The State of Montana used to have no speed limit during the daytime. It was "do not drive faster than conditions allow". So one day a cop ticketed a guy going ~90 mph. The guy sued the State saying 90 was safe, the court ruled the law was too vague, and the State created a daytime speed limit of 75.
How speed limits are set:
- Highway engineers design most interstates for 120 mph travel, per Congressional law. ---- Traffic engineers observe how fast everyone is driving, and make an observation "70% of drivers are moving 84 mph or less. 30% are driving 85 or higher. We recommend the 70th percentile speed of 84 mph for maximum traffic flow and minimal accidents." ----- Politicians step-in, kiss a couple butts, and impose 55 or 65 "for safety's sake" or "gas savings" or some other bs (perhaps bribery from the insurance company, or a desire to collect more money off speeding tickets).
And then you have a mess.
Some people are doing 75-85mph, per the traffic engineers' original recommendation. Other people would like to drive faster (after all the interstate was designed for safe travel at 120), but they are only doing 55-60 for fear of getting a $150 extortion....er, fine + increased insurance rates. The resulting disparity of speeds (55 to 85) creates a dangerous situation like bumper cars in an amusement park... a situation that would not exist if the Politicians had bothered to follow the Engineers recommendation.
But I'm an engineer so I'm used to not being heard by management.
Mandating insurance for everybody is cheaper than having to (1) sue the uninsured person who hit you (2) try to win the case (3) try to take the other person's car, house, anything of value (4) and waste years in the process.
Someone show me where in the Bill of Rights it says,
"Every person has the right to raid their neighbors' wallets, so said person can buy themselves a new heart, lung, or other organ."* I cannot lay my hand on that part of the Constitution. It must be there since everyone claims they have that right, but I cannot locate it?
Thanks.;-)
* [IMHO this is theft of labor... making someone else work to pay your bills. Also known as slavery (reference Rome where slaves earned money & then handed it over to their masters). Nobody has a right to enslave another & take the other's wages earned, just so he/she can buy a new organ.]
I forgot to add how truly sucky Windows machines were pre-98. I don't know what colleges are like today, but back in the 90s we had a choice to use Macs on the left side of the computer lab, or IBMs on the right side of the room. Like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. ----- But later in my career they forced us into a "computer learning class" for Advanced Physics which had nothing but IBMs.
Having grown-up with GEOS on the Commodore, Workbench on the Amiga, and Finder on the Mac, using the bass-backwards Windows 3.1 Kludge was like torture to me.
A more stupidly-designed graphical OS I have never seen.
I just acquired a Win98 laptop (with 96 meg of RAM).
But after experiencing the frustration of trying to run VLC Player, Azureus, and RealPlayer, and discovering either (1) they don't work or (2) they can't load the latest codecs and therefore display a blank screen instead of video and (3) they can see my USB drive but can't read it.... I decided to get a WinXP laptop.
10 years for a Win98 PC is just too old to work with current Vista-designed software.
10 years for a Mac? It will still get the job done.
>>>Crappy, closed-technology machines.>>The cult of the single-button mouse.>>Reseller programs from hell. Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless.>>Two wire AppleTalk networks with all of the speed of ISDN on a good day.>>Wonderful and proprietary (given few others used them) PPC CPUs.
PowerPC was as ubiquitous as Motorola 68000-based machines. It was the logical next step after the 68040 and everyone (even Microsoft) thought PowerPCs would eventually take-over desktops. It didn't quite work out, but that's not Apple's fault..... anymore than it's Apple's fault that Pentiums were discontinued. That's just the way things go.
I'm glad this merger happened, because they already announced an "a la carte" plan. You pay $5 and get 20 channels of your own choice. That would be cheap enough for me to sign up.
(Although I did just get free HD Radio which provides about twice as many channels. Hmmmm. See? The customer does have choices.)
Well every "rule" has exceptions. There was PS3 at ~$700 and the 3DO at ~$700 back in the 90s. But generally speaking, consoles use one-generation-old technology in order to provide decent gaming at an affordable price (about $300). Nintendo's NES was providing 8 bit gaming while most computer gamers had already moved onto 16 bit. Super Nintendo provided 65,000 colors but computer gamers were already looking at 16 million colors. And so on.
>>>"A genre that used to dominate innovation in the field now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate"
As I recall that statement would have been just as valid in 1990. PC gaming has never been inexpensive to participate, because PC gaming is always pushing the envelope.
Woah. Stop. Is this so-called "between television channels" technology going to stop me from watching channel 5 in D.C.? (80 miles distant). I don't like the idea of some corporation or person deciding, "Well channel 5 is not used in southeast Pennsylvania, so I'll broadcast there," and wipe out my weak but still watchable television 5.
>>>"But why should internet connectivity have to be like other services?"
That was the same thing people were asking in the 1990s. They said "internet is different and doesn't have to follow the same rules as old-style brick-and-mortar business". Then the bubble popped in 2000 and they discovered that internet truly does need to follow the old rules (profit or go bankrupt).
Same applies to internet billing.
You can't sell everybody the same product, because not everybody is downloading the same amount of data. Some just read email (megabytes) while others download music (gigabytes) while others download movies (terabytes). Since the data amount changes according to each person's wants, it makes sense to change the amount of money charged based upon those bytes.
$15 for low "bytes per month" users $30 for medium $45 for high $100 for unlimited
Also: I don't see why it's necessary for ISPs to oversubscribe their lines. As we can see, that's not working very well, what with P2P or Itunes connections getting disconnected or blocked. Imposing extra fees is a good way to limit traffic (look at "time of use" fees being applied to California highways) by encouraging customers to self-limit themselves to save money.
>>>"Commercial movie download services are going to have a much harder time getting business if users start finding that they have to pay higher fees because they downloaded too many movies in a month."
Yes.
Oh well. (shrug) If downloading movies requires a $100 a month "unlimited gigabytes" connection, thus making DVDs a cheaper option for customers, so be it. That's the free market in action, where one type of product (downloading) competes with another type of product (dvd) for consumer dollars.
That reason is why I buy more DVDs than downloads. It's cheaper to get the DVD, than to pay for more gigabytes.
>>>"We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly"
False. Consumers did not reject "per gigabyte" tiers because no such animal has ever existed within the U.S. Some of the ISPs had time limits, but never gigabyte limits (you could download as much as you wanted).
Also, tiers based upon speed have proved themselves to be inoperative, because the professional liars.... er, salespeople exaggerate. They sell 10 megabit and then backwards-kludge it to 1 megabit through limits.
Therefore it would be smarter to based the tiers on a measureable, unalterable quantity - 50 gigabyte, 200 gigabyte, 500 gigabyte, or unlimited gigabyte. That way the control is in the hands of the customer. Want more? Pay more. Need to save money? Lower your gigabyte usage.
Simple.
Just like how consumers control the numbers of Watts of electricity used (or not used). Same principle.
I find it difficult to believe Gates stole Microsoft BASIC from his local user group.
HE was the one who wrote the famous CUG letter about not stealing software. For him to lecture his fellow club members about not stealing, and then do it himself, would be hypocritical.
Hate Apple? I don't remember anyone hating apple, although they did say their prices were too high in the 1980s.
And Bill Gates:
I never had an opinion about him, but I hated the IBM/MS-DOS empire which symbolized a lack of progress in the 80s (and in some respects still do). While I was creating music on my Ataris and Commodores, the MS-DOS machines were still going "beep" with a mere 4 colors. While my Amiga was running a dozen programs at the same time, Microsoft machines were still limited to just a single task.
By rights IBM/Microsoft PCs should have died while the innovators at Atari, Commodore, Amiga rose to the top with their multimedia machines.
But success and innovation aren't always the same thing.
All my other utilities have tired/metered service - electricity, water, even the phone (10 cents per call). Why should the internet utility be the sole exception? I suggest the following solution:
- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit) - $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit) - $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit) - $100 a month for unlimited
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
>>>"And it extended the mainstream support period for XP to April 14, 2009"
Works for me. Hopefully by that time Windows 10 will be on the market, and if Mickeysoft keeps its promise to "streamline" the kernal, Win10 will run much faster than Vista.
Oh well. I'll just repeat it: "If you think engineering textbooks are boring (black and white and contain long equations) then you should take heart, because the Engineering Job is going to be just as boring."
That was a genuine comment from a genuine engineer... not offensive enough to deserve deleting? If anything, my time at Penn State was MORE exciting than my actual 10-year career as an electrical engineer. Every day I come to the same tiny cubicle and stare at the same flickering CRT moving around the same circuits I've seen a thousand times. At least at Penn State I got to flirt with biology coeds (points to wife), but that's not the case on the job. I'm not even sure we have any women here.;-) Oh well; that's life. The reason I stay on the job is because they pay me $55 an hour, else I'd go do something more fun. I theorize that the more boring the job, the more they pay, because that's the only way for them to fill the seat.
Anyway, back on topic:
If you think college is boring, maybe you ought to go on an Internship and discover the boredom of an actual engineering job.
I only pay $5 a month for my cellphone. If you think your cellphone company is charging too much ($0.40/min overages charges, et cetera) than maybe it's time to switch. If you think the charges are unfair, then stop paying them. Switch to a better company.
Exercise your freedom to walk away. Vote with your dollar. Choose a better company.
>>>Claiming that something is 'entirely and completely fair' while using the cellular industry as your example strains creditability"
Claiming I only used the cell industry makes me question your reading comprehension. I also said, "Take more; pay more. Just like electrical service, cell service, water service, et cetera, et cetera." Every utility that comes into my house is metered according to use (yes even my phone is metered; 10 cents per call). Why should the internet utility be the sole exception? I suggest the following solution:
- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit) - $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit) - $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit) - $100 a month for unlimited
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
I use dialup for P2P usage, and never once have they needed to block my access. That's because the Dialup service accurately describes their available bandwidth as "56k" and they design their servers accordingly.
In contrast Comcast describes their available bandwidth as "10,000k" which is a blatant lie. The courts should step in and force Comcast to downgrade their ads to say "1000k" since that's apparently all their servers can handle.
I don't know why people talk about "literacy" like it's such a great thing. Gone are the days when the only source of information was books or newspapers... such as during the 1800s when European researcher Tocqueville observed virtually all Americans could read. Back then reading was a necessity.
But not today. Today you can acquire huge sums of knowledge from television and radio. For myself, I took college-level courses while driving & listening to an audio cassette. No reading required, because the information traveled from the professor to me via sound waves.
The idea that "reading is the only way to learn" is an old-fashioned as steam-engined trains.
A TRUE literacy test would also take into account modern forms of learning such as sight and sound.
Nothing. You can't deport naturalized citizens. But you can deport their illegal parents. I'd give the parents the option to take their children with them (guardians determine the citizenship of minors), but the parents absolutely can not stay, even if that means turning the children over to an adoption agency (there are tons of sterile familes just waiting to adopt).
Criminals NEED to be punished, not patted on the back and said, "Good job." I'm sick and tired of people acting like it's okay to steal, rape, kill..... and then not get punished. Laws exist to be enforced, not ignored. This is a REPUBLIC, where the law rules, and people who break the law need to be punished.
(And yes I consider illegally entering as country to be as bad as stealing. You're breaking the law, and trying to gain access to taxpayer-provided services like food stamps when you never paid any income tax. That's stealing. Send them back to Canada where they belong.)
A lot of those so-called "Quality of Life" lists are nothing more than arbitrary opinion by some socialist. For example, they assume that if a country has government-run healthcare that's a "high quality" asset and move them up in rank.
I strongly disagree.
I think government-run anything is a negative. Were I to produce a list, most of the so-called "top" countries would actually be at the bottom, due to monopolistic anti-choice services, lack of individual freedom, and onerous laws that treat adults like children too stupid to run their own lives.
The best government is that government which governs least. Setting-up a system where State Legislatures battle with the National Legislature for power creates a system where the government is too busy fighting itself, to bother with enslaving its citizens and turning them into Serfs.
"If it were possible to have no government, we would do so. It is only to protect our rights that we resort to any government at all." - Thomas Jefferson
If men were angels, there would be no need for government. If leaders were angels, there would be no need for a constitution. Since neither is true, government is necessary to protect men from criminals, and a constitution is necessary to protect men from their government & restrain its power.
I'm not overstating the extent of the ban. As one lower court judge observed, "What is reasonable about the banning of ALL guns?"
It literally is ALL guns that are banned from D.C. citizens. Which violates the Constitutional Law guaranteeing every person has a right to own at least SOME kind of gun (even if it's just a pistol).
Slashdot Mirror
The State of Montana used to have no speed limit during the daytime. It was "do not drive faster than conditions allow". So one day a cop ticketed a guy going ~90 mph. The guy sued the State saying 90 was safe, the court ruled the law was too vague, and the State created a daytime speed limit of 75.
How speed limits are set:
- Highway engineers design most interstates for 120 mph travel, per Congressional law. ---- Traffic engineers observe how fast everyone is driving, and make an observation "70% of drivers are moving 84 mph or less. 30% are driving 85 or higher. We recommend the 70th percentile speed of 84 mph for maximum traffic flow and minimal accidents." ----- Politicians step-in, kiss a couple butts, and impose 55 or 65 "for safety's sake" or "gas savings" or some other bs (perhaps bribery from the insurance company, or a desire to collect more money off speeding tickets).
And then you have a mess.
Some people are doing 75-85mph, per the traffic engineers' original recommendation. Other people would like to drive faster (after all the interstate was designed for safe travel at 120), but they are only doing 55-60 for fear of getting a $150 extortion....er, fine + increased insurance rates. The resulting disparity of speeds (55 to 85) creates a dangerous situation like bumper cars in an amusement park... a situation that would not exist if the Politicians had bothered to follow the Engineers recommendation.
But I'm an engineer so I'm used to not being heard by management.
Mandating insurance for everybody is cheaper than having to (1) sue the uninsured person who hit you (2) try to win the case (3) try to take the other person's car, house, anything of value (4) and waste years in the process.
Someone show me where in the Bill of Rights it says,
;-)
"Every person has the right to raid their neighbors' wallets, so said person can buy themselves a new heart, lung, or other organ."* I cannot lay my hand on that part of the Constitution. It must be there since everyone claims they have that right, but I cannot locate it?
Thanks.
* [IMHO this is theft of labor... making someone else work to pay your bills. Also known as slavery (reference Rome where slaves earned money & then handed it over to their masters). Nobody has a right to enslave another & take the other's wages earned, just so he/she can buy a new organ.]
I forgot to add how truly sucky Windows machines were pre-98. I don't know what colleges are like today, but back in the 90s we had a choice to use Macs on the left side of the computer lab, or IBMs on the right side of the room. Like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. ----- But later in my career they forced us into a "computer learning class" for Advanced Physics which had nothing but IBMs.
Having grown-up with GEOS on the Commodore, Workbench on the Amiga, and Finder on the Mac, using the bass-backwards Windows 3.1 Kludge was like torture to me.
A more stupidly-designed graphical OS I have never seen.
I just acquired a Win98 laptop (with 96 meg of RAM).
But after experiencing the frustration of trying to run VLC Player, Azureus, and RealPlayer, and discovering either (1) they don't work or (2) they can't load the latest codecs and therefore display a blank screen instead of video and (3) they can see my USB drive but can't read it.... I decided to get a WinXP laptop.
10 years for a Win98 PC is just too old to work with current Vista-designed software.
10 years for a Mac? It will still get the job done.
>>>Crappy, closed-technology machines.>>The cult of the single-button mouse.>>Reseller programs from hell. Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless.>>Two wire AppleTalk networks with all of the speed of ISDN on a good day.>>Wonderful and proprietary (given few others used them) PPC CPUs.
PowerPC was as ubiquitous as Motorola 68000-based machines. It was the logical next step after the 68040 and everyone (even Microsoft) thought PowerPCs would eventually take-over desktops. It didn't quite work out, but that's not Apple's fault..... anymore than it's Apple's fault that Pentiums were discontinued. That's just the way things go.
You are correct.
I'm glad this merger happened, because they already announced an "a la carte" plan. You pay $5 and get 20 channels of your own choice. That would be cheap enough for me to sign up.
(Although I did just get free HD Radio which provides about twice as many channels. Hmmmm. See? The customer does have choices.)
Well every "rule" has exceptions. There was PS3 at ~$700 and the 3DO at ~$700 back in the 90s. But generally speaking, consoles use one-generation-old technology in order to provide decent gaming at an affordable price (about $300). Nintendo's NES was providing 8 bit gaming while most computer gamers had already moved onto 16 bit. Super Nintendo provided 65,000 colors but computer gamers were already looking at 16 million colors. And so on.
>>>"A genre that used to dominate innovation in the field now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate"
As I recall that statement would have been just as valid in 1990.
PC gaming has never been inexpensive to participate,
because PC gaming is always pushing the envelope.
Woah.
Woah.
Woah. Stop. Is this so-called "between television channels" technology going to stop me from watching channel 5 in D.C.? (80 miles distant). I don't like the idea of some corporation or person deciding, "Well channel 5 is not used in southeast Pennsylvania, so I'll broadcast there," and wipe out my weak but still watchable television 5.
>>>"But why should internet connectivity have to be like other services?"
That was the same thing people were asking in the 1990s. They said "internet is different and doesn't have to follow the same rules as old-style brick-and-mortar business". Then the bubble popped in 2000 and they discovered that internet truly does need to follow the old rules (profit or go bankrupt).
Same applies to internet billing.
You can't sell everybody the same product, because not everybody is downloading the same amount of data. Some just read email (megabytes) while others download music (gigabytes) while others download movies (terabytes). Since the data amount changes according to each person's wants, it makes sense to change the amount of money charged based upon those bytes.
$15 for low "bytes per month" users
$30 for medium
$45 for high
$100 for unlimited
Also: I don't see why it's necessary for ISPs to oversubscribe their lines. As we can see, that's not working very well, what with P2P or Itunes connections getting disconnected or blocked. Imposing extra fees is a good way to limit traffic (look at "time of use" fees being applied to California highways) by encouraging customers to self-limit themselves to save money.
>>>"Commercial movie download services are going to have a much harder time getting business if users start finding that they have to pay higher fees because they downloaded too many movies in a month."
Yes.
Oh well. (shrug) If downloading movies requires a $100 a month "unlimited gigabytes" connection, thus making DVDs a cheaper option for customers, so be it. That's the free market in action, where one type of product (downloading) competes with another type of product (dvd) for consumer dollars.
That reason is why I buy more DVDs than downloads.
It's cheaper to get the DVD, than to pay for more gigabytes.
>>>"We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly"
False. Consumers did not reject "per gigabyte" tiers because no such animal has ever existed within the U.S. Some of the ISPs had time limits, but never gigabyte limits (you could download as much as you wanted).
Also, tiers based upon speed have proved themselves to be inoperative, because the professional liars.... er, salespeople exaggerate. They sell 10 megabit and then backwards-kludge it to 1 megabit through limits.
Therefore it would be smarter to based the tiers on a measureable, unalterable quantity - 50 gigabyte, 200 gigabyte, 500 gigabyte, or unlimited gigabyte. That way the control is in the hands of the customer. Want more? Pay more. Need to save money? Lower your gigabyte usage.
Simple.
Just like how consumers control the numbers of Watts of electricity used (or not used). Same principle.
I find it difficult to believe Gates stole Microsoft BASIC from his local user group.
HE was the one who wrote the famous CUG letter about not stealing software. For him to lecture his fellow club members about not stealing, and then do it himself, would be hypocritical.
Oh wait.
Hate Apple? I don't remember anyone hating apple, although they did say their prices were too high in the 1980s.
And Bill Gates:
I never had an opinion about him, but I hated the IBM/MS-DOS empire which symbolized a lack of progress in the 80s (and in some respects still do). While I was creating music on my Ataris and Commodores, the MS-DOS machines were still going "beep" with a mere 4 colors. While my Amiga was running a dozen programs at the same time, Microsoft machines were still limited to just a single task.
By rights IBM/Microsoft PCs should have died while the innovators at Atari, Commodore, Amiga rose to the top with their multimedia machines.
But success and innovation aren't always the same thing.
All my other utilities have tired/metered service - electricity, water, even the phone (10 cents per call). Why should the internet utility be the sole exception? I suggest the following solution:
- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit)
- $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit)
- $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit)
- $100 a month for unlimited
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
>>>"And it extended the mainstream support period for XP to April 14, 2009"
Works for me. Hopefully by that time Windows 10 will be on the market, and if Mickeysoft keeps its promise to "streamline" the kernal, Win10 will run much faster than Vista.
And if not, then I'll buy a Mac.
Oh well. I'll just repeat it: "If you think engineering textbooks are boring (black and white and contain long equations) then you should take heart, because the Engineering Job is going to be just as boring."
;-) Oh well; that's life. The reason I stay on the job is because they pay me $55 an hour, else I'd go do something more fun. I theorize that the more boring the job, the more they pay, because that's the only way for them to fill the seat.
That was a genuine comment from a genuine engineer... not offensive enough to deserve deleting? If anything, my time at Penn State was MORE exciting than my actual 10-year career as an electrical engineer. Every day I come to the same tiny cubicle and stare at the same flickering CRT moving around the same circuits I've seen a thousand times. At least at Penn State I got to flirt with biology coeds (points to wife), but that's not the case on the job. I'm not even sure we have any women here.
Anyway, back on topic:
If you think college is boring, maybe you ought to go on an Internship and discover the boredom of an actual engineering job.
You may find yourself changing careers.
P.S.
I only pay $5 a month for my cellphone. If you think your cellphone company is charging too much ($0.40/min overages charges, et cetera) than maybe it's time to switch. If you think the charges are unfair, then stop paying them. Switch to a better company.
Exercise your freedom to walk away.
Vote with your dollar.
Choose a better company.
>>>Claiming that something is 'entirely and completely fair' while using the cellular industry as your example strains creditability"
Claiming I only used the cell industry makes me question your reading comprehension. I also said, "Take more; pay more. Just like electrical service, cell service, water service, et cetera, et cetera." Every utility that comes into my house is metered according to use (yes even my phone is metered; 10 cents per call). Why should the internet utility be the sole exception? I suggest the following solution:
- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit)
- $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit)
- $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit)
- $100 a month for unlimited
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
Oh well.
I use dialup for P2P usage, and never once have they needed to block my access. That's because the Dialup service accurately describes their available bandwidth as "56k" and they design their servers accordingly.
In contrast Comcast describes their available bandwidth as "10,000k" which is a blatant lie. The courts should step in and force Comcast to downgrade their ads to say "1000k" since that's apparently all their servers can handle.
I don't know why people talk about "literacy" like it's such a great thing. Gone are the days when the only source of information was books or newspapers... such as during the 1800s when European researcher Tocqueville observed virtually all Americans could read. Back then reading was a necessity.
But not today. Today you can acquire huge sums of knowledge from television and radio. For myself, I took college-level courses while driving & listening to an audio cassette. No reading required, because the information traveled from the professor to me via sound waves.
The idea that "reading is the only way to learn" is an old-fashioned as steam-engined trains.
A TRUE literacy test would also take into account modern forms of learning such as sight and sound.
Nothing. You can't deport naturalized citizens. But you can deport their illegal parents. I'd give the parents the option to take their children with them (guardians determine the citizenship of minors), but the parents absolutely can not stay, even if that means turning the children over to an adoption agency (there are tons of sterile familes just waiting to adopt).
Criminals NEED to be punished, not patted on the back and said, "Good job." I'm sick and tired of people acting like it's okay to steal, rape, kill..... and then not get punished. Laws exist to be enforced, not ignored. This is a REPUBLIC, where the law rules, and people who break the law need to be punished.
(And yes I consider illegally entering as country to be as bad as stealing. You're breaking the law, and trying to gain access to taxpayer-provided services like food stamps when you never paid any income tax. That's stealing. Send them back to Canada where they belong.)
A lot of those so-called "Quality of Life" lists are nothing more than arbitrary opinion by some socialist. For example, they assume that if a country has government-run healthcare that's a "high quality" asset and move them up in rank.
I strongly disagree.
I think government-run anything is a negative. Were I to produce a list, most of the so-called "top" countries would actually be at the bottom, due to monopolistic anti-choice services, lack of individual freedom, and onerous laws that treat adults like children too stupid to run their own lives.
The best government is that government which governs least. Setting-up a system where State Legislatures battle with the National Legislature for power creates a system where the government is too busy fighting itself, to bother with enslaving its citizens and turning them into Serfs.
"If it were possible to have no government, we would do so. It is only to protect our rights that we resort to any government at all." - Thomas Jefferson
If men were angels, there would be no need for government.
If leaders were angels, there would be no need for a constitution.
Since neither is true, government is necessary to protect men from criminals,
and a constitution is necessary to protect men from their government & restrain its power.
- James Madison (paraphrased)
I'm not overstating the extent of the ban. As one lower court judge observed, "What is reasonable about the banning of ALL guns?"
It literally is ALL guns that are banned from D.C. citizens. Which violates the Constitutional Law guaranteeing every person has a right to own at least SOME kind of gun (even if it's just a pistol).