Of course the 3/5ths rule was bad, but having slaves counted fully for the purpose of representation as the southern states wanted would have increased southern representation in the house. With more representation for southern states, the conflicts over slavery might have been settled in favor of the south and the south might not have succeeded. This would have delayed emancipation. Clearly the constitution should have outlawed slavery or forbidden counting slaves when allocating representatives because each representative was supposed to represent an equal number of citizens. Clearly congressmen who owned slaves couldn't honestly claim slaves as their constituents.
Schools in Puerto Rico often teach Spanish as the primary language. Children born there are still citizens and have a constitutional right to vote even if they move out of Puerto Rico.
While I don't agree with the grandparent, your figures don't really address his point. He claims that americans are bad at drinking and smoking in moderation. We either abstain or consume excessive amounts. Your figures show the average consumption across users and non-users. Since most americans drink alcohol at least occasionally, the alcohol number is somewhat useful. The tobacco number is much less useful because the majority of americans don't smoke. Some countries may have a smoking rate 2 to 3 times higher than the american rate.
I strongly doubt that weed use in america would drop down to 18% if it was legalized. My guess is that the number of people smoking weed in america would increase slightly if it was legalized. I don't think that people would smoke significantly more weed if it was legalized. Unlike tobacco, nobody chain smokes weed.
You can't scan items as fast as the cashier can. I used to be a cashier at a store. I could scan and bag one small item in one or two seconds. I can't scan that fast at the grocery store because the machine wont let me. After I scan one item, the scanner turns off for 4 seconds while the register verifies the weight of the item. At the larger self check lane I can't even bag my purchases while I scan them.
The t-mobile price you compared against doesn't include unlimited text. The t-mobile plan is actually $15 more expensive for one line. For two lines, t-mobile would be $40 more expensive. I don't text much, but for someone who does the price difference is significant.
The cards may be issued by another bank, but the terms of the card will often be better. My credit union gave me a card at 8.9% even though I had no credit history. Even if my local bank had been willing to issue me a card, the interest rate would have been at least 23%.
A jailbroken iphone does not usually slow down when an application runs in the background because it doesn't support virtual memory. In my experience, the phone frequently runs out of memory and kills your background applications. There isn't much point to running pandora or iradio in the background if safari is going to kill it to free up memory to load slashdot. I think that the multitasking in OS 4 would work better on the 2g iphone because the OS would know that pandora was playing music and try to kill mail and ipod before killing pandora.
I believe that Switzerland has heroin injection sites. People with existing addictions can buy a dose of heroin at a reduced price and have it injected by a nurse. The clinics sell heroin on a sliding scale to eliminate the need to steal to pay for drugs. Because getting drugs from the government is cheaper and safer than on the street, drug dealers don't sell heroin.
In this situation, heroin is easier for addicts to get, but harder for new users to get. Because heroin users don't have to hide from the government, they are less afraid to seek treatment. The injection centers even offer referrals to treatment programs. I believe that overall heroin use is down since the program started.
If people were less uptight about drugs, we could do the same thing here. Unfortunately, a program to give free heroin to addicts wouldn't pass here. It doesn't matter that keeping addicts from robbing citizens to pay for their addictions is better for everyone.
The problem with the news industry is that the Associated Press sells their content to newspapers very inexpensively on the assumption that they can spread the costs among many newspapers that operate in different cities. This assumption was fine before the internet. When a small paper with no national reporters can post the AP feed on their web site, they ensure that nobody wants to pay for news. This will cause a massive consolidation in the newspaper industry. After the consolidation, a subscription to AP will cost much more because there will be fewer newspapers to share the cost.
Since giving away the AP feed on the internet is going to massively increase the cost of an AP subscription, the AP should start charging a massively higher rate for newspapers who give AP content away on the internet. Newspapers could still give stories away for free, but only stories that their own reporters wrote. This change should drive readers to the newspapers with the best journalists instead of the newspapers that leech off the AP and provide no original reporting. Hopefully, this would allow newspapers to focus on using quality reporting to sell news to readers instead of inexpensive reporting to sell readers to advertisers.
If I understood correctly, drm is to prevent everyone from copying the game and then immediately selling it back to the game store. If everyone did this then each store would only buy a handfull of copies of the game from the publisher and repeatedly resell the few copies they bought. For example, a store might buy 20 copies from the distributer and then buy them back and resell each copy 10 times each in the first week. While this is legitimate if the game is unplayable, it isn't legitimate if all 200 customers kept a copy and are still playing it. The publishers hope that drm prevents customers from copying the game and selling it back to the store until after initial rush of sales ends and they have hopefully made a profit on the game.
Of course nobody would buy $6,000 at one time just to fill an ipod, but over time people who love music will spend that much money over time. My wife and I have bought about 500 in the last decade. At $12 each, they would have cost $6,000 total. We didn't buy it all at once, we bought 4 CDs a month for a decade. Even though our whole music collection is only about 30gb, but I wouldn't feel bad about owning a larger ipod because buying music is about discovering and enjoying new things. If I only had a 30gb ipod, it wouldn't have room to add the new albums I find in the future.
While I understand that people don't want to sacrifice battery life by running lots of background applications, not all background applications kill battery life. By default the iphone runs Mail, iPod, Safari, and Phone in the background. Together all these applications take up about all the memory on the phone. If users could install more background applications, the phone would frequently run out of memory. Even with the default set of background applications, loading a large web page can kill the iPod application.
I would like to see iphone applications be allowed to perform minimal tasks when not running. For example, I want my todo list to update its emblem every morning to show how many tasks are on today's todo list. I would like to be able to set alarms on tasks in the todo list. I want to listen to internet radio while I use other applications.
These kind of things were all supported on my Treo. Background alarms for user installed programs were even supported on my old Palm IIxe with 8mb of ram and a 16mhz processor. There really is no excuse for not providing these features.
While the palm os was designed specifically to allow calling functions of programs that were not running in the foreground, emulating those features with a modern operating system should be easy. For example background tasks could be implemented with small programs that would be executed with tight limits on cpu and memory usage. The system could start these tasks one at a time to avoid using too much cpu. Applications like an internet radio client could be split into a background task that just played the music and a user interface that could be unloaded when not in the foreground.
Time limited demos are not allowed in the application store. I doubt the author of the article would be complaining about pricing if the app store allowed potential users to try his software before paying. People will pay for quality, but they won't pay just because a developer claims the software is high quality or the screenshot looks pretty.
Lots of developers are making free versions, but apple restricts the developer from using the free version as an effective demo for the full version in the same ways that developers could on palm or windows mobile. Nearly all complex applications for palmOS had a time limited demo that allowed the user to try all the features. Usually the software would have a popup that reminded the user to pay for the software. If you didn't register after a few weeks, the software would disable all the advanced features or display a nag screen for 30 seconds at startup. Apple forbids an iPhone application from doing all these things.
As a result, developers have to find a way to produce a fully functional free version of their software that lacks a few features that the majority of their users will pay extra for. In many cases, the majority of users will not pay extra for premium features even though they would have paid for a well built application on palmOS. People porting applications from palmOS are finding that they need to price their application lower on the iPhone store even though it is better than the other choices in the category. For example, the PocketMoney finance application cost $30 on PalmOS and it costs $10 on iPhone because people are reluctant to try applications without a demo version. If the author released a free version, it would probably be better than the vast majority of similar applications and very few users would pay for the full version.
In this case the user was using a data card in his laptop. There wasn't any phone involved. I believe that when a user runs up a large bill using data roaming on a cell phone, AT&T does call the user and warn them. When the user has a data card, they don't do this. I'm not sure why.
Of course the base model civic doesn't have all the features of the hybrid. Unfortunately, the dealers in my area only stock top of the line hybrids. Since I want to save money by buying a hybrid, I would prefer to buy a low end hybrid. Buying a modestly equipped Civic, Fit or Yaris is easy. I won't consider a high end standard car just because I can't find a base model Prius or Civic Hybrid anywhere.
The pole is much less likely to fall over if it doesn't have a heavily loaded box the size of a pair of standard size racks strapped to the top. I doubt that a standard telephone pole is designed to hold that much weight at the top.
Of course there is a way to detect if an idiot manually configures his computer to have the same node address as your mac address. Similar techniques are used by windows to detect idiotic misconfiguration on ipv4 networks. There are other ways besides auto configuration to assign ip addresses, but by default it is done by combining the network address and the mac address. The point is that you don't need to have a dhcp server to keep track of the mapping between mac addresses and ipv6 addresses as long as all the clients are all using the auto configuration system. If some clients pick addresses at random, using a dhcp server will not do a better job of maintain a mapping from ip addresses to mac addresses than auto configuration.
I believe that the default ipv6 address is the 64 bit network address concatenated with the mac address. This makes any database of that sort redundant.
I believe that most stores staff their registers based on a desired level of service. The store I work at considers having more than two people in one line unacceptable. Enough cashiers are scheduled to meet that standard. If we ever did add self service lines, we would probably reduce cashier staffing to keep the same service level as staffing for no waiting ever is prohibitively expensive.
I would assume that other retailers do this as well, but they just have a different standard. Walmart seems to expect a line length of 3 to 7. Late at night when fewer people shop, they seem to have less staff and the lines are still 3 to 7 long. I would assume that their level of service was the same before the self service registers were added. I really can't imagining the lines were any worse before.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the 3/5ths rule was bad, but having slaves counted fully for the purpose of representation as the southern states wanted would have increased southern representation in the house. With more representation for southern states, the conflicts over slavery might have been settled in favor of the south and the south might not have succeeded. This would have delayed emancipation. Clearly the constitution should have outlawed slavery or forbidden counting slaves when allocating representatives because each representative was supposed to represent an equal number of citizens. Clearly congressmen who owned slaves couldn't honestly claim slaves as their constituents.
Correct. But if they did move to Nevada, for example, they could legally demand a spanish ballot.
Schools in Puerto Rico often teach Spanish as the primary language. Children born there are still citizens and have a constitutional right to vote even if they move out of Puerto Rico.
While I don't agree with the grandparent, your figures don't really address his point. He claims that americans are bad at drinking and smoking in moderation. We either abstain or consume excessive amounts. Your figures show the average consumption across users and non-users. Since most americans drink alcohol at least occasionally, the alcohol number is somewhat useful. The tobacco number is much less useful because the majority of americans don't smoke. Some countries may have a smoking rate 2 to 3 times higher than the american rate.
I strongly doubt that weed use in america would drop down to 18% if it was legalized. My guess is that the number of people smoking weed in america would increase slightly if it was legalized. I don't think that people would smoke significantly more weed if it was legalized. Unlike tobacco, nobody chain smokes weed.
You can't scan items as fast as the cashier can. I used to be a cashier at a store. I could scan and bag one small item in one or two seconds. I can't scan that fast at the grocery store because the machine wont let me. After I scan one item, the scanner turns off for 4 seconds while the register verifies the weight of the item. At the larger self check lane I can't even bag my purchases while I scan them.
The t-mobile price you compared against doesn't include unlimited text. The t-mobile plan is actually $15 more expensive for one line. For two lines, t-mobile would be $40 more expensive. I don't text much, but for someone who does the price difference is significant.
The cards may be issued by another bank, but the terms of the card will often be better. My credit union gave me a card at 8.9% even though I had no credit history. Even if my local bank had been willing to issue me a card, the interest rate would have been at least 23%.
A jailbroken iphone does not usually slow down when an application runs in the background because it doesn't support virtual memory. In my experience, the phone frequently runs out of memory and kills your background applications. There isn't much point to running pandora or iradio in the background if safari is going to kill it to free up memory to load slashdot. I think that the multitasking in OS 4 would work better on the 2g iphone because the OS would know that pandora was playing music and try to kill mail and ipod before killing pandora.
I believe that Switzerland has heroin injection sites. People with existing addictions can buy a dose of heroin at a reduced price and have it injected by a nurse. The clinics sell heroin on a sliding scale to eliminate the need to steal to pay for drugs. Because getting drugs from the government is cheaper and safer than on the street, drug dealers don't sell heroin.
In this situation, heroin is easier for addicts to get, but harder for new users to get. Because heroin users don't have to hide from the government, they are less afraid to seek treatment. The injection centers even offer referrals to treatment programs. I believe that overall heroin use is down since the program started.
If people were less uptight about drugs, we could do the same thing here. Unfortunately, a program to give free heroin to addicts wouldn't pass here. It doesn't matter that keeping addicts from robbing citizens to pay for their addictions is better for everyone.
The problem with the news industry is that the Associated Press sells their content to newspapers very inexpensively on the assumption that they can spread the costs among many newspapers that operate in different cities. This assumption was fine before the internet. When a small paper with no national reporters can post the AP feed on their web site, they ensure that nobody wants to pay for news. This will cause a massive consolidation in the newspaper industry. After the consolidation, a subscription to AP will cost much more because there will be fewer newspapers to share the cost.
Since giving away the AP feed on the internet is going to massively increase the cost of an AP subscription, the AP should start charging a massively higher rate for newspapers who give AP content away on the internet. Newspapers could still give stories away for free, but only stories that their own reporters wrote. This change should drive readers to the newspapers with the best journalists instead of the newspapers that leech off the AP and provide no original reporting. Hopefully, this would allow newspapers to focus on using quality reporting to sell news to readers instead of inexpensive reporting to sell readers to advertisers.
If I understood correctly, drm is to prevent everyone from copying the game and then immediately selling it back to the game store. If everyone did this then each store would only buy a handfull of copies of the game from the publisher and repeatedly resell the few copies they bought. For example, a store might buy 20 copies from the distributer and then buy them back and resell each copy 10 times each in the first week. While this is legitimate if the game is unplayable, it isn't legitimate if all 200 customers kept a copy and are still playing it. The publishers hope that drm prevents customers from copying the game and selling it back to the store until after initial rush of sales ends and they have hopefully made a profit on the game.
Of course nobody would buy $6,000 at one time just to fill an ipod, but over time people who love music will spend that much money over time. My wife and I have bought about 500 in the last decade. At $12 each, they would have cost $6,000 total. We didn't buy it all at once, we bought 4 CDs a month for a decade. Even though our whole music collection is only about 30gb, but I wouldn't feel bad about owning a larger ipod because buying music is about discovering and enjoying new things. If I only had a 30gb ipod, it wouldn't have room to add the new albums I find in the future.
While I understand that people don't want to sacrifice battery life by running lots of background applications, not all background applications kill battery life. By default the iphone runs Mail, iPod, Safari, and Phone in the background. Together all these applications take up about all the memory on the phone. If users could install more background applications, the phone would frequently run out of memory. Even with the default set of background applications, loading a large web page can kill the iPod application.
I would like to see iphone applications be allowed to perform minimal tasks when not running. For example, I want my todo list to update its emblem every morning to show how many tasks are on today's todo list. I would like to be able to set alarms on tasks in the todo list. I want to listen to internet radio while I use other applications.
These kind of things were all supported on my Treo. Background alarms for user installed programs were even supported on my old Palm IIxe with 8mb of ram and a 16mhz processor. There really is no excuse for not providing these features.
While the palm os was designed specifically to allow calling functions of programs that were not running in the foreground, emulating those features with a modern operating system should be easy. For example background tasks could be implemented with small programs that would be executed with tight limits on cpu and memory usage. The system could start these tasks one at a time to avoid using too much cpu. Applications like an internet radio client could be split into a background task that just played the music and a user interface that could be unloaded when not in the foreground.
Time limited demos are not allowed in the application store. I doubt the author of the article would be complaining about pricing if the app store allowed potential users to try his software before paying. People will pay for quality, but they won't pay just because a developer claims the software is high quality or the screenshot looks pretty.
As a result, developers have to find a way to produce a fully functional free version of their software that lacks a few features that the majority of their users will pay extra for. In many cases, the majority of users will not pay extra for premium features even though they would have paid for a well built application on palmOS. People porting applications from palmOS are finding that they need to price their application lower on the iPhone store even though it is better than the other choices in the category. For example, the PocketMoney finance application cost $30 on PalmOS and it costs $10 on iPhone because people are reluctant to try applications without a demo version. If the author released a free version, it would probably be better than the vast majority of similar applications and very few users would pay for the full version.
They require a phone number when signing up for service. They could call that one if they really wanted to.
In this case the user was using a data card in his laptop. There wasn't any phone involved. I believe that when a user runs up a large bill using data roaming on a cell phone, AT&T does call the user and warn them. When the user has a data card, they don't do this. I'm not sure why.
Of course the base model civic doesn't have all the features of the hybrid. Unfortunately, the dealers in my area only stock top of the line hybrids. Since I want to save money by buying a hybrid, I would prefer to buy a low end hybrid. Buying a modestly equipped Civic, Fit or Yaris is easy. I won't consider a high end standard car just because I can't find a base model Prius or Civic Hybrid anywhere.
The pole is much less likely to fall over if it doesn't have a heavily loaded box the size of a pair of standard size racks strapped to the top. I doubt that a standard telephone pole is designed to hold that much weight at the top.
I don't want a 4'x4'x2' box suspended from the telephone pole over my head. If it falls off it could kill someone.
Of course there is a way to detect if an idiot manually configures his computer to have the same node address as your mac address. Similar techniques are used by windows to detect idiotic misconfiguration on ipv4 networks. There are other ways besides auto configuration to assign ip addresses, but by default it is done by combining the network address and the mac address. The point is that you don't need to have a dhcp server to keep track of the mapping between mac addresses and ipv6 addresses as long as all the clients are all using the auto configuration system. If some clients pick addresses at random, using a dhcp server will not do a better job of maintain a mapping from ip addresses to mac addresses than auto configuration.
I believe that the default ipv6 address is the 64 bit network address concatenated with the mac address. This makes any database of that sort redundant.
I would assume that other retailers do this as well, but they just have a different standard. Walmart seems to expect a line length of 3 to 7. Late at night when fewer people shop, they seem to have less staff and the lines are still 3 to 7 long. I would assume that their level of service was the same before the self service registers were added. I really can't imagining the lines were any worse before.
The store is Giant Eagle in Frederick Maryland. I don't know if all their stores have the system. There is an article about it here.
Block encryption doesn't help if data is inserted instead of overwritten in the middle of the file.