But having a popular vote doesn't mean you would have to have a national recount, simply changing the presidential election so that each state casts their electoral votes proportionally to the votes cast by their voters would be enough.
There are a lot of slightly different systems for assigning mandates to multiple winners, most European countries have systems like this for their parliamentary elections, I'm sure you could learn a thing or two there.:-)
The benefits of removing the winner takes all system is that suddenly every state would count, and some votes would be more likely to affect the outcome than today. If you are a republican in California, you're screwed. Your vote "counts", but since the majority of the state always votes democrat, your vote won't affect the outcome. Same if you are a democrat in Texas, and if you vote for a candidate other than a republican or a democrat, you're vote will never affect the outcome, since no "alternative" candidate ever has a chance of winning an entire state.
However, if the electoral votes are assigned proportionally, it would be possible for an alternative candidate to secure maybe one or two votes, which would show the people in other states that there actually is an alternative to the duopoly that you have.
As for recounts, you would still have the electoral votes assigned by state, and you could subdivide some big states into smaller voting districts if you wanted to, so if someone disputes the result, they would still have to dispute it per state or per district, which is no change compared to the current system. You would only get nationwide recounts if you made one big voting district of the entire nation, but there's no reason to do that.
You should come to northern Europe, atheists are clearly in the majority here, and the result is that religion is not a big deal. There's a really low tolerance for religious extremism, or mixing religion and politics, but I would say that it's probably a lot easier to be religious over here, than an atheist in the US.
I completely disagree, it's the people that have a broad experience of languages that will truly recognize the limitations of a given language or technology much much faster than the people who only know one language.
If I'm hiring someone for a position that involves a lot of programming in language X, I would *much* rather pick someone that has a broad experience and some of langauge X or close langauges, than someone who only has 15 years experience or whatever of langauge X. The first person has an interest in learning new things, the second person is completely uninterested, and therefore probably also not a very creative person. That's not someone I would want to hire for a creative job.
I agree that C# is a nicer language than Java, but Eclipse is so much better than Visual Studio out of the box. I use an add-on called ReSharper which makes VS almost as good as Eclipse, but not quite.
Also, knowing java allows you to learn C# very, very quickly, and then you can decide for yourself which language you like better.
For programming, that reasoning is bullshit. The more code you see and write, the more programming paradigms and syntaxes you have seen and used, the better programmer you will be.
Yes, some people are mean on the internet, that's what IP-bans are for. No, you can't talk them into being nice, you slap an IP-ban on them, delete their posts, and forget about them.
Argh, I had mod points yesterday, but not today when I needed them!:-(
Yes, views and trigger and stored procedures are good, and if you have a really competent DBA that is part of the development team and can take responsibility for those parts, and if you're ok with being tightly tied to a certain DB, then fine.
But most projects don't look like that, and most projects don't need that. If you want speed, then you want to hit the database as little as possible, and when you do, you want it to do as little as possible. Constraints, views, joins, transactions, all these things add up and you lose performance.
Scaling a database is really, really, hard. Shifting the work to the web server and adding a bunch more web servers is easy.
Actually, it's not that odd if you think about it.
Over here in Europe, the age of consent is about 14-15-16 depending on country. The purpose of age of consent is *NOT* to determine when people can start having sex, it's there to draw the line between rape and child molestation. Where I am, the law explicitly states that if the age difference is negligible, i.e. if a 16yo and a 14yo have consentual sex, then it's not a crime. Even if their parents were wailing about it, the police would politely tell them to fuck off and leave the kids alone.
However, the age for child pornography is universally 18 within Europe. The reason for this is that porn, once produced, won't disappear. It's to protect you from doing something stupid in your youth, or being exploited as a youth. It says that you have to be 18 to accept the job of porn actor, you have to be an adult before you're allowed to do that. The secondary reason is of course to make child porn illegal, but noone really cares if a pair of 17yo take pictures of themselves, that's not the focus.
So no, it doesn't make sense to set the child porn age limit at the same as that for consentual sex, they have completely different purposes. The first is there to make child molestation a worse crime than rape, not prohibit kids from having sex. The second is there to protect kids from making stupid job choices, not prohibit kids from filming themselves.
But the moral conservatives of course interpret the laws as they like, i.e. a ban on that horrible horrible sex thing that kids really really shouldn't be doing, and the letter of the law supports their view in many places, unfortunately.
I saw some statistics, but I can't remember where, that secularism increases with about 10% per generation in the US right now. It kinda makes sense, you're a few generations behind us in Europe, and we're still becoming more and more secular.
You have to remember that your religious right is a very, very vocal minority. The overwhelming amount of people do not belong to that group, and slowly they start caring less and less about religion, and caring less and less about passing it on to their children. Remember also that faith is the first to disappear, but traditions last the longest which would give the appearance of a higher degree of religiosity than what it actually is.
When I was in school as a kid, we always celebrated the winter holiday and the summer holiday by going to the local church. It was a mixed service of teachers wishing us well over the holidays, and a priest delivering some christian message. I've listened to the christmas gospel at the start of every winter holiday while in elementary school. I've sung psalms with all my classmates before every summer holiday. About half of my classmates went to a christian confirmation camp at age 14. I have several friends who got married in a church, by a priest. I've been to several funerals in churches, singing psalms, with a priest.
But I'm not christian. My classmates from school aren't christian. My parents aren't. Their parent's aren't. My married friends aren't. My dead and buried old relatives were kinda. It's just a lot of people going through the motions and traditions, without having the faith, and I think you have a lot of people like that in the US as well, but it's hard to see without actually pressing people about their faith.
I'd pick the philosophy teacher in a class on the philosophy of science. I didn't study that until university though, which is a shame, it and the scientific method really should be taught a lot earlier in schools.
Relax, the entire world is becoming more and more secular if you look at the statistics.
In fact, the outbreak of fanatic islamic terrorism has a secularizing effect on the moslem world too, because most regular moslems think the fanatics are fucking nuts and distance themselves from them. This splinters islam in the same way that the reformation once started splintering christianity.
The more choice of religion people have, the less religious they will be, since it's obvious that if a bunch of different religious groups all claim to the the One True Faith, none of them are.
The louder the various fanatics scream, the less people will actually listen to them, so in the end, this whole ID thing will only make the US more secular.
You're missing the point, ID is not science and shouldn't be taught in a science class. It's perfect for a class on religion or christianity, but don't even try to present it as some sort of equally plausible alternative to evolution.
When I was a kid in school I had classes on all the major religions, and their creation myths, including christianity. I've read the old testament in literature classes. I've had physics classes that taught about the Big Bang. And I've had biology classes that taught evolution.
Noone is saying that we shouldn't teach everything, but each thing has a place, and biology classes is not the place for ID.
Whenever I see or read about religious fanatics of whatever creed do their things to try to stop science, I just watch this video from Discovery Channel:
It reminds me that the world is filled with people who love the world just like it is, and who are curious about how it all works, and who wants to do real science.
The creationists and other science-destroying idiots can't win against that, it's like trying to stop children from being curious.
So relax. The ID agenda is just religions resisting change in a world that is slowly but surely becoming more secular. Real science will win in the end, it always does.
There is such a list in Sweden, and some of the big ISPs use it. There was quite an uproar when someone tried to put The Pirate Bay on it, claiming they had torrents of child porn, and it never got on the list. Almost everyone agrees that the list is useless, but it's still there.:-/
So it's not a question of whether or not someone will try to use such a list for their own goals, but how soon that will happen.
Recruiting the wrong person for a job is very, very costly, you'll end up paying a few months of salary before noticing the mistake, and then you have to re-do the entire hiring process again, which also costs money.
On that scale, five bucks for a phonecall is totally worth the money.
However, it's a bit weak on the side where the user can't control memory management in a good way. What the? You are not supposed to control the memory management, that's the job of your virtual machine. This has a number of advantages, foremost is that the people writing your virtual machine need to be smart once, and their work can be utilized by everyone who is making a java program simply by running it on their JVM. If it was the programmer's job to do memory management, the programmer has to be smart every single time he or she writes a program.
There's a reason there are many, many more Java and Visual Basic and PHP programmers than there are C or C++ programmers, memory management is really hard.
Sometimes you need control over your memory, and in those cases you simply have to use a programming language where you get to and have to do all the memory management yourself. No language is perfect and fit for every job, even though some people delusionally think this is so.
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But having a popular vote doesn't mean you would have to have a national recount, simply changing the presidential election so that each state casts their electoral votes proportionally to the votes cast by their voters would be enough.
There are a lot of slightly different systems for assigning mandates to multiple winners, most European countries have systems like this for their parliamentary elections, I'm sure you could learn a thing or two there. :-)
The benefits of removing the winner takes all system is that suddenly every state would count, and some votes would be more likely to affect the outcome than today. If you are a republican in California, you're screwed. Your vote "counts", but since the majority of the state always votes democrat, your vote won't affect the outcome. Same if you are a democrat in Texas, and if you vote for a candidate other than a republican or a democrat, you're vote will never affect the outcome, since no "alternative" candidate ever has a chance of winning an entire state.
However, if the electoral votes are assigned proportionally, it would be possible for an alternative candidate to secure maybe one or two votes, which would show the people in other states that there actually is an alternative to the duopoly that you have.
As for recounts, you would still have the electoral votes assigned by state, and you could subdivide some big states into smaller voting districts if you wanted to, so if someone disputes the result, they would still have to dispute it per state or per district, which is no change compared to the current system. You would only get nationwide recounts if you made one big voting district of the entire nation, but there's no reason to do that.
They're a minority in the US, yes.
You should come to northern Europe, atheists are clearly in the majority here, and the result is that religion is not a big deal. There's a really low tolerance for religious extremism, or mixing religion and politics, but I would say that it's probably a lot easier to be religious over here, than an atheist in the US.
I will buy the expansion, and I will play, and grind, etc. I will not be happy about it.
If you pay for something you don't enjoy, that's pretty close to the definition of stupidity.
I agree
me too
I would also never hire someone who couldn't spell "language" properly!
I completely disagree, it's the people that have a broad experience of languages that will truly recognize the limitations of a given language or technology much much faster than the people who only know one language.
If I'm hiring someone for a position that involves a lot of programming in language X, I would *much* rather pick someone that has a broad experience and some of langauge X or close langauges, than someone who only has 15 years experience or whatever of langauge X. The first person has an interest in learning new things, the second person is completely uninterested, and therefore probably also not a very creative person. That's not someone I would want to hire for a creative job.
I agree that C# is a nicer language than Java, but Eclipse is so much better than Visual Studio out of the box. I use an add-on called ReSharper which makes VS almost as good as Eclipse, but not quite.
Also, knowing java allows you to learn C# very, very quickly, and then you can decide for yourself which language you like better.
For programming, that reasoning is bullshit. The more code you see and write, the more programming paradigms and syntaxes you have seen and used, the better programmer you will be.
Last I checked, gravity had a tendency to accelerate objects, not make them fall with a constant velocity...
That's what IP range bans are for.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
Yes, some people are mean on the internet, that's what IP-bans are for. No, you can't talk them into being nice, you slap an IP-ban on them, delete their posts, and forget about them.
Argh, I had mod points yesterday, but not today when I needed them! :-(
Yes, views and trigger and stored procedures are good, and if you have a really competent DBA that is part of the development team and can take responsibility for those parts, and if you're ok with being tightly tied to a certain DB, then fine.
But most projects don't look like that, and most projects don't need that. If you want speed, then you want to hit the database as little as possible, and when you do, you want it to do as little as possible. Constraints, views, joins, transactions, all these things add up and you lose performance.
Scaling a database is really, really, hard. Shifting the work to the web server and adding a bunch more web servers is easy.
Actually, it's not that odd if you think about it.
Over here in Europe, the age of consent is about 14-15-16 depending on country. The purpose of age of consent is *NOT* to determine when people can start having sex, it's there to draw the line between rape and child molestation. Where I am, the law explicitly states that if the age difference is negligible, i.e. if a 16yo and a 14yo have consentual sex, then it's not a crime. Even if their parents were wailing about it, the police would politely tell them to fuck off and leave the kids alone.
However, the age for child pornography is universally 18 within Europe. The reason for this is that porn, once produced, won't disappear. It's to protect you from doing something stupid in your youth, or being exploited as a youth. It says that you have to be 18 to accept the job of porn actor, you have to be an adult before you're allowed to do that. The secondary reason is of course to make child porn illegal, but noone really cares if a pair of 17yo take pictures of themselves, that's not the focus.
So no, it doesn't make sense to set the child porn age limit at the same as that for consentual sex, they have completely different purposes. The first is there to make child molestation a worse crime than rape, not prohibit kids from having sex. The second is there to protect kids from making stupid job choices, not prohibit kids from filming themselves.
But the moral conservatives of course interpret the laws as they like, i.e. a ban on that horrible horrible sex thing that kids really really shouldn't be doing, and the letter of the law supports their view in many places, unfortunately.
I saw some statistics, but I can't remember where, that secularism increases with about 10% per generation in the US right now. It kinda makes sense, you're a few generations behind us in Europe, and we're still becoming more and more secular.
You have to remember that your religious right is a very, very vocal minority. The overwhelming amount of people do not belong to that group, and slowly they start caring less and less about religion, and caring less and less about passing it on to their children. Remember also that faith is the first to disappear, but traditions last the longest which would give the appearance of a higher degree of religiosity than what it actually is.
When I was in school as a kid, we always celebrated the winter holiday and the summer holiday by going to the local church. It was a mixed service of teachers wishing us well over the holidays, and a priest delivering some christian message. I've listened to the christmas gospel at the start of every winter holiday while in elementary school. I've sung psalms with all my classmates before every summer holiday. About half of my classmates went to a christian confirmation camp at age 14. I have several friends who got married in a church, by a priest. I've been to several funerals in churches, singing psalms, with a priest.
But I'm not christian. My classmates from school aren't christian. My parents aren't. Their parent's aren't. My married friends aren't. My dead and buried old relatives were kinda. It's just a lot of people going through the motions and traditions, without having the faith, and I think you have a lot of people like that in the US as well, but it's hard to see without actually pressing people about their faith.
I'd pick the philosophy teacher in a class on the philosophy of science. I didn't study that until university though, which is a shame, it and the scientific method really should be taught a lot earlier in schools.
*sigh* Nice try leeching on my up-modded post.
And believing that the intelligent designer with a complex sense of order came into being by chance is less illogical because...?
Relax, the entire world is becoming more and more secular if you look at the statistics.
In fact, the outbreak of fanatic islamic terrorism has a secularizing effect on the moslem world too, because most regular moslems think the fanatics are fucking nuts and distance themselves from them. This splinters islam in the same way that the reformation once started splintering christianity.
The more choice of religion people have, the less religious they will be, since it's obvious that if a bunch of different religious groups all claim to the the One True Faith, none of them are.
The louder the various fanatics scream, the less people will actually listen to them, so in the end, this whole ID thing will only make the US more secular.
You're missing the point, ID is not science and shouldn't be taught in a science class. It's perfect for a class on religion or christianity, but don't even try to present it as some sort of equally plausible alternative to evolution.
When I was a kid in school I had classes on all the major religions, and their creation myths, including christianity. I've read the old testament in literature classes. I've had physics classes that taught about the Big Bang. And I've had biology classes that taught evolution.
Noone is saying that we shouldn't teach everything, but each thing has a place, and biology classes is not the place for ID.
Whenever I see or read about religious fanatics of whatever creed do their things to try to stop science, I just watch this video from Discovery Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0
It reminds me that the world is filled with people who love the world just like it is, and who are curious about how it all works, and who wants to do real science.
The creationists and other science-destroying idiots can't win against that, it's like trying to stop children from being curious.
So relax. The ID agenda is just religions resisting change in a world that is slowly but surely becoming more secular. Real science will win in the end, it always does.
It's really that good.
There is such a list in Sweden, and some of the big ISPs use it. There was quite an uproar when someone tried to put The Pirate Bay on it, claiming they had torrents of child porn, and it never got on the list. Almost everyone agrees that the list is useless, but it's still there. :-/
So it's not a question of whether or not someone will try to use such a list for their own goals, but how soon that will happen.
You forgot this point:
Knowing the culture of the country you are moving to, for example how lawyers are viewed and what they are used for there.
To me, the advice of getting a lawyer seems completely overkill, everything you need to know is on a number of government websites anyway?
Recruiting the wrong person for a job is very, very costly, you'll end up paying a few months of salary before noticing the mistake, and then you have to re-do the entire hiring process again, which also costs money.
On that scale, five bucks for a phonecall is totally worth the money.
There's a reason there are many, many more Java and Visual Basic and PHP programmers than there are C or C++ programmers, memory management is really hard.
Sometimes you need control over your memory, and in those cases you simply have to use a programming language where you get to and have to do all the memory management yourself. No language is perfect and fit for every job, even though some people delusionally think this is so.
You forgot to add "Community Technology Preview" to that name, since MS obviously cannot put "beta" in their product names.