It won't even let me post if I don't whitelist it. Then again, I do have slashdot whitelisted, soooo.... I might have to look into a custom set of script enablements for Slashdot now, because this is just ridiculous.
On the upside, the people put a government in place that curbs air and water pollution, and makes it difficult to fire someone because they're gay.
The legal climate is that of every area that has lots of money floating around: you can hire a cheap lawyer, an expensive lawyer, or anything in between. For what it's worth, I haven't seen anyone be sued for volunteering to work through lunch. Forcing someine to work through lunch without overtime compensation though will quickly get you a letter from a lawyer.
The environmentalism can be kooky - but then again, every area has its bunch of crazies. We just have all of them - crystal power people, anti-vaxxers, celeb-chasers, gun nuts, republicans, white supremacists, black panther, democrats, socialists, libertarians, slow-food people, fast-food people, techies, farmers, billionaires, hill-billies, etc. The upside: whatever your brand of crazy is, we have it.
It's a nice place to live, if you decide to actually live there. And find a place to live. Everything else is pretty copacetic there.
Not opensource, but Salesforce does offer up a good chunk of their online storage/access for free to charities. And since at the core, Salesforce is just an Oracle DB wrapped with some fancy business logic, you can use it as an easy store of information, with access that can be handled even by total neophytes. Drawback: it requires Internet access and depends entirely on what Salesforce decides to do with its offering for charities.
For an open-source and stand-alone application, LibreOffice Base is the way to go. Just make sure they have some form of backup (hard copies!) and that someone who knows at least a smidgeon of computer stuff takes over after you leave. Otherwise, I'll echo what someone else said: if it's too complicated, they'll abandon it the instance you walk out the door.
And why do I need to whitelist it to load full comments, reply to large comments, and to moderate? The only thing I can find is this shit: http://pureleads.com/, and it seems to me that beta still hasn't fully died.
Unfortunately, Seaworld's version of an orca enclosure is the equivalent of the zoos and circuses of the PT Barnum era. For comparison, the Monterey Bay aquarium has a bigger tank for its shark/turtle/tuna and other large fish exhibit.
Yes, you get to see the animal. Yes, you get to see it do stupid tricks. But that's the only value it has for you, and the only value it has for the animal is that it isn't immediately killed off.
The vast majority of ISPs in this country do not offer any (or very little) TV service at all.
And the vast majority of "ISPs" in this country are not relevant to the vast majority of Americans, as they service tiny and highly localized markets. Most markets are served by some form of the telephone/cable company duopoly, both of which offer TV, DVRs and soon streaming services.
The majority of the money you pay for your cable television goes to the the content providers and re-transmit fees. Local stations re-transmit fees are huge. The ISPs make the most money off services. Like voip, cloud storage, antivirus, DVRs, equipment rentals, etc...
If it would be a money-losing proposition, ISPs would get out of the business of offering TV. Somehow, neither Comcast nor ATT are doing that.
Despite this, every ISP that I've worked with over the past 5 years or so has bandwidth cap projects going now. It's coming to everyone, everywhere. regardless of if your ISP provides TV or not.
Of course. It's an awesome way of making sure that you maximize your revenue while minimizing your investment. Bandwidth caps are awesome for ISPs. They suck for customers. The reason they are coming everywhere should tell you something about the competitiveness of the market.
They're locked in a race to the bottom with prices. Customers always go with the cheapest provider, so they can't afford infrastructure improvements without cutting themselves out of the market.
You mean, there's actual competition in the market? I haven't seen actual competition in one of the heaviest populated areas in the US since.... well, ever. The only options were Comcast (sometimes), ATT (always), and maybe an ATT DSL reseller, whose main line during issues was "Sorry, we know this, but ATT won't fix their lines."
Most customers are like your parents.
If that would be true, Netflix wouldn't see the growth it does. Plus, there's a huge opportunity for remote doctor's visits that isn't taking off because most plans offer a measly 1Mb up.
The sizzlers trying to narrow the front door so we can't get in.
You missed the part where there's only two food places in town, both are colluding in making smaller doors, and both are offering slightly larger doors at rapidly increasing prices.
Congratulations - you just proved that the current agribusiness model is purely based on profit and zero on long-term sustainability, thereby in one shot invalidating both capitalist viewpoints (ownership results in guaranteed long-term care!) and libertarian viewpoints (by the time the agribusiness is done, polyculture is out of business and incapable of providing any sustenance).
What about adoption? Children without marriage? Poly-amorous relationships? Common enough in my area that no one blinks an eye, and yet they're not in the game.
Let's face it - Tomodachi Life is the Tamagotchi of sims. Dead simple, based on really simple rules, and with little actual simulation of anything. So gay relationships - yeah, I'm not surprised they were left out.
Personally, I think the biggest mistake by Nintendo was to use Miis instead of other, customizable avatars. At that point, you're waiting to piss someone off because their preferred lifestyle is impossible in the game.
aybe if we cleaned up our unnecessarily exhaustive legal process that has basically become a job program this wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, because making sure due process was observed, mistakes were uncovered and general asshattery by various people was minimized is just a job program. I guess we should just put you in a suit and call you Judge Dredd, right?
Here's one original study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 There are many more out there. The consensus is that a non-trivial amount of people are wrongly sentenced to death, and an even higher proportion are wrongly convicted, but never exonerated on further review
Or asphyxiation by Nitrogen. Feed them pure Nitrogen, watch them pass and die without their body noticing the total absence of oxygen.
I'm fairly convinced that the US actually wants executions to be gruesome. Otherwise, they'd have settled on some long-known and totally harmless methods.
Actually, the reason I don't like BBT is that especially in the last few seasons, it's basically gotten mean. Penny calls the geeks losers, the geeks call Penny a loser, no one actually achieves anything, the geeky side of things is mostly there to get laughs on the basis of "look how anti-social and inept they are".
So in short, it's not really geeky anymore, the humor is basically about insulting everyone right and left, and the people are basically flat stereotypes.
When I read a page, I can actually see multiple words in a sentence, context from the line(s) above, and generally can access a context of about 10-15 words at a time. While speed reading (as in, actual speed reading a page), you read by going down the center of the page, which preserves a good chunk of the context, and assumes that missing a few words here and there is only going to minorly impair your understanding of the text.
This, on the other hand, provides a minor speed-up at the cost of context, the ability to back-track and no ability to skip words that don't help much with understanding like various particles or flowery prose.
Hogwash, rights exist specifically to protect the minority from the majority.
Please explain how those rights are enforced without resorting to laws, a court system, or other people part of the power structure.
Have fun.
It is my belief that these righs are natural, you saying they are not is meaningless to me. And you certainly have the right to think whatever the fuck you want to, I could care less.
That was certainly an eloquent and convincing argument. Not to mention, a great display of your grasp of the English language.
Fun fact: your right to life is inviolate only for as long as everyone around you agrees to it. Fun fact #2: no one specified anything about what life.
In other words: your right to life is a privilege granted to you by everyone around you, and can be revoked by a single person in your environment. Feel free to explain how that differs from a privilege.
Because a lot of Slashdotters are libertarians who only have the most cursory understanding of social philosophy, the Constitution, what lead to it, who created it and why, and are about as sensible as the Communists of the last century.
Rights exist because a majority of the power structure in a society agree that they do. Where that agreement comes from is rather irrelevant - church, open fora, private discussions, backroom deals between cigar-chomping fat cats, a sentimental upwelling; it all works the same way: at some point, enough people agree that some rights are useful or fit into the current moral philosophy, and decide to enforce them.
That's why equal rights for gays are being accepted now, that's why Freedom of Speech is central to how the US operates politically, and why gun rights in the US are sacrosanct.
Babbling on about natural rights is as useful about babbling on about what Nature "wants".
Feel free to demonstrate how the theories and models do not match reality, and provide a better theory and model. In the meantime, your opinion is worth squat.
Since you clearly never took logic 101: an appeal to authority is only wrong when your appeal to authority does not involve an actual authority. Which the two people referred to, are. In which case an appeal to authority is actually the right course of action.
Asimov said it best: our greatest failing is that we believe that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.
Because too often, Americans are ignorant of what the Constitution says, how it came about, the philosophical ideas that its writers tried to cement in law and are thin-skinned, whiny idiots.
No, seriously. I've had this discussion with people since the mid-nineties, and it's because they were the above. Some people do get it, but a frightening amount of people have no idea what Freedom of Speech actually means, why it exists, and why it is important.
It's not a dangerous road, it's how societies operate. As a matter of fact, it's the only way to actually build a society. Anything short of that is just pie-in-the-sky anarchism. As for your reverse example, that is exactly what's taking place in the US right now. They're free to do that, and I'm free to organize a counter boycott.
The alternative that you propose either requires an incredible restriction on speech and action, or requires a complete lack of interaction between any individuals. One is terrible, the other untenable.
And where does my free speech start to vociferously disagree with someone else's use of free speech? Let me clue you in: it starts the instant I open my mouth, the same way that Eich's did.
Free speech means exactly one thing: the government can't put you in jail for what you say, and even that comes with (very specific and spelled out, but nevertheless) limits.
What you're failing to understand is that free speech protection has nothing to do with protecting someone from others who he/she pissed off through his/her speech. And that speech extends to organizing a boycott. Because without action, speech is just.... well, speech. Eich supported his speech with money, and others threatened to do the same. Eich just found out that his right to speech and action cuts both ways. To his credit, he resigned. He would not have been able to properly run Mozilla after this kerfuffle.
Living in a society means that you do follow local standards. Otherwise, they WILL kick you out. Eich just found out that he joined a society that disagreed with his stance on gay marriage. What you're advocating is nothing but anarchy. And that gets quickly eaten up by warlords.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't even let me post if I don't whitelist it. Then again, I do have slashdot whitelisted, soooo.... I might have to look into a custom set of script enablements for Slashdot now, because this is just ridiculous.
On the upside, the people put a government in place that curbs air and water pollution, and makes it difficult to fire someone because they're gay.
The legal climate is that of every area that has lots of money floating around: you can hire a cheap lawyer, an expensive lawyer, or anything in between. For what it's worth, I haven't seen anyone be sued for volunteering to work through lunch. Forcing someine to work through lunch without overtime compensation though will quickly get you a letter from a lawyer.
The environmentalism can be kooky - but then again, every area has its bunch of crazies. We just have all of them - crystal power people, anti-vaxxers, celeb-chasers, gun nuts, republicans, white supremacists, black panther, democrats, socialists, libertarians, slow-food people, fast-food people, techies, farmers, billionaires, hill-billies, etc. The upside: whatever your brand of crazy is, we have it.
It's a nice place to live, if you decide to actually live there. And find a place to live. Everything else is pretty copacetic there.
Not opensource, but Salesforce does offer up a good chunk of their online storage/access for free to charities. And since at the core, Salesforce is just an Oracle DB wrapped with some fancy business logic, you can use it as an easy store of information, with access that can be handled even by total neophytes. Drawback: it requires Internet access and depends entirely on what Salesforce decides to do with its offering for charities.
For an open-source and stand-alone application, LibreOffice Base is the way to go. Just make sure they have some form of backup (hard copies!) and that someone who knows at least a smidgeon of computer stuff takes over after you leave. Otherwise, I'll echo what someone else said: if it's too complicated, they'll abandon it the instance you walk out the door.
And why do I need to whitelist it to load full comments, reply to large comments, and to moderate? The only thing I can find is this shit: http://pureleads.com/, and it seems to me that beta still hasn't fully died.
Dice and Dice Holdings: go fuck yourself.
Unfortunately, Seaworld's version of an orca enclosure is the equivalent of the zoos and circuses of the PT Barnum era. For comparison, the Monterey Bay aquarium has a bigger tank for its shark/turtle/tuna and other large fish exhibit.
Yes, you get to see the animal. Yes, you get to see it do stupid tricks. But that's the only value it has for you, and the only value it has for the animal is that it isn't immediately killed off.
Not much of an endorsement.
The vast majority of ISPs in this country do not offer any (or very little) TV service at all.
And the vast majority of "ISPs" in this country are not relevant to the vast majority of Americans, as they service tiny and highly localized markets. Most markets are served by some form of the telephone/cable company duopoly, both of which offer TV, DVRs and soon streaming services.
The majority of the money you pay for your cable television goes to the the content providers and re-transmit fees. Local stations re-transmit fees are huge. The ISPs make the most money off services. Like voip, cloud storage, antivirus, DVRs, equipment rentals, etc...
If it would be a money-losing proposition, ISPs would get out of the business of offering TV. Somehow, neither Comcast nor ATT are doing that.
Despite this, every ISP that I've worked with over the past 5 years or so has bandwidth cap projects going now. It's coming to everyone, everywhere. regardless of if your ISP provides TV or not.
Of course. It's an awesome way of making sure that you maximize your revenue while minimizing your investment. Bandwidth caps are awesome for ISPs. They suck for customers. The reason they are coming everywhere should tell you something about the competitiveness of the market.
They're locked in a race to the bottom with prices. Customers always go with the cheapest provider, so they can't afford infrastructure improvements without cutting themselves out of the market.
You mean, there's actual competition in the market? I haven't seen actual competition in one of the heaviest populated areas in the US since.... well, ever. The only options were Comcast (sometimes), ATT (always), and maybe an ATT DSL reseller, whose main line during issues was "Sorry, we know this, but ATT won't fix their lines."
Most customers are like your parents.
If that would be true, Netflix wouldn't see the growth it does. Plus, there's a huge opportunity for remote doctor's visits that isn't taking off because most plans offer a measly 1Mb up.
The sizzlers trying to narrow the front door so we can't get in.
You missed the part where there's only two food places in town, both are colluding in making smaller doors, and both are offering slightly larger doors at rapidly increasing prices.
Congratulations - you just proved that the current agribusiness model is purely based on profit and zero on long-term sustainability, thereby in one shot invalidating both capitalist viewpoints (ownership results in guaranteed long-term care!) and libertarian viewpoints (by the time the agribusiness is done, polyculture is out of business and incapable of providing any sustenance).
Wish I could still use my mod points - instead I'll just post a "Well-said".
What about adoption? Children without marriage? Poly-amorous relationships? Common enough in my area that no one blinks an eye, and yet they're not in the game.
Let's face it - Tomodachi Life is the Tamagotchi of sims. Dead simple, based on really simple rules, and with little actual simulation of anything. So gay relationships - yeah, I'm not surprised they were left out.
Personally, I think the biggest mistake by Nintendo was to use Miis instead of other, customizable avatars. At that point, you're waiting to piss someone off because their preferred lifestyle is impossible in the game.
There are plenty of studies out there that show that executions cost significantly more than life imprisonments. You can get started with some studies here: http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost If you want to save money, lock people up in the Waldorf Astoria for life.
aybe if we cleaned up our unnecessarily exhaustive legal process that has basically become a job program this wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, because making sure due process was observed, mistakes were uncovered and general asshattery by various people was minimized is just a job program. I guess we should just put you in a suit and call you Judge Dredd, right?
Here's one original study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 There are many more out there. The consensus is that a non-trivial amount of people are wrongly sentenced to death, and an even higher proportion are wrongly convicted, but never exonerated on further review
Or asphyxiation by Nitrogen. Feed them pure Nitrogen, watch them pass and die without their body noticing the total absence of oxygen.
I'm fairly convinced that the US actually wants executions to be gruesome. Otherwise, they'd have settled on some long-known and totally harmless methods.
Actually, the reason I don't like BBT is that especially in the last few seasons, it's basically gotten mean. Penny calls the geeks losers, the geeks call Penny a loser, no one actually achieves anything, the geeky side of things is mostly there to get laughs on the basis of "look how anti-social and inept they are".
So in short, it's not really geeky anymore, the humor is basically about insulting everyone right and left, and the people are basically flat stereotypes.
Hadn't thought about that - good to know.
When I read a page, I can actually see multiple words in a sentence, context from the line(s) above, and generally can access a context of about 10-15 words at a time. While speed reading (as in, actual speed reading a page), you read by going down the center of the page, which preserves a good chunk of the context, and assumes that missing a few words here and there is only going to minorly impair your understanding of the text.
This, on the other hand, provides a minor speed-up at the cost of context, the ability to back-track and no ability to skip words that don't help much with understanding like various particles or flowery prose.
Yep, this approach is idiotic.
Correction: people get shot in China when their fraud embarrasses the government.
What's with the hard-on that some right-wingers have for autocratic governments? Wait - don't answer that. It'll be depressing.
Privileges can be revoked without legal repercussions.
Good. Step 2: how are legal repercussions determined? Compare and contrast your inalienable rights with those of blacks pre 1970.
Hogwash, rights exist specifically to protect the minority from the majority.
Please explain how those rights are enforced without resorting to laws, a court system, or other people part of the power structure.
Have fun.
It is my belief that these righs are natural, you saying they are not is meaningless to me. And you certainly have the right to think whatever the fuck you want to, I could care less.
That was certainly an eloquent and convincing argument. Not to mention, a great display of your grasp of the English language.
You have the right to life for example,
Fun fact: your right to life is inviolate only for as long as everyone around you agrees to it. Fun fact #2: no one specified anything about what life.
In other words: your right to life is a privilege granted to you by everyone around you, and can be revoked by a single person in your environment. Feel free to explain how that differs from a privilege.
Because a lot of Slashdotters are libertarians who only have the most cursory understanding of social philosophy, the Constitution, what lead to it, who created it and why, and are about as sensible as the Communists of the last century.
Rights exist because a majority of the power structure in a society agree that they do. Where that agreement comes from is rather irrelevant - church, open fora, private discussions, backroom deals between cigar-chomping fat cats, a sentimental upwelling; it all works the same way: at some point, enough people agree that some rights are useful or fit into the current moral philosophy, and decide to enforce them.
That's why equal rights for gays are being accepted now, that's why Freedom of Speech is central to how the US operates politically, and why gun rights in the US are sacrosanct.
Babbling on about natural rights is as useful about babbling on about what Nature "wants".
Feel free to demonstrate how the theories and models do not match reality, and provide a better theory and model. In the meantime, your opinion is worth squat.
Since you clearly never took logic 101: an appeal to authority is only wrong when your appeal to authority does not involve an actual authority. Which the two people referred to, are. In which case an appeal to authority is actually the right course of action.
Asimov said it best: our greatest failing is that we believe that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.
Because too often, Americans are ignorant of what the Constitution says, how it came about, the philosophical ideas that its writers tried to cement in law and are thin-skinned, whiny idiots.
No, seriously. I've had this discussion with people since the mid-nineties, and it's because they were the above. Some people do get it, but a frightening amount of people have no idea what Freedom of Speech actually means, why it exists, and why it is important.
It's not a dangerous road, it's how societies operate. As a matter of fact, it's the only way to actually build a society. Anything short of that is just pie-in-the-sky anarchism. As for your reverse example, that is exactly what's taking place in the US right now. They're free to do that, and I'm free to organize a counter boycott.
The alternative that you propose either requires an incredible restriction on speech and action, or requires a complete lack of interaction between any individuals. One is terrible, the other untenable.
And where does my free speech start to vociferously disagree with someone else's use of free speech? Let me clue you in: it starts the instant I open my mouth, the same way that Eich's did.
Free speech means exactly one thing: the government can't put you in jail for what you say, and even that comes with (very specific and spelled out, but nevertheless) limits.
What you're failing to understand is that free speech protection has nothing to do with protecting someone from others who he/she pissed off through his/her speech. And that speech extends to organizing a boycott. Because without action, speech is just.... well, speech. Eich supported his speech with money, and others threatened to do the same. Eich just found out that his right to speech and action cuts both ways. To his credit, he resigned. He would not have been able to properly run Mozilla after this kerfuffle.
Living in a society means that you do follow local standards. Otherwise, they WILL kick you out. Eich just found out that he joined a society that disagreed with his stance on gay marriage. What you're advocating is nothing but anarchy. And that gets quickly eaten up by warlords.