My apologies for misunderstanding. (I was puzzled trying to figure out what the motive would be for making such an obviously-falsified claim as you seemed to be... makes much more sense now).
Is it because of your mother that you feel about the internet is trolls?
In Capitalist America, internet trolls you too.
It's like my favorite Soviet Russia gag: "In Capitalist America, man oppresses man, but in Soviet Russia it's the other way around!"
It kind of makes me wonder how effective this kind of shilling actually is.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone change their mind because of an argument, on the internet or otherwise. Ok, not anyone every, but the rare occasions I've ever seen of anyone ever having their mind changed about anything involved people who were already very open-minded critical thinkers, being presented with well-reasoned and nuanced arguments, and even those are rare.
Can the kind of mindless name-calling that passes for "argument" in most forums actually change anyone's mind, much less the kind of closed minds that tend to engage in that sort of conflict in the first place? What's the payoff for a big organization to engage in that sort of thing at all?
(Then again, I also frequently get spam that does not mention any products or contain any links or attachments or even complete sentences sometimes, which seems to completely defeat the point of spamming, yet it's been going on for years and years anyway at someone's expense...)
Unless they've been deleted somehow (Slashdot wouldn't do that, would they?), none of the posts prior to yours in this thread appears to be pro-Russian propaganda-trolls. There's a Stalin/Putin comparison (with a OT subthread ranting about Dice), a OT rant about Dice, an "In Soviet Russia" joke, a post distinguishing internet trolling from plain old propaganda (with an OT subthread ranting about Dice), and an AC calling trolling an artform. What's pro-Russian in there?
Other people have already said this, but they're buried in replies to replies so I'll say this up here where it's more noticeable:
The practical upshot that a human can get to anywhere in the universe within their lifetime given enough fuel to keep up acceleration is correct, but from no frame of reference will you appear to have travelled faster than a beam of light.
In your traveling frame of reference, it will appear that the distance you travelled got smaller. That's why you can reach places that seemed too distant to reach in your lifetime before: because they don't seem so distant once you're on your way there.
In the rest of the universe's frame of reference, it will appear that you aged more slowly. That's why you can reach places that seemed too distant to reach in your lifetime before: because your lifetime got prolonged once you were on your way there.
In either frame of reference, when you get where you're going, you will still find that a beam of light sent at the same moment you departed will have arrived at your destination before you, and thus in neither frame of reference did you outrun the light. You just either aged more slowly or travelled less distance, depending on whose frame of reference we're talking about.
In a photon's frame of reference, there is no distance between anything and no at all time elapses to travel it. Given enough fuel you can get arbitrarily close to that and so travel to arbitrary locations with arbitrarily little aging along the way, and so get anywhere in your lifetime. But light can always do that better than you still.
Just a pedantic nitpick: the Republican party was never part of the Democratic-Republican party. The Democratic-Republicans split into Democrats and Whigs. The Whigs later folded, and the Republicans rose up as the opposition to the Democrats.
We are a representative democracy, and also a republic, and those are not the same thing.
The US is both a democracy and a republic.
The UK is a democracy but not a republic.
North Korea is not a democracy but is a republic.
Saudi Arabia is neither a democracy nor a republic.
Being a democracy or not is about how and by whom the power of the state is exercised. Being a republic or not is about in whose name the power of the state is exercised.
A republic is a state that officially belongs to the people, in whose name its power is exercised. The degree to which the people themselves direct the use of that power can vary from complete (in a direct democracy) to partial (in a representative democracy) to none at all (in an autocracy).
A democracy is a state that is directed and controlled (to at least some extent) by the people, whether the power of that state is in their name (as in a republic) or not (as in a monarchy).
The US is a republic, because the power of the state is officially that of the people (which is why court cases are titled things like "The People vs
My mom is unfortunately on my phone plan because she can't manage her own finances well enough to pay for a phone herself.
Last November she lost her closest-thing-to-a-dumb-phone-I-could-get-her. It would still do web stuff, but... in a very dumb way, like "smart" phones before the modern (iPhone/Android/etc) smart phone era did. I simply could not get her a phone that only make phone calls, but that was close enough for those purposes.
And then she lost it, and I had to replace it. I wanted the cheapest goddamn dumbest simplest most basic phone possible. All she wants or needs to do is make phone calls. She doesn't give a flying fuck about texting or internet or anything! (Or she didn't at the time, and I wish it had stayed that way). All. She. Needs. Is. A Phone. But to get her a "dumb" (not even, like before) phone would have actually cost me more than their cheapest generation-or-two-old smart phone, a Galaxy Mini S3. Now she's fucking addicted to it and sucking up all the data (that I barely even use) on my plan.
What the fucking fuck has happened where it is simply impossible to get just basic phone service without paying more for it!?!?
I've never used any of the three languages in discussion here, and would barely count myself as a programmer at all, and upon initial reading of each of these routines this was my interpretation:
Java (I assume yours is): For every integer (call it "i") in the set "items", if "i" is less than ten, do whatever the 'add' function of the 'results' object does to it. (No idea what that function is, but my first guess would be to do the math of "results" + "i". Upon reflection after seeing the other languages' versions of this routine, I get now that it means "put 'i' as a member into the set 'results', or more loosely, "add 'i' to the set 'results'".)
Haskell: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results" contains every member of that set ("items") that passes the filter of being less than 10. (This is the clearest to me, and the one that shed light on the purpose of the other two).
Python: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results"... uhh.... assuming this does the same thing as the Haskell function, I'd guess it means that "results" contains every "item", where "item" is any item in the set of items, but only if "item" is less than ten; a roundabout way of saying, in a more Java-like fashion, "for every item (call it 'item') in the set 'items', if 'item' is less than ten [then that is part of what the set 'results' equals]".
Except it's not hyperbole because I actually mean all.
The company is valuable because it makes high profits.
It makes high profits in large part by paying low wages to its employees.
Thus the wealth of the owners of the company is directly due to the poverty induced in its employees.
Nobody needs to sell anything to reverse this. Just paying the employees more would accomplish that, but that would come at the cost of the profits of the company, and thus the stock value, and thus the wealth of the owners, who aren't willing to make that sacrifice.
Black, but it's covered in a bunch of transparent hairs that scatter white light something awful, obscuring its true color.
I wasn't really the one making a generational analysis, just casually agreeing with someone else's that sounds pretty plausible from my personal experience and the things I hear other people saying.
Anyway, with regard to average incomes, the mean personal income is approximately equal to the median household income, both of which in turn are approximately twice the median personal income. Which suggests that the median household has two median income-earners supporting it, not one earner supporting five people like your family did. The days when it was plausible for most people to support a household with one income are long gone now. Which means single people, or people like me whose significant others don't make much, face even greater challenges. A single person who wants to live an independent life (and not be crammed into a house with strangers who aren't even family) has to pull the financial resources of two people to accomplish that.
Bravo! Thank you. I wish I still had the emotional fortitude to respond to people like that like you just did.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
