Ok, that's just too much. I was willing to give the benefit of the dot when I had the image of the pink IDE with the big bubbly code font, but take that away and, "That girl is a girly-man, baby!"
Another interesting thing is that this past season's hurricanes had an unusual amount of electrical activity. Typically, there is very little if any lightning in a hurricane. This was from a NOAA site, if I remember correctly. The explanation was that the predominant horizontal flow of the air in a hurrican impedes top-to-bottom electrical discharge.
But this season in particular, visible eletrical activity (lightning bolts) were seen with unusually high frequency. No doubt a "reasonable" non-alarmist explanation will be determined, but it is just another "something is different" tidbit.
There's another line of reasoning which I read from "The Coming Superstorm"--yes, it is considered fringe--that discusses the following sequence of events:
Planet heats up
Glacial shelves begin to melt and alter the salnity of the ocean.
Major heat transfer currents in the northern hemisphere are interrupted.
Hurricane intensity escalates dramatically.
The ocean currents are a major source of global heat transfer and so are hurricanes. If the gulf stream is interrupted, then there is that much more heat to be dealt with by the other heat transfer systems. Hurricanes will increase in intensity to compensate.
Think of a straw swirling a soda. The faster you swirl it the higher up toward the rim goes the swirling. If you go fast enough it swirls right out of the cup. Well, if you get a hurricane going fast enough, the outer layers of air become the cup and the swirling rises higher and higher into the atmosphere. High enough, it will reach into the very cool areas of the troposphere, which causes a pipeline between the very hot warm air near the oceans and the cool air high in the atmosphere. That gives you really strong vertical flow. You've already got a ton of ionization happening, so zap, zap, zap! Lightning.
I am not claiming that all of this is factual. I would have to go dig up all the sources I've read and substantiate them, etc. But there are definite patterns here. One definite fact is that the glacial shelves have melted significantly and the major currents that bring warm water to the colder regions of the North Atlantic have been measured to have reduced in strength by as much as 30% in the past 50 years.
Many scientists are in agreement that if that flow stops, northern hemisphere temperatures will drop significantly in a single year (because the flow of warm water from the equatorial regions will not be present to balance the cold of the Winter months and the ocean is a huge temperature reservoir for the northern continents). So the second season, we potentially sink to an even lower temperature, until some other environmental balancing factor can take over the role that the ocean is no longer playing in the heat transfer process.
Rapid climate change is a historically documented fact (from core samples in regions all over the world). And it is not just because of us. It happens on Earth quite frequently. If you search the web for rapid climate change, you will find a wealth of information (not all of which is sensationalist crap like TFA,:-). Here's one I think is quite informative: http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/ abruptclimate_joyce_keigwin.html.
The bottom line here from my perspective is that we as a global population really need to get our heads out of our asses. Not because of what we are doing to the Earth, though that is a significant issue we should consider, but simply because the Earth changes quite a bit all by itself, and we are not very well prepared for it.
Witness what happened in New Orleans. That was a many billion dollar tragedy and what caused it? A single storm. That should be one Hell of a wakeup call, but honestly, it is not seen as economically expedient to plan for change. Most of the countries on this planet ha
I would have no trouble signing up for the Kyoto Protocol regardless of what China and India do, but the resulting tariffs that we would levy would cause God awful whining from China and India and I have misplaced my earplugs. Therefore, I ask Gaia to make me some new earplugs. If she does that for me, I promise O Great Planetary Goddess that I will levy tarrifs the likes of which even God has never seen upon the anti-Kyoto infidels.
A respectable scientist would cite supporting evidence. His argument is emotional and he attempts to persuade through fear. Fear creates confusion, not clarity.
He is the worst kind of person. He preys on your fears for profit. The only "layer of smoke" in that article is the emotional one in which he has couched his true motive.
If the rumors of Vista are true and it is an efficient and secure operating system that can function in plain jane deterministic manners, then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more... ever.
The MO for M$ is to release an OS and deprecate in favor of WIN.X when TCO becomes unacceptably low. AFAIK, you're SOL.
Like most M$ crap (their studies are as buggy as their software), this is nonsense. The number of bugs absolutely matters. Even if you patch quickly and easily, a large number of bugs does not inspire consumer confidence. I bought a Honda recently, not because of concerns about repair cost or time, but because I simply felt more secure with the production values and history of the company. (Right or wrong, that is why I made a $20K choice and I am not the only one that did over quality concerns.) I was able to make this choice because the market is competitive.
The only thing that will lead M$ to better quality is competition. When the desktop monopoly cracks and a competitor is offering feature parity with reduced bug counts, they will be forced to improve. Otherwise, they will simply do the minimum necessary to maintain their hegemony.
The idea of charging people money for beta quality that will cost them even more money due to serious vulnerabilities and forced upgrades is loathesome. It is even more unfortunate that the consumer has largely come to accept this in the absence of an alternative. Apple is building a quality product right now, but at a pretty large margin on hardware. Linux is on the rise, but in the desktop market, it is not quite where it needs to be (for many reasons including economic pressure created by M$ deals with vendors).
Labor force was 8M in 2001.
Population around 20M in 2003.
Less than a tenth of the US population./. ate my numbers, for some reason. Now if only it would eat my quite incorrect 250,000 in the above post,:-). Either way, though, the point is there. Less volume to absorb strain.
Dug around for some recent numbers and the labor force was
Looking through some posts from some Aussies, though, they do not see this problem, so perhaps the entire discussion is moot.
Hrm...I read the responses, but I think there is a difference in context here which I can resolve. When I referred to the "local economy", what I was considering and the part that I see as devastating is market saturation for a skill set. As I suspect many of us have felt from time to time, our current job and salary are due, in no small part, to a long sequence of educational events which specifically trained us for our job.
But the idea I am more getting at is the "local economy" as a social one. If you have 10,000 jobs of a particular type in a market and you have 10,000 foreign nationals capable of doing the job and 10,000 local workers, then certainly supply and demanded play a role in adjusting the price point for the service. No need for an Economics 101 lecture, there.
However, if you have 20,000 foreign nationals capable of doing the job and willing to enter a local market, and there is no protection from them so doing, they will and then they can displace many local workers. The situation is, of course, worse if they are actually more qualified for whatever reason.
You can turn around and say, "Well, those local workers need to retrain and move to a different job." Well, yes. That is a path. But you must also consider the realities of individual citizens, the flexibility in their life style, their willingness and ability to retrain, and other economic constraints that might devastate their life ("Where'd my house go?") if they need to retrain at their own cost with a reduced income or simply accept a job that pays less. Is this the individual's responsibility? Well, yes. It certainly is. You can take the tack of full personal responsibility.
But you also have to be aware of the limitations of your citizens. You can expect a great deal from them, but there are points beyond which, on average, your citizens will be unable to be flexible enough to deal with being bent over an occupational barrel by a completely free and unrestricted labor market. Some of those limitations might well be limitations of your governments own making for not investing significantly enough particular areas of education, thus putting you at a disadvantage. Can you compensate? Yes, any individual could ultimately take full responsibility for everything that befalls them.
Your economics and your argument may be perfect, but the reality is that your citizens are not. We have limits, we get lost sometimes, we make poor choices, we get overwhelmed, and so on. I think the point of a nation, the reason they exist, is to help protect the way of life of a group of people that have a shared identity. Sometimes that means protecting your population from its own limitations.
If for whatever reason, you end up with an important segment of your industry which is staffed largely by foreign nationals--well for one, that would be a significant security risk or at least a significant economic weakness that puts you at a disadvantage in dealings with other nations. But there are other more subtle erosions that can occur and the result is typically bloody.
So in response, to your final paragraph, I would say that yes, "protectionism" does resulting in a higher economic cost, but it exists and is used in situations where the social cost has the potential to be greater (risks to national security, risks of social unrest, etc.). Put two ways: sometimes you take out a loan, and sometimes you purchase insurance. (And some times you take out a loan to purchase insurance, which can really ruin your day.)
I think when most people argue for ideal concepts like "a free market", they are neglecting the people variable in the equation. You cannot just look at the economics of the situation, because people's fears are difficult to predict and quantify, but they can in certain situations have a critical impact on the economy. If you have sufficient time, then the economics will mirror the social factors, but sometimes you do not have the time and you hit a break point. It is good to keep
Well this is a very broad and deep topic, so it would be difficult to explore it fully, but there are many factors which contribute to relative economic strength in the world. A simple example would be: higher per capita skilled workforce for what kind of work? If your nation is full of a half billion super janitors, still, that is not so good for the average per capita income of your nation, maybe:-). But then there is the fact that what a job pays is typically strongly tied to a particular standard of living that "the market" has determined that job should command and the cost of that standard of living in the local environment. That market determination depends on a huge number of factors but broadly, supply of appropriate labor and demand for the product of the job. Supply and demand in this sense can be very largely affected by the government of the nation in which the work is taking place (visas, immigration restrictions, related trade tariffs, government funding of relted educational programs, and so on)
The bigger question you are asking about relative strengths of national economies, well that's just a huge topic. As a matter of national policy, it really depends on what resources that nation has and what resources it needs, and how effectively they can leverage the nations assets (people and natural resources) to reach agreements with other nations that are advantageous. The more resource that a nation has, the less it depends on others and so it has a stronger position. The more valuable the resources it has that it is will to exchange for power or other benefit, the stronger its position. (Witness the important of the Middle East on the global economic stage: Hello, Oil. Just for giggles, imagine if 90% of the oil on the Earth had actually been located in what is now U.S. territory.)
The market is very "fair" in the sense that the strongest nation at any given moment when factoring all these things in (lots of nuclear weapons is not to be underestimated in this respect for instance), is going to have the most "wealth". Might makes right is true on a national stage, no matter how subtle "might" happens to be. It's still the ultimate "fairness" in matters of power. Depending on the government, it may be concentrated into very few or it may be distributed more. That's where your per capita money comment comes into play. A nation leverages its resources as effectively as possible and that results in a certain GNP. If the leveraging is very inefficient, you get a low return on a large number of people and presto: low per capita wealth.
What you see in China right now is the industrial and technological revolutions occuring at a very rapid pace. Right now they have relatively little leverage (but still considerable) because they are somewhat behind the time curve on these economic transformations, but that will not hold for long,...
Then you will see fairness in the form of a much bigger per capita leverage multiplier * 1.5 billion. The interesting question, at least to me, is how will the global community respond to this. How will the planet respond to the exponentially increasing energy demands, is interesting, too.
The next 50 years will be very interesting, unless an H5N1 or some such thing greatly simplifies things.
The immigrant IT workers might be better qualified due to a stronger education and technical background.
Workers could have similar skill levels, but the number of foreign applicants might far outnumber citizen applications.
Foreign nationals of particular national, ethnic, or racial background might be perceived (and I know this is against the law in at least the U.S. but it still can happen in the form of unofficial bias) as more skilled.
Sure, wage might be an issue. Not in IT from what I can see, though. Often it is more expensive to hire the non-citizen.
I think the issue here is that what is true for the U.S. (are you a U.S. citizen) does not necessarily apply for Australia which has a much smaller population. So what you may argue could be valid for the U.S. situation but not for the situation in Australia.
Sometimes for whatever reason, a nation might produce fewer skilled workers per capita in an industry than another nation does. But the fact is that a nation does need to protect its citizens, and an unmitigated deluge of skilled workers in an area from a nation with great capacity to produce them (perhaps they have a population that is 30 times larger) can be devastating to the local economy.
This would be a very terrible thing, and the reason it can happen is simply that some nations have far greater populations than others. Understand that, India, as an example, would have it well in its power to produce sufficient people in certain technical areas to supply the entire world with all the needed labor in that area. Checks and balances in work visas for foreign nationals is one of the ways to provide sanity.
So no, it would not be a perfect world if competition were welcome because the playing field is not at all level when the two nations in question have a great disparity in ability to produce a particular industry's per capita workforce.
Well, I think most of the mod+insightful posts on this thread are interesting but also mod-off topic as far as the post itself, which was reasonably interesting. It's not often someone tells you that you are spinning around on a giant floppy frisbee that is whizzing through the Universe at a million miles an hour.
I think the implied objection is that you feel this fellow is profiting from net traffic that is the result of a special relationship with ScuttleMonkey. If the articles that are posted are topical and of interest, and certainly there are many postings on the topic of cosmological and astronomical facts, I think you have not much leg to stand on.
If the articles were irrelevant tripe, that is a different matter. You threw out your own judgement about the relevancy or the derivativeness of this fellow's particular postings, but choosing posted topics is not really a democratic process: you are not given the power to mod the topics, but you can mod the resulting discussion.
Which means you are trying to do what you have not the power to do and you are doing it by posting off-topic comments which is actually more objectionable according to the "rules" than anything. If I were you, I would be happy that you received enough community support for your opinion that you were modded up despite being off topic,:-).
Perhaps for amusement, you could try writing your own article about the inequities of Slashdot topic selection and then submit it for consideration as a posted topic. That would be a hoot. Imagine if they actually posted. Hard to argue about integrity in that case.
Anyway, cheerio. I understand your beef. But this is how far you get bitching at the establishment, even a good spirited open-source friendly one: 0 meters. Although, if the galaxy warps enough there could be some error in that measurement and you might actually make some progress in a billion years!
I bet the school district can establish a more insidious motive here because that young man probably knew that Slashdot would get a hold of it and DDOS the poor district as a result, so you see his crime is for more subtle and dangerous than we first thought. He corrupted his fellow students to attract media attention, knowing that this would result in Slashdot interest and a further more devastating attack.
*Refresh*Refresh*Ref...oh, uh...*looks up and then hides his hand's behind his back and stares at the ceiling*
4: An overwhelming majority of Americans are Christian. A consistent majority of Americans have chosen overtly Christian Presidents. If your argument is "Will of the People", it's not going to work very well.
The denomination of the majority of the population is not a justification for setting United States policy according to that faith's tenets. That is specifically interdicted by the Constitution: "The Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The line that cannot be crossed is the one where policy validates a particular religion's beliefs as truth.
The "Will of the People" is an excellent argument, because the Constitution is the legal document of the United States. It is the strongest statement of the "Will of the People" that this nation has. The judicial power of the nation is vested in the Supreme Court of the United States and it is the ultimate arbiter of the word and intent of this one document (Article 3). The Constitution provides a mechanism by which the Constitution itself may be altered, should the the values of society change substantially enough to warrant it (Article 5). It is for this reason that your argument in 4 is poor.
You presume in your first point and you wager in your second. I do not presume or wager in my points. I read the Constitution. I read the transcripts of the President's communications on www.whitehouse.gov, and I read material from reputable news sources like the BBC. I also read the text of most judgements handed down by the Supreme Court.
If I had to wager anything, I would wager that these sources are a more accurate reflection of what is true about our nation than you are.
Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian official said the President had told him he was "driven with a mission from God" [when asked about the U.S. role in the Middle East].
It is the Will of the People of the United States of America by which he should be driven. That is his mandate as set forth in Article 2 of the Constitution. The Constitution is that document that beings "We the People" rather than "In the beginning God".
There was no backspace key, and you didn't see what command you typed in until AFTER you hit the enter key. So to keep things easy, you end up with 2 to 4 letter commands. ls, ed, df, dd, etc...
Clearly "grep" came along later: [a-b^!]\\s\((a|b).* )!!!
But I giggle whenever I need to edit an image and I think, "Bring out the GIMP." This would never have been without Linux, and I couldn't edit my text files with vigor and VIM, either. I could have my new Razr phone, however, and I could Excel at spreadsheet calculations on my new computer that is named after a secluded hollow or small valley usually covered with trees or turf (Dell).
I do not at all agree with that article. If perfectly descriptive names were important, all word processors would be called "Word Processor", and even that is pretty vague--what kind of processing? But they are not. And they do not need to be. And it is not a usability issue that they are not. Without any prior knowledge, if someone handed me an application called "Word", I would expect it to be a dictionary.
It isn't.
Maynard: But the Gimp's sleeping.
Zed: Well I guess your gonna have to go wake him up now, won't you?
Slashdot Mirror
It is frequently observed by my coworkers that I am never sick. In light of this recent post, my secret will not last long...
"Why won't this wig come off?"
Grandmas always give you the good stuff.
But this season in particular, visible eletrical activity (lightning bolts) were seen with unusually high frequency. No doubt a "reasonable" non-alarmist explanation will be determined, but it is just another "something is different" tidbit.
There's another line of reasoning which I read from "The Coming Superstorm"--yes, it is considered fringe--that discusses the following sequence of events:
The ocean currents are a major source of global heat transfer and so are hurricanes. If the gulf stream is interrupted, then there is that much more heat to be dealt with by the other heat transfer systems. Hurricanes will increase in intensity to compensate.
Think of a straw swirling a soda. The faster you swirl it the higher up toward the rim goes the swirling. If you go fast enough it swirls right out of the cup. Well, if you get a hurricane going fast enough, the outer layers of air become the cup and the swirling rises higher and higher into the atmosphere. High enough, it will reach into the very cool areas of the troposphere, which causes a pipeline between the very hot warm air near the oceans and the cool air high in the atmosphere. That gives you really strong vertical flow. You've already got a ton of ionization happening, so zap, zap, zap! Lightning.
I am not claiming that all of this is factual. I would have to go dig up all the sources I've read and substantiate them, etc. But there are definite patterns here. One definite fact is that the glacial shelves have melted significantly and the major currents that bring warm water to the colder regions of the North Atlantic have been measured to have reduced in strength by as much as 30% in the past 50 years.
Many scientists are in agreement that if that flow stops, northern hemisphere temperatures will drop significantly in a single year (because the flow of warm water from the equatorial regions will not be present to balance the cold of the Winter months and the ocean is a huge temperature reservoir for the northern continents). So the second season, we potentially sink to an even lower temperature, until some other environmental balancing factor can take over the role that the ocean is no longer playing in the heat transfer process.
Rapid climate change is a historically documented fact (from core samples in regions all over the world). And it is not just because of us. It happens on Earth quite frequently. If you search the web for rapid climate change, you will find a wealth of information (not all of which is sensationalist crap like TFA, :-). Here's one I think is quite informative: http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/ abruptclimate_joyce_keigwin.html.
The bottom line here from my perspective is that we as a global population really need to get our heads out of our asses. Not because of what we are doing to the Earth, though that is a significant issue we should consider, but simply because the Earth changes quite a bit all by itself, and we are not very well prepared for it.
Witness what happened in New Orleans. That was a many billion dollar tragedy and what caused it? A single storm. That should be one Hell of a wakeup call, but honestly, it is not seen as economically expedient to plan for change. Most of the countries on this planet ha
*chuckle*
He is the worst kind of person. He preys on your fears for profit. The only "layer of smoke" in that article is the emotional one in which he has couched his true motive.
TTYL, :-).
The only thing that will lead M$ to better quality is competition. When the desktop monopoly cracks and a competitor is offering feature parity with reduced bug counts, they will be forced to improve. Otherwise, they will simply do the minimum necessary to maintain their hegemony.
The idea of charging people money for beta quality that will cost them even more money due to serious vulnerabilities and forced upgrades is loathesome. It is even more unfortunate that the consumer has largely come to accept this in the absence of an alternative. Apple is building a quality product right now, but at a pretty large margin on hardware. Linux is on the rise, but in the desktop market, it is not quite where it needs to be (for many reasons including economic pressure created by M$ deals with vendors).
Oh, well.
Population around 20M in 2003.
Less than a tenth of the US population. /. ate my numbers, for some reason. Now if only it would eat my quite incorrect 250,000 in the above post, :-). Either way, though, the point is there. Less volume to absorb strain.
Spot On.
But the idea I am more getting at is the "local economy" as a social one. If you have 10,000 jobs of a particular type in a market and you have 10,000 foreign nationals capable of doing the job and 10,000 local workers, then certainly supply and demanded play a role in adjusting the price point for the service. No need for an Economics 101 lecture, there.
However, if you have 20,000 foreign nationals capable of doing the job and willing to enter a local market, and there is no protection from them so doing, they will and then they can displace many local workers. The situation is, of course, worse if they are actually more qualified for whatever reason.
You can turn around and say, "Well, those local workers need to retrain and move to a different job." Well, yes. That is a path. But you must also consider the realities of individual citizens, the flexibility in their life style, their willingness and ability to retrain, and other economic constraints that might devastate their life ("Where'd my house go?") if they need to retrain at their own cost with a reduced income or simply accept a job that pays less. Is this the individual's responsibility? Well, yes. It certainly is. You can take the tack of full personal responsibility.
But you also have to be aware of the limitations of your citizens. You can expect a great deal from them, but there are points beyond which, on average, your citizens will be unable to be flexible enough to deal with being bent over an occupational barrel by a completely free and unrestricted labor market. Some of those limitations might well be limitations of your governments own making for not investing significantly enough particular areas of education, thus putting you at a disadvantage. Can you compensate? Yes, any individual could ultimately take full responsibility for everything that befalls them.
Your economics and your argument may be perfect, but the reality is that your citizens are not. We have limits, we get lost sometimes, we make poor choices, we get overwhelmed, and so on. I think the point of a nation, the reason they exist, is to help protect the way of life of a group of people that have a shared identity. Sometimes that means protecting your population from its own limitations.
If for whatever reason, you end up with an important segment of your industry which is staffed largely by foreign nationals--well for one, that would be a significant security risk or at least a significant economic weakness that puts you at a disadvantage in dealings with other nations. But there are other more subtle erosions that can occur and the result is typically bloody.
So in response, to your final paragraph, I would say that yes, "protectionism" does resulting in a higher economic cost, but it exists and is used in situations where the social cost has the potential to be greater (risks to national security, risks of social unrest, etc.). Put two ways: sometimes you take out a loan, and sometimes you purchase insurance. (And some times you take out a loan to purchase insurance, which can really ruin your day.)
I think when most people argue for ideal concepts like "a free market", they are neglecting the people variable in the equation. You cannot just look at the economics of the situation, because people's fears are difficult to predict and quantify, but they can in certain situations have a critical impact on the economy. If you have sufficient time, then the economics will mirror the social factors, but sometimes you do not have the time and you hit a break point. It is good to keep
The bigger question you are asking about relative strengths of national economies, well that's just a huge topic. As a matter of national policy, it really depends on what resources that nation has and what resources it needs, and how effectively they can leverage the nations assets (people and natural resources) to reach agreements with other nations that are advantageous. The more resource that a nation has, the less it depends on others and so it has a stronger position. The more valuable the resources it has that it is will to exchange for power or other benefit, the stronger its position. (Witness the important of the Middle East on the global economic stage: Hello, Oil. Just for giggles, imagine if 90% of the oil on the Earth had actually been located in what is now U.S. territory.)
The market is very "fair" in the sense that the strongest nation at any given moment when factoring all these things in (lots of nuclear weapons is not to be underestimated in this respect for instance), is going to have the most "wealth". Might makes right is true on a national stage, no matter how subtle "might" happens to be. It's still the ultimate "fairness" in matters of power. Depending on the government, it may be concentrated into very few or it may be distributed more. That's where your per capita money comment comes into play. A nation leverages its resources as effectively as possible and that results in a certain GNP. If the leveraging is very inefficient, you get a low return on a large number of people and presto: low per capita wealth.
What you see in China right now is the industrial and technological revolutions occuring at a very rapid pace. Right now they have relatively little leverage (but still considerable) because they are somewhat behind the time curve on these economic transformations, but that will not hold for long, ...
Then you will see fairness in the form of a much bigger per capita leverage multiplier * 1.5 billion. The interesting question, at least to me, is how will the global community respond to this. How will the planet respond to the exponentially increasing energy demands, is interesting, too.
The next 50 years will be very interesting, unless an H5N1 or some such thing greatly simplifies things.
I think the issue here is that what is true for the U.S. (are you a U.S. citizen) does not necessarily apply for Australia which has a much smaller population. So what you may argue could be valid for the U.S. situation but not for the situation in Australia.
This would be a very terrible thing, and the reason it can happen is simply that some nations have far greater populations than others. Understand that, India, as an example, would have it well in its power to produce sufficient people in certain technical areas to supply the entire world with all the needed labor in that area. Checks and balances in work visas for foreign nationals is one of the ways to provide sanity.
So no, it would not be a perfect world if competition were welcome because the playing field is not at all level when the two nations in question have a great disparity in ability to produce a particular industry's per capita workforce.
I think the implied objection is that you feel this fellow is profiting from net traffic that is the result of a special relationship with ScuttleMonkey. If the articles that are posted are topical and of interest, and certainly there are many postings on the topic of cosmological and astronomical facts, I think you have not much leg to stand on.
If the articles were irrelevant tripe, that is a different matter. You threw out your own judgement about the relevancy or the derivativeness of this fellow's particular postings, but choosing posted topics is not really a democratic process: you are not given the power to mod the topics, but you can mod the resulting discussion.
Which means you are trying to do what you have not the power to do and you are doing it by posting off-topic comments which is actually more objectionable according to the "rules" than anything. If I were you, I would be happy that you received enough community support for your opinion that you were modded up despite being off topic, :-).
Perhaps for amusement, you could try writing your own article about the inequities of Slashdot topic selection and then submit it for consideration as a posted topic. That would be a hoot. Imagine if they actually posted. Hard to argue about integrity in that case.
Anyway, cheerio. I understand your beef. But this is how far you get bitching at the establishment, even a good spirited open-source friendly one: 0 meters. Although, if the galaxy warps enough there could be some error in that measurement and you might actually make some progress in a billion years!
"The Last Temptation of the DVD" followed by the surprisingly successful, "The Resurrection of DVD" (aka "I Was Only Mostly Dead").
*Refresh*Refresh*Ref...oh, uh...*looks up and then hides his hand's behind his back and stares at the ceiling*
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4320586.stm.
The denomination of the majority of the population is not a justification for setting United States policy according to that faith's tenets. That is specifically interdicted by the Constitution: "The Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The line that cannot be crossed is the one where policy validates a particular religion's beliefs as truth.The "Will of the People" is an excellent argument, because the Constitution is the legal document of the United States. It is the strongest statement of the "Will of the People" that this nation has. The judicial power of the nation is vested in the Supreme Court of the United States and it is the ultimate arbiter of the word and intent of this one document (Article 3). The Constitution provides a mechanism by which the Constitution itself may be altered, should the the values of society change substantially enough to warrant it (Article 5). It is for this reason that your argument in 4 is poor.
You presume in your first point and you wager in your second. I do not presume or wager in my points. I read the Constitution. I read the transcripts of the President's communications on www.whitehouse.gov, and I read material from reputable news sources like the BBC. I also read the text of most judgements handed down by the Supreme Court.
If I had to wager anything, I would wager that these sources are a more accurate reflection of what is true about our nation than you are.
So less power might not necessarily be cooler...if more of the power is going to heat generation.
(ALERT: I'm just joking around here.)
There was no backspace key, and you didn't see what command you typed in until AFTER you hit the enter key. So to keep things easy, you end up with 2 to 4 letter commands. ls, ed, df, dd, etc... Clearly "grep" came along later: [a-b^!]\\s\((a|b).* )!!!
In my opinion, that is wrong.
I do not at all agree with that article. If perfectly descriptive names were important, all word processors would be called "Word Processor", and even that is pretty vague--what kind of processing? But they are not. And they do not need to be. And it is not a usability issue that they are not. Without any prior knowledge, if someone handed me an application called "Word", I would expect it to be a dictionary.
It isn't.