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I know you're not really being serious, but I'm still having hard time understanding how you'd even have the perception that sports and religion are in conflict. Growing up going to church, sports analogies were a regular part of sermons, and then of course there are church baseball leagues and organizations like FCA and Kamp Kanakuk, and even the YMCA (the "C" stands for "Christian"). And there was the John 3:16 guy at football games and other sporting events, and half of the guys that score touchdowns in the NFL do the little kneeling-in-prayer celebration in the end-zone. Is there any sphere of public life that's more friendly to Christianity than sports, or any leisure activity that Christianity encourages more than sports?

Romney's experience speaks for itself: he'll say anything to get elected, even if it means making fun of the state he's "running".

It's good to be friendly and caring; it's much better to be honest.

This idea still seems iffy. It creates a rather strong disincentive for investment, and unless enacted universally, it will cause massive capital flight.

The chats sometimes include photos taken from women's Facebook pages, and in the Yale student's case, one person threatened to sexually violate her. Another participant claimed to be the student, making it appear that she was taking part in the discussion.

You haven't seen some of the ballot papers used in Scotland. To save money, the polling stations chose to have two votes on one ballot paper. On the left column, you had twenty candidates, of which you had to select in order of preference. On the right column, you had a smaller number of candidates of which you could only pick one. The result? 100,000 spoilt ballot papers

You must not be from the U.S. In most states, we vote on something every year, not just every four. Last year, I voted on at least 8 things with one or two of them involving voting for multiple people for a board. In the U.S., we are used to voting for multiple things on a single ballot.

Here are the election results for that year. We had two bond issues, a state senator, a state delegate, soil and water director (vote for three), County Clerk, County Attorney, County Sheriff, Chairman of Board of Supervisors, Board Representative, School Board (vote for three), School Board local.

Ok, 12 issues and we voted for three people in two of them. There were a few more things to vote on than usual, but not a lot more.

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it. This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield. Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly. The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse. The colonel ordered the test stopped. Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong? The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane.

Maybe, but his economic success in business certainly didn't translate to success in running Massachusetts - his tenure here consisted of making Massachusetts the butt of his jokes, and doing everything he could to break unions in preparing for his presidential run. The Boston area is doing okay, because, well it's the Boston area, but the rest of the state is trying to dig ourselves out of the hole he dug for us.

And if it's losing effectiveness gradually, people will use more and more of it as it does. The salesmen will assure them that they simply need to spray more of it to reach the places they missed.

Katherine Albrecht, founder of CASPIAN, an anti-RFID group, says, "Nobody cares about radio tags on crates and pallets. But if we don't keep RFID off of individual consumer items, our stores will one day turn into retail 'zoos' where the customer is always on exhibit."

I agree with Katherine. I hope that Katherine and her friends will be able to stop this monster... sadly I think they will eventually be overpowered by corporate interest.
This situations will not just be contained in store, it will be in every aspect of our lives. While part of me is excited at the idea of cool widgets and the techno magic that accompanies them I am 100% scared crap-less about the complete loss of privacy. So, I have taken it upon myself to offer the best possible solution for dealing with this unavoidable future.

Definition: The ownership of chips. The ownership of a chip is determined by who is in personal possession of the chip. For instance if an item is sitting on a shelf in Wal-Mart, the owner is Wal-Mart. When a customer purchases said item all ownership of that item and the RFID chip is transferred to the customer who will now have complete control of the RFID chip.

1.) All RFID chips must have the following access levels: PUBLIC, PRIVATE and PROTECTED. These access levels can be modified by the chips owner and only by the chips owner. Any attempt to modify a chip that you do not have have ownership of or express permission from the owner to modify should be considered illegal and punishable. I am assuming that it will be easy for people to set permissions on their RFID chip through the use of ubiquitous devices such as their Blackberry/iPhone/(next big thing).

By having permission levels on RFID chips it would potentially eliminate many of the privacy issues while maintaining some of the useful functionality. At the same time if we ever reach a state of ubiquitous RFID tags imagine how easy airport security checks would be! Simply set all of your RFID tags to be public or protected(and give permission to be read by the security scanner) and you can walk right on through. If you have any sort of unsafe item on you it will show up... granted you might be able to sneak in something with out a tag or with a fake tag or a tag that has been tampered with. But that is a different problem, maybe there will be some sort of global authentication system/authority to make sure that the tag matches the item and is not providing false data about that item.

2.) Chip technology must be maintained in the public sector and as open source. This issue so greatly concerns our privacy that the only way anyone should ever feel comfortable about this technology being used in the publics best interest is if it is open source and openly policed(monitored?) by the public. There will never be a company that I would trust to maintain a technology this intrusive and not attempt to use their power over it without devious intent.
There is of course the possibility that companies might still manufacture proprietary impostor chips... but hopefully consumers will have the ability to easily sniff out impostor chips (global authentication of

If you own a cell phone and often carry it with you everywhere you go, you can be tracked. You can even be tracked with your phone turned off. The government has been asking to track people even without sufficient probably cause(and probably doing it illegally since we know about it).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201444.html?hpid=topnews

I believe this was mandated in the 1996 Telecommunications Act for all cellular devices and has been implemented long since.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/
http://www.opensecrets.org/

Good places to get started to figure out where everyone stands. Don't forget your congress critters home page, either.

The FDA is the biggest example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" in the US government. With the exception of a few right-wingnuts, nobody seriously argues that it should be done away with. Yet even though I disagree with Arthur B's basic arguments and probably pretty close to his whole ideaology, he is right that the FDA as it's set up today is causing almost as much harm as it is good. It fails to do it's most basic missions, whether it's ensuring the safety of medications (see Vioxx among others) or whether its ensuring the safety of our food supply (See Peter Pan Peanut Butter, and among many other massive food safety scares over the last several years).

I suspect that the course of action that I'd take is probably pretty close to the opposite of what Artur would recommend (Arthur: If I misread your political ideaology, I apologize!). I'm no expert, but there are a few things that I'd recommend: Triple, quadruple, maybe more their inspection staff so they have the ability to inspect every food producing plant at least once a year, and a least quarterly for large volume producers and plants with a history of issues. Give them more authority to shut down plants, force recalls, etc. (I'm not familiar enough with the problems of the dug saftey side to have any quick fixes, but they certainly need to be done.) Yes, all these things cost money. It would probably add a few pennies-- certainly less than $.50-- to your average daily food bill. How much is safe food worth to you?

One other thing that needs to happen for both food and drug safety and product saftey in general() is strict -criminal- sanctions against the corporate officers of any company that knowingly markets an unsafe product that results in someones death. Merck intentionally hid the fact that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attack & stroke. As many as 60,000 people died from heart attacks as a direct result of taking Vioxx, yet as far as I know, no one is in prison as a result.

Anyway. It's almost 2:30am, so I've got to crash. I hope this is somewhat coherent... Please forgive me if not.

Their recount tested the results under 9 different scenarios of how overvotes and undervotes should be counted. In 4 of the scenarios (including the scenario most consistent with contemporary FL law), Bush prevailed with more votes (woo hoo for Bush supporters!). In the remaining 5, Gore won (woo hoo for Gore supporters!).

Why, yes, they did find different results depending on which ballots were counted.

Calling for recounts only in some areas is part gaming the system, and is irrelevant to the question of for whom more Florida voters cast their ballots. Those recounts that do not have as their standard a "clear indication of the intent of the voter" are irrelevant.

A statewide recounts where all undervotes and overvotes were considered is the only relevant issue here. Under five different criteria of "clear indicaton of the voter", Gore comes out ahead on four of them, only losing in one where subjective factors of what constitutes a valid mark on optical scan ballots come into play.

In Florida in 2000, more voters went to the polls intending to vote for Gore than for Bush; despite intimidation and illegal purges of the voter rolls, more voters got to the voting booth intending to vote for Gore; and despite bad balloting technology and practices (which disproportionately affected poor neighborhoods, making a mockery of "equal protection"), more voters voted for Gore than voted for Bush. The fact that Bush was declared the "winner" shows that the voting system was broken; nothing significant has been done to resolve the problems, and indeed they seem to have gotten worse in many ways.

Perhaps this lady could help:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702359.html/

The Washington Post is also covering the new transplant technique, with a different human interest story attached.

Jeffrey Sachs plan isn't very realistic. The two biggest economic success stories of the past couple of decades are China and India, and mostly they pulled themselves up to first (or second) world status with free market reforms not with big cash handouts. Meanwhile, there are many nations in Africa and elsewhere in the world that receive a lot of funding and the funding seems merely to prop up the existing non-functioning system. I've heard of another theory keeping some of these nations poor and it isn't the "poverty trap" it is the "corruption trap." Where local governments are too corrupt for free market reforms to work.

An interesting review of Sachs's book:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25562-2005Mar10.html

Here's a link to a story with a picture of the dragonfly the cia worked with in the 70's. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18963401/
Even if it didn't work very well, that was thirty years ago. I'm betting there's quite a gap of functionality between what we see and what has been developed. For the truly paranoid, here's an article that mentions sitings of such devices: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801434_pf.html

BTW, congestion tolling on I-95/I-395 from Northern Virginia into Washington, DC is projected to be up to $1.60 per mile, or $41.46 for a round trip.

The text of a legal document sets forth a demand, a contract, etc. The writing is not creative, it is just a listing of facts or positions. I was told this by one of the top partners at WSGW (top legal firm in Silicon Valley) when he advised me to copy another company's contract. The formatting of the contract (e.g. the forms you can buy at a stationer's store or download pdfs online) is creative layout - you can't just photocopy the contract and use it as that is a copyright infringement. But if you want to make your own form with a different layout and using the exact same words, that is perfectly legal.

Of course, lawyers can CLAIM copyright on their legal documents, but that doesn't mean they are correct. Lawyers make false claims all the time, when it suits them or suits their case. Recently the RIAA made a claim that it is illegal to rip music from your own CDs to listen to that music on different devices that you own. In the 1974 Supreme Court ruling in Sony VS Universal Studios, this type of personal use copying was ruled as fair use, but that didn't stop the RIAA from making this new outrageous claim.

For what it's worth, Whitman later resigned as Administrator of the EPA due to Cheney's meddling in EPA business. She had some public disagreements with the administration, but left when she couldn't handle it anymore. It's sad to realize that her successors at the EPA are actually much more incompetent (or subservient) than she.

This is really nothing more than a delaying tactic by the current administration. Looking back into some older articles, Mr. Johnson's (the head of the EPA) own staff had recommended passing the California waver unanimously from both a scientific and legal standpoint. If this goes to litigation, which is only a matter of time, not even the EPA thinks they could win. Part of the PowerPoint presentation mentioned in the link I provided could be the same one they talk about in this discussion and recent AP release.

With the delay of the California waver, the very soonest auto manufacturers are liable for more strict standards would be 2010 models. It buys time for the industry and it's a "thank you" to them for not using their lobbying power against the current, and in my opinion, highly flawed, energy bill.

The Washington Post has a bit more detail as to what the CIA said and why here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011803277.html?hpid=moreheadlines/

I presume that won't stop the slasherd's pavlovian response (OMG! CIA! THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES! OMG! OMG!), but this is really just a case of the CIA doing it's job. (I know. CIA. Their real job is to take all our civil liberties as part of some huge neo-con conspiracy. Mod me down now if you must, but the tinfoil hat really doesn't look that becoming on you.)

MOD PARENT UP. There is no other profession (other than priests maybe) that protect their own from real accountability when they screw up.

Time to move to Japan where competition provides REAL high speed internet at a reasonable price. This is what happens when you have limited options for internet connectivity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801990_2.html?nav=rss_technology

OSCE found the US elections to have only some minor problems, ...

They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.

• Many states (such as NH and Ohio) still count votes using machines with secret sauce source code that have been proved to be trivial to crack, making it easy for a single person to alter the outcome of an entire election.
• The media via a private company have conspired to keep the raw exit poll data secret (see first link above) so it can't be used to check the official results.
• A recount was ordered in one of the states that could possibly change the overall winner of the entire election but that recount was rigged and the ballots were destroyed so we have no idea of who actually won.

Food and Drug Administration officials today announced that food from cloned animals is safe to eat even as their counterparts in the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked producers to keep their cloned animals off the market indefinitely

Apparently this is only for public perception--they do say (perhaps with a subtle irony), that "we conclude that meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones are as safe as food we eat every day..."

The US government makes quite extensive use of open source software. In the Intelligence Community alone, some of the examples of open source software in use on Intelink, the IC's three networks that run at UNCLASSIFIED, SECRET, and TOP SECRET/SCI levels:

- LAMP (Linux, apache, PHP, MySQL) stacks to support a wide variety of applications, such as some below
- MediaWiki powers Intellipedia, the highly successful wikis that run on the three iterations of Intelink
- phpBB powers Intelink Forums
- WordPress MU enables the current generation of Intelink Blogs
- Jabber provides the IC-wide Intelink Instant Messaging
- tag|Connect is a social bookmarking tool based on del.icio.us
- Zimbra powers the uGov Collaboration Suite
- RSS, XML, and other open standards are used extensively
- ...and much more

These services are run in robust, highly available environments, and have gotten great support within various IC components. In fact, much of the social software movement within the IC is reliant on open source software and open standards, and they have been embraced. For a great overview of what the IC is doing with social software, see:

- 'The Intellipedians' The social software movement within the U.S. Intelligence Community, Federal Computer Week, 16 August 2007

And if you don't want to sit through the presentation (it is a bit long, though quite good), see:

- Open-Source Spying, New York Times Magazine, 3 December 2006
- A Wikipedia of Secrets, Washington Post, 5 November 2006

And on the newest initiative, A-Space:

- Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence, New York Times, 2 September 2007
- Classified social-networking system promises to help U.S. spies talk, collaborate, Associated Press, 5 September 2007

Some of the articles are a little over-simplified, but the reality is that social software running on open source platforms and environments is taking off in the Intelligence Community.

Bullshit, the 'litigation' that is supposedly driving up insurance premiums on the doctors side, and as a result increasing individual health care premiums, is a red herring from the health care companies so you focus on that and not their mismanagement of funds.

Be wary of the bullshit the republican party, insurance companies, and their doctors, feed you through the news cycle and various organizations. Theres more to it.

Cheers.

Speaking of DWI
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

A Lancaster, Ohio man was arrested for driving while intoxicated despite repeatedly blowing 0.0 on a breath test. The double standard here is that blowing a .08 or higher is generally an automatic conviction. But blowing 0.0 can still trigger an arrest.

The police officer says the man failed a roadside sobriety test. That doesn't mean much of anything. The roadside sobriety test is a farce, with no scientific research whatsoever to attest to its effectiveness. A couple of years ago, the Washington Post published a terrific article on the test, including its ridiculous history, the lack of peer-reviewed scientific data to back it up, and how the federal government and police departments across the country have for 30 years been using it to arrest drivers, anyway.

In Chicago, it has been documented that dead people have voted, sometimes twice in the same election. Some convictions listed in this article.

In Texas, it has been documented that non-US citizens have voted.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-2000Nov16?language=printer Like back in 1960.

The Washington post has a story about Hollywood studios

Okay... so the story covers (alleged, sigh) violations by...

Fox Sports
Virgin Mobile Australia
"Thousands of boys"
Microsoft
Real Time w/Bill Maher (admittedly taped at CBS studios in LA)
Babble (an online magazine)

Is this really story about Hollywood studios?

Hubble was not a waste of money, but if NASA decides repair it and doesn't delivers the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/01/AR2007120100760.html,you'll have a 1.5 Billion paperweight and 500 mad physicists.

Uuuuhhhh, yes, it does say that. Did you bother to read both articles? From the article:

As many as three American Airlines passenger jets will be outfitted this spring with laser technology intended to protect planes from missile attacks.

Officials said yesterday that the anti-missile system would not be tested on flights that carry passengers. The tests, which could involve more than 1,000 flights, will determine how the technology holds up under the rigors of flight, they said.

So yes, they are actually outfitting the planes with these systems, whether the tests are for fuel burn, aerodynamic drag, etc or others. My point would still be valid even if they weren't testing for the above, it's not as if they would have passengers on the plane during a live test anyway.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/09/AR2006050901841.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/09/AR2006050901841.html

I think you are remembering this news article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801654.html?nav=rss_nation

I think we already have that. It is the county elections registration offices.

  Many dead people have a history of voting. And that history isn't all that long ago.

Quite a few people protested against going into Iraq this time around. In fact, they were the biggest protests since Vietnam. For some reason, you didn't hear much about them in the media. Hell, there were even some large ones in 2005 yet somehow they were marginalized to the point that people don't even seem to remember they happened. After all, supporting our troops means agreeing with whatever stupid situation our president puts them into.

For some non-partisan data to put the situation into perspective using 'Bad Math' derived from the U.S. Census Bureau:

233,039,000 households x $80 = $18,643,120,000 for DTV converter box coupons

$95 billion in farm aid

Ron Paul has repeatedly said that some of his personal heroes are Martin Luther King Jr and Ghandi -- very odd choices for a white supremacist. He also said in an interview that he would consider someone like Walter Williams, a black economist, as his running mate.

The article posted has long since been dismissed as the writing of a ghost writer that was subsequently removed from his staff. His public life of service has shown no other evidence of any racism beyond this single article from the early nineties as was covered in Free Market News

From that article is the following quote by Ron Paul:

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees - while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers. More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct what is essentially a sin of the heart, we should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.

It really is amazing that in 10 terms in congress and being in the public spotlight for 30 years, this is the only thing that the media can dig up against Ron Paul.

Comment I posted in a firehose story (which took all of 30 seconds to realize the summary was simplistic and wrong):

More Info

here and here

Looks like the person in question was using Kazaa, which listed his mp3 files, although they weren't actually shared (uhh ... does kazaa publish them if they're not shared?) Media Sentry found them (but didn't actually download them?). He represented himself and lost big time.

How do you know that peoples vote that was not on a paper ballot is counted correctly?

Also what guarantee is there that people do not somehow print out some hidden code for each ballot, thus making it not so secret anymore.

Make a paper ballot. Put that through a high speed scanner. Done. All those that could not be read must be read by people.

However, the confusion is understandable, since the TSA Web page has a picture of a fscking laptop computer as the article's headline.

But even given that, it's still fscking stupid. I suppose they imagine, by limiting power sources, they can do an end-run around that abject security failure that let simulated bomb parts through.

Is there an event horizon for national embarrassment? 'Cause I think we're getting damned close to it...

Schwab

However, people who flock to social programs tend to be in a state of non-self-determination. Their hands are more tied and thus form lower income strata.

Their "non-self-determination" stems from the fact that they lack the gray matter necessary to perform almost any work which is much more productive than, say, mowing your yard, or clipping your hedges [and if the discipline of robotics ever advances to the point that robots can perform those jobs, then they're gonna be S.O.L.].

They will never grow up to be rocket scientists or brain surgeons - they can't "succeed" in a free-market economy [the way that a George Soros or a Warren Buffet can be wildly successful] because they don't have the intellect for it.

We're talking entire blocks of voters whose average IQ is below [or well below] 90 - and a child needs an IQ of about 90 just to have any hope of being able to benefit from even the most modest of educations.

As children's IQ's head south of 90, they very, very rapidly become ineducable.

And these children already form, effectively, almost half of our population - which is to say, they will determine one half of our future.

PS: Did you know that the average ineducable high-school dropout costs the taxpayer more than $19,500?

Per Year?

IN PERPETUITY, UNTIL THE END OF HIS LIFE?!?