Slashdot Mirror
McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
Here are the goods from TFA:
The Friday, July 11 version of the page says:
"at great cost our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006."
The Monday, July 14 version spidered by Versionista says:
"Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military's hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families."
robots.txt is idiotic in this context, except to steer spiders away from forms that shouldn't be submitted or triggering infinite loops. Suppose you find something like:
Don't you think that's going to be the first place to look? Again, robots.txt is to avoiding causing site meltdowns or stupid behavior. It's not to hide information.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why not pencil in Powell as a candidate on the ballet?!
Because he was complicit in misleading the public into the Iraq war.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You cut off your nose despite your face.
No, you cut off your nose to spite your face.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Am I the only person who clicked on the link (hyperlink behind "Vote McCain in 2008". It takes you to McCain food services. It was a joke, folks.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Qwest said "no".
Qwest actually said, "This is not what a warrant looks like; come back when you have a real warrant."
It was pretty much the most impressive piece of corporate ballsiness I can recall in recent history.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The theory is based on the Laffer curve. At a 0% tax rate, revenue will obviously be zero. At some arbitrarily high tax rate (100%? 1000%? 100,000%?), there's such a strong disincentive to earn money that revenue will also be zero. Given two zero crossings, you have an optimizable function of tax rate vs. revenue.
In short, some groups of intelligent people think that the tax rate is higher than the optimal value, and other intelligent people think it's lower than it should be. It's not inherently idiotic to imagine how tax cuts could in fact increase revenue.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I don't argue that spending is out of control and something that should be slowed down a lot, but I have an issue with the tax cuts on the 'rich'*. The only places that taxes can be cut is on the rich* b/c they are the only ones paying taxes! From here:
So when we cut taxes who else do you want to cut them on? Or are you talking more about income redistribution. The whole take money from those who have it and hand it out to those who don't?
* what defines 'rich'?
In India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_India/, we have a multi-party system where there are literally 10s of parties that have representation in the parliament. But people are sick and tired of these small parties being corrupt and opportunistic in their voting and destabilizing elected governments. I think that is the case in Israel and to some extent in Italy. Grass is always greener on the other side...I guess.
Ugh. No. You're so wrong I don't know where to start.
Slavery is anathema to libertarian ideology, because it allows one person to impinge on the rights of another. That's a fundamentally Bad Thing; in fact the whole point of libertarianism is the maximization of personal freedom, up to the point where your freedom to do something starts impinging on someone else's.
Basically you've constructed a straw man and then proceeded to tear it down; congratulations. It's a good argument except that it has nothing to do with any actual libertarians that I've ever met, nor the positions of either the Libertarian party or the other similar state-level parties.
If you want to criticize libertarian theory, that's fine -- there are many valid critiques of it. But saying that it advocates or legitimizes slavery is just false and stupid, and a great way of advertising your own ignorance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."