I really doubt that the average internet user ever makes the connection that clicking the add can support the website, and most of the people who have made that connection probably don't bother. I usually only click ads by accident, but sometimes I remember what they're selling if it's something like a video game or a travel website that might be of interest later. Which is, of course, the point.
Can you possibly make a plate visible to an eye and invisible to a camera when they're both using the same wavelengths of radiation to detect images? I remember seeing that episode and thinking it was an idiotic idea, but maybe they know something I don't. I don't recall them going into the science of it at all.
My intuitions about whether someone is a good person or not are not right 100% of the time, but they are well over half. I don't know what the positive correlation between someone doing a good job as, say, 1 of 100 senators and doing a good job as 1 of 1 US president is, but I doubt it's 100% either. Being able to oil the machine, push, prod, and cajole is a very important part of being an effective politician, and physical mannerisms are a good way to tell if someone is capable of doing this. All the good ideas in the world don't do you any good if you can't implement them, and good ideas on paper are worthless if you're a liar. You may notice that the 'pretty' candidate doesn't always win. A good example of this would be John Edwards, who has trouble because he seems like a fraud. Surprise - now he's trying to exploit his wife's terminal cancer for public sympathy. Looks like the intuition was right. I get the same impression this time around about Mitt Romney, too. Guess I'll have to wait and see how that plays out.
There's a difference between someone who looks ugly and someone who looks dishonest. It's not just physical appearance - it's mannerisms, etc. People are pretty good at reading each other's expressions. The blind guy is a total red herring.
I did see that.. I'm just curious... The tax net revenue (collected - rebate) summed over the whole population has to remain pretty similar to the current tax revenue. If someone's paying at a lower rate, either someone else has to be paying at a higher rate or the whole pot has to be getting bigger. It appears they think the pot will be getting somewhat bigger (they claimed 10.5% in the first year), but it didn't seem like it would be enough to make up the difference. Obviously making the tax code simpler reduces the collection cost substantially, but even cutting the IRS from 100K to 30-50K employees is relatively small potatoes compared to the annual budget. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad idea, I'd just like to know how they're getting the numbers to work. I also wonder if it would fuel some avoidance of the tax by paying cash. That doesn't save a ton at the moment but I've still had offers from mechanics and locksmiths and whatnot to take cash for a lower fee, and I'd think that would increase if total state and federal sales tax rate was close to 40%.
I just read that, and I'm more confused than I was before. How will they increase the tax income if the tax burden of every income category of citizen is reduced (per graphs on pages 3 & 4)? Is it working on the premise that lowering the tax rate will increase consumption, increasing spending, increasing the tax base and taxes collected? I'm not sure I follow where exactly the money is coming from under their proposal. Or was it this line that makes up the difference?
Generally total taxes paid divided by total lifetime taxable income for a given period of time; Kotlikoff's definition
is total taxes paid net of Social Security benefits and the FairTax prebate divided by total taxable income over one's
lifetime. The marginal FairTax rate is 23 percent above the poverty level.
Also, the idea of a >30% sales tax affecting my rent is kind of frightening. I agree that the system as it stands is too complicated, but I'm not sure that I understand where they're getting all the money from.
No, the defense department has had them for a bit longer than 5 years. There were some pretty damned impressive displays of their effect on civilian populations about 62 years ago. That was terrorism on a scale not seen since.
Just off the top of my head, try the Nanking massacre (etc), the Holocaust, the firebombing of Tokyo & Dresden (etc), the whole Russian debacle in the Ukraine, the Khmer Rouge, the entire Kim Jong Il family tree... of course, they did it over time and most of those predate the 'since'. That's without touching the issue of what the death toll would have been with a conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands (see Iwo Jima or Okinawa for possible ideas).
A foreign policy of "shoot first and don't bother asking questions" is a greater enemy to the US then any sovereign nation ever could be, especially coming from a nation with a track record such as ours.
I can't disagree with that. We should not be wantonly invading other countries. But dubious, inflammatory claims tend to get the argument dismissed with a waive of the hand rather than considered seriously.
Trust me, I am in the UK, I understand the idea of people being concerned about the concept of a police state. Thankfully we still have Habeas Corpus here, something, alas, not guaranteed in the US Constitution. My bias is that I think that Habeas Corpus is a good thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus#Suspens ion_in_the_United_States_in_1990s_and_2000s
From your link: United States
Main article: Habeas corpus in the United States
The United States Constitution specifically included the English common law procedure in the Suspension Clause, located in Article One, Section 9. It states: " The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it. "
So, yes, we do have it. We... just use the wartime loophole for things we shouldn't. I think the sheer size of the US makes it hard to govern... there doesn't seem to be anything that everyone agrees on so we end up with BS that no one likes. And it gives us a superiority complex.
But I don't expect you to learn any life lessons from this. People like stories with comic book villains and if seeing Saddam as evil, omnipotent, and omniscient makes your universe make sense, whatever. [Here's where I make some insulting generalization about you, but even I have too much good taste for that.]
Idle curiosity: Do you think a smart-assed remark about how you, unlike the other guy, are too good for personal attacks is something other than a personal attack?
No, but if they're in the county, you have to smell them.
One thing you notice in the country when you get back from a trip to the city is the smell of fresh air. And the urge to shower to wash the grime and smog of the city off you.
Fresh air, or pig shit, depending how much farming is in the area.
Satellite.
Sucks.
Nope.
Until the squirrels chew through the line. Then it sucks again. But now that cell coverage is everywhere, it's pretty much a moot point.
American Idol is so popular it no longer needs to advertise, as near as I can tell. I was shocked last year to find it was the most watched program on television. I don't know about survivor.
When I was in the Boy Scouts, we did monthly overnight backpacking trips, and a few longer ones a year. They weren't anything too terribly difficult, usually in the 15-20 miles range over two days, though some of the several-day trips were tougher because you'd be carrying so much stuff. The guys in our troop ranged from 12-17, and were generally pretty active academically and athletically. Are the age groups worldwide the same? I'm not sure how having separate camps at jamborees would make the American scouts "pussies". I'd guess it has more to do with attitudes on sex being a lot less liberal in America than Europe than anything else.
No. That's a terrible analogy. Simply being ahead in a format war helps you to get further ahead, since more players on the market encourage production of more media and more media in existance encourages more people to buy players. A footrace has no such positive feedback loop. That's not to say being ahead early guarantees success, but it certainly doesn't make failure more likely as starting a marathon sprinting would.
Assuming no one retires or mutinies for middle management.... I wonder, though, explicitly what majors does that CS total include? Software Engineering? Computer Engineering? Various Information Systems related majors? I know people with those degrees doing basically CS work, and people with CS degrees working on Wall Street.
The idea that water vapor is the most important gas when it comes to keeping the sun's heat around the earth is completely true, and totally misleading. Without any heat retention by the atmosphere, the Earth would have an average temperature well below zero. Water vapor makes up the majority of the difference between the earth in a deep freeze and the earth in its current state. The majority of the difference between the earth in 1800 and the earth in 2000 is carbon dioxide, since that's increased appreciably while the water vapor has remained more or less constant. But continue hurling insults based on half-facts, if you'd like.
I couldn't find any statistics going back as far as I'd liked to, but something has caused a decrease in the death rate (per capita and per auto-mile) for both pedestrians and motorists over the last 12 years. I think that the downward trend started well before 1994, but I can't seem to find the numbers at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but Scientology is more of a pyramid scheme than a religion.
RTFA, please.
Of course, I'm not american.
What does this have to do with anything? Do people really think that voting in America is coercive, or am I too sensitive to get the joke?
I really doubt that the average internet user ever makes the connection that clicking the add can support the website, and most of the people who have made that connection probably don't bother. I usually only click ads by accident, but sometimes I remember what they're selling if it's something like a video game or a travel website that might be of interest later. Which is, of course, the point.
Can you possibly make a plate visible to an eye and invisible to a camera when they're both using the same wavelengths of radiation to detect images? I remember seeing that episode and thinking it was an idiotic idea, but maybe they know something I don't. I don't recall them going into the science of it at all.
My intuitions about whether someone is a good person or not are not right 100% of the time, but they are well over half. I don't know what the positive correlation between someone doing a good job as, say, 1 of 100 senators and doing a good job as 1 of 1 US president is, but I doubt it's 100% either. Being able to oil the machine, push, prod, and cajole is a very important part of being an effective politician, and physical mannerisms are a good way to tell if someone is capable of doing this. All the good ideas in the world don't do you any good if you can't implement them, and good ideas on paper are worthless if you're a liar. You may notice that the 'pretty' candidate doesn't always win. A good example of this would be John Edwards, who has trouble because he seems like a fraud. Surprise - now he's trying to exploit his wife's terminal cancer for public sympathy. Looks like the intuition was right. I get the same impression this time around about Mitt Romney, too. Guess I'll have to wait and see how that plays out.
+5 totally missed the point.
There's a difference between someone who looks ugly and someone who looks dishonest. It's not just physical appearance - it's mannerisms, etc. People are pretty good at reading each other's expressions. The blind guy is a total red herring.
The wikipedia BMI chart has the metric weight in kilograms (ok), and the imperial weight in fucking stones. Bastards making me do mental arithmetic.
I did see that.. I'm just curious... The tax net revenue (collected - rebate) summed over the whole population has to remain pretty similar to the current tax revenue. If someone's paying at a lower rate, either someone else has to be paying at a higher rate or the whole pot has to be getting bigger. It appears they think the pot will be getting somewhat bigger (they claimed 10.5% in the first year), but it didn't seem like it would be enough to make up the difference. Obviously making the tax code simpler reduces the collection cost substantially, but even cutting the IRS from 100K to 30-50K employees is relatively small potatoes compared to the annual budget. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad idea, I'd just like to know how they're getting the numbers to work. I also wonder if it would fuel some avoidance of the tax by paying cash. That doesn't save a ton at the moment but I've still had offers from mechanics and locksmiths and whatnot to take cash for a lower fee, and I'd think that would increase if total state and federal sales tax rate was close to 40%.
Right, cause all of Yellowstone is as dangerous as Mt. St. Helens.
Potentially more, actually. Just not very often. And this has nothing to do with geothermal power one way or another. But I'm a pedant...
I just read that, and I'm more confused than I was before. How will they increase the tax income if the tax burden of every income category of citizen is reduced (per graphs on pages 3 & 4)? Is it working on the premise that lowering the tax rate will increase consumption, increasing spending, increasing the tax base and taxes collected? I'm not sure I follow where exactly the money is coming from under their proposal. Or was it this line that makes up the difference?
Generally total taxes paid divided by total lifetime taxable income for a given period of time; Kotlikoff's definition is total taxes paid net of Social Security benefits and the FairTax prebate divided by total taxable income over one's lifetime. The marginal FairTax rate is 23 percent above the poverty level.
Also, the idea of a >30% sales tax affecting my rent is kind of frightening. I agree that the system as it stands is too complicated, but I'm not sure that I understand where they're getting all the money from.
Didn't look like a malapropism to me. Maybe a bit better than the typical one-line political dig, but hardly clever.
Are you serious? Because he clearly wasn't.
No, the defense department has had them for a bit longer than 5 years. There were some pretty damned impressive displays of their effect on civilian populations about 62 years ago. That was terrorism on a scale not seen since.
Just off the top of my head, try the Nanking massacre (etc), the Holocaust, the firebombing of Tokyo & Dresden (etc), the whole Russian debacle in the Ukraine, the Khmer Rouge, the entire Kim Jong Il family tree... of course, they did it over time and most of those predate the 'since'. That's without touching the issue of what the death toll would have been with a conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands (see Iwo Jima or Okinawa for possible ideas).
A foreign policy of "shoot first and don't bother asking questions" is a greater enemy to the US then any sovereign nation ever could be, especially coming from a nation with a track record such as ours.
I can't disagree with that. We should not be wantonly invading other countries. But dubious, inflammatory claims tend to get the argument dismissed with a waive of the hand rather than considered seriously.
Trust me, I am in the UK, I understand the idea of people being concerned about the concept of a police state. Thankfully we still have Habeas Corpus here, something, alas, not guaranteed in the US Constitution. My bias is that I think that Habeas Corpus is a good thing.s ion_in_the_United_States_in_1990s_and_2000s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus#Suspen
From your link: United States
Main article: Habeas corpus in the United States
The United States Constitution specifically included the English common law procedure in the Suspension Clause, located in Article One, Section 9. It states:
" The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it. "
So, yes, we do have it. We... just use the wartime loophole for things we shouldn't. I think the sheer size of the US makes it hard to govern... there doesn't seem to be anything that everyone agrees on so we end up with BS that no one likes. And it gives us a superiority complex.
But I don't expect you to learn any life lessons from this. People like stories with comic book villains and if seeing Saddam as evil, omnipotent, and omniscient makes your universe make sense, whatever. [Here's where I make some insulting generalization about you, but even I have too much good taste for that.]
Idle curiosity: Do you think a smart-assed remark about how you, unlike the other guy, are too good for personal attacks is something other than a personal attack?
Now I'm curious. Where and by whom was women's suffrage considered a communist plot?
You don't HAVE to live next to cows.
No, but if they're in the county, you have to smell them.
One thing you notice in the country when you get back from a trip to the city is the smell of fresh air. And the urge to shower to wash the grime and smog of the city off you.
Fresh air, or pig shit, depending how much farming is in the area.
Satellite.
Sucks.
Nope.
Until the squirrels chew through the line. Then it sucks again. But now that cell coverage is everywhere, it's pretty much a moot point.
Welcome to Slashdot, where half the people are batshit crazy making baseless statements to one extreme or another.
American Idol is so popular it no longer needs to advertise, as near as I can tell. I was shocked last year to find it was the most watched program on television. I don't know about survivor.
When I was in the Boy Scouts, we did monthly overnight backpacking trips, and a few longer ones a year. They weren't anything too terribly difficult, usually in the 15-20 miles range over two days, though some of the several-day trips were tougher because you'd be carrying so much stuff. The guys in our troop ranged from 12-17, and were generally pretty active academically and athletically. Are the age groups worldwide the same? I'm not sure how having separate camps at jamborees would make the American scouts "pussies". I'd guess it has more to do with attitudes on sex being a lot less liberal in America than Europe than anything else.
No. That's a terrible analogy. Simply being ahead in a format war helps you to get further ahead, since more players on the market encourage production of more media and more media in existance encourages more people to buy players. A footrace has no such positive feedback loop. That's not to say being ahead early guarantees success, but it certainly doesn't make failure more likely as starting a marathon sprinting would.
Assuming no one retires or mutinies for middle management.... I wonder, though, explicitly what majors does that CS total include? Software Engineering? Computer Engineering? Various Information Systems related majors? I know people with those degrees doing basically CS work, and people with CS degrees working on Wall Street.
The idea that water vapor is the most important gas when it comes to keeping the sun's heat around the earth is completely true, and totally misleading. Without any heat retention by the atmosphere, the Earth would have an average temperature well below zero. Water vapor makes up the majority of the difference between the earth in a deep freeze and the earth in its current state. The majority of the difference between the earth in 1800 and the earth in 2000 is carbon dioxide, since that's increased appreciably while the water vapor has remained more or less constant. But continue hurling insults based on half-facts, if you'd like.
I couldn't find any statistics going back as far as I'd liked to, but something has caused a decrease in the death rate (per capita and per auto-mile) for both pedestrians and motorists over the last 12 years. I think that the downward trend started well before 1994, but I can't seem to find the numbers at the moment.