? Logic, how does it work?
You seem to be confirming my point.
I play slavic folk music, myself. Stuff I inherited from my parents.
Ask the average American to name 3 famous composers of classical music. This being America, I'd imagine many will fail this simple task. But really, I'd imagine you'll get quite a few "Bach, Beethoven, Mozart" responses.
Ask the average American to name 3 famous folk musicians. From at least one century ago. Good luck getting a single response.
I'm not saying that there is no knowledge of the existence of folk music from long ago. I'm merely comparing folk music against classical music. It seems to me that one is considerably more forgotten than the other, generally speaking. I'm not talking about what music historians know, but general knowledge.
You don't need a boat to go fishing, and hunting is as [almost] as accessible today as it was decades ago.
I'm [only?] 31, and I love going outside. I'm an avid hiker/backpacker. I geocache. I like riding my bike (not one of those spandex-demanding road bikes, just a normal fucking bicycle). I ski. I don't own any [functioning] video game consoles. I play video games very rarely. I don't have TV, and I rarely download/stream video content to watch.
If people are abandoning hunting and fishing, it's because there's more fun to be had doing other things. I own guns. I went hunting once, when I lived in Maine. After spending most of the day either silently tiptoeing through the woods or sitting huddled up patiently for hours on end, I hiked home empty-handed. Forgive me if I think shooting holes in paper is a lot more enjoyable than that. Regarding fishing, well... I love the idea of sitting by the water and drinking beers for hours on end. I just don't understand why a fishing rod is required.
Your Fish&Wildlife folks should be glad they're approaching retirement age. It's gonna be a rough industry to be in.
But first show me a better method to prosecute those who would perpetuate suicide bombings than going up to people and asking, "Are you Taliban?" and arresting those who say Yes. Show us a way to be both secure and free, for there are those who desire to eat their cake and have it too.
Why? Will you show me a better method to protect people against lightning strikes? To prevent people from falling and hitting their heads in the bathtub? Because as far as I know, both of these issues pose a considerably more grave threat to the lives of Americans.
I'm saying that we don't particularly need to prosecute those who would perpetuate [sic] suicide bombings. Not only do they not pose any material threat to the safety of these United States, but they're already imposing the death sentence on themselves. We can't really do any better than that, unless you mean to suggest that we start prosecuting thought crime to arrest people not for breaking the law, but for wanting to break the law.
Well now I feel ignorant.
Thanks, though.