One of my first jobs was getting on a old Model 16 that had been upgraded to a Model 6000 (a whopping 1mb of RAM), with two 20mb hard drives, and five or six dumb terminals. We actually used the Radio Shack multi-user accounting software and worked on multi-department accounting. Did the job nicely, actually, and it's how I got my training as a sysadmin/bookkeeper/manager. I inherited the beast when the company closed down and I monkeyed around with it for a while; got a Usenet and email feed going via UUCP. In the end the 8" floppy drive crapped out, so I gave it to a friend of mine who got things up and running again and had a private BBS running for a few years.
Tandy made some reasonably decent hardware. The 16/6000 was quite a machine: M68000 processor, Z80 coprocessor that could run CP/M, but under Xenix basically took care of all the I/O.
I also had an MC10 a CoCo, CoCo 2 and a CoCo 3 (though I never upgraded the latter to 512k). Played around a lot in OS/2 and wrote an accounting program in BASIC-09 (which was a dialect that felt like a mix of BASIC, Pascal and COBOL). But in the end the PC one the computer wars, I went out and bought a 486, switched between Linux and Windows 3.1, and my old equipment finally got chucked during my last move about eight years ago.
I remember in the early 1980s the owner of the Radio Shack in my town would let me monkey around with the Color Computers, the Model 4s and the Model 100s. My grandfather bought me my first computer; a lowly Radio Shack MC-10, when I was 10 years old and I remember reading the manual from front to back about three or four times. My earliest programming experience was on that little computer, with 4k of RAM onboard and a 16k expansion module.
Good memories, but that store went away a long time ago, replaced by an unremarkable stereo and cell phone dealer staffed by people who could barely read the sales brochures.
Canada is little different in regards to its lower house. The House of Commons is elected based on first-past-the-post voting. I believe there is some language in the Constitution about the minimum number of seats in the House of Commons some provinces may have, which does create a long-standing inequity between the growing provinces in Western Canada and the original members of Confederation.
That being said, "riding" (what you call districts) boundaries are set by an independent non-partisan body called Elections Canada. The provinces have similar non-partisan commissions. The intent is to de-politicize the actual mechanics of elections and prevent gerrymandering.
Again, as I said in my first paragraph, there are inequities in the size of ridings (districts) based upon how the House of Commons was originally divided up in 1867, but all in all, there are very few accusations of gerrymandering at the federal or provincial level. Obviously I believe that proportional representation of some sort is needed to truly create a fairly elected legislature that more accurately reflects the will of the electorate.
And then there is the matter of the Canadian Senate, which was modeled on the British House of Lords as it stood in the mid-19th century; along with Bagehot's notion of life peerages (which didn't come into being in Britain until the 20th century). That body is completely partisan in nature; as it is the Prime Minister who advises the Governor General on who to appoint. But in general the Canadian Senate does not defy the will of the lower house, so it is not as big an issue as it seems.
Not that political parties up here in Canada don't pull self-serving stunts, but how the US has allowed the architecture of its electoral system to become part of the partisan machine boggles the mind.
Be glad you weren't a Nexus 7 user, particularly the 2012 edition. Lollipop was an unmitigated catastrophe that Google has still only partially patched.
Morphological changes may have been minimal, but I suspect genomic changes have still occurred. Neutral drift alone would assure that these bacteria were not identical at the molecular level to their two billion year old ancestors.
You will forgive me for pointing out that many Evangelicals assert a literal interpretation of Genesis, and asserting some form of theistic evolution is at best wrong or at worst heretical.
How about someone else who can't receive the vaccine? The whole point of herd immunity is to protect those who, for health reasons, cannot receive a vaccination. Once that herd immunity is compromised, it's not just the children of evil, repugnant, vile, despicable, moronic parents who deny decades of medical science that can be harmed, but the children of decent rational parents whose children have immunological conditions that prevent them from being immunized.
But how else could he expect to get the Libertarian and various other anti-government voters to vote for him? You don't get to be a populist leader by saying things that piss off your core demographic.
If vaccinations aren't mandatory for a fairly large proportion of the population, herd immunity is compromised and then not only do you get the poor children of anti-vaccine types getting diseases like measles, but those children who cannot, for health reasons, receive the vaccine, are put at substantial risk.
I'm willing to compromise, however. Don't vaccinate your kids, and they are not allowed in a school, daycare, public park or anywhere else where they may come into contact with other children.
If you're wage covers less and less purchases, particularly NON-DISCRETIONARY purchases (like food, clothing and housing), then the effect is a pay cut. When wages do not roughly follow inflation, it is an effective reduction in wages.
I would posit that the version of God believed by Evangelicals as opposed to, say mainstream Catholics, Anglicans or Lutherans, are sufficiently different that even the Nicene Creed is sufficient to patch over the differences.
Evangelicals cannot even tolerate the idea of biological evolution on Earth, let alone the idea of it happening elsewhere. If you have to justify exobiology funding by playing into bizarre superstitions like "Satan created life on Europa", I say your religious worldview has some significant issues.
Fortunately, Evangelicals do not constitute the majority of Christians, so attacking their absurd beliefs hardly constitutes "bashing Christians".
He created three separate Elvish languages, a Dwarfish language (though with a much more limited vocabulary) and at least the morphology of the Adunaic language (the native language of the Numenoreans). His Middle Earth narrative writings (prose and poetry) largely existed to populate a world with people who spoke his invented languages.
Not to take anything away from George RR Martin and Michael Moorcock, but frankly the only other author I know of who put that much effort into the underlying world creation aspects of their stories was Frank Herbert, and even he only put a fraction of the effort into the world creation aspects that Tolkien did. For Tolkien, it quite literally was a lifetime pursuit, with the earliest version of the languages dating back to his teenage years, the earliest versions of the mythos to at least his service in World War I, and continuing on well into his twilight years.
I found it sucked right from the beginning. It was like Tolkien rewritten by a fourteen year old. I got halfway through the first book and gave up. Unreadable pap.
Tell them there's oil there. If you tell them there's life, they'll probably want to nuke the place lest the Evangelicals' version of Yahweh be brought into question by those evil scientists.
The Founding Fathers didn't write about speed limits or concrete sidewalks either. The Constitution's intent was to create a basic legal framework, not to envision every possible tax. Income taxes have long been ruled lawful, so pay them, hypocrite.
And you're a product of sociopathy and idiocy. You're selfish, wvul and vile, and yet clearly enjoy the benefits or the society you revile. Worse than a moron, you are a hypocrite.
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And what the fuck do you suggest the Federal government do to save mom and pops? Outlaw Walmart?
The economic realities have made mom and pops increasingly less viable since the 1980s. You'd be better off blaming China.
One of my first jobs was getting on a old Model 16 that had been upgraded to a Model 6000 (a whopping 1mb of RAM), with two 20mb hard drives, and five or six dumb terminals. We actually used the Radio Shack multi-user accounting software and worked on multi-department accounting. Did the job nicely, actually, and it's how I got my training as a sysadmin/bookkeeper/manager. I inherited the beast when the company closed down and I monkeyed around with it for a while; got a Usenet and email feed going via UUCP. In the end the 8" floppy drive crapped out, so I gave it to a friend of mine who got things up and running again and had a private BBS running for a few years.
Tandy made some reasonably decent hardware. The 16/6000 was quite a machine: M68000 processor, Z80 coprocessor that could run CP/M, but under Xenix basically took care of all the I/O.
I also had an MC10 a CoCo, CoCo 2 and a CoCo 3 (though I never upgraded the latter to 512k). Played around a lot in OS/2 and wrote an accounting program in BASIC-09 (which was a dialect that felt like a mix of BASIC, Pascal and COBOL). But in the end the PC one the computer wars, I went out and bought a 486, switched between Linux and Windows 3.1, and my old equipment finally got chucked during my last move about eight years ago.
The Radio Shack of my youth did die years ago.
I remember in the early 1980s the owner of the Radio Shack in my town would let me monkey around with the Color Computers, the Model 4s and the Model 100s. My grandfather bought me my first computer; a lowly Radio Shack MC-10, when I was 10 years old and I remember reading the manual from front to back about three or four times. My earliest programming experience was on that little computer, with 4k of RAM onboard and a 16k expansion module.
Good memories, but that store went away a long time ago, replaced by an unremarkable stereo and cell phone dealer staffed by people who could barely read the sales brochures.
Yeah, because mom and pops were flourishing in Bush's America.
Canada is little different in regards to its lower house. The House of Commons is elected based on first-past-the-post voting. I believe there is some language in the Constitution about the minimum number of seats in the House of Commons some provinces may have, which does create a long-standing inequity between the growing provinces in Western Canada and the original members of Confederation.
That being said, "riding" (what you call districts) boundaries are set by an independent non-partisan body called Elections Canada. The provinces have similar non-partisan commissions. The intent is to de-politicize the actual mechanics of elections and prevent gerrymandering.
Again, as I said in my first paragraph, there are inequities in the size of ridings (districts) based upon how the House of Commons was originally divided up in 1867, but all in all, there are very few accusations of gerrymandering at the federal or provincial level. Obviously I believe that proportional representation of some sort is needed to truly create a fairly elected legislature that more accurately reflects the will of the electorate.
And then there is the matter of the Canadian Senate, which was modeled on the British House of Lords as it stood in the mid-19th century; along with Bagehot's notion of life peerages (which didn't come into being in Britain until the 20th century). That body is completely partisan in nature; as it is the Prime Minister who advises the Governor General on who to appoint. But in general the Canadian Senate does not defy the will of the lower house, so it is not as big an issue as it seems.
Not that political parties up here in Canada don't pull self-serving stunts, but how the US has allowed the architecture of its electoral system to become part of the partisan machine boggles the mind.
Be glad you weren't a Nexus 7 user, particularly the 2012 edition. Lollipop was an unmitigated catastrophe that Google has still only partially patched.
Morphological changes may have been minimal, but I suspect genomic changes have still occurred. Neutral drift alone would assure that these bacteria were not identical at the molecular level to their two billion year old ancestors.
You will forgive me for pointing out that many Evangelicals assert a literal interpretation of Genesis, and asserting some form of theistic evolution is at best wrong or at worst heretical.
In other words, Paul, like Christie, is courting the Evangelical vote.
How about someone else who can't receive the vaccine? The whole point of herd immunity is to protect those who, for health reasons, cannot receive a vaccination. Once that herd immunity is compromised, it's not just the children of evil, repugnant, vile, despicable, moronic parents who deny decades of medical science that can be harmed, but the children of decent rational parents whose children have immunological conditions that prevent them from being immunized.
But how else could he expect to get the Libertarian and various other anti-government voters to vote for him? You don't get to be a populist leader by saying things that piss off your core demographic.
If vaccinations aren't mandatory for a fairly large proportion of the population, herd immunity is compromised and then not only do you get the poor children of anti-vaccine types getting diseases like measles, but those children who cannot, for health reasons, receive the vaccine, are put at substantial risk.
I'm willing to compromise, however. Don't vaccinate your kids, and they are not allowed in a school, daycare, public park or anywhere else where they may come into contact with other children.
If you're wage covers less and less purchases, particularly NON-DISCRETIONARY purchases (like food, clothing and housing), then the effect is a pay cut. When wages do not roughly follow inflation, it is an effective reduction in wages.
I would posit that the version of God believed by Evangelicals as opposed to, say mainstream Catholics, Anglicans or Lutherans, are sufficiently different that even the Nicene Creed is sufficient to patch over the differences.
Evangelicals cannot even tolerate the idea of biological evolution on Earth, let alone the idea of it happening elsewhere. If you have to justify exobiology funding by playing into bizarre superstitions like "Satan created life on Europa", I say your religious worldview has some significant issues.
Fortunately, Evangelicals do not constitute the majority of Christians, so attacking their absurd beliefs hardly constitutes "bashing Christians".
Private industry can barely get into orbit.
He created three separate Elvish languages, a Dwarfish language (though with a much more limited vocabulary) and at least the morphology of the Adunaic language (the native language of the Numenoreans). His Middle Earth narrative writings (prose and poetry) largely existed to populate a world with people who spoke his invented languages.
Not to take anything away from George RR Martin and Michael Moorcock, but frankly the only other author I know of who put that much effort into the underlying world creation aspects of their stories was Frank Herbert, and even he only put a fraction of the effort into the world creation aspects that Tolkien did. For Tolkien, it quite literally was a lifetime pursuit, with the earliest version of the languages dating back to his teenage years, the earliest versions of the mythos to at least his service in World War I, and continuing on well into his twilight years.
I found it sucked right from the beginning. It was like Tolkien rewritten by a fourteen year old. I got halfway through the first book and gave up. Unreadable pap.
Tell them there's oil there. If you tell them there's life, they'll probably want to nuke the place lest the Evangelicals' version of Yahweh be brought into question by those evil scientists.
Ah, another freeman on the land nutter.
The Founding Fathers didn't write about speed limits or concrete sidewalks either. The Constitution's intent was to create a basic legal framework, not to envision every possible tax. Income taxes have long been ruled lawful, so pay them, hypocrite.
My mistake. You're a fantasist.
Well, so long as you keep paying your taxes, you're free to your own private absurd religious beliefs.
You're a hypocrite because you enjoy the benefits of society, but insist that you owe it nothing.
And you're a product of sociopathy and idiocy. You're selfish, wvul and vile, and yet clearly enjoy the benefits or the society you revile. Worse than a moron, you are a hypocrite.
Well then you're fucked, because no society like that has ever existed, or ever will exist.