The idea that, "since you can't get a job means that you lose freedom" is asinine (I'm sorry, it is.) You have the Right to quit right now. You are not held in your job by law. You are held there by your mentality that you are entitled the life you are living along with all that comes from your normal paycheck. This is where you get confused by what a "Right" is.
Everyone in the US has the freedom to buy health insurance. Let me repeat that. Everyone in the US has the freedom to buy health insurance.
I don't know what law you are referring to that says: "John Doe may not buy health insurance." If you can point that out, I'd love to see it. Again, Rights are not Entitlements. Just because you can't afford something doesn't mean you are not free to buy it.
Financial reform can only come in allowing the people to control their money. If you don't like the way some company is running their ship, you can take your money elsewhere. Mandating that your income be taxed to provide services removes that freedom. What you are saying is that you think the government can better appropriate your money than you can. I don't know what kind of disorganization that takes, but I'm glad that's not me. Now you have the government deciding what companies fail and which ones succeed. You've taken away your right to decide with your wallet. The only true way to do this would be a "luxury" sales tax (with exceptions on staple products) and abolishing the income tax, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. It would be a swift indicator of public approval and it would require that the government only spend what it has instead of what it will have next year. If you don't like what the money is being spent on, buy basics until the person spending it gets the idea. This would also be a public approval indicator for people to exercise. If you don't like what X Company did, don't buy their products and they go out of business if enough people agree. Monetary Democracy... no "financial reform" (read: big brother) needed. The only position government should hold in financial reform is regulation (read: removal) of monopolistic practices.
Sure, it's a great thing to help out the less fortunate. It's call charity and the US is among the (if not The) most charitable countries in the world.
By taxing out the charity you only reduce the amount people are able to give to causes they think are noble. You take away the ability for someone to decide for themselves that they want to seriously help that family down the street that just just had a house fire. If you mandate insurance for all, you take away that sympathy. Now the person down the street is likely to say, "Oh well, they have insurance." You care less about your neighbors and your neighborhood because you start to assume that everyone gets the same as you... you even alienate those that might have given by forcing them to give.
What progressive cause reduces personal rights? Mandatory health care?
Yes actually... I have a right to get healthcare, if I want it. Mandatory takes away that right of choice. I can choose to not have healthcare and die in a ditch if I want. Mandatory is the opposite of personal freedom.
Not being beholden to your employer... greatly increases personal freedom.
I don't know about you, but I can leave my employer at any time and go to another one. Nobody is forcing me to take their money for my work.
Financial reform? A stable economy increases personal freedom.
It depends on what you mean by stable economy. Personally, I have a nest egg set back for hard times and I feel a great amount of personal freedom, even in what everyone calls "our dire economy." I have a personal choice to set back money when I need it... so does everyone else. Why should I have to suffer to provide for their stability? Why should we (as taxpayers) have to bailout companies that don't know how to run their own operations efficiently? Why should we have to pay for some union employee to be fired for doing something completely moronic and have the union get his job back? (I've seen this MANY, MANY times... the place I work has a great union presence and is suffering because the workers have no accountability. It literally takes a criminal act to be fired.) How is that stability? Sure, you have a stable job, at the expense of others. Even if those others are the company suffering because you don't "feel" like working as hard today.
Alternative energy? I'd certainly like to have the personal freedom to choose sustainable energy sources and not support oppressive regimes.
You have that choice now. You don't have to buy a gas powered car. You can buy a bike, move closer to work and walk, or take city transport. If you live outside a big city, that's your personal freedom of choice infringing on your feeling of entitlement.
If you are truly willing to make choices you have to suffer some consequence. You can't have everything you ever wanted, and be truly free. By joining a society you give up certain personal freedoms to properly co-mingle.
Progressives have traditionally been anti-freedom to accommodate their own goals. Just as your post points out, you lack the ability to see beyond your own desires and don't care that you are removing the right of choice from some people to "progress" your whims.
That's how I do it, braces for everything, even single lines. I hate reading code that someone never put the braces after simple ifs. I like that there's a defined start and end to that block of code, or that train of thought.
I also still put 2 spaces at the end of my sentences by habit.
It's an arm of the Department of Justice, but it's not part of the Judicial Branch of government. The Attorney General is nominated by the President and a member of the Cabinet. They are a part of the Executive Branch.
This gets back into the argument on whether or not the criminal is the person handing you a gun or the person using it...
Just like anything Wikipedia is a tool. It doesn't make committing crime unavoidable. If you use it in a manner that is dubious in nature, you are breaking the law, not the person that gave you the seal image.
Then it gets lost at cool looking and has two seats. I was thinking somewhere along the lines of an enclosed T-Rex with one seat... and not starting at $50k.
I'd want something I can drive in the rain, and most three wheeled vehicles lose major attractive points and seem to get taller when you enclose them. The Smart car and others just look like straight chairs with tiny wheels.
I'm kind of curious why someone hasn't made an electric commuter car. A one seat, three wheel vehicle made exclusively to go to work and come home. You can probably make it very lightweight and relatively inexpensive. If it looked cool and had about 100-150 miles per charge, maybe throw a solar panel on the roof to charge in the lot... I'd definitely buy one. Heck, I drive a two seater to work now because I can't see hauling an SUV with me when I go to work by myself.
We could reduce accidents over time, and make people drive better... follow this logic:
Place the Hydrogen tanks covered in flint in the front of the car and put a steel plate in the back. Now if someone rear ends you, they go boom and you feel a slight push. Makes you slow down a bit, eh?
Sure, the mortality rate might be high the first year, but I'll bet accidents go down along with the mortality rate the following year.;)
I just downloaded this package, and all it has a lists of names and URLs to Facebook profiles. If they users made their profile private, you're not going to get anything more than their name.
That's really up to the developer. If I were to use such a service, I'd allow a certain number of executions without validation before validation was required again. For example, if the validation comes back, I save that date to my app database, maybe encrypt it, and run the same check each time it's run. If I don't get a reply for N days (or N runs) then disable the app. It would most likely be easily hacked (cause I'd have to store the value somewhere...) but it would most likely cut out the couch pirates. It could also be like "shareware" with an N day limit on play.
Wine works well for x86, not so well for non-x86. As netbook makers introduce ARM powered models to save battery, "play all your games on Wine" won't be the easy cop-out that it used to be, at least until DOSBox gains some sort of dynarec.
But you listed Windows applications... and those won't run on ARM either.
Not being a subject of your party doesn't mean you will no longer go to meetings though...
Personally I think the party system is wrong. All it does is help people make uneducated votes. My Grandmother concreted that thought in my head when she told me she had voted Democrat from the time of JFK and she doesn't understand why they are different today, but she still votes for them because that's how she's registered.
The sad thing about vocational schools is that they are normally considered a "last resort" for kids who can't go to college. (That's how it was pitched to me. "You should be looking for a good college," says my guidance counselor.)
You went to DeVry didn't you? I quit after 6 trimesters of COBOL when I was promised much more (and expected much more.) Granted, it was 1996-1998 so they were "conditioning" us for Y2K (from what I figure) but I didn't want to be a one trick COBOL programmer when I left school. I stopped giving them my money. I ended up learning what I wanted in my free time while working for a small "Mom and Pop" computer store. That landed me a job in technical support for a Fortune 500 company where I eventually got into Web Development and now I'm a Senior Developer for our Corporate eLearning department. I don't regret leaving DeVry... what I do regret is giving them what money I did as well as my 50% scholarship.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've been looking or a college that offers some real courses on programming where I might actually learn something new. I have a really good grasp and experience with OOP (as with anything, there's still more to learn!) but I want to find courses in Functional Programming without having to move across country. What I'm finding is that most colleges don't teach non-mainstream topics and I really don't want to have to learn it the same way I did OOP without something to prove it.
...sometimes I type out of seuqence (faster fingers tend to beat the weaker fingers to the punch), sometimes I dont put enough pressue on the keys/touchscreen for them to register, sometimes I get the finger right, but on tehwuong hand...
I think we are getting hung up on the fact that I said average when I should have been saying C level...
But it makes me wonder what would happen if you did make the lower 50% of the students retake a particular class. They should do better the next time and pass on to the next level or be forced to take it again until they exceeded the 50% mark for the class... you'd have to break up the classes into specific skills though and you'd have to teach that skill over and over until the students learn it and bypass the average level (50%) students in the class. Children that studied or were talented would be pushed through to harder classes where they may not understand something until they take the course again and kids who are really excellent would fly through classes. You'd most definitely have very different age groups in each class though and barring psychological effects of having some younger kid bypass you in skill I don't know how that would work.
That's pretty stupid. Which questions? Who writes them? Who chooses them? Essay or multiple choice? If both are they equally weighted? Are the grade cutoff scores predefined? Are they good questions? Or are we talking about photocopied example tests from the teachers edition?
Personally I think any test with an average of 85% is too damn easy and typically target tests I make to have a 50% average and a 15% standard deviation. By your logic I'd need to fail 85% of the class if you use a fixed 70% as a cutoff
The questions are created by the teachers... where they get them from is probably a book approved by the Dept. Of Education for the individual States. (At least that was the way it was done when I sent to school.)
Most of the grading was done on tests and homework assignments (weighting I think had to be approved[?]) and based on the percentage of correct answers (or least number of marks for essays) you'd get a grade. When I went to school, 90-100% was an A, 80-89% was a B... etc.
Do you teach in the US? You'd know better than I would if that's still the norm.
I never said to fail 85% class. I just said if the students can't get a more than half the questions right on their tests, they should probably redo the class until they can.
Grades are not assigned based on the normal of the class. They are based on the ability to answer a set amount of questions correctly.
Why keep the above average student learning less than they should be because you let the under average students into the next level? (If the D student just barely passed basic math, how are they going to understand the next level?)
Why do schools consistently push forward below average kids without teaching them what they need to know to be above C level? Eventually you narrow that "below C" group to only a few who can be filtered into special classes for slow learners.
The problem we have is that we expect children to learn at the same level as every other child. We expect to be able to point to a kid in a room, ask him his age and be able to determine what level of education he has opposed to what level he actually performed.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that, "since you can't get a job means that you lose freedom" is asinine (I'm sorry, it is.) You have the Right to quit right now. You are not held in your job by law. You are held there by your mentality that you are entitled the life you are living along with all that comes from your normal paycheck. This is where you get confused by what a "Right" is.
Everyone in the US has the freedom to buy health insurance.
Let me repeat that.
Everyone in the US has the freedom to buy health insurance.
I don't know what law you are referring to that says: "John Doe may not buy health insurance." If you can point that out, I'd love to see it. Again, Rights are not Entitlements. Just because you can't afford something doesn't mean you are not free to buy it.
Financial reform can only come in allowing the people to control their money. If you don't like the way some company is running their ship, you can take your money elsewhere. Mandating that your income be taxed to provide services removes that freedom. What you are saying is that you think the government can better appropriate your money than you can. I don't know what kind of disorganization that takes, but I'm glad that's not me. Now you have the government deciding what companies fail and which ones succeed. You've taken away your right to decide with your wallet. The only true way to do this would be a "luxury" sales tax (with exceptions on staple products) and abolishing the income tax, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. It would be a swift indicator of public approval and it would require that the government only spend what it has instead of what it will have next year. If you don't like what the money is being spent on, buy basics until the person spending it gets the idea. This would also be a public approval indicator for people to exercise. If you don't like what X Company did, don't buy their products and they go out of business if enough people agree. Monetary Democracy... no "financial reform" (read: big brother) needed. The only position government should hold in financial reform is regulation (read: removal) of monopolistic practices.
Sure, it's a great thing to help out the less fortunate. It's call charity and the US is among the (if not The) most charitable countries in the world.
By taxing out the charity you only reduce the amount people are able to give to causes they think are noble. You take away the ability for someone to decide for themselves that they want to seriously help that family down the street that just just had a house fire. If you mandate insurance for all, you take away that sympathy. Now the person down the street is likely to say, "Oh well, they have insurance." You care less about your neighbors and your neighborhood because you start to assume that everyone gets the same as you... you even alienate those that might have given by forcing them to give.
What progressive cause reduces personal rights? Mandatory health care?
Yes actually... I have a right to get healthcare, if I want it. Mandatory takes away that right of choice. I can choose to not have healthcare and die in a ditch if I want. Mandatory is the opposite of personal freedom.
Not being beholden to your employer... greatly increases personal freedom.
I don't know about you, but I can leave my employer at any time and go to another one. Nobody is forcing me to take their money for my work.
Financial reform? A stable economy increases personal freedom.
It depends on what you mean by stable economy. Personally, I have a nest egg set back for hard times and I feel a great amount of personal freedom, even in what everyone calls "our dire economy." I have a personal choice to set back money when I need it... so does everyone else. Why should I have to suffer to provide for their stability? Why should we (as taxpayers) have to bailout companies that don't know how to run their own operations efficiently? Why should we have to pay for some union employee to be fired for doing something completely moronic and have the union get his job back? (I've seen this MANY, MANY times... the place I work has a great union presence and is suffering because the workers have no accountability. It literally takes a criminal act to be fired.) How is that stability? Sure, you have a stable job, at the expense of others. Even if those others are the company suffering because you don't "feel" like working as hard today.
Alternative energy? I'd certainly like to have the personal freedom to choose sustainable energy sources and not support oppressive regimes.
You have that choice now. You don't have to buy a gas powered car. You can buy a bike, move closer to work and walk, or take city transport. If you live outside a big city, that's your personal freedom of choice infringing on your feeling of entitlement.
If you are truly willing to make choices you have to suffer some consequence. You can't have everything you ever wanted, and be truly free. By joining a society you give up certain personal freedoms to properly co-mingle.
Progressives have traditionally been anti-freedom to accommodate their own goals. Just as your post points out, you lack the ability to see beyond your own desires and don't care that you are removing the right of choice from some people to "progress" your whims.
That's how I do it, braces for everything, even single lines. I hate reading code that someone never put the braces after simple ifs. I like that there's a defined start and end to that block of code, or that train of thought.
I also still put 2 spaces at the end of my sentences by habit.
It's an arm of the Department of Justice, but it's not part of the Judicial Branch of government. The Attorney General is nominated by the President and a member of the Cabinet. They are a part of the Executive Branch.
This gets back into the argument on whether or not the criminal is the person handing you a gun or the person using it...
Just like anything Wikipedia is a tool. It doesn't make committing crime unavoidable. If you use it in a manner that is dubious in nature, you are breaking the law, not the person that gave you the seal image.
I don't... ;)
Then it gets lost at cool looking and has two seats. I was thinking somewhere along the lines of an enclosed T-Rex with one seat... and not starting at $50k.
I'd want something I can drive in the rain, and most three wheeled vehicles lose major attractive points and seem to get taller when you enclose them. The Smart car and others just look like straight chairs with tiny wheels.
I'm kind of curious why someone hasn't made an electric commuter car. A one seat, three wheel vehicle made exclusively to go to work and come home. You can probably make it very lightweight and relatively inexpensive. If it looked cool and had about 100-150 miles per charge, maybe throw a solar panel on the roof to charge in the lot... I'd definitely buy one. Heck, I drive a two seater to work now because I can't see hauling an SUV with me when I go to work by myself.
We could reduce accidents over time, and make people drive better... follow this logic:
Place the Hydrogen tanks covered in flint in the front of the car and put a steel plate in the back. Now if someone rear ends you, they go boom and you feel a slight push. Makes you slow down a bit, eh?
Sure, the mortality rate might be high the first year, but I'll bet accidents go down along with the mortality rate the following year. ;)
Those Martians never stood a chance.
I just downloaded this package, and all it has a lists of names and URLs to Facebook profiles. If they users made their profile private, you're not going to get anything more than their name.
That's really up to the developer. If I were to use such a service, I'd allow a certain number of executions without validation before validation was required again. For example, if the validation comes back, I save that date to my app database, maybe encrypt it, and run the same check each time it's run. If I don't get a reply for N days (or N runs) then disable the app. It would most likely be easily hacked (cause I'd have to store the value somewhere...) but it would most likely cut out the couch pirates. It could also be like "shareware" with an N day limit on play.
Wine works well for x86, not so well for non-x86. As netbook makers introduce ARM powered models to save battery, "play all your games on Wine" won't be the easy cop-out that it used to be, at least until DOSBox gains some sort of dynarec.
But you listed Windows applications... and those won't run on ARM either.
Still, that takes time and requires someone to reach out. It takes balls to reach out because you face being vilified by both sides.
Not being a subject of your party doesn't mean you will no longer go to meetings though...
Personally I think the party system is wrong. All it does is help people make uneducated votes. My Grandmother concreted that thought in my head when she told me she had voted Democrat from the time of JFK and she doesn't understand why they are different today, but she still votes for them because that's how she's registered.
The sad thing about vocational schools is that they are normally considered a "last resort" for kids who can't go to college. (That's how it was pitched to me. "You should be looking for a good college," says my guidance counselor.)
You went to DeVry didn't you? I quit after 6 trimesters of COBOL when I was promised much more (and expected much more.) Granted, it was 1996-1998 so they were "conditioning" us for Y2K (from what I figure) but I didn't want to be a one trick COBOL programmer when I left school. I stopped giving them my money. I ended up learning what I wanted in my free time while working for a small "Mom and Pop" computer store. That landed me a job in technical support for a Fortune 500 company where I eventually got into Web Development and now I'm a Senior Developer for our Corporate eLearning department. I don't regret leaving DeVry... what I do regret is giving them what money I did as well as my 50% scholarship.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've been looking or a college that offers some real courses on programming where I might actually learn something new. I have a really good grasp and experience with OOP (as with anything, there's still more to learn!) but I want to find courses in Functional Programming without having to move across country. What I'm finding is that most colleges don't teach non-mainstream topics and I really don't want to have to learn it the same way I did OOP without something to prove it.
I don't have a degree, and I call myself a developer... a Senior Developer, but still a developer.
...sometimes I type out of seuqence (faster fingers tend to beat the weaker fingers to the punch), sometimes I dont put enough pressue on the keys/touchscreen for them to register, sometimes I get the finger right, but on teh wuong hand...
I seriously hope that was done on purpose. ;)
Can we call you when someone figures out how to parse that comment? ;)
Does it matter? If I get some terminal disease tomorrow, why can't I decide to relieve my family and friends from the burden of taking care of me?
Why can't a person volunteer to end their life at any time if they know they will be a drain on society in general?
I don't understand this mentality that someone else knows better about your well being than yourself.
I think we are getting hung up on the fact that I said average when I should have been saying C level...
But it makes me wonder what would happen if you did make the lower 50% of the students retake a particular class. They should do better the next time and pass on to the next level or be forced to take it again until they exceeded the 50% mark for the class... you'd have to break up the classes into specific skills though and you'd have to teach that skill over and over until the students learn it and bypass the average level (50%) students in the class. Children that studied or were talented would be pushed through to harder classes where they may not understand something until they take the course again and kids who are really excellent would fly through classes. You'd most definitely have very different age groups in each class though and barring psychological effects of having some younger kid bypass you in skill I don't know how that would work.
That's pretty stupid. Which questions? Who writes them? Who chooses them? Essay or multiple choice? If both are they equally weighted? Are the grade cutoff scores predefined? Are they good questions? Or are we talking about photocopied example tests from the teachers edition?
Personally I think any test with an average of 85% is too damn easy and typically target tests I make to have a 50% average and a 15% standard deviation. By your logic I'd need to fail 85% of the class if you use a fixed 70% as a cutoff
The questions are created by the teachers... where they get them from is probably a book approved by the Dept. Of Education for the individual States. (At least that was the way it was done when I sent to school.)
Most of the grading was done on tests and homework assignments (weighting I think had to be approved[?]) and based on the percentage of correct answers (or least number of marks for essays) you'd get a grade. When I went to school, 90-100% was an A, 80-89% was a B... etc.
Do you teach in the US? You'd know better than I would if that's still the norm.
I never said to fail 85% class. I just said if the students can't get a more than half the questions right on their tests, they should probably redo the class until they can.
You can't use normal distribution in grades.
Grades are not assigned based on the normal of the class. They are based on the ability to answer a set amount of questions correctly.
Why keep the above average student learning less than they should be because you let the under average students into the next level? (If the D student just barely passed basic math, how are they going to understand the next level?)
Why do schools consistently push forward below average kids without teaching them what they need to know to be above C level? Eventually you narrow that "below C" group to only a few who can be filtered into special classes for slow learners.
The problem we have is that we expect children to learn at the same level as every other child. We expect to be able to point to a kid in a room, ask him his age and be able to determine what level of education he has opposed to what level he actually performed.