My first thought was how could he not feel the same way when attacking Iraqui troops too.
Simple, the Iraqi troops were enemies fighting his forces. He attacked allied forces accidentally. Many of the Iraqi forces who did not want to fight simply surrendered (so much so that by the end of the invasion, the coalition forces started to just simply disarm, document, and release the lower ranking surrendering forces since they had run out of space for prisoners). A belligerent group can have force used on it, an allied force, a surrendering force, or a non-combatant group cannot. Accidents will occur, but there is a big difference between harming those who are fighting you and harming an innocent.
Well we as a country do just fine, Washington DC as a city does downright terrible. Despite more pork per Capita or pork per square mile than any state, the territory still has soaring poverty rates. This has nothing to do with minorities, and despite DC's bitterness about not having a representation (which is only partially true, the 23rd Amendment gives them 3 electorial college seats in a Presidential Election, and they get a delegate in the House who can debate, serve on and vote in committees, and introduce bills, it is just not Constitutional for the Federal District to obtain Statehood, nor can a non-State constitutionally have actual representatives.) Washington DC does bad just because inner city areas in general do bad and have high poverty rates (minorities in suburbia usually do roughly on par with their white counterparts, so this is an inner city culture problem, not a minority problem. I'm just noting that while the USA is doing all right, DC isn't.)
We shouldn't have any problems with legal, rational, immigration. Legal immigrants rarely cause problems in the USA. The UK's problem appears to be that they will accept immigrants with little to no pre-qualifications under the banner of "diversity" which causes people to immigrate into the UK without assimilating in the British culture creating a semi-perminant underclass. Accepting foreigners who want to become part of your culture and view your country as a work opportunity is good, accepting anyone but then having them live in a perminant underclass isn't beneficial to either party.
The UK's recent actions appear to be rather disturbing, but the UK has a history of doing things that on the surface appear disturbing, but bellow that there is such incompetence that it isn't a real threat to civil liberties. The excessive survalence is another area. They will put cameras everywhere to monitor people, which is scary until you figure out they can't actually get these cameras to do anything.
It's more of a "cost tax" than a "sin tax". The consumption of certain products (most obvious example: tobacco) has costs far beyond that of the production and selling of the item (consumer much more likely to die earlier and require expensive health treatment before he or she dies.
Putting a modest tax on tobacco and using it to cover lung cancer patients makes sense. Putting a 50% tax on tobbacco and using it to fund head start makes no sense whatsoever. The expense has no relation to the tax (if we wish to create a head start program we should do so using the general funds rather than punishing an unrelated group). The same goes with fuel taxes being used to fund roads, liquor taxes being used to fund DUI checks, but soda is different. Diet coke contains essentially no calories. It has slightly negative health effects (it can sap calcium from bones), but not enough to justify singling it out for taxation. Even regular junk food is completely harmless if consumed as an occasional treat and not as a primary source of food. Taxing soda with the hope of changing peoples habits is little more than nannyism.
Being coldly clinical for a moment: death has costs.
Soda != Death.
people who contract expensive to treat diseases are more likely to have their paid-for insurance revoked on technicalities
This is actually quite rare. The majority of non-payment issues are from the uninsured, not the under-insured. They won't let you join if your already sick, in the same way car insurance companies don't let you join to cover an accident you had yesterday. It's just a simple risk pool. The health insurance industry has a decent record of following through. I have personal experience with this, as my insurance company covered an expensive surgery I needed (though I looked it up, it would simply have not been covered in Britain or Canada). They kept their end of the deal and paid for their part of it.
50% of bankruptcies in the US are due to insurance not covering critical healthcare treatments.
This is true in one sense. Though Americans have a culture of carrying large amounts of individual debt. A big expense like an unexpected surgery can tip the balance. Being the most regulated industry in the country doesn't exactly help make things cheaper.
How do you deal with it while maximizing liberties? Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions. And that's where cost taxes come in.
At what point does it end. First sodas need more taxes to cover their "health effects", what next? Chips? Beer? Loud headphones? Non-ergonomic keyboards? Computers? Cars?
If you really want to maximize liberty then give people real choice. Allow hospitals to turn down people in non-life threatening situations, ban states from discriminating against out of state insurance (as we do with car insurance and life insurance), get rid of laws requiring all insurance companies to cover specific things promoted by disease activist groups (in the same way you can buy collision only car insurance), and have insurance be something that is purchased by individuals rather than regulating employers into buying it (employers still could, and there are some situations where the employee and employer may prefer to do so, but our employer-purchase driven system drives up cost for small businesses and people paying out of pocket), and expand health savings accounts (or better yet adopt a tax code like FairTax, the negative tax, or the flat tax and keep inflation under control, then we wouldn't be discouraging savings and investment and wouldn't need special accounts, we could save on our own).
until corporate greed drove arse holes to remove expensive reasonably healthy ingredients and replace them with addictive junk chemical substitutes
People who blame issues on "corporate greed" seldom think through what that term means. If problems can be caused by so called "greed" then that creates several questions. What causes "greed" to fluctuate? Where people less "greedy" in the past, and if so why? What is the difference between trying to satisfy what is clearly a market demand and being "greedy"? Are the corporations you so love demonizing really any more "greedy" than the people who work to buy their products? Are the companies that make healthy beverages less "greedy"? Are customers who buy these healthier products less "greedy" somehow, even though they too work to buy them (indeed the healthier "natural" ones are generally more expensive, possibly due to this mysterious force you call "greed", or possibly due to this mysterious force I call "individual choices")? It is no surprise people attribute problems to "greed'. It is the same reason people have attributed things to conspiracies, witches, Jews, or "the rich", that is people are always happy to look for simplistic answers to complex problems, even if these answers really make no sense upon analysis.
double bonus not only cheaper but you will be forced to feed your addiction. Don't think it's addictive, you honestly don't think it's addictive, just read some of the comments and if those are not the comments of drug addicts, then it didn't take me four goes to give up smoking and give me the opportunity to learn how to recognise the behavioural patterns of addicts on a first hand basis.
Oh yes, I have heard of many people who have gone into shock or gone mad from being deprived of soda! I mean, I almost died of my former soda habit. BE STRONG!/sarcasm.
What a new law, a good law, than make it compulsory for corporate executives and their families to live on nothing but the junk food they create and, perhaps then we might see the 'real' not the marketing quality of the products improve, either that or all the crap executives will bloat up and die off, either way a real win;)
Yes, of course, BURN THE WITCHES! There is nothing unhealthy about having the occasional soda or bag of chips. If you go over to a party and have some chips and a soda, no harm done. There is such thing as "moderation". If you try to live off of sodas and chips you will have problems, but it is perfectly healthy to have them occasionally. The same thing can be said about almost any health habit. The occasional glass of wine is good for you, and occasional light consumption of alcohol is harmless, but bing drinking or getting plowed is dangerous. Heck even healthy things can be harmful in large quantities. Jogging for an hour a day is good for you, forcing yourself to jog for a hundred miles nonstop would likely kill you.
Now I am sure you must be really smart, being able to micromanage everybody's life and all, but I feel people can handle deciding things for themselves. Sure occasionally someone will get fat, but if they do so out of their own free will, who am I to judge?
I don't know about you but I find the rationale for this type of censorship to be utterly absurd. So much for free speech.....
Free speech vanished in Europe as soon as people figured out it was sometimes offensive. Now speech that is "hateful" such as showing an unpleasant moment in history, mocking radical Islam (you can mock Christians, and radical Islamic groups can safely threaten to kill Danish cartoonist who criticize them, but that is because Christians are in the majority and Muslims are in the minority), or expressing an opinion outside of the mainstream is classified as "hate speech" in the name of protecting people from being offended.
Sadly, this is slowly creeping into America. Our 1st Amendment protects us from most of it, but "speech codes" on colleges, harassment, slander, and libel laws, and the occasional threat of censorship of talk radio (and now the internet) to provide "balance" are threats.
It says "full screen video playback", not specifically Flash, so I'm guessing it's some other kind of video that can take advantage of hardware decoding--- probably DVD.
Why should I, or anyone else, get upset that I can't put Linux on a console?
Because it's cool.
My Xbox runs XBMC and X-DSL Linux, my Wii runs the homebrew channel.
Linux installations have been done to iPods, DVRs, 3rd party router firmware, cell phones, PDAs, the Xbox, the Xbox 360 (albiet it is very primitive), the "fat" PS2, the "fat" PS3, the Wii, the GameCube, the Nintendo DS, the PSP, all sorts of computers including very obscure hardware (IBM made a wristwatch that runs linux).
No, I would have to say that Windows 7 is still overpriced. Without it being able to be pirated or sold at a reasonable price it will never have the share that XP does.
XP is Windows 7 competition, not Linux or OSX.
XP is also going to be sold less and less, especially since Windows 7 is far more capable on netbooks than Vista. MS will simply stop licensing XP and let time do the rest.
There is no "fix", first sale says it is legal to resell a copyrighted work. Used game stores won't hurt game companies any more than used book stores hurt authors. All it means to these companies is that they are selling a copy and not a contract. Copyright should involve just that, the rights over making copies, not the rights over what is done with said copies after they are sold. Once sold, they shouldn't still own the work, they should just own the right to replicate the work.
In life and in D&D the number one lesson is if things aren't going your way, argue with the person in charge that they should, be they dungeon master or boss. Come up with a reason, however illogical, why they should go your way, wham, your in.
Seriously. Growing up in the US suburbs, the concept of 'bartering' is foreign, and considered impolite at best, and offensive at worst, to the point where you will be banned from a shop for it.
Obviously you have never been to an average suburban garage sale.
For the same reason we subsidize grain - there is a tremendous national security advantage to being self-sufficient. We can't lose our industrial capacity any more than we can lose our ability to feed ourselves, or we risk becoming dependent on nations we might war against.
Then the solution is to figure out why they are leaving. We have the worlds second highest corporate income tax. That isn't exactly going to encourage businesses to move here. Lets stop taxing companies so high.
Hell, lets go to a program like FairTax. Under systems like this there are no corporate taxes, no investment taxes, no estate taxes, no gift taxes, no individual income taxes, instead we simply enact a tax on retail sale of goods at the point of sale. Then we refund to every american what someone at poverty level pays making it progressive but still rewarding success. Under this system, there is no need to prop crap up. American companies have no corporate income tax. An american car company that makes all its goods here with american parts and american labor will have incured no taxes. The only time that a tax is paid is when someone buys the car, and they are buying with their full paycheck, plus a prebate to offset part of the cost. This puts american companies at considerable advantage. If I make a car in America, paying no taxes on empoyment, no taxes on income, no taxes on bonuses we give to executives, not taxes on my personal income, I will have a huge advantage here over a car made in Germany where the owner had to pay corporate income, income, and other taxes, plus Europes VAT still leaves some cost behind. I could easily outcompete either here or abroads since I have no taxes to pay (until I personally decide to spend money). A german car company here would have 23 cents out of every dollar going to pay US taxes, on top of the foreign taxes paid to the german government, a US car would have the same 23 cents out of a dollar going to taxes, but it wouldn't need to worry about anything else. This is totally WTO compliant too.
Tell me, is it not a watergate scandal that GM is going to be run by the US government, rather than let fail because of poor management and unions run amok?
What CREEP did was a blatant and intentional violation of the law. What Obama is doing is controversial and I disagree with it but what Obama is doing is not illegal.
In 1942 in the case of Wickard v. Filburn the court made a very controversial ruling. FDR had essentially coerced the court a few years earlier after it struck down portions of the New Deal. FDR claimed essentially that since this was an emergency, he had the legal authority to do pretty much anything and that the constitution should not be permitted to restrain him. When FDR attempted (unsuccessfully) to have congress increase the number of judges so that he could pack the court and not have to worry about constitutional challenges. After he did this the court was essentially scared and refused to challenge FDR.
In the case of Wickard v Filburn, A wheat farmer was growing wheat on his own personal property for his own consuption. He was charged with violating FDR's agricultural adjustment act. He argued that the constitution specifies that congress only has the authority to to regulate commerce "among the several states" and that it never grants the congress the power to provide any other forms of economic regulation. The court however disagreed. SCOTUS held that although the constitution is only granting the congress power to regulate commerce "among the several states" it also says that congress shall have the authority to do what is "necessary and proper" in order to regulate. The court then came to the conclusion that a non-commerciall growing of grain for personal use was something that theoretically could have an impacton on commerce between the states and thus congress was essentially free to enact any sort of law it wanted.
What Obama is doing is not watergate. It is not an impeachable charge. If the courts ever overturn Wickard V. Filburn and congress is once again restricted to only being able to regulate commerce between states. Better reporting might have led to the failure of the Treasury Secretary, Tim Geitner, who does not pay his own taxes but now runs the IRS. Better reporting might have reported that the administration is proposing congress enact a national Value Added Tax in addition to all current taxes to pay for a socialised healthcare system. is not simply a sales tax, It is a tax at each point in which value is added to a product. It is designed to mask growth in government because raising the rate a tenth of a percent can actually result in the final cost of a product becoming extremely high.
We all know paywalls won't work. However, the alternative is worse: if newspapers don't find a way to make money online soon, they'll start seriously blending advertising inside news content. I don't want that to happen!
One idea, based on what I have seen work abroad, is to mandate, for a limited time, a fee of $1 on all Internet connections. You could then use that monthly credit to subscribe to whatever content you chose. That would inject millions in the content economy. If what you want is free music, use your credit for that. If you want to read the New York Times, fine.
After a few years, phase out the fee (hum...)
Since when has any government imposed fee ever been phased out. Ok that is sarcasm, but seriously, I see a fee like this quickly mutating into an internet access tax.
Just because you don't like that a bunch of white men lost their case does not mean the law said they should win or that she misinterpreted it.
The 14th Amendment states that nobody can be denied "equal protection under the law". The fact that she ruled that it is legal for a city to decide to throw out a test on the basis of race is disturbing. Add to that her statements on how a "wise latina woman" would render a better verdict than a white male and her nomination appears troublesome. While this point has been brought up before, I think it bears repeating; imagine if someone like Scalia had said a white male would make a better justice than a latina woman, the Senate would have a cow at such a nomination.
I hope the Senate can remain civil about the Sotomayor nomination but still leave it open to questioning. The Senate has occasionally gone into hissy fits over SCOTUS nominees. In particular the case of Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork (Reagan eventually successfully nominated Anthony Kennedy) and Bush41's successful nomination of Clarence Thomas Democratic Senators turned the process into a circus of personal attacks. Clarence Thomas, who is black, refered to the largely baseless series of bizzare allegations of sexual harrasment and personal attacks as being nothing more than a "high tech lynching". During the Bork nomination Ted Kennedy issued a series of very personal attacks, Bork's video rentals (of which there was nothing interesting) were spied on, and a large number of attack ads were run by various left wing special interest groups. At the end of either case, the public was left wondering if the Senate had been abusive of its "advice and consent" powers. Hopefully in the Sotomayor case, Republicans can get some answers without engaging in similar tactics.
I do hope that we can get some answers, the current knowledge we have of Sotomayor makes me uneasy.
If we're serious... and I mean really serious... we need a branch of the military to do the heavy lifting. We don't need to start this in a big way, but we need the security infrastructure to build on should tensions begin rising with nation states. These guys would be the grunts doing the front line lifting and poking around while the NSA focuses it's talent on developing high level techniques. This is what we'd do if we got really serious.
The NSA could likely be extended to cover both ends of security (both defence against hacking and offence in the sense of monitoring enemies.)
Are you surprised? Most European countries (which are regarded as further to the left than the United States in most instances) already criminalize "hate" speech.
Hell, US colleges have similar policies.
True it is much worse in Europe. Hell, I have heard of some countries that have prosecuted members of their legislature for "hate speech" for such crimes as criticising radical sects of Islam.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Don't grade the results, grade the change. If your students are doing better then they were last year, it means you are likely a better teacher. This is true even if they still fail. Grade teachers based upon improvement.
Another option is to give the standardized test at the begining of the year and give it again at the end. If there is improvement you might have a good teacher, If not, they might be bad. But if the students they got have always done poorly, then that might not make them bad, it just proves they are not exceptional.
Most teachers are required to take continuing education to maintain their licenses, and many of those classes, workshops, and other professional activities are done in the summer to accommodate teacher schedules.
It seems logical that perhaps there should be some way you can "test out" of these classes, much like how I can CLEP a college class. Of course why it takes a license to teach seems strange to me.
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference.
Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money. People who really want to teach, such as myself, will often take a cut in pay to do so. I have been working manual labor for a long time while taking classes to become an educator. When I take my first teaching job, assuming I do it here in Nebraska, I will go from ~$32,000/yr to ~$28,000 if I don't do anything but teach. That's a huge cut when a person has three kids to feed, but it is what I love doing.
Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
And for those teachers that LOVE teaching we could possibly introduce bonuses for demonstrable improvement. I have had teachers that I liked and some I wasn't fond of. Those that I liked were involved in my learning. They should get raises because my grades went up and I scored well on Colorado's CSAP exam.
In fact, "independents" are the only open-minded folks, by definition -- everybody else just copped out and picked a label.
No, "independant" is just a term we use for someone who has no idea what they believe. They either have mixed views, or they simply haven't been following the issues.
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My first thought was how could he not feel the same way when attacking Iraqui troops too.
Simple, the Iraqi troops were enemies fighting his forces. He attacked allied forces accidentally. Many of the Iraqi forces who did not want to fight simply surrendered (so much so that by the end of the invasion, the coalition forces started to just simply disarm, document, and release the lower ranking surrendering forces since they had run out of space for prisoners). A belligerent group can have force used on it, an allied force, a surrendering force, or a non-combatant group cannot. Accidents will occur, but there is a big difference between harming those who are fighting you and harming an innocent.
We seem to be doing just fine.
Well we as a country do just fine, Washington DC as a city does downright terrible. Despite more pork per Capita or pork per square mile than any state, the territory still has soaring poverty rates. This has nothing to do with minorities, and despite DC's bitterness about not having a representation (which is only partially true, the 23rd Amendment gives them 3 electorial college seats in a Presidential Election, and they get a delegate in the House who can debate, serve on and vote in committees, and introduce bills, it is just not Constitutional for the Federal District to obtain Statehood, nor can a non-State constitutionally have actual representatives.) Washington DC does bad just because inner city areas in general do bad and have high poverty rates (minorities in suburbia usually do roughly on par with their white counterparts, so this is an inner city culture problem, not a minority problem. I'm just noting that while the USA is doing all right, DC isn't.)
We shouldn't have any problems with legal, rational, immigration. Legal immigrants rarely cause problems in the USA. The UK's problem appears to be that they will accept immigrants with little to no pre-qualifications under the banner of "diversity" which causes people to immigrate into the UK without assimilating in the British culture creating a semi-perminant underclass. Accepting foreigners who want to become part of your culture and view your country as a work opportunity is good, accepting anyone but then having them live in a perminant underclass isn't beneficial to either party.
The UK's recent actions appear to be rather disturbing, but the UK has a history of doing things that on the surface appear disturbing, but bellow that there is such incompetence that it isn't a real threat to civil liberties. The excessive survalence is another area. They will put cameras everywhere to monitor people, which is scary until you figure out they can't actually get these cameras to do anything.
It's more of a "cost tax" than a "sin tax". The consumption of certain products (most obvious example: tobacco) has costs far beyond that of the production and selling of the item (consumer much more likely to die earlier and require expensive health treatment before he or she dies.
Putting a modest tax on tobacco and using it to cover lung cancer patients makes sense. Putting a 50% tax on tobbacco and using it to fund head start makes no sense whatsoever. The expense has no relation to the tax (if we wish to create a head start program we should do so using the general funds rather than punishing an unrelated group). The same goes with fuel taxes being used to fund roads, liquor taxes being used to fund DUI checks, but soda is different. Diet coke contains essentially no calories. It has slightly negative health effects (it can sap calcium from bones), but not enough to justify singling it out for taxation. Even regular junk food is completely harmless if consumed as an occasional treat and not as a primary source of food. Taxing soda with the hope of changing peoples habits is little more than nannyism.
Being coldly clinical for a moment: death has costs.
Soda != Death.
people who contract expensive to treat diseases are more likely to have their paid-for insurance revoked on technicalities
This is actually quite rare. The majority of non-payment issues are from the uninsured, not the under-insured. They won't let you join if your already sick, in the same way car insurance companies don't let you join to cover an accident you had yesterday. It's just a simple risk pool. The health insurance industry has a decent record of following through. I have personal experience with this, as my insurance company covered an expensive surgery I needed (though I looked it up, it would simply have not been covered in Britain or Canada). They kept their end of the deal and paid for their part of it.
50% of bankruptcies in the US are due to insurance not covering critical healthcare treatments.
This is true in one sense. Though Americans have a culture of carrying large amounts of individual debt. A big expense like an unexpected surgery can tip the balance. Being the most regulated industry in the country doesn't exactly help make things cheaper.
How do you deal with it while maximizing liberties? Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions. And that's where cost taxes come in.
At what point does it end. First sodas need more taxes to cover their "health effects", what next? Chips? Beer? Loud headphones? Non-ergonomic keyboards? Computers? Cars?
If you really want to maximize liberty then give people real choice. Allow hospitals to turn down people in non-life threatening situations, ban states from discriminating against out of state insurance (as we do with car insurance and life insurance), get rid of laws requiring all insurance companies to cover specific things promoted by disease activist groups (in the same way you can buy collision only car insurance), and have insurance be something that is purchased by individuals rather than regulating employers into buying it (employers still could, and there are some situations where the employee and employer may prefer to do so, but our employer-purchase driven system drives up cost for small businesses and people paying out of pocket), and expand health savings accounts (or better yet adopt a tax code like FairTax, the negative tax, or the flat tax and keep inflation under control, then we wouldn't be discouraging savings and investment and wouldn't need special accounts, we could save on our own).
until corporate greed drove arse holes to remove expensive reasonably healthy ingredients and replace them with addictive junk chemical substitutes
People who blame issues on "corporate greed" seldom think through what that term means. If problems can be caused by so called "greed" then that creates several questions. What causes "greed" to fluctuate? Where people less "greedy" in the past, and if so why? What is the difference between trying to satisfy what is clearly a market demand and being "greedy"? Are the corporations you so love demonizing really any more "greedy" than the people who work to buy their products? Are the companies that make healthy beverages less "greedy"? Are customers who buy these healthier products less "greedy" somehow, even though they too work to buy them (indeed the healthier "natural" ones are generally more expensive, possibly due to this mysterious force you call "greed", or possibly due to this mysterious force I call "individual choices")? It is no surprise people attribute problems to "greed'. It is the same reason people have attributed things to conspiracies, witches, Jews, or "the rich", that is people are always happy to look for simplistic answers to complex problems, even if these answers really make no sense upon analysis.
double bonus not only cheaper but you will be forced to feed your addiction. Don't think it's addictive, you honestly don't think it's addictive, just read some of the comments and if those are not the comments of drug addicts, then it didn't take me four goes to give up smoking and give me the opportunity to learn how to recognise the behavioural patterns of addicts on a first hand basis.
Oh yes, I have heard of many people who have gone into shock or gone mad from being deprived of soda! I mean, I almost died of my former soda habit. BE STRONG! /sarcasm.
What a new law, a good law, than make it compulsory for corporate executives and their families to live on nothing but the junk food they create and, perhaps then we might see the 'real' not the marketing quality of the products improve, either that or all the crap executives will bloat up and die off, either way a real win ;)
Yes, of course, BURN THE WITCHES! There is nothing unhealthy about having the occasional soda or bag of chips. If you go over to a party and have some chips and a soda, no harm done. There is such thing as "moderation". If you try to live off of sodas and chips you will have problems, but it is perfectly healthy to have them occasionally. The same thing can be said about almost any health habit. The occasional glass of wine is good for you, and occasional light consumption of alcohol is harmless, but bing drinking or getting plowed is dangerous. Heck even healthy things can be harmful in large quantities. Jogging for an hour a day is good for you, forcing yourself to jog for a hundred miles nonstop would likely kill you.
Now I am sure you must be really smart, being able to micromanage everybody's life and all, but I feel people can handle deciding things for themselves. Sure occasionally someone will get fat, but if they do so out of their own free will, who am I to judge?
I don't know about you but I find the rationale for this type of censorship to be utterly absurd. So much for free speech.....
Free speech vanished in Europe as soon as people figured out it was sometimes offensive. Now speech that is "hateful" such as showing an unpleasant moment in history, mocking radical Islam (you can mock Christians, and radical Islamic groups can safely threaten to kill Danish cartoonist who criticize them, but that is because Christians are in the majority and Muslims are in the minority), or expressing an opinion outside of the mainstream is classified as "hate speech" in the name of protecting people from being offended.
Sadly, this is slowly creeping into America. Our 1st Amendment protects us from most of it, but "speech codes" on colleges, harassment, slander, and libel laws, and the occasional threat of censorship of talk radio (and now the internet) to provide "balance" are threats.
It says "full screen video playback", not specifically Flash, so I'm guessing it's some other kind of video that can take advantage of hardware decoding--- probably DVD.
Last I checked the XO has no optical drive.
Unless they -- I don't know -- like playing console games,
Wait, there are GAMES for the PS3?
Why should I, or anyone else, get upset that I can't put Linux on a console?
Because it's cool.
My Xbox runs XBMC and X-DSL Linux, my Wii runs the homebrew channel.
Linux installations have been done to iPods, DVRs, 3rd party router firmware, cell phones, PDAs, the Xbox, the Xbox 360 (albiet it is very primitive), the "fat" PS2, the "fat" PS3, the Wii, the GameCube, the Nintendo DS, the PSP, all sorts of computers including very obscure hardware (IBM made a wristwatch that runs linux).
No, I would have to say that Windows 7 is still overpriced. Without it being able to be pirated or sold at a reasonable price it will never have the share that XP does.
XP is Windows 7 competition, not Linux or OSX.
XP is also going to be sold less and less, especially since Windows 7 is far more capable on netbooks than Vista. MS will simply stop licensing XP and let time do the rest.
There is no "fix", first sale says it is legal to resell a copyrighted work. Used game stores won't hurt game companies any more than used book stores hurt authors. All it means to these companies is that they are selling a copy and not a contract. Copyright should involve just that, the rights over making copies, not the rights over what is done with said copies after they are sold. Once sold, they shouldn't still own the work, they should just own the right to replicate the work.
In life and in D&D the number one lesson is if things aren't going your way, argue with the person in charge that they should, be they dungeon master or boss. Come up with a reason, however illogical, why they should go your way, wham, your in.
Seriously. Growing up in the US suburbs, the concept of 'bartering' is foreign, and considered impolite at best, and offensive at worst, to the point where you will be banned from a shop for it.
Obviously you have never been to an average suburban garage sale.
For the same reason we subsidize grain - there is a tremendous national security advantage to being self-sufficient. We can't lose our industrial capacity any more than we can lose our ability to feed ourselves, or we risk becoming dependent on nations we might war against.
Then the solution is to figure out why they are leaving. We have the worlds second highest corporate income tax. That isn't exactly going to encourage businesses to move here. Lets stop taxing companies so high.
Hell, lets go to a program like FairTax. Under systems like this there are no corporate taxes, no investment taxes, no estate taxes, no gift taxes, no individual income taxes, instead we simply enact a tax on retail sale of goods at the point of sale. Then we refund to every american what someone at poverty level pays making it progressive but still rewarding success. Under this system, there is no need to prop crap up. American companies have no corporate income tax. An american car company that makes all its goods here with american parts and american labor will have incured no taxes. The only time that a tax is paid is when someone buys the car, and they are buying with their full paycheck, plus a prebate to offset part of the cost. This puts american companies at considerable advantage. If I make a car in America, paying no taxes on empoyment, no taxes on income, no taxes on bonuses we give to executives, not taxes on my personal income, I will have a huge advantage here over a car made in Germany where the owner had to pay corporate income, income, and other taxes, plus Europes VAT still leaves some cost behind. I could easily outcompete either here or abroads since I have no taxes to pay (until I personally decide to spend money). A german car company here would have 23 cents out of every dollar going to pay US taxes, on top of the foreign taxes paid to the german government, a US car would have the same 23 cents out of a dollar going to taxes, but it wouldn't need to worry about anything else. This is totally WTO compliant too.
Tell me, is it not a watergate scandal that GM is going to be run by the US government, rather than let fail because of poor management and unions run amok?
What CREEP did was a blatant and intentional violation of the law. What Obama is doing is controversial and I disagree with it but what Obama is doing is not illegal.
In 1942 in the case of Wickard v. Filburn the court made a very controversial ruling. FDR had essentially coerced the court a few years earlier after it struck down portions of the New Deal. FDR claimed essentially that since this was an emergency, he had the legal authority to do pretty much anything and that the constitution should not be permitted to restrain him. When FDR attempted (unsuccessfully) to have congress increase the number of judges so that he could pack the court and not have to worry about constitutional challenges. After he did this the court was essentially scared and refused to challenge FDR.
In the case of Wickard v Filburn, A wheat farmer was growing wheat on his own personal property for his own consuption. He was charged with violating FDR's agricultural adjustment act. He argued that the constitution specifies that congress only has the authority to to regulate commerce "among the several states" and that it never grants the congress the power to provide any other forms of economic regulation. The court however disagreed. SCOTUS held that although the constitution is only granting the congress power to regulate commerce "among the several states" it also says that congress shall have the authority to do what is "necessary and proper" in order to regulate. The court then came to the conclusion that a non-commerciall growing of grain for personal use was something that theoretically could have an impacton on commerce between the states and thus congress was essentially free to enact any sort of law it wanted.
What Obama is doing is not watergate. It is not an impeachable charge. If the courts ever overturn Wickard V. Filburn and congress is once again restricted to only being able to regulate commerce between states. Better reporting might have led to the failure of the Treasury Secretary, Tim Geitner, who does not pay his own taxes but now runs the IRS. Better reporting might have reported that the administration is proposing congress enact a national Value Added Tax in addition to all current taxes to pay for a socialised healthcare system. is not simply a sales tax, It is a tax at each point in which value is added to a product. It is designed to mask growth in government because raising the rate a tenth of a percent can actually result in the final cost of a product becoming extremely high.
We all know paywalls won't work. However, the alternative is worse: if newspapers don't find a way to make money online soon, they'll start seriously blending advertising inside news content. I don't want that to happen!
One idea, based on what I have seen work abroad, is to mandate, for a limited time, a fee of $1 on all Internet connections. You could then use that monthly credit to subscribe to whatever content you chose. That would inject millions in the content economy. If what you want is free music, use your credit for that. If you want to read the New York Times, fine.
After a few years, phase out the fee (hum...)
Since when has any government imposed fee ever been phased out. Ok that is sarcasm, but seriously, I see a fee like this quickly mutating into an internet access tax.
Just because you don't like that a bunch of white men lost their case does not mean the law said they should win or that she misinterpreted it.
The 14th Amendment states that nobody can be denied "equal protection under the law". The fact that she ruled that it is legal for a city to decide to throw out a test on the basis of race is disturbing. Add to that her statements on how a "wise latina woman" would render a better verdict than a white male and her nomination appears troublesome. While this point has been brought up before, I think it bears repeating; imagine if someone like Scalia had said a white male would make a better justice than a latina woman, the Senate would have a cow at such a nomination.
I hope the Senate can remain civil about the Sotomayor nomination but still leave it open to questioning. The Senate has occasionally gone into hissy fits over SCOTUS nominees. In particular the case of Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork (Reagan eventually successfully nominated Anthony Kennedy) and Bush41's successful nomination of Clarence Thomas Democratic Senators turned the process into a circus of personal attacks. Clarence Thomas, who is black, refered to the largely baseless series of bizzare allegations of sexual harrasment and personal attacks as being nothing more than a "high tech lynching". During the Bork nomination Ted Kennedy issued a series of very personal attacks, Bork's video rentals (of which there was nothing interesting) were spied on, and a large number of attack ads were run by various left wing special interest groups. At the end of either case, the public was left wondering if the Senate had been abusive of its "advice and consent" powers. Hopefully in the Sotomayor case, Republicans can get some answers without engaging in similar tactics.
I do hope that we can get some answers, the current knowledge we have of Sotomayor makes me uneasy.
You forgot a step.
1) Con city into using Company A
2) Sign fat contract with Company A
3) Hold election (sweep massive FAIL under rug)
4) ????
5) Profit
Step four is:
Sign ACORN up to assist in "organising" your election.
If we're serious... and I mean really serious... we need a branch of the military to do the heavy lifting. We don't need to start this in a big way, but we need the security infrastructure to build on should tensions begin rising with nation states. These guys would be the grunts doing the front line lifting and poking around while the NSA focuses it's talent on developing high level techniques. This is what we'd do if we got really serious.
The NSA could likely be extended to cover both ends of security (both defence against hacking and offence in the sense of monitoring enemies.)
If you don't like the things I say in my blog, wouldn't the most rational reaction be to simply don't fucking read it???
No, it's to post goatse links as comments.
Are you surprised? Most European countries (which are regarded as further to the left than the United States in most instances) already criminalize "hate" speech.
Hell, US colleges have similar policies.
True it is much worse in Europe. Hell, I have heard of some countries that have prosecuted members of their legislature for "hate speech" for such crimes as criticising radical sects of Islam.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Don't grade the results, grade the change. If your students are doing better then they were last year, it means you are likely a better teacher. This is true even if they still fail. Grade teachers based upon improvement.
Another option is to give the standardized test at the begining of the year and give it again at the end. If there is improvement you might have a good teacher, If not, they might be bad. But if the students they got have always done poorly, then that might not make them bad, it just proves they are not exceptional.
Most teachers are required to take continuing education to maintain their licenses, and many of those classes, workshops, and other professional activities are done in the summer to accommodate teacher schedules.
It seems logical that perhaps there should be some way you can "test out" of these classes, much like how I can CLEP a college class. Of course why it takes a license to teach seems strange to me.
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference. Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money. People who really want to teach, such as myself, will often take a cut in pay to do so. I have been working manual labor for a long time while taking classes to become an educator. When I take my first teaching job, assuming I do it here in Nebraska, I will go from ~$32,000/yr to ~$28,000 if I don't do anything but teach. That's a huge cut when a person has three kids to feed, but it is what I love doing. Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
And for those teachers that LOVE teaching we could possibly introduce bonuses for demonstrable improvement. I have had teachers that I liked and some I wasn't fond of. Those that I liked were involved in my learning. They should get raises because my grades went up and I scored well on Colorado's CSAP exam.
In fact, "independents" are the only open-minded folks, by definition -- everybody else just copped out and picked a label.
No, "independant" is just a term we use for someone who has no idea what they believe. They either have mixed views, or they simply haven't been following the issues.
Parents are basically, a complete bunch of wankers.
Only on Slashdot would this comment be modded "interesting".