The only way to move off the two-party system is to start small, with local, provincial, and lastly federal elections. It'll take a long time and a lot of work, but that's how democracies function. If your state senate or city council is made up of three or four parties such that no one party holds a definitive majority, that's when you know there's progress.
Unfortunately, most voters are idiots capable only of understanding a dichotamy and no more. In fact, a good number of voters don't care where their candidate stands in relation to them, so long as the candidate is in the right party. That's how screwed up US society is. If there are any grips with the US political climate, don't blame the politicians; blame the voters for not wanting to make an informed decision and not valuing their vote enough.
In-game ads probably wouldn't be anywhere close to your traditional media ads. In-game ads would be more like product placement. You know, "ColdSteel broadsword of fury" or "United Cutlry scimitar of the stars" or something. Or for potions, it'd be "Cherry Gatorade" and "Blueberry Gatorade."
Actual cut-scene advertisements probably won't be such a great idea, and wouldn't be used at all.
They're not going to do acrobatics on those things, but they can sure as hell disorient and discomfort any attacker, severely injure anyone not strapped into a seat, and more or less nullify terrorist threats.
Not to mention that we now have air marshals that carry...
1) Particularly bad paper cuts from map reading. 2) An accident happened outside, but the bleeder was brought to the car because the first aid kit is there. 3) The other type of accident (which would make you want to change your seats too).
Endangering the welfare of a minor, negligence, fraud, hell, even a number of conspiricy charges would apply...
Just slap her with as many charges as possible and let the court sort it out. But she'll be let of by the mere ridiculosity of it all if this is all they're going to charge her with. Maybe the DA is trying to let her off...
After all, a little varnish can be had from parts of the violin that don't affect sound. Granted, it would scratch the thing, but it's a very small scratch.
Because with a few exceptions, our brains are wired serially, as is our thought process.
Parallel programming is most applicable for simulations, where the program is actually trying to immitate real world situations. However, it is terrible for application programming, as applications are user-input-based, and because users' brains are serial, user applications are largely serial.
Quite frankly, we really only need 3 threads to look up e-mail, and 2 for word processing or web surfing. And since we can't do more than one thing at the same time, we don't need 7 cores total in order to do all tasks effectively, just 3. If we add background OS processes, we might need a few more threads, but 8 is already sufficient to cover all everyday tasks. And by the time it gets to 8, the bottleneck isn't the CPU or system memory, it's the storage medium, HDD, SSD, whatever, which is sequentially accessed. Yes, we can implement RAID, but how many regular, average Joe users even know what RAID is, much less need it.
I can just imagine some poor hiker being blasted into the sky walking or climbing over one of these pressurized caverns, just because the engineers had missed a hole somewhere inside the main cavern.
It'd be ideal if they could spray some kind of airtight lining along the walls, but that wouldn't be too eco-friendly, would it?
There are indeed patches of nothing in the southwest, but there are many places where vegetation does grow, irrespective of irrigation. The desert there is a teeming ecosystem; it's not the Sahara that's all sand dunes and such. You don't always want to build on top of that vegetation.
Also, it might not be the brightest idea to build next to something like a mesa. It might or might not be a good to build on top of a mesa even if it has to be cut to allow trucks to get to the top.
There are lots of other examples where a proposal might be rejected.
Part of it is because it's really hard to get things passed without a true majority, that is, a veto-overriding majority. So anything the Democrats really want to do gets vetoed by Bush. Only the things that get both parties' support would be able to override a veto. Unfortunately, that would mean Republicans breaking with their party, which they're reluctant to do unless their constituents really demand for it, because it would mean less support from their party base come next election.
So the Democrats are forced to compromise on everything. Now, whether their compromises have been wise or not is a separate debate. But compromises are much better than a Republican-controlled congress and white house, as even the smallest checks that a two-party system offers would be completely blown away.
But this is why having multiple parties is a good thing, in particular, an odd number of parties. Far fewer compromises need to be made, and the power of congress actually increases.
Sales tax is a consumption tax. In fact, there are places with food and clothing (necessities) exempt, so the sales tax in those places are actually luxury goods taxes.
Who consumes the most amount of luxury goods? The middle class and upper class are both major consumers. But more specifically, it is the visitors, the tourists, who are the largest such consumers. A sales tax brings in a lot of income for the municipality for a tourism-driven economic paradigm. However, in places where there are few or no tourists, it acts as a "presence" tax for the lower-middle class and the poor. Since these people pay very little income tax, and probably no property tax, it's probably the only tax they pay.
Online sales taxes are split into intrastate tax, and interstate tax. The constitutional legality of interstate tax (like the one in New York) is up for debate. However, the purpose of such a tax is to promote local businesses. After all, items ordered online usually have the additional shipping expense on top of the cost of the order. Intrastate taxes have the opposite effect--they discourage local businesses by encouraging residents to order outside of their own state, and encourage businesses to not have a presence within the state.
Remember; when you are being approached your gun is in your holster - his is already out, who do you think gets to shoot first?
BS. Most armed muggers just flash their guns. It's not the movies, where they stick it to your head and demand for money. If you threaten them, they might use it, but that's about it. The more dangerous situations are with the kids with their hands in their pockets, and something inside that looks like a gun. In that case, take out your money, but drop it onto the floor. This typically buys you the opening you need, unless you're up against a grizzled veteran, which is always a good thing.
And all that crap about taking care of civilians - BS! if you got a gun and start flashing it people will die, even at 15 m. most people will be wildly inaccurate with a pistol - and if they are inexperienced with munition they are likely to have bullets that will go straight through the target and hit whatever is on the other side (hint even the police in several countries have bullets that fail to stop inside the target, and have killed innocent bystanders).
Which is why licenses, requirement for proper training, etc. are not bad things. Besides, without proper training, if you just flash a gun, you're actually a greater danger to yourself. That gun can be taken from you, or it can shoot you while in the holster. And if it's taken from you, you're dead. By flashing your gun, you just showed your mugger you're ready and willing to use lethal force against him. To cover his own back, he's not going to let you go.
You're missing the point: these people more than likely already have guns.
And revocation of this particular isn't necessarily an implication that the prices of guns and ammunition will go down.
The upside is that a license will still be necessary for ownership, and hence depending on how the government plays it, there might be more people with formal gun training than people without. And that's really the safest thing; a gun in the hands of a well-trained user is far less dangerous than one in the hands of an untrained user, to everyone in the vicinity, including the user himself.
Breyer's concern is well founded. Unfortunately, his example is highly flawed. He uses the machine gun as an example. However, machine guns have no place in self-defense. Machine guns cause wanton and unnecessary destruction. The very idea of a machine gun is to cause wanton and unnecessary destruction--to spray an area full of bullets. Any weapon whose application will kill indiscriminately is not a weapon for the purpose self-defense; at best, it is a weapon for self-defense and then some.
It is the same idea that "arms" does not include bombs, grenades, rockets, missiles, etc. At no time does self-defense require such drastic measures, and hence the Second Amendment does not apply. Now, I'm all for owning such weapons, because it is a free country. However, in the course of using these weapons, self-defense is likely not applicable, and hence the use of such weapons is and should be illegal, and not covered under the constitutional right. Hence, if the DC restriction of requiring a handgun to be disassembled or locked is applied to such weapons, such a law wouldn't be unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.
In fact, the same could be said of cop-killer bullets. The purpose of such bullets is not to defend oneself, but to kill or severely maim. The concept of the bullets cannot be applied within the framework of self-defense, hence such "arms" are not protected under the Second Amendment. Any new weapon "more dangerous" (which I read to be more lethal) to a person than a basic firearm would be considered the same way. Now, if people started becoming resiliant to getting hit with bullets even if they had vests on, then it would be time to reconsider what falls reasonably under self-defense. But until that time, and it would be a highly unlikely event, there is no circular reasoning.
Sightly off topic, but since we're quoting the decision, my favorite line:
It would be rather like saying "He filled and kicked the bucket" to mean "He filled the bucket and died." Grotesque.
Not a big fan of replying to myself, but I'm going to go into a bit of a rant now regarding *ix systems in general:
UNIX originally was not designed for average Joe consumption. First off, it was command line only, which implied a certain linear method of thinking that not everybody is good at. Most people are visual, because that's what they're used to, and not geared towards the mathematical thinking that issuing commands requires. The biggest problem from this design philosophy is that engineers like to do everything efficiently, so they all of their most commonly-performed tasks have the shortest, most efficient names.
Take the most basic, simpliest thing one could do in a directory: list its contents. The command: ls. If you had never seen a command prompt in your life, much less DOS, but you knew how files were organized in say, Explorer or Finder, you'd want to know what was in a directory. You wouldn't even know how to figure that out! So you type "help," hoping for some insight into the system. Only problem, help either gives you a ton of garbage not related to what you want to do, or it's an alias for man.
First of all, WTF is man? I'm a man. What does that have to do with providing me help? I know man is short for manual, but the average Joe does not. Why couldn't it be "manual" and have "man" be the alias? Hell, why couldn't it just be damn "help" and have manual or man be aliases. I don't know...
And then it gives a usage message, but you have to already know the command. That's no help at all. If I knew the damn command for getting the contents of a directory (or folder in Windows-speak), I wouldn't need help!
Then we get into opening up the most basic of files: text files for reading. What do we use? Text? Open? Read? Nope, it's "cat," "more," "less," or "type." First of all, cat is an animal. Where does more and less come in, and what are they more or less than (for that matter, WTF is a pipe, and does it have to do with the tubes of the internet--does it get clogged too sometimes)? Type is a bit better, but type is a user action, not a computer action. The user doesn't want to type anyway, he wants to view. Which brings up vi. And don't even get me started on how unfriendly vi is for even intermediate computer users, not to mention the average Joe. So, trying to read a text file may, at best, result in actually opening the file up and being able to see the first page, but having to reboot when you want to do something else; and at worst, accidentally deleting the file altogether.
OK, these are issues with beginner (or intermediate) users using the command line, which one could argue, they probably shouldn't be doing unless they intend on becoming advanced users. Fine. But the bigger issue is, this philosophy has extended to the naming of all programs for unix; apt-get, emacs, gimp, to name a few. Even better names like Firefox and Blender are kinda WTF until you've done your research. Why couldn't they have been named "update" "text editor" "photo editor" "internet browser" and "3D modeler" respectively, or some cooler version thereof, is completely beyond me. Yes, the unix command line is most efficiently used when programs are single words. But it's easy enough to adopt the Windows model of having a separate executable name from a program name, and have both names go to the same executable.
Usability begins at the name. If a user cannot figure out how to do what the user wants to get done, usability is 0. If the user has to go through several steps, one of which is going to yet another program, usability is pretty damn low. That is to say, if a user has to look through a massive list to find what program name does what, and then go back and try to start said program based on a name that doesn't make any sense or isn't even pronounceable, useability is pretty far in the shithole.
As opposed to windows (let's start with 95-2K and ignore the later bloat): Start button is labeled "start" because that's where you want users to g
If anyone had actually RTFA, you'd know that Gates did not deny writing this e-mail when it was shown to him, he simply said that writing emails like this was a part of his job.
This is partly/.'s fault for not linking to the original article in the Seattle PI and instead linked it to Gizmodo:
Isn't Visio a program that has a more technical user base? Why would the average Joe want to draw flow, state, or design diagrams on the computer, much less know that Visio is a program for this? But if say, you were to compare the names "Visio" with "Dia," I'd say Visio was some kind of graphics-related software, and Dia has something to do with calendars and organization.
More accurate would be asking random people what "Windows Media Player" does, or "Windows Movie Maker" for that matter. Not everyone uses these applications, but they sure as hell can tell what it does when they hear the name. Or as crappy as it is, "Notepad," or "Paint." Heck, extrapolate it out to non-MS products like "Textpad" and "Photoshop." As opposed to "Gimp" which evokes imagery of...uh, someone whose leg got mangled in an accident.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to move off the two-party system is to start small, with local, provincial, and lastly federal elections. It'll take a long time and a lot of work, but that's how democracies function. If your state senate or city council is made up of three or four parties such that no one party holds a definitive majority, that's when you know there's progress.
Unfortunately, most voters are idiots capable only of understanding a dichotamy and no more. In fact, a good number of voters don't care where their candidate stands in relation to them, so long as the candidate is in the right party. That's how screwed up US society is. If there are any grips with the US political climate, don't blame the politicians; blame the voters for not wanting to make an informed decision and not valuing their vote enough.
In-game ads probably wouldn't be anywhere close to your traditional media ads. In-game ads would be more like product placement. You know, "ColdSteel broadsword of fury" or "United Cutlry scimitar of the stars" or something. Or for potions, it'd be "Cherry Gatorade" and "Blueberry Gatorade."
Actual cut-scene advertisements probably won't be such a great idea, and wouldn't be used at all.
Just remember to park on the top floor of the garage.
They're not going to do acrobatics on those things, but they can sure as hell disorient and discomfort any attacker, severely injure anyone not strapped into a seat, and more or less nullify terrorist threats.
Not to mention that we now have air marshals that carry...
Maybe these people are just jealous that somebody else gets to live out their fantasy. Sour grapes and all.
Common sources of blood in a car:
1) Particularly bad paper cuts from map reading.
2) An accident happened outside, but the bleeder was brought to the car because the first aid kit is there.
3) The other type of accident (which would make you want to change your seats too).
Endangering the welfare of a minor, negligence, fraud, hell, even a number of conspiricy charges would apply...
Just slap her with as many charges as possible and let the court sort it out. But she'll be let of by the mere ridiculosity of it all if this is all they're going to charge her with. Maybe the DA is trying to let her off...
Why not test both?
After all, a little varnish can be had from parts of the violin that don't affect sound. Granted, it would scratch the thing, but it's a very small scratch.
Give it to 'em on toilet paper.
Because with a few exceptions, our brains are wired serially, as is our thought process.
Parallel programming is most applicable for simulations, where the program is actually trying to immitate real world situations. However, it is terrible for application programming, as applications are user-input-based, and because users' brains are serial, user applications are largely serial.
Quite frankly, we really only need 3 threads to look up e-mail, and 2 for word processing or web surfing. And since we can't do more than one thing at the same time, we don't need 7 cores total in order to do all tasks effectively, just 3. If we add background OS processes, we might need a few more threads, but 8 is already sufficient to cover all everyday tasks. And by the time it gets to 8, the bottleneck isn't the CPU or system memory, it's the storage medium, HDD, SSD, whatever, which is sequentially accessed. Yes, we can implement RAID, but how many regular, average Joe users even know what RAID is, much less need it.
I can just imagine some poor hiker being blasted into the sky walking or climbing over one of these pressurized caverns, just because the engineers had missed a hole somewhere inside the main cavern.
It'd be ideal if they could spray some kind of airtight lining along the walls, but that wouldn't be too eco-friendly, would it?
Where's that /. effect when you really need it?
You're anti-social.
There are indeed patches of nothing in the southwest, but there are many places where vegetation does grow, irrespective of irrigation. The desert there is a teeming ecosystem; it's not the Sahara that's all sand dunes and such. You don't always want to build on top of that vegetation.
Also, it might not be the brightest idea to build next to something like a mesa. It might or might not be a good to build on top of a mesa even if it has to be cut to allow trucks to get to the top.
There are lots of other examples where a proposal might be rejected.
Part of it is because it's really hard to get things passed without a true majority, that is, a veto-overriding majority. So anything the Democrats really want to do gets vetoed by Bush. Only the things that get both parties' support would be able to override a veto. Unfortunately, that would mean Republicans breaking with their party, which they're reluctant to do unless their constituents really demand for it, because it would mean less support from their party base come next election.
So the Democrats are forced to compromise on everything. Now, whether their compromises have been wise or not is a separate debate. But compromises are much better than a Republican-controlled congress and white house, as even the smallest checks that a two-party system offers would be completely blown away.
But this is why having multiple parties is a good thing, in particular, an odd number of parties. Far fewer compromises need to be made, and the power of congress actually increases.
And when is electrical consumption the highest? In parts of the US, this is during the day (AC). In other parts, it is in the evening (lights).
If the increased in demand caused by the former could be fulfilled by solar instead of gas/coal/oil, it would already be a major step.
1) Install solar plants.
2) Wait for air to heat up and create a breeze.
3) Install wind planst to take advantage of breeze.
4) Profit!
Sales tax is a consumption tax. In fact, there are places with food and clothing (necessities) exempt, so the sales tax in those places are actually luxury goods taxes.
Who consumes the most amount of luxury goods? The middle class and upper class are both major consumers. But more specifically, it is the visitors, the tourists, who are the largest such consumers. A sales tax brings in a lot of income for the municipality for a tourism-driven economic paradigm. However, in places where there are few or no tourists, it acts as a "presence" tax for the lower-middle class and the poor. Since these people pay very little income tax, and probably no property tax, it's probably the only tax they pay.
Online sales taxes are split into intrastate tax, and interstate tax. The constitutional legality of interstate tax (like the one in New York) is up for debate. However, the purpose of such a tax is to promote local businesses. After all, items ordered online usually have the additional shipping expense on top of the cost of the order. Intrastate taxes have the opposite effect--they discourage local businesses by encouraging residents to order outside of their own state, and encourage businesses to not have a presence within the state.
It gets a little hard to tell what's what when someone has his head up his ass and his tail between his legs.
Remember; when you are being approached your gun is in your holster - his is already out, who do you think gets to shoot first?
BS. Most armed muggers just flash their guns. It's not the movies, where they stick it to your head and demand for money. If you threaten them, they might use it, but that's about it. The more dangerous situations are with the kids with their hands in their pockets, and something inside that looks like a gun. In that case, take out your money, but drop it onto the floor. This typically buys you the opening you need, unless you're up against a grizzled veteran, which is always a good thing.
And all that crap about taking care of civilians - BS! if you got a gun and start flashing it people will die, even at 15 m. most people will be wildly inaccurate with a pistol - and if they are inexperienced with munition they are likely to have bullets that will go straight through the target and hit whatever is on the other side (hint even the police in several countries have bullets that fail to stop inside the target, and have killed innocent bystanders).
Which is why licenses, requirement for proper training, etc. are not bad things. Besides, without proper training, if you just flash a gun, you're actually a greater danger to yourself. That gun can be taken from you, or it can shoot you while in the holster. And if it's taken from you, you're dead. By flashing your gun, you just showed your mugger you're ready and willing to use lethal force against him. To cover his own back, he's not going to let you go.
You're missing the point: these people more than likely already have guns.
And revocation of this particular isn't necessarily an implication that the prices of guns and ammunition will go down.
The upside is that a license will still be necessary for ownership, and hence depending on how the government plays it, there might be more people with formal gun training than people without. And that's really the safest thing; a gun in the hands of a well-trained user is far less dangerous than one in the hands of an untrained user, to everyone in the vicinity, including the user himself.
Breyer's concern is well founded. Unfortunately, his example is highly flawed. He uses the machine gun as an example. However, machine guns have no place in self-defense. Machine guns cause wanton and unnecessary destruction. The very idea of a machine gun is to cause wanton and unnecessary destruction--to spray an area full of bullets. Any weapon whose application will kill indiscriminately is not a weapon for the purpose self-defense; at best, it is a weapon for self-defense and then some.
It is the same idea that "arms" does not include bombs, grenades, rockets, missiles, etc. At no time does self-defense require such drastic measures, and hence the Second Amendment does not apply. Now, I'm all for owning such weapons, because it is a free country. However, in the course of using these weapons, self-defense is likely not applicable, and hence the use of such weapons is and should be illegal, and not covered under the constitutional right. Hence, if the DC restriction of requiring a handgun to be disassembled or locked is applied to such weapons, such a law wouldn't be unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.
In fact, the same could be said of cop-killer bullets. The purpose of such bullets is not to defend oneself, but to kill or severely maim. The concept of the bullets cannot be applied within the framework of self-defense, hence such "arms" are not protected under the Second Amendment. Any new weapon "more dangerous" (which I read to be more lethal) to a person than a basic firearm would be considered the same way. Now, if people started becoming resiliant to getting hit with bullets even if they had vests on, then it would be time to reconsider what falls reasonably under self-defense. But until that time, and it would be a highly unlikely event, there is no circular reasoning.
Sightly off topic, but since we're quoting the decision, my favorite line:
It would be rather like saying "He filled and kicked the bucket" to mean "He filled the bucket and died." Grotesque.Not a big fan of replying to myself, but I'm going to go into a bit of a rant now regarding *ix systems in general:
UNIX originally was not designed for average Joe consumption. First off, it was command line only, which implied a certain linear method of thinking that not everybody is good at. Most people are visual, because that's what they're used to, and not geared towards the mathematical thinking that issuing commands requires. The biggest problem from this design philosophy is that engineers like to do everything efficiently, so they all of their most commonly-performed tasks have the shortest, most efficient names.
Take the most basic, simpliest thing one could do in a directory: list its contents. The command: ls. If you had never seen a command prompt in your life, much less DOS, but you knew how files were organized in say, Explorer or Finder, you'd want to know what was in a directory. You wouldn't even know how to figure that out! So you type "help," hoping for some insight into the system. Only problem, help either gives you a ton of garbage not related to what you want to do, or it's an alias for man.
First of all, WTF is man? I'm a man. What does that have to do with providing me help? I know man is short for manual, but the average Joe does not. Why couldn't it be "manual" and have "man" be the alias? Hell, why couldn't it just be damn "help" and have manual or man be aliases. I don't know...
And then it gives a usage message, but you have to already know the command. That's no help at all. If I knew the damn command for getting the contents of a directory (or folder in Windows-speak), I wouldn't need help!
Then we get into opening up the most basic of files: text files for reading. What do we use? Text? Open? Read? Nope, it's "cat," "more," "less," or "type." First of all, cat is an animal. Where does more and less come in, and what are they more or less than (for that matter, WTF is a pipe, and does it have to do with the tubes of the internet--does it get clogged too sometimes)? Type is a bit better, but type is a user action, not a computer action. The user doesn't want to type anyway, he wants to view. Which brings up vi. And don't even get me started on how unfriendly vi is for even intermediate computer users, not to mention the average Joe. So, trying to read a text file may, at best, result in actually opening the file up and being able to see the first page, but having to reboot when you want to do something else; and at worst, accidentally deleting the file altogether.
OK, these are issues with beginner (or intermediate) users using the command line, which one could argue, they probably shouldn't be doing unless they intend on becoming advanced users. Fine. But the bigger issue is, this philosophy has extended to the naming of all programs for unix; apt-get, emacs, gimp, to name a few. Even better names like Firefox and Blender are kinda WTF until you've done your research. Why couldn't they have been named "update" "text editor" "photo editor" "internet browser" and "3D modeler" respectively, or some cooler version thereof, is completely beyond me. Yes, the unix command line is most efficiently used when programs are single words. But it's easy enough to adopt the Windows model of having a separate executable name from a program name, and have both names go to the same executable.
Usability begins at the name. If a user cannot figure out how to do what the user wants to get done, usability is 0. If the user has to go through several steps, one of which is going to yet another program, usability is pretty damn low. That is to say, if a user has to look through a massive list to find what program name does what, and then go back and try to start said program based on a name that doesn't make any sense or isn't even pronounceable, useability is pretty far in the shithole.
As opposed to windows (let's start with 95-2K and ignore the later bloat): Start button is labeled "start" because that's where you want users to g
If anyone had actually RTFA, you'd know that Gates did not deny writing this e-mail when it was shown to him, he simply said that writing emails like this was a part of his job.
This is partly /.'s fault for not linking to the original article in the Seattle PI and instead linked it to Gizmodo:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp
Isn't Visio a program that has a more technical user base? Why would the average Joe want to draw flow, state, or design diagrams on the computer, much less know that Visio is a program for this? But if say, you were to compare the names "Visio" with "Dia," I'd say Visio was some kind of graphics-related software, and Dia has something to do with calendars and organization.
More accurate would be asking random people what "Windows Media Player" does, or "Windows Movie Maker" for that matter. Not everyone uses these applications, but they sure as hell can tell what it does when they hear the name. Or as crappy as it is, "Notepad," or "Paint." Heck, extrapolate it out to non-MS products like "Textpad" and "Photoshop." As opposed to "Gimp" which evokes imagery of...uh, someone whose leg got mangled in an accident.