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Comment Re:Then they preach to the world about capitalism (Score 5, Interesting) 306

That definition turns ugly repeatedly so often that the government has to get involved to stop the excesses (company stores, interlocking trusts, monopoly pricing, collusion, vertical market lock).

The bad thing here is that the government was subverted by business and is no longer acting as a check and balance.

A "free market" works for small businesses but not for large multi-national corporations and not even really for simply "large" corporations. It's sort of like how libertarianism can work under a strong government but fails badly when you have a weak government and very powerful people who use that power to abuse weaker people.

There's also a "moral" component which makes capitalism work and be beneficial and that's eroded a lot since 1980.

Comment A good overview of international school years here (Score 1) 421

http://www.infoplease.com/worl...

For example:

"The school day in France typically runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half day on Saturday, although students do not attend school on Wednesday or Sunday. Lunch is a two-hour break for public school students. Students usually attend school from ages 6 to 18. The average number of students per class is 23. Uniforms are not required, but religious dress of any kind is banned. The school year for this country in the northern hemisphere stretches from August to June, and is divided into four seven-week terms, with one to two weeks of vacation in between."

Part of a consideration for any school year is the parent's work schedule and child care.

Comment Re:No, school should not be year-round. (Score 1) 421

It's about indoctrinating them to be one people to prevent a lot of civil strife later on and to make them cohesive in the face of national threats.

Public education unified the united states.

And it's about education. Producing a citizen base which is capable.

It seems to be a lot less about civics than it used to be.

It's layered too- a lot of ugly information is held back until you go to college.

I'm saying that indoctrination is not all bad. Lack of indoctrination results in some fairly bloody civil wars over fairly meaningless differences.

Comment Re:Nerd Blackface (Score 1) 442

The downside is this. Those geeks are portrayed as having happy lives- attracting beautiful women- making good money- and generally having a fun social life.

To the geek who doesn't have a happy life- this sets unrealistic expectations.

I like the show. It's funny. But my life is okay. I think the show talks at geeks, not down to them. But just as other TV shows portray a "middle class" family as having a $750,000 house, with cars for every kid-- this show is unrealistic.

Comment Re:Nerd Blackface (Score 1) 442

In my mothers case, she basically said after three rounds of treatment she didn't want to suffer that way any more. She was essentially choosing to die even tho she could have suffered a month and had 3 more months and then suffered a month and had 2 more months.

We discussed it and I understood. The tradeoff of good days to bad days wasn't worth it for her any more.

Her choice didn't matter since she got blood poisoning from the transfusions (about 1% odds apparently) and that killed her before she made it to the next time she would have required time in the hospital again.

When I said not all pain is physical what I meant was that some people suffer terribly from mental conditions but are not "crazy" in the classic since. Just terribly dreadfully unhappy and nothing can be done to help them at this time. I can understand how a person who lives in constant misery or dread and is still really sane would decide they'd had enough for rational sane reasons.

Didn't take it as a dig. I agree that it is a difficult and nuanced subject.

Comment Re:Nerd Blackface (Score 5, Insightful) 442

Perhaps for the young and healthy.

For the unhealthy, suicide can be a logical exit.

Geeky, if you were going to be in severe pain for the rest of your life and drugs wouldn't help- you wouldn't be able to sleep more than 2 hours at a stretch without being woken up by the pain-- how long before suicide would seem like a rational way out.

Not everyone's pain is physical.

Comment Re:ATO - GoA 4 (Score 2) 84

Well first.. those two numbers are very similar.

Second- as he points out, a lot of them were suicides. Suicides also occurred on the Portland.

These are exceptions which will be figured out- and once they are there (and they will be) will never be "rookie" drivers or "sad drivers because they had a death in the family" or "old drivers" or "sleepy drivers" again.

And if you are suicidal enough to jump in front of a train (a grisly way to die), then you are probably going to find another way to suicide (like jumping off a building).

I don't think your argument is very powerful. You have a point. But we allow a lot more deaths to occur for other reasons which don't save as much money.

Comment Re:Hands and feet? (Score 1) 163

I wish that were the case in the states.

Here, the police no longer ticket for even aggressive tailgating.

Drivers here get angry if they are within 10 feet behind you and you don't speed up (and you are already over the speed limit by 5mph). And what you really need to do is to slow down to account for the extra stopping distance you need to keep them from plowing into you.

There are a lot of basic rules of the road that the police used to enforce and which made everyone better drivers.

Now, the police seem to focus only on high revenue tickets-- even blatantly showing up regularly 3-4 days at the end of the month to meet their quotas on certain stretches of the highway.

Submission + - Conservatives Release New Video Proving Global Warming is a Hoax (youtube.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Conservative Louisiana House of Representative Lenar Whitney has released a new four minute video on Youtube proving once and for all that global warming is a hoax. In the heavily referenced and peer reviewed video, Whitney puts to rest global warming — something "any ten year-old can invalidate." She points out the important fact that our planet "has done nothing but get colder each year." The highly polished video with special effects clearly exhausted all of Whitney's cognitive powers in researching and backing up each point in her proof that global warming is the "greatest deception in the history of mankind." Fat cat scientists and their propaganda machines don't stand a chance with this hardworking former oilfield equipment company sales employee to set the record straight.

Comment Hasn't been my experience (Score 1) 189

The information for 99.9% of wiki pedia articles is useful.

Only politically charged articles and obscure articles are suspect.

I can see how something that might be true but which is very hard to verify as true or false on a non critical subject (like this book character hoax) would last a while. But I'd never encounter it in my use of the Wiki.

Comment Over at Dice? (Score 4, Insightful) 315

Over at Dice

But we are at Dice, sir:

[Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
[whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG
Domain ID: D2289308-LROR
Creation Date: 1997-10-05T04:00:00Z
Updated Date: 2014-03-14T22:12:11Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2015-10-04T04:00:00Z
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 69
WHOIS Server:

Referral URL:
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registrant ID:tuE8gFbzWFO9qSj2
Registrant Name:Host Master
Registrant Organization:Dice Holdings, Inc.
Registrant Street: 1040 Avenue of the Americas
Registrant City:New York
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:10018
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.8557527436
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email:hostmaster@slashdotmedia.com

Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

Comment Re:Hardware ages too (Score 1) 281

dude. he was being snarky because he is ignorant of the way expansion and contraction, dropping your phone, turning on and off your phone, etc. etc. damage the solid state components.

He's just ignorant and flipped off a sarcastic comment without thinking. I've done the same thing myself on other subjects.

It seems dumb and like solid state devices should be impervious to damage.

But run them hot, run them through a lot of on/off cycles or cool/hot cycles and they are damaged and have a lower MTBF.

My god, reading the entire thread, I can't believe anyone took him seriously.

What does he need to do, put it in green text?

---
Look, for an easier way to find info on this subject google for router antenna's. They have the same problem (solid state but they degrade fairly quickly) and there are a lot more pages exploring why this is true.

My samsung has been hot to the touch many times (so over 100 degrees but probably less than 110- but probably over 110 inside) and heat is a leading cause for solid state parts of routers to go bad.

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