Isn't it that it is all right for your carrier (ATT & Verizon) to sell your phone records (Amdocs) to anyone who has a couple of bucks? How dare these little players get into this game. Next thing you know is that customers might start thinking that their financial records are their alone and not the property of their financial institutes.
I keep reading more and more about how the 4th Amendment does not apply to records stored on servers, only to records that are physically located in your house. Next thing you know, attorney client privileges will be the property of the attorney who will charge you even more if he has something really incriminating.
Well, why stop there. Maybe we can make it a decatholon event. We can add a game we played in college. Beer Pong. Like Ping-Pong, except you have to drink a sip of beer after each miss. We also use to have a Beer Mile Relay in HS track. It was patterned after the Three Mile Relay, but one carried a six pack of cheap beer, one can of which he had to drink before finishing his 1/2 mile segment, and pass the remaining containers to the next runner.
Please help me file out additional events, maybe make the pole vault more interesting by jumping over a razor wire fence.
One interesting thing I learned in statistics is that often just the fact that certain things exhibit significant correlation, then there is a high probability they they are interrelated.
A case in point is how events are treated in the pharmaceutical industry. It is just enough that events are correlated that one makes a judgment about efficacy. One cannot possibly study all the chemical interactions that can and will occur. So, it just comes down to a calculated guess. In fact, there are lots of drugs which have both positive and negative effects. One approach is to administer the drug and to moderate the negative counter effects via other drugs or therapy. This is one reason why people say that the cure is often worse than the symptom. For example, 100 years ago, mercury was used to cure syphilis.
Too bad I can't think of other examples, but this mode is used in many fields where one cannot control the experiment or the nature is too complicated to be quantified or modeled.
I can see the conservatives are being ones really standing up for food and shelters of kids born to mothers who did not want or could not afford them.
Yes, the same conservatives and Puritans who value life so much that are willing to get us into a war where we kill people in order to steal their oil. I guess these are the same people that slaughtered the Indians because they were in the way of rich farmland. Or better yet, the same class that has no problem sending poor African and Latino kids to fight and die over assets and lands so that their children will run corporations which will extract profit from those gains.
Praise be Jesus! God Bless America!
I claim knowing a higher prime!!
2^(2^43,112,609 - 1) - 1
or 2^(2^(2^43,112,609 - 1) - 1) - 1
better yet 2^(2^(2^(2^43,112,609 - 1) - 1) - 1) - 1.. recursively..
Where do I get my money!!
Well, most high school hackers can get around this issue.
Suppose that you want to bring in information on a laptop.
You take your information and run it through a compression and encryption algorithm.
You then run an utility which writes this data inside a deleted segment of the hard drive.
Unless the border security are exceptionally bright and computer savvy, I doubt that they can find even where to look. Maybe they have a utility program at the border which automates this process. I doubt that unless you are a strong suspect, most security guards have any idea of how to approach this issue.
Personally, I like the idea of hiding the SanDisk in a cupcake or an iPod up your ass.
BTW, isn't this a great way to get rid of your old computer hardware. Just rename a garbled file as AlQuida battle plans and drop it off at the border. Maybe you might get a free trip to Gitmo.
Actually, I did not.
But the point of my post was that I could not find the facination with religion non the less.
I just find it a silly belief and cannot fanthom how it is so influential in people's lives.
That was all before reading "The God Delusion" too.
I am really surprised that so many Americans are interested in religion. Yes, I guess that there is the "going to Hell" fear in the back of some people's minds, but hey, look at all the incidents of priests behaving inappropriately with children and need I bring up Baker and Swargget to illustrate that even people in the center of religions indoctrination are disregretful of the wrath of God. Maybe its because that many young adult boys believe that a good side effect of religion is that it keeps young girls in line, else they would be running off and having sex with all of their male friends.
I read the book, "The Martian Way" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Way], which discusses capturing floating ice crystals and bringing them to a planet (Mars). I was watching an episode of "The Universe", which stated that the vast majority of water on Earth comes from captured meteoroids. Light planets (Mars) lose their water because hydrogen evaporates off into space.
I watched George Pal's "When World Collide" as well as a bunch of other movies ("War of the Worlds", "The Time Machine") from the 1950's. It is funny how the world (now and in the future) is inhabited only by beautiful white women blonds and while Anglo Saxon men.
I was watching a TV show about this last year. I heard that you could repack Testor's engines. They used aluminum powder, potassium nitrate, and sulfur. I think that you are allowed to launch them up to 2000 ft.
Kansas is one of the major strongholds of Christian Fundamentalism. Do they even teach biology or is it a "creation inspired curriculum" where they throw samples into a test tube and pray that God will set things right? What college educated person would want to move there and have to deal with all those religious quacks every day? Maybe in this recession, but if things ever pick up, Bubba Pastor and his flock will be running the place.
I must have been in 6 different school districts in elementary education. Most of my teachers were good.
In the three years before a teacher makes tenure, there is ample opportunity to fire him/her. The ones that make it through this probation period are the ones who are able to tow the party line and fit in. After that, I guess that some just get lazy. While this might be true, I have seen students and parents gang up on teachers and students who did not "get along," usually for their political or religious beliefs.
Most Americans are religious bigots and political jingoist. You can talk about how evil Hitler was (and I agree), but once you compare Hitler to Andrew Jackson, you are are a traitor. You can talk about how Hitler rounded up Jews, but no one cares how the Indians were treated in OK. You can talk about 6M Jews who were killed by the Nazi's, but don't bring up the fact that 50M Africans were killed during the Slave Trade funded by the Confederacy.
Christianity as a Religion is even easier to rip apart by most pissed off Americans, but no one has the guts to do so. A simple topic is if Jesus was indeed the Messiah and preformed the miracles attributed to him, why did he chose not to perform one act in front of Pilate's court on the Friday before Passover.
But the real question is, how can you have an educational system if most graduates can't discuss these topics nor have any inclination of how to approach such an argument. I use to hate oral exams and thought I was lucky that I never had one all during my elementary school education. It was not much later on in life that I realized that most evaluations of performance in jobs was based on my oral presentation and how much of a disservice was done to me by having avoid that.
I think Pink Floyd got it right, "All in all, you are just another brick in the wall!"
As other programmers have pointed out, there are things to learn beyond just languages alone, e.g. exception handling, memory management, multi-threading and semephores. Try to learn things that transend languages alone.
Syntax comes and goes, but software engineering is an art. You have learn to write clean code and learn how to modularize functionality. This sort of thing is not learned out of a book alone, but rather by looking at good examples and trying to imitate the style.
Finally, I should add that learning a business domain or scientific niche is perhaps just as important. Someday, you might find yourself landing a job not because you are the best hot shot programmer around, but rather that you have skills and understanding in a problem someone needs solved. This is especially true if you are going to be working for people who are not strict programmers themselves. A lot of times, your bosses might take it for granted that you know how to program. They want to know that you understand the problem enough and know how to solve it with minimal supervision. Othertimes, the choice of a programming language and tools has been set before you got involved and you will be asked to complete a task or to take the project in another direction. You might hate the previous choice of tools, but changing those on an established task is going to cause you brand new headaches and undue conflict. I once jokingly said that we should drop our old tools (AS400 & DB2) and techniques on our current project. This went in direct conflict with my boss's opinion to his yearly summery to upper management. Not only was he pissed that I made such an off the cuff remark during a meeting, but he pointed out that a migration like that was an onerous task, the end result of which would have not really contributed to something that business people would value as important. Business people don't care about software issues if they don't see a direct and immediate return on investment. Moreover, a project might have hidden and undocumented features, which will only surface after a migration is complete. Some bass ackwards feature that you though should have been eliminated off the face of the Earth is going to come back and haunt you because an financial audit fails to verify its existence. This is the real world of programming, so hold onto your coconuts!
After 9/11, there was a sign banning photographing the Triborough [??] Bridge, one major connection to LGA from Westchester.
The logic was that we did not want to provide photos for terrorists who might try to bomb the bridge (as I guess they were too stupid to dig up postcard or old photographs).
Well, I don't know about now, but for years (2000-2004?), a bunch of ignoramus construction workers came in and dug up the left two lanes, and left the bridge all tore up, and restricted traffic to the one lane often clutter with debris. If urban planning could not come up with a way to finish, why bother starting? This was a great obstacle if you are trying to catch a flight out of LGA during rush hour.
People use to say, maybe we should let someone bomb the bridge, maybe someone would actually be forced to rebuild the three lanes. I guess no one calculated the number of fatalities and economic impact of destroying the alignment of all the cars that would travel over the right lane? How many traffic accidents must have occurred during rain and poor weather on this road?
oxymoron: civil engineers
Well, there are two major factors.
1) Given the current recession, the number of jobs have fallen off. That and there is pressure to hire an American over someone on a visa. Plus, maybe the foreigners don't want to pay our debt due to all of the bailouts and "Economic stimulus".
2) Xenophobia is alive and well. Even if there were no 9/11, there was a fear of foreigners in the US. Be it left over hostiles from the Cold War, hatred towards Mexicans and South Americans for taking "good jobs" from Americans, Native Americans wanting their land back, or African-Americans wanting a piece of the American Dream and compensation from slavery, there are build up resentments which have been under the surface.
Whenever you evaluate a strategic game or a problem, you can see it by seeing it from the opponents point of view.
Whether it was a Nigerian scam or just a plain St. Louis swindle, there are plenty of people out there looking to con you. You just can't be too careful. Nigeria might have lots of oil wealth, but that is tightly held by the families in the oil business. The rest of the population was to dig up their own "income".
Just amongst legitimate bills, there are lots of errors and unnecessary stuff that gets added to the bills to piss me off. I wish I had knowledge to know which things were completely unnecessary.
For example, my automatic transmission was not working. I had to pay $700 for getting the gears replaced. I paid a bit more for using aluminum gears, rather than plastic parts, but this was ok. However, what sort of thief designer would put plastic gears in a transmission? But, I could not just purchase the gears alone. I had to buy the who damn assembly!!
Suppose that you are a worker at Los Alamos, and you lose a computer. Do you
1) Report it lost. Hey, if a laptop was lost by the Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf War, it could happen to any peon!
2) Don't report it, and maybe no one might notice. I bet this happens a lot too. Sometimes, the records might not be closely watched.
3) Buy an identical computer on EBay, Change the serial number on the firmware and repopulate the data.
My guess is #3 is the worst choice because suppose that you did lose it, and it ends up in the hands of the enemy. Maybe it might be used against you in a multitude of ways. Well, sometimes, there are moles planted amongst the enemy, so it might end up getting spotted and word gets back to your side. Now, you are accused of intentionally replacing the goods with counterfeit items.
I was watching a PBS show with Michio Kaku call this the cascade scenario. As soon as two satellites collide, the debris field will spread and cause more collisions, until Earth is surrounded by a debris field which will prohibit Earth launched space travel for many years.
1) How to Solve Proofs.
2) How to Solve It, by Polya
3) A Compendium of Soviet High School Math Challenge Problems. I can't recall if this is the exact title, but it was a collection of hard math problems (solvable with only a high school math understanding) meant to find math geniuses. This book was translated from Russian and was available at Barnes and Nobel about 5 years ago. I know that in high school, I would take something like the Putnam (ECS?) exam, and if I had done well enough, I could have received a math scholarship to a top rated university.
Ironically, I see an ad to Stop Internet Gambling. Why is that? Is it because some government entity is truly concerned about the loss and devastation to people due to gambling (and decided not to focus on Los Vegas)? Or is it because the Gambling establishments really want to keep business to themselves. Either that, or go into options and futures trading?
Gambling is very lucrative and requires very little base capital to get started. It is so much cheaper to set up business in Costa Rica and sell to customers in the world.
One thing I have noticed that Americans can buy coffee and other agricultural goods for very cheap in South America. However, the problem is getting it over the border in sizable quantities. Customs and parasite prevention regulations make it nearly impossible. I understand that one is worried about bringing contaminates from abroad, but if this is truly an issue, then there should be a systematic examination agricultural goods brought in by major corporation as well. Every pound of Maxwell House coffee should be inspected as well. As it currently stands, only about.2% of agricultural goods are inspected, leaving the majority of the industry to be self regulated.
Another great example of how our government fails us is with the USDA and cattle in California. Cattle raised in (a desert of) California consume 100,000 gallons water per year at a fixed 1920's price of water (to appease the corporate farmers). These cattle are then shipped off to Japan, and undercut the price of steak sold there. However, if the price of water was that paid by the city of Los Angeles, California grown beef would be just as expensive as that grown in Japan.
My final case in point is with tobacco. I don't know about current legislation, but in the 1970's, tobacco was the most heavily subsidized agriculture in the US. How the hell could anyone have decided to subsides tobacco, unless the Duke family got their paid representatives in government to support these subsidies.
What ever happened to the idea of free markets when our politics is involved?
That and maybe we should discuss that if we want to walk in the way of Jesus, then why is the catholic church so wealthy? Anyone who has seen Rome must be awestruck by the immense cost of all the architecture. Not to mention that it was built in the 16th century, using men and oxen, not gas powered bulldozers and cranes.
Jesus owned the clothes on his back and the sandles on his feet.
The other issue of Jesus's powers came up in the trial of Jesus. Pontious Pilot asked Jesus to demonstrate his powers in front of an audience. Why turn water into wine or heal the sick and injured when no one is watching. It makes you wonder if this was indeed what really happened or not some pallor trick.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it that it is all right for your carrier (ATT & Verizon) to sell your phone records (Amdocs) to anyone who has a couple of bucks? How dare these little players get into this game. Next thing you know is that customers might start thinking that their financial records are their alone and not the property of their financial institutes. I keep reading more and more about how the 4th Amendment does not apply to records stored on servers, only to records that are physically located in your house. Next thing you know, attorney client privileges will be the property of the attorney who will charge you even more if he has something really incriminating.
Well, what if the Chinese and Indians decided to jump un and down at the same time. Shit, we should be planning for this too!!
Well, why stop there. Maybe we can make it a decatholon event. We can add a game we played in college. Beer Pong. Like Ping-Pong, except you have to drink a sip of beer after each miss. We also use to have a Beer Mile Relay in HS track. It was patterned after the Three Mile Relay, but one carried a six pack of cheap beer, one can of which he had to drink before finishing his 1/2 mile segment, and pass the remaining containers to the next runner.
Please help me file out additional events, maybe make the pole vault more interesting by jumping over a razor wire fence.
One interesting thing I learned in statistics is that often just the fact that certain things exhibit significant correlation, then there is a high probability they they are interrelated.
A case in point is how events are treated in the pharmaceutical industry. It is just enough that events are correlated that one makes a judgment about efficacy. One cannot possibly study all the chemical interactions that can and will occur. So, it just comes down to a calculated guess. In fact, there are lots of drugs which have both positive and negative effects. One approach is to administer the drug and to moderate the negative counter effects via other drugs or therapy. This is one reason why people say that the cure is often worse than the symptom. For example, 100 years ago, mercury was used to cure syphilis. Too bad I can't think of other examples, but this mode is used in many fields where one cannot control the experiment or the nature is too complicated to be quantified or modeled.
I can see the conservatives are being ones really standing up for food and shelters of kids born to mothers who did not want or could not afford them.
Yes, the same conservatives and Puritans who value life so much that are willing to get us into a war where we kill people in order to steal their oil. I guess these are the same people that slaughtered the Indians because they were in the way of rich farmland. Or better yet, the same class that has no problem sending poor African and Latino kids to fight and die over assets and lands so that their children will run corporations which will extract profit from those gains.
Praise be Jesus! God Bless America!
I claim knowing a higher prime!! 2^(2^43,112,609 - 1) - 1 or 2^(2^(2^43,112,609 - 1) - 1) - 1 better yet 2^(2^(2^(2^43,112,609 - 1) - 1) - 1) - 1 .. recursively ..
Where do I get my money!!
Well, most high school hackers can get around this issue. Suppose that you want to bring in information on a laptop. You take your information and run it through a compression and encryption algorithm. You then run an utility which writes this data inside a deleted segment of the hard drive. Unless the border security are exceptionally bright and computer savvy, I doubt that they can find even where to look. Maybe they have a utility program at the border which automates this process. I doubt that unless you are a strong suspect, most security guards have any idea of how to approach this issue. Personally, I like the idea of hiding the SanDisk in a cupcake or an iPod up your ass. BTW, isn't this a great way to get rid of your old computer hardware. Just rename a garbled file as AlQuida battle plans and drop it off at the border. Maybe you might get a free trip to Gitmo.
Actually, I did not. But the point of my post was that I could not find the facination with religion non the less. I just find it a silly belief and cannot fanthom how it is so influential in people's lives. That was all before reading "The God Delusion" too.
I am really surprised that so many Americans are interested in religion. Yes, I guess that there is the "going to Hell" fear in the back of some people's minds, but hey, look at all the incidents of priests behaving inappropriately with children and need I bring up Baker and Swargget to illustrate that even people in the center of religions indoctrination are disregretful of the wrath of God. Maybe its because that many young adult boys believe that a good side effect of religion is that it keeps young girls in line, else they would be running off and having sex with all of their male friends.
I read the book, "The Martian Way" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Way], which discusses capturing floating ice crystals and bringing them to a planet (Mars).
I was watching an episode of "The Universe", which stated that the vast majority of water on Earth comes from captured meteoroids. Light planets (Mars) lose their water because hydrogen evaporates off into space.
I watched George Pal's "When World Collide" as well as a bunch of other movies ("War of the Worlds", "The Time Machine") from the 1950's. It is funny how the world (now and in the future) is inhabited only by beautiful white women blonds and while Anglo Saxon men.
I was watching a TV show about this last year. I heard that you could repack Testor's engines. They used aluminum powder, potassium nitrate, and sulfur. I think that you are allowed to launch them up to 2000 ft.
Kansas is one of the major strongholds of Christian Fundamentalism. Do they even teach biology or is it a "creation inspired curriculum" where they throw samples into a test tube and pray that God will set things right? What college educated person would want to move there and have to deal with all those religious quacks every day? Maybe in this recession, but if things ever pick up, Bubba Pastor and his flock will be running the place.
I must have been in 6 different school districts in elementary education. Most of my teachers were good. In the three years before a teacher makes tenure, there is ample opportunity to fire him/her. The ones that make it through this probation period are the ones who are able to tow the party line and fit in. After that, I guess that some just get lazy. While this might be true, I have seen students and parents gang up on teachers and students who did not "get along," usually for their political or religious beliefs.
Most Americans are religious bigots and political jingoist. You can talk about how evil Hitler was (and I agree), but once you compare Hitler to Andrew Jackson, you are are a traitor. You can talk about how Hitler rounded up Jews, but no one cares how the Indians were treated in OK. You can talk about 6M Jews who were killed by the Nazi's, but don't bring up the fact that 50M Africans were killed during the Slave Trade funded by the Confederacy.
Christianity as a Religion is even easier to rip apart by most pissed off Americans, but no one has the guts to do so. A simple topic is if Jesus was indeed the Messiah and preformed the miracles attributed to him, why did he chose not to perform one act in front of Pilate's court on the Friday before Passover.
But the real question is, how can you have an educational system if most graduates can't discuss these topics nor have any inclination of how to approach such an argument. I use to hate oral exams and thought I was lucky that I never had one all during my elementary school education. It was not much later on in life that I realized that most evaluations of performance in jobs was based on my oral presentation and how much of a disservice was done to me by having avoid that.
I think Pink Floyd got it right, "All in all, you are just another brick in the wall!"
As other programmers have pointed out, there are things to learn beyond just languages alone, e.g. exception handling, memory management, multi-threading and semephores. Try to learn things that transend languages alone.
Syntax comes and goes, but software engineering is an art. You have learn to write clean code and learn how to modularize functionality. This sort of thing is not learned out of a book alone, but rather by looking at good examples and trying to imitate the style.
Finally, I should add that learning a business domain or scientific niche is perhaps just as important. Someday, you might find yourself landing a job not because you are the best hot shot programmer around, but rather that you have skills and understanding in a problem someone needs solved. This is especially true if you are going to be working for people who are not strict programmers themselves. A lot of times, your bosses might take it for granted that you know how to program. They want to know that you understand the problem enough and know how to solve it with minimal supervision. Othertimes, the choice of a programming language and tools has been set before you got involved and you will be asked to complete a task or to take the project in another direction. You might hate the previous choice of tools, but changing those on an established task is going to cause you brand new headaches and undue conflict. I once jokingly said that we should drop our old tools (AS400 & DB2) and techniques on our current project. This went in direct conflict with my boss's opinion to his yearly summery to upper management. Not only was he pissed that I made such an off the cuff remark during a meeting, but he pointed out that a migration like that was an onerous task, the end result of which would have not really contributed to something that business people would value as important. Business people don't care about software issues if they don't see a direct and immediate return on investment. Moreover, a project might have hidden and undocumented features, which will only surface after a migration is complete. Some bass ackwards feature that you though should have been eliminated off the face of the Earth is going to come back and haunt you because an financial audit fails to verify its existence. This is the real world of programming, so hold onto your coconuts!
Look at this site which rates languages by popularity of use:
.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
My suggestion is to read Kernigan's The Practice of Programming
Debugging the Software Development Process by Microsoft Press
After 9/11, there was a sign banning photographing the Triborough [??] Bridge, one major connection to LGA from Westchester. The logic was that we did not want to provide photos for terrorists who might try to bomb the bridge (as I guess they were too stupid to dig up postcard or old photographs).
Well, I don't know about now, but for years (2000-2004?), a bunch of ignoramus construction workers came in and dug up the left two lanes, and left the bridge all tore up, and restricted traffic to the one lane often clutter with debris. If urban planning could not come up with a way to finish, why bother starting? This was a great obstacle if you are trying to catch a flight out of LGA during rush hour.
People use to say, maybe we should let someone bomb the bridge, maybe someone would actually be forced to rebuild the three lanes. I guess no one calculated the number of fatalities and economic impact of destroying the alignment of all the cars that would travel over the right lane? How many traffic accidents must have occurred during rain and poor weather on this road?
oxymoron: civil engineers
Well, there are two major factors.
1) Given the current recession, the number of jobs have fallen off. That and there is pressure to hire an American over someone on a visa. Plus, maybe the foreigners don't want to pay our debt due to all of the bailouts and "Economic stimulus".
2) Xenophobia is alive and well. Even if there were no 9/11, there was a fear of foreigners in the US. Be it left over hostiles from the Cold War, hatred towards Mexicans and South Americans for taking "good jobs" from Americans, Native Americans wanting their land back, or African-Americans wanting a piece of the American Dream and compensation from slavery, there are build up resentments which have been under the surface.
Whenever you evaluate a strategic game or a problem, you can see it by seeing it from the opponents point of view.
Whether it was a Nigerian scam or just a plain St. Louis swindle, there are plenty of people out there looking to con you. You just can't be too careful. Nigeria might have lots of oil wealth, but that is tightly held by the families in the oil business. The rest of the population was to dig up their own "income". Just amongst legitimate bills, there are lots of errors and unnecessary stuff that gets added to the bills to piss me off. I wish I had knowledge to know which things were completely unnecessary.
For example, my automatic transmission was not working. I had to pay $700 for getting the gears replaced. I paid a bit more for using aluminum gears, rather than plastic parts, but this was ok. However, what sort of thief designer would put plastic gears in a transmission? But, I could not just purchase the gears alone. I had to buy the who damn assembly!!
Suppose that you are a worker at Los Alamos, and you lose a computer. Do you
1) Report it lost. Hey, if a laptop was lost by the Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf War, it could happen to any peon!
2) Don't report it, and maybe no one might notice. I bet this happens a lot too. Sometimes, the records might not be closely watched.
3) Buy an identical computer on EBay, Change the serial number on the firmware and repopulate the data.
My guess is #3 is the worst choice because suppose that you did lose it, and it ends up in the hands of the enemy. Maybe it might be used against you in a multitude of ways. Well, sometimes, there are moles planted amongst the enemy, so it might end up getting spotted and word gets back to your side. Now, you are accused of intentionally replacing the goods with counterfeit items.
I was watching a PBS show with Michio Kaku call this the cascade scenario. As soon as two satellites collide, the debris field will spread and cause more collisions, until Earth is surrounded by a debris field which will prohibit Earth launched space travel for many years.
3) The problems of the All-Soviet-Union mathematical competitions 1961-1986 http://pertselv.tripod.com/RusMath.html
1) How to Solve Proofs.
2) How to Solve It, by Polya
3) A Compendium of Soviet High School Math Challenge Problems.
I can't recall if this is the exact title, but it was a collection of hard math problems (solvable with only a high school math understanding) meant to find math geniuses. This book was translated from Russian and was available at Barnes and Nobel about 5 years ago. I know that in high school, I would take something like the Putnam (ECS?) exam, and if I had done well enough, I could have received a math scholarship to a top rated university.
Ironically, I see an ad to Stop Internet Gambling. Why is that? Is it because some government entity is truly concerned about the loss and devastation to people due to gambling (and decided not to focus on Los Vegas)? Or is it because the Gambling establishments really want to keep business to themselves. Either that, or go into options and futures trading? .2% of agricultural goods are inspected, leaving the majority of the industry to be self regulated.
Gambling is very lucrative and requires very little base capital to get started. It is so much cheaper to set up business in Costa Rica and sell to customers in the world.
One thing I have noticed that Americans can buy coffee and other agricultural goods for very cheap in South America. However, the problem is getting it over the border in sizable quantities. Customs and parasite prevention regulations make it nearly impossible. I understand that one is worried about bringing contaminates from abroad, but if this is truly an issue, then there should be a systematic examination agricultural goods brought in by major corporation as well. Every pound of Maxwell House coffee should be inspected as well. As it currently stands, only about
Another great example of how our government fails us is with the USDA and cattle in California. Cattle raised in (a desert of) California consume 100,000 gallons water per year at a fixed 1920's price of water (to appease the corporate farmers). These cattle are then shipped off to Japan, and undercut the price of steak sold there. However, if the price of water was that paid by the city of Los Angeles, California grown beef would be just as expensive as that grown in Japan.
My final case in point is with tobacco. I don't know about current legislation, but in the 1970's, tobacco was the most heavily subsidized agriculture in the US. How the hell could anyone have decided to subsides tobacco, unless the Duke family got their paid representatives in government to support these subsidies.
What ever happened to the idea of free markets when our politics is involved?
That and maybe we should discuss that if we want to walk in the way of Jesus, then why is the catholic church so wealthy? Anyone who has seen Rome must be awestruck by the immense cost of all the architecture. Not to mention that it was built in the 16th century, using men and oxen, not gas powered bulldozers and cranes. Jesus owned the clothes on his back and the sandles on his feet.
The other issue of Jesus's powers came up in the trial of Jesus. Pontious Pilot asked Jesus to demonstrate his powers in front of an audience. Why turn water into wine or heal the sick and injured when no one is watching. It makes you wonder if this was indeed what really happened or not some pallor trick.