Any affiliate program that requires any monthly fee should be a big warning sign. Period. That is you paying them to work for them, and is totally insane.
Even ones that require a flat fee to join should be looked at, unless it's a nominal one.
Something like $5 to keep riffraff out would be reasonable, that would help keep out spammers, who keep signing up for new accounts when their old account get killed for spamming. Heck, just making people type in credit card numbers and billing them a dime will make it harder for spammers to sign up. (OTOH, now the company has to prove they aren't an entirely different kind of scammer.)
But any thing higher, or at least, proportionally higher where you can't make it up with three or four sales, should be recognized as a scam. And, like I said, anything with a recurring fee isn't a scam so much as they've tricked you into working for them...and paying them for the privilege.
There were a number of "corrections" that got sent in, and they heavily favored Franken.
I have no idea what you're trying to say there.
There were not 'corrections' 'sent in', whatever that means. There were people from both sides who pointed out questionable ballots they saw during the recount, just like they're supposed to do. Which then ended up in court.
And Franken won more of them. Although, strictly speaking, this was not needed for him to win.
The official decision disagreed with what was on the ballot (as by my own judging, and by the general public) almost always only for Franken.
You're asserting something that should be easily demonstrative with statistics. So where are they?
And even more importantly, Frankin would have won the damn election without 'challenging' a single ballot, you loon. The 'lead' you imagine that Coleman had at some point was due to 1284 uncounted absentee ballots that both campaigns later agreed to count.
Do the math: After the mandatory recount (before any challenges) Coleman lead by 192. Then the challenges added a lot of votes, but let's ignore them. Then 933 absentee ballots, which both sides agreed to count, added 183. Then Coleman initiated, and Franken agreed, to count some more absentee ballot, which added another 87 vote for Franken.
In other words, and this is very very important for you to understand....forget any 'challenged' ballots. If we only count the ballots that both Coleman and Franken agreed to be counted, which they did vote-unseen, Franken still won by 82 votes.
Franken also managed to convince the election panel to add 230 more votes than Coleman convinces them to add, via challenges, but he would have won simply had every legitimate absentee ballot, which both sides agreed on, had been counted. Any imagined Coleman lead was entirely due to the election officials wrongly, according to state law, the court, and both campaigns, discarding some absentee ballots. Everyone agreed to include those ballots, and, once you include them, Franken wins, period, without any challenges at all.
Now, you can indeed make the claim that, had Coleman know what was on those ballots, or had he been in the lead to start with, he wouldn't have agreed to count them. So in some parallel universe where Franken hadn't won more challenges and wasn't ahead at that point, Coleman wouldn't have agreed to count some legit votes, and Coleman would have won.
You're probably right, but that's rather damming of him.
Lower demand can, paradoxically, for a short amount of time, raise the price. Until suppliers compensate.
Think about it. It still costs the same to get illegal drugs there. Everyone is doing the same work, taking the same risk...and less people are buying the drugs.
Hence the drugs have to be sold for more to pay everyone the same amount.
What will eventually happen is that people in the illegal drug industry will stop working in said industry, or switch to other drugs, at which point the price will go down past the original amount.
But the illegal chain stretching from who-knows-where to your front door supplying the drugs takes a long time to compensate, especially as it's entirely possible that 90% of the people in it, who consider themselves 'businessmen', nevertheless have no business sense at all and couldn't foresee a drop in demand.
But try hiring a photographer for an event such as a wedding - AIUI, typically the photographer retains the copyright (and so strictly speaking, a married couple would be breaking the law to photocopy their own wedding photos).
It depends on how much you're willing to pay. You can pay for the photos, or you pay for a 'work for hire' where all copyrights get turned over to you. (Wedding photos, however, are a scam in that people often don't realize they don't own the copyright, or that there is a copyright in the first place. Photographers should be required to explain to clients exactly what the rights are of people who hire them.)
But, anyway, celebrities have plenty of work-for-hire images of themselves, where they hired the photographer to do a work-for-hire and now own the copyright on those photos free and clear, and could release them if they wanted.
And they have retarded publicists, who are too stupid to look through those images, pick out a reasonable good one, resize it for Wikipedia, and release that single image under the right CC license.
Because they want to retain total control over their celebrities images, and keep someone from pasting it to a mug and selling it, Wikipedia ends up with a craptastic image that some random dude snapped on his cell phone of George Clooney eating pasta at the table next to him. Over which they have no control at all.
The more they tighten their grasp, the more their celebrity's image will slip through their fingers.
Since he actually lives in Honduras (at least so he says), he is qualified to give a much more accurate account of it than any of us outsiders.
Not really. It actually makes him her more likely to be partisan. Go ask people about the 2000 US election and how fair it was.
Oh, sure, he says he's not partisan, but at this point, we're taking a lot of faith.
And he's repeating the talking point that Honduras has 'no way to remove a president'. There might be no codified way to do that, but the writers of the constitution clearly expected it was possible because they put in a specific law that removes people from public office if they do a specific thing...which Zelaya did!
So removing a president from office in Honduras is akin to calling a Constitutional convention in the US...we're not really sure how it works, and if it ever happened they'd be a lot of questions...but it's not a damn 'coup' if the entire rest of the government and the guy's own party are in agreement with said removal. Without a codified removal process, they decided to have both Congress and the Supreme Court vote on it, which sounds entirely reasonable to me. (It's more than our impeachment requires.)
And, yes, the people removing him broke the rules also, and Zelaya has a residency claim and a lawsuit against the military for kidnapping him and throwing him out of the country. That was entirely improper...but it still doesn't make him the damn president.
Attempt to change or even discuss changing the term limits of the office, you're removed from it. That is the damn rule, and I can read and understand it perfectly fine. The fact no one bothered to write down how to demonstrate that the president had done so, and thus the proper process for removal, is annoying, but does not mean that he can't actually be removed, it just means the the first time is going to be...bumpy.
Granted, all this could be lies and it was a military coup and the military is holding everyone else in the government at gunpoint and making them lie...but it's a rather surreal military coup if so. (Why not just hold Zelaya at gunpoint also?)
Just because the military was involved in the removal from office does not make it a military coup. The US has very specific laws against the military being involved in law enforcement, so if a president here ever refused to leave office and the rest of the government had to remove him by force, we would not use them, we'd use the secret service...and it would not be a 'Secret Service Coup', either. But Honduras is not the US, and probably does not have a law like the Posse Comitatus act.
He wanted to have a referendum to debate changes to the Constitution, and asked that the voice of the people be heard on the matter. That doesn't sound like "dismantling democratic rule" to me.
The Constitution on Honduras specifically makes it punishable by removal from office to discuss such a change. Not make such a change, not attempt to make such a change, but even to discuss attempting to make such a change.
They take their term limits incredibly fucking serious. Sounds crazy, I know, but it is the damn law.
They sat down and wrote, in their constitution, a part that not only can they not change (Which isn't that weird, we have a part we can't change...in ours we can't make slavery illegal, even via constitutional amendment, before 1808. Although obviously that is moot now.), but they can't even talk about changing or they're barred from any public office for the next decade, and removed if they're in it. It's not some weird accident, it's not some strange overlap of laws, it's not some court decision, it's an actual damn constitutional principle specifically put there, that exactly matches what he attempted to do.
Think of it, if you will, as our third amendment. It seems damn stupid and pointless, it's only be used in half a dozen court decisions in the entire history of this country, but it indeed is actually there and fairly explicit.
Oh, and this vote only became a 'discussion' or 'poll' after people starting, you know, trying to arrest him for it. (Although that's still illegal.) It was, in fact, a constitutional referendum to attempt to illegally change the Constitution. It became a 'poll' rather suddenly after the courts ruled against him and ordered him out of office.
You're an idiot. You didn't link to a single shred of...well, I would say evidence, but you didn't actually link to anything.
You're lying about his lawyer being 'known' for rigging election, but people should feel free to google who his lawyer is (Marc Elias, but don't trust me either.) and then google what he's known for. (Here's a hint...nothing. Not a single hit on 'rigging' an election, except for stuff about him 'rigging' this one.)
You're an idiot about the 'statistical likelyhood'. Statistics do not work like that. There is no calculable likelihood what several thousands challenged ballots would be.
And you're just plain wrong about the 'local newspaper'. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who I presume is who you're talking about, indeed scanned the ballets. And the results were...Franken still winning, although by about a third the amount.
Oh, and Franken didn't 'keep doing recounts'. Franken did not ask for the single recount that happened, it was required by law.
He and Coleman then challenged ballots that were not counted, but should be, or vis versa. Every challenged ballot was looked at and decided in court, once.
That was it...the required-by-law recount of all ballots, and a few thousand ballots that both parties had pulled out and said 'Hey, wait, that was a vote for me you didn't count', and 'Hey, that was counted as a vote for him that shouldn't have counted.'. Neither party asked for a 'recount', neither party initiated this, it is part of the process of the required-by-law recount. (And, in fact, the original count.)
This required-by-law recount Franken won, back in January, two months after it started.
Coleman then proceeded to sue and hold the entire thing up for six months.
More to the point, almost no city has ever had 'dog catcher' as an elected position. It's just an idiotic hypothetical that one city might have had once, and doesn't matter at all.
It's especially implausible now as more and more cities are switching over to system with a much more limited chief executive. Dog catcher, and almost all positions, are indeed appointed, but by the city commissioners.
Hell, cities don't even have 'dog catcher' as a damn appointed position either. The 'Office of Animal Control', to use the correct name, is usually the responsibility of the police or health department or the park and rec, hired by them, and has absolutely no policy making power whatsoever. They just catch the damn animals that people call in.
The people in Iraq who are attacking 'us' are not terrorists in general. Terrorists, by definition, attack civilians in an attempt to terrorize them. There are not that many US civilians walking around in Iraq.
Now, there are a few people attacking Iraqi civilians, but that's more 'ethnic cleansing' than 'terrorism'. In terrorism, you're attempting to get civilians to change their behavior out of terror, whereas in 'cleansing', you're just trying to kill them.
There, is, of course, some overlap. Killing a group of people straightforwardly is ethnic cleansing, whereas killing them horrible is sorta both...you're hoping that some of them be so terrified they will move elsewhere, and the rest you'll kill.
But, anyway, almost no terrorism against the US happens in Iraq. Shooting at soldiers is not terrorism.
But by the same logic, nothing should prevent a citizen with the means to do so from purchasing an M1 Abrams and driving it around.
Erm, except the fact that streets can't support it and it can't maintain the minimum speed required by law in most places. And does not meet various other standards.
The Army seized him on the orders of the supreme court because he broke the law:
Article 239 -- No citizen that has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President.
Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.
You're standing there yammering about the 'rule of law' and you don't even know what it says.
Yes, you might find such a constitutional provision objectionable, but it does, indeed, exist. Merely attempting to alter the term limits of the office of president is illegal and grounds from removal from office. The Honduras Supreme Court found he had, indeed, violated this law, and ordered him removed.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle actually removing him from office, as everyone was unsure that the executive branch would actually do so, but his removal from office was entirely legal and not any sort of 'coup' at all.
Unless, of course, the evidence was faked to drive a stake through the heart of any movement to bring Zelaya back as president.
I'm not entirely sure the idea that certified electronic voting results were faked by someone besides the person in power would really help prove the security of electronic voting.
'I don't know about those electronic voting machines, I heard the president of Honduras faked the electronic voting results.'
'Oh, no, it wasn't him, it was some random guys who faked the electronic voting result to frame him. Electronic voting is perfectly secure, because only...um...random people off the street can hack it, not governments.'
Actually, a parallel test would be easily defeatable.
Simple have special vote, one that is unlikely in the real world such as voting for a Socialist president candidate and a Libertarian senator, and unlikely candidates for a dozen other races, trigger some hidden instruction to alter 15% of the vote for that election.
Also have it the triggered machine mark each 'ballot card' that comes though, which then triggers every other machine to start doing the same thing when that card is placed in another machine.
Then simply have voters in on the fraud, one at each precinct, come in early in the morning and vote that way. The trigger would rapidly spread to all machine, randomly altering 15% of each vote cast, but this would never happen in any of the tests.
If you want to be more sure it won't happen in a test, put a check that if someone does a different irrational voting pattern, one that is close to the actual trigger but not exactly, it will totally disable the trigger, even if someone later gets it right. Which will make it extremely unlikely random random testing will happen to hit on the correct trigger first.
Yeah, some mistakes will get made and someone will screw up putting in the trigger by accident, but they'd do that anyway. And some people won't show up, or they'll make it at 2 in the afternoon. But if 95% of the precincts are shifted one way, and 5% are left at the original place, they aren't going to be looking for fraud in the 95% places.
What sort of moron creates a constitutional system where lawbreaking presidents can't be removed from office via some means? What sort of fuckery is that?
Hell, forget changing the term limits/treason. What if he'd gone out and murdered someone? What do you do then? Arrest him, and watch him order the police to release him? Or watched him continue to operate the government from prison?
Even more surreally, does he have pardon power? The president in the US can pardon anyone, even himself(1), but can't override an impeachment. So without an impeachment process...what happens?
The impeachment concept is designed to keep the country from descending into anarchy if the president turns criminal. So...yeah, guess what happened without such a process?
1) This has never actually happened, but there is no restriction in the Constitution stopping it.
Well, yeah, in some places they have 'pilot' programs that people can opt into.
But people aren't going to actually care until they all get switched, and they all are informed that power cost different amounts at different times, and told to deal with it.
Erm, if you think that b->c isn't accessing the memory of b, you need a C refresher course.
Assigning b to something would be fine if b was NULL. Assigning b->c requires reading b to find out where c is pointing. It does not require reading c, and hence c can be NULL, but it requires reading b, which cannot be NULL.
Testing for what is supposed to be impossible is indeed valid, and can indeed be optimized away, but the compiler really should say something about it.
It should mention all dead code, in fact. Anytime it notices code that does nothing that it decides it doesn't need, it should tell the programmer, if only to keep them from maintaining unused code.
The only exception is the specific case of 'if (0)' tests, which are often used to comment out code where comments wouldn't work, and presumable people know what they're doing there.
That is poor design, not defective. And Windows stopped having a poor design a while back. (It still has a poor implementation, though.)
Defective by design is a specific term used to refer to DRM, which is, indeed, impossible to actually work. The design is defective. You cannot present information to the end user without it being copyable.
DRM is like attempting to build a perpetual motion machine...fools sit down and design complicated weights and counterweights, each time thinking they're going to get it if they could just get rid of one flaw. No, the flaw is that it's theoretically impossible to do what they're attempting to do, but it's very very possible to almost do what they're attempting to do, so fools will keep trying.
The person who said this article would be tagged defectivebydesign if it about Windows was full of crap.
I've never understood the whole 'key in the ignition' crap. Yes, you want a lot of stuff to turn off when you turn the car off, and we used to do that simply by cutting all power to them...
But, seriously, this is 2009. I don't think it's too much to ask the car to send a signal to the radio saying 'turn off' when the ignition switches off, but continues to power the radio so that someone can turn it back on. This isn't rocket surgery, people.
We manage to already do that with headlights, with a timer in there that keeps them on for another minute, it clearly wouldn't be hard to do it without a timer. (Although keeping the radio on as people got out of the car would not really be a bad thing.) We have buttons on the steering wheel that can turn the damn radio off and on, surely we can make the key turn it off and on but additionally leave where it can be turned on anyway.
No, someone, somewhere, because they were raised on cars that did it, got the idea that there's some actual logical reason to have the radio non-operational without the key. My guess, like yours, is they think it runs down the batteries, despite the fact it would actually take a damn long time to do that, and a safety feature that turns the radio off automatically after six hours with no button press so would stop that easily.
The real interesting fact there is that if the key is in the ignition, often, legally, you are 'operating the motor vehicle'. Hence it can be, for example, illegal to get out of the vehicle. Think about that the next time you leave people in the car listening to the radio while you pump gas.
That's actually as good reason to redesign how cars function so that the engine will operate without the key, and the key unlocks shifting into gear. So people could run AC and whatnot without it. (I'm sorry, if bad people have gotten into your car interior, they have better ways to cost you money than sit there and waste your gas. Like, oh, opening your gas tank and pouring sugar in, and waiting for you to start the car.)
But I understand why car companies don't do that, that would require a lot of work, and people are very used to the physical turning of the key starting the engine. But they still should go halfway and let people use electrical parts of the car without the key.
No shit. Forget this 'smart appliance' crap, and work on actually charging less for power at night, which, you know, is sorta a requirement for this to even exist at all.
Once you do that, publish a schedule, and people will start using non-peak hours for that, manually.
Then, and only then, do you invent a way to send said schedule over the power lines, both in a complicated 'rate by every hour' version and a simple-to-understand 'we are now a lower rate/hour warning for that ending/it ended' signal that can be parsed with a two dollar IC. (And while we're at it, why don't we send the current time, too, so appliances that parse the schedule actually understand it.)
And in addition to 'one hour delay' button, dishwashers and dryers will start including a 'until non-peak hour' button, and then the complicated energy saving can start, which fridges, water heater, and other things using excess energy before peak. And while we're talking to appliances, we should be able to locally talk to them, like you said, and say 'We're on vacation. Stop doing everything you can.' and have water heaters cut off and fridges operate on the assumption that no one will open the door and stuff like that.
...but the very first damn thing is for power companies to start charging us different amounts for different times, because until there's some actual savings on the part of the consumers by implementing this, this is all mental masturbation on the part of electric companies, who'd really like us to use power at non-peak times but can't actually be bothered to, you know, give us any incentive at all to do that.
I agree completely, I was just explaining the POV of many of the ISP's defenders. Prioritizing when ISPs became overloaded because of some unpredictable surge, or even just a normal Saturday afternoon spike that's three times the traffic at other times that the ISP doesn't want to upgrade for to handle once a week, would be reasonable, and people who are defending them are operating like this is true.
Sadly, it's not true at all. It is not prioritizing, it is capping, it not to deal with high traffic, it is at set times, and it is not really to deal with any actual problems, it is to keep from having to pay for more bandwidth (aka, to make more profit) by pretending their high usage customers are 'unethical'. (With is going to work less and less as Hulu and whatnot catch on.)
There is a danger they will collude with big media, but there's not much in that for them...they'd still have to upgrade their damn pipes for what big media wants.
Right now ISPs are using 'piracy' as a justification, but it is not slightly related to the actual reason they're capping torrents. They picked torrents because they can tell everyone all torrents are illegal, and because torrents use uploading bandwidth, which they've really skimped on.
It's not because they're in anyone's pocket, and there's little reason for them to keep going along with big media when media finally gets its act together and starts sending stuff over the wire. Watch, they'll start calling Hulu 'network abuse' and demanding extra money to carry it.
Which is sorta what you're talking about, but less big media blocking competitors from the marketplace, and more ISPs extorting money from big media. Big media is in for a rude awakening when it runs into a more monopolized market than itself.
Something like 90% of the people in this country have no high speed ISP alternatives. If they can't watch House because Fox refused to pay their ISP so they get 10k/s download, they can't watch House on the internet. It's not some debatable thing where consumers choose, they cannot watch it. As more and more people watch TV on the internet, less and less people will bother to watch House on their actual TV. Big media is not going to 'bribe' ISPs, ISPs are going to extort big media. (Along with any other big website that has money.)
Of course, big media doesn't realizes what's going to happen yet...because big media, especially the TV studios, WRT the internet, are a bunch of morons who couldn't dump water out of a shoe with instructions printed on the heel, and the shoe handed to them upside down and the water already dumped out. They'd flip the shoe back over and piss in it.
Our biggest way to avoid this is for ISPs to actually try this on big media...because big media owns a lot more politicians than ISPs, and net neutrality would magically suddenly happen.
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Any affiliate program that requires any monthly fee should be a big warning sign. Period. That is you paying them to work for them, and is totally insane.
Even ones that require a flat fee to join should be looked at, unless it's a nominal one.
Something like $5 to keep riffraff out would be reasonable, that would help keep out spammers, who keep signing up for new accounts when their old account get killed for spamming. Heck, just making people type in credit card numbers and billing them a dime will make it harder for spammers to sign up. (OTOH, now the company has to prove they aren't an entirely different kind of scammer.)
But any thing higher, or at least, proportionally higher where you can't make it up with three or four sales, should be recognized as a scam. And, like I said, anything with a recurring fee isn't a scam so much as they've tricked you into working for them...and paying them for the privilege.
There were a number of "corrections" that got sent in, and they heavily favored Franken.
I have no idea what you're trying to say there. There were not 'corrections' 'sent in', whatever that means. There were people from both sides who pointed out questionable ballots they saw during the recount, just like they're supposed to do. Which then ended up in court.
And Franken won more of them. Although, strictly speaking, this was not needed for him to win.
The official decision disagreed with what was on the ballot (as by my own judging, and by the general public) almost always only for Franken.
You're asserting something that should be easily demonstrative with statistics. So where are they?
And even more importantly, Frankin would have won the damn election without 'challenging' a single ballot, you loon. The 'lead' you imagine that Coleman had at some point was due to 1284 uncounted absentee ballots that both campaigns later agreed to count.
Do the math: After the mandatory recount (before any challenges) Coleman lead by 192. Then the challenges added a lot of votes, but let's ignore them. Then 933 absentee ballots, which both sides agreed to count, added 183. Then Coleman initiated, and Franken agreed, to count some more absentee ballot, which added another 87 vote for Franken.
In other words, and this is very very important for you to understand....forget any 'challenged' ballots. If we only count the ballots that both Coleman and Franken agreed to be counted, which they did vote-unseen, Franken still won by 82 votes.
Franken also managed to convince the election panel to add 230 more votes than Coleman convinces them to add, via challenges, but he would have won simply had every legitimate absentee ballot, which both sides agreed on, had been counted. Any imagined Coleman lead was entirely due to the election officials wrongly, according to state law, the court, and both campaigns, discarding some absentee ballots. Everyone agreed to include those ballots, and, once you include them, Franken wins, period, without any challenges at all.
Now, you can indeed make the claim that, had Coleman know what was on those ballots, or had he been in the lead to start with, he wouldn't have agreed to count them. So in some parallel universe where Franken hadn't won more challenges and wasn't ahead at that point, Coleman wouldn't have agreed to count some legit votes, and Coleman would have won.
You're probably right, but that's rather damming of him.
Lower demand can, paradoxically, for a short amount of time, raise the price. Until suppliers compensate.
Think about it. It still costs the same to get illegal drugs there. Everyone is doing the same work, taking the same risk...and less people are buying the drugs.
Hence the drugs have to be sold for more to pay everyone the same amount.
What will eventually happen is that people in the illegal drug industry will stop working in said industry, or switch to other drugs, at which point the price will go down past the original amount.
But the illegal chain stretching from who-knows-where to your front door supplying the drugs takes a long time to compensate, especially as it's entirely possible that 90% of the people in it, who consider themselves 'businessmen', nevertheless have no business sense at all and couldn't foresee a drop in demand.
But try hiring a photographer for an event such as a wedding - AIUI, typically the photographer retains the copyright (and so strictly speaking, a married couple would be breaking the law to photocopy their own wedding photos).
It depends on how much you're willing to pay. You can pay for the photos, or you pay for a 'work for hire' where all copyrights get turned over to you. (Wedding photos, however, are a scam in that people often don't realize they don't own the copyright, or that there is a copyright in the first place. Photographers should be required to explain to clients exactly what the rights are of people who hire them.)
But, anyway, celebrities have plenty of work-for-hire images of themselves, where they hired the photographer to do a work-for-hire and now own the copyright on those photos free and clear, and could release them if they wanted.
And they have retarded publicists, who are too stupid to look through those images, pick out a reasonable good one, resize it for Wikipedia, and release that single image under the right CC license.
Because they want to retain total control over their celebrities images, and keep someone from pasting it to a mug and selling it, Wikipedia ends up with a craptastic image that some random dude snapped on his cell phone of George Clooney eating pasta at the table next to him. Over which they have no control at all.
The more they tighten their grasp, the more their celebrity's image will slip through their fingers.
Since he actually lives in Honduras (at least so he says), he is qualified to give a much more accurate account of it than any of us outsiders.
Not really. It actually makes him her more likely to be partisan. Go ask people about the 2000 US election and how fair it was.
Oh, sure, he says he's not partisan, but at this point, we're taking a lot of faith.
And he's repeating the talking point that Honduras has 'no way to remove a president'. There might be no codified way to do that, but the writers of the constitution clearly expected it was possible because they put in a specific law that removes people from public office if they do a specific thing...which Zelaya did!
So removing a president from office in Honduras is akin to calling a Constitutional convention in the US...we're not really sure how it works, and if it ever happened they'd be a lot of questions...but it's not a damn 'coup' if the entire rest of the government and the guy's own party are in agreement with said removal. Without a codified removal process, they decided to have both Congress and the Supreme Court vote on it, which sounds entirely reasonable to me. (It's more than our impeachment requires.)
And, yes, the people removing him broke the rules also, and Zelaya has a residency claim and a lawsuit against the military for kidnapping him and throwing him out of the country. That was entirely improper...but it still doesn't make him the damn president.
Attempt to change or even discuss changing the term limits of the office, you're removed from it. That is the damn rule, and I can read and understand it perfectly fine. The fact no one bothered to write down how to demonstrate that the president had done so, and thus the proper process for removal, is annoying, but does not mean that he can't actually be removed, it just means the the first time is going to be...bumpy.
Granted, all this could be lies and it was a military coup and the military is holding everyone else in the government at gunpoint and making them lie...but it's a rather surreal military coup if so. (Why not just hold Zelaya at gunpoint also?)
Just because the military was involved in the removal from office does not make it a military coup. The US has very specific laws against the military being involved in law enforcement, so if a president here ever refused to leave office and the rest of the government had to remove him by force, we would not use them, we'd use the secret service...and it would not be a 'Secret Service Coup', either. But Honduras is not the US, and probably does not have a law like the Posse Comitatus act.
He wanted to have a referendum to debate changes to the Constitution, and asked that the voice of the people be heard on the matter. That doesn't sound like "dismantling democratic rule" to me.
The Constitution on Honduras specifically makes it punishable by removal from office to discuss such a change. Not make such a change, not attempt to make such a change, but even to discuss attempting to make such a change.
They take their term limits incredibly fucking serious. Sounds crazy, I know, but it is the damn law.
They sat down and wrote, in their constitution, a part that not only can they not change (Which isn't that weird, we have a part we can't change...in ours we can't make slavery illegal, even via constitutional amendment, before 1808. Although obviously that is moot now.), but they can't even talk about changing or they're barred from any public office for the next decade, and removed if they're in it. It's not some weird accident, it's not some strange overlap of laws, it's not some court decision, it's an actual damn constitutional principle specifically put there, that exactly matches what he attempted to do.
Think of it, if you will, as our third amendment. It seems damn stupid and pointless, it's only be used in half a dozen court decisions in the entire history of this country, but it indeed is actually there and fairly explicit.
Oh, and this vote only became a 'discussion' or 'poll' after people starting, you know, trying to arrest him for it. (Although that's still illegal.) It was, in fact, a constitutional referendum to attempt to illegally change the Constitution. It became a 'poll' rather suddenly after the courts ruled against him and ordered him out of office.
That was an EPIC FAIL as a troll, dude.
You're an idiot. You didn't link to a single shred of...well, I would say evidence, but you didn't actually link to anything.
You're lying about his lawyer being 'known' for rigging election, but people should feel free to google who his lawyer is (Marc Elias, but don't trust me either.) and then google what he's known for. (Here's a hint...nothing. Not a single hit on 'rigging' an election, except for stuff about him 'rigging' this one.)
You're an idiot about the 'statistical likelyhood'. Statistics do not work like that. There is no calculable likelihood what several thousands challenged ballots would be.
And you're just plain wrong about the 'local newspaper'. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who I presume is who you're talking about, indeed scanned the ballets. And the results were...Franken still winning, although by about a third the amount.
Oh, and Franken didn't 'keep doing recounts'. Franken did not ask for the single recount that happened, it was required by law.
He and Coleman then challenged ballots that were not counted, but should be, or vis versa. Every challenged ballot was looked at and decided in court, once.
That was it...the required-by-law recount of all ballots, and a few thousand ballots that both parties had pulled out and said 'Hey, wait, that was a vote for me you didn't count', and 'Hey, that was counted as a vote for him that shouldn't have counted.'. Neither party asked for a 'recount', neither party initiated this, it is part of the process of the required-by-law recount. (And, in fact, the original count.)
This required-by-law recount Franken won, back in January, two months after it started.
Coleman then proceeded to sue and hold the entire thing up for six months.
More to the point, almost no city has ever had 'dog catcher' as an elected position. It's just an idiotic hypothetical that one city might have had once, and doesn't matter at all.
It's especially implausible now as more and more cities are switching over to system with a much more limited chief executive. Dog catcher, and almost all positions, are indeed appointed, but by the city commissioners.
Hell, cities don't even have 'dog catcher' as a damn appointed position either. The 'Office of Animal Control', to use the correct name, is usually the responsibility of the police or health department or the park and rec, hired by them, and has absolutely no policy making power whatsoever. They just catch the damn animals that people call in.
The people in Iraq who are attacking 'us' are not terrorists in general. Terrorists, by definition, attack civilians in an attempt to terrorize them. There are not that many US civilians walking around in Iraq.
Now, there are a few people attacking Iraqi civilians, but that's more 'ethnic cleansing' than 'terrorism'. In terrorism, you're attempting to get civilians to change their behavior out of terror, whereas in 'cleansing', you're just trying to kill them.
There, is, of course, some overlap. Killing a group of people straightforwardly is ethnic cleansing, whereas killing them horrible is sorta both...you're hoping that some of them be so terrified they will move elsewhere, and the rest you'll kill.
But, anyway, almost no terrorism against the US happens in Iraq. Shooting at soldiers is not terrorism.
But by the same logic, nothing should prevent a citizen with the means to do so from purchasing an M1 Abrams and driving it around.
Erm, except the fact that streets can't support it and it can't maintain the minimum speed required by law in most places. And does not meet various other standards.
Yes, it is a stupid law. And, yes, anyone who supported changing it can be barred from office from ten years.
That, however, does not make removing presidents who break it a 'coup'.
The Army seized him on the orders of the supreme court because he broke the law:
Article 239 -- No citizen that has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President.
Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.
You're standing there yammering about the 'rule of law' and you don't even know what it says.
Yes, you might find such a constitutional provision objectionable, but it does, indeed, exist. Merely attempting to alter the term limits of the office of president is illegal and grounds from removal from office. The Honduras Supreme Court found he had, indeed, violated this law, and ordered him removed.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle actually removing him from office, as everyone was unsure that the executive branch would actually do so, but his removal from office was entirely legal and not any sort of 'coup' at all.
Unless, of course, the evidence was faked to drive a stake through the heart of any movement to bring Zelaya back as president.
I'm not entirely sure the idea that certified electronic voting results were faked by someone besides the person in power would really help prove the security of electronic voting.
'I don't know about those electronic voting machines, I heard the president of Honduras faked the electronic voting results.'
'Oh, no, it wasn't him, it was some random guys who faked the electronic voting result to frame him. Electronic voting is perfectly secure, because only...um...random people off the street can hack it, not governments.'
Actually, a parallel test would be easily defeatable.
Simple have special vote, one that is unlikely in the real world such as voting for a Socialist president candidate and a Libertarian senator, and unlikely candidates for a dozen other races, trigger some hidden instruction to alter 15% of the vote for that election.
Also have it the triggered machine mark each 'ballot card' that comes though, which then triggers every other machine to start doing the same thing when that card is placed in another machine.
Then simply have voters in on the fraud, one at each precinct, come in early in the morning and vote that way. The trigger would rapidly spread to all machine, randomly altering 15% of each vote cast, but this would never happen in any of the tests.
If you want to be more sure it won't happen in a test, put a check that if someone does a different irrational voting pattern, one that is close to the actual trigger but not exactly, it will totally disable the trigger, even if someone later gets it right. Which will make it extremely unlikely random random testing will happen to hit on the correct trigger first.
Yeah, some mistakes will get made and someone will screw up putting in the trigger by accident, but they'd do that anyway. And some people won't show up, or they'll make it at 2 in the afternoon. But if 95% of the precincts are shifted one way, and 5% are left at the original place, they aren't going to be looking for fraud in the 95% places.
What sort of moron creates a constitutional system where lawbreaking presidents can't be removed from office via some means? What sort of fuckery is that?
Hell, forget changing the term limits/treason. What if he'd gone out and murdered someone? What do you do then? Arrest him, and watch him order the police to release him? Or watched him continue to operate the government from prison?
Even more surreally, does he have pardon power? The president in the US can pardon anyone, even himself(1), but can't override an impeachment. So without an impeachment process...what happens?
The impeachment concept is designed to keep the country from descending into anarchy if the president turns criminal. So...yeah, guess what happened without such a process?
1) This has never actually happened, but there is no restriction in the Constitution stopping it.
Well, yeah, in some places they have 'pilot' programs that people can opt into.
But people aren't going to actually care until they all get switched, and they all are informed that power cost different amounts at different times, and told to deal with it.
Erm, if you think that b->c isn't accessing the memory of b, you need a C refresher course.
Assigning b to something would be fine if b was NULL. Assigning b->c requires reading b to find out where c is pointing. It does not require reading c, and hence c can be NULL, but it requires reading b, which cannot be NULL.
Even if there are a bunch of warnings in some code, that's why warnings are individually configurable. It doesn't even have to be the default.
In fact, all dead and removed code should generate warnings of some sort.
Testing for what is supposed to be impossible is indeed valid, and can indeed be optimized away, but the compiler really should say something about it.
It should mention all dead code, in fact. Anytime it notices code that does nothing that it decides it doesn't need, it should tell the programmer, if only to keep them from maintaining unused code.
The only exception is the specific case of 'if (0)' tests, which are often used to comment out code where comments wouldn't work, and presumable people know what they're doing there.
This is why distros come out with kernels that aren't the newest one. I'm willing to bet that no distro is ever going to come with this kernel.
That is poor design, not defective. And Windows stopped having a poor design a while back. (It still has a poor implementation, though.)
Defective by design is a specific term used to refer to DRM, which is, indeed, impossible to actually work. The design is defective. You cannot present information to the end user without it being copyable.
DRM is like attempting to build a perpetual motion machine...fools sit down and design complicated weights and counterweights, each time thinking they're going to get it if they could just get rid of one flaw. No, the flaw is that it's theoretically impossible to do what they're attempting to do, but it's very very possible to almost do what they're attempting to do, so fools will keep trying.
The person who said this article would be tagged defectivebydesign if it about Windows was full of crap.
I've never understood the whole 'key in the ignition' crap. Yes, you want a lot of stuff to turn off when you turn the car off, and we used to do that simply by cutting all power to them...
But, seriously, this is 2009. I don't think it's too much to ask the car to send a signal to the radio saying 'turn off' when the ignition switches off, but continues to power the radio so that someone can turn it back on. This isn't rocket surgery, people.
We manage to already do that with headlights, with a timer in there that keeps them on for another minute, it clearly wouldn't be hard to do it without a timer. (Although keeping the radio on as people got out of the car would not really be a bad thing.) We have buttons on the steering wheel that can turn the damn radio off and on, surely we can make the key turn it off and on but additionally leave where it can be turned on anyway.
No, someone, somewhere, because they were raised on cars that did it, got the idea that there's some actual logical reason to have the radio non-operational without the key. My guess, like yours, is they think it runs down the batteries, despite the fact it would actually take a damn long time to do that, and a safety feature that turns the radio off automatically after six hours with no button press so would stop that easily.
The real interesting fact there is that if the key is in the ignition, often, legally, you are 'operating the motor vehicle'. Hence it can be, for example, illegal to get out of the vehicle. Think about that the next time you leave people in the car listening to the radio while you pump gas.
That's actually as good reason to redesign how cars function so that the engine will operate without the key, and the key unlocks shifting into gear. So people could run AC and whatnot without it. (I'm sorry, if bad people have gotten into your car interior, they have better ways to cost you money than sit there and waste your gas. Like, oh, opening your gas tank and pouring sugar in, and waiting for you to start the car.)
But I understand why car companies don't do that, that would require a lot of work, and people are very used to the physical turning of the key starting the engine. But they still should go halfway and let people use electrical parts of the car without the key.
No shit. Forget this 'smart appliance' crap, and work on actually charging less for power at night, which, you know, is sorta a requirement for this to even exist at all.
Once you do that, publish a schedule, and people will start using non-peak hours for that, manually.
Then, and only then, do you invent a way to send said schedule over the power lines, both in a complicated 'rate by every hour' version and a simple-to-understand 'we are now a lower rate/hour warning for that ending/it ended' signal that can be parsed with a two dollar IC. (And while we're at it, why don't we send the current time, too, so appliances that parse the schedule actually understand it.)
And in addition to 'one hour delay' button, dishwashers and dryers will start including a 'until non-peak hour' button, and then the complicated energy saving can start, which fridges, water heater, and other things using excess energy before peak. And while we're talking to appliances, we should be able to locally talk to them, like you said, and say 'We're on vacation. Stop doing everything you can.' and have water heaters cut off and fridges operate on the assumption that no one will open the door and stuff like that.
I agree completely, I was just explaining the POV of many of the ISP's defenders. Prioritizing when ISPs became overloaded because of some unpredictable surge, or even just a normal Saturday afternoon spike that's three times the traffic at other times that the ISP doesn't want to upgrade for to handle once a week, would be reasonable, and people who are defending them are operating like this is true.
Sadly, it's not true at all. It is not prioritizing, it is capping, it not to deal with high traffic, it is at set times, and it is not really to deal with any actual problems, it is to keep from having to pay for more bandwidth (aka, to make more profit) by pretending their high usage customers are 'unethical'. (With is going to work less and less as Hulu and whatnot catch on.)
There is a danger they will collude with big media, but there's not much in that for them...they'd still have to upgrade their damn pipes for what big media wants.
Right now ISPs are using 'piracy' as a justification, but it is not slightly related to the actual reason they're capping torrents. They picked torrents because they can tell everyone all torrents are illegal, and because torrents use uploading bandwidth, which they've really skimped on.
It's not because they're in anyone's pocket, and there's little reason for them to keep going along with big media when media finally gets its act together and starts sending stuff over the wire. Watch, they'll start calling Hulu 'network abuse' and demanding extra money to carry it.
Which is sorta what you're talking about, but less big media blocking competitors from the marketplace, and more ISPs extorting money from big media. Big media is in for a rude awakening when it runs into a more monopolized market than itself.
Something like 90% of the people in this country have no high speed ISP alternatives. If they can't watch House because Fox refused to pay their ISP so they get 10k/s download, they can't watch House on the internet. It's not some debatable thing where consumers choose, they cannot watch it. As more and more people watch TV on the internet, less and less people will bother to watch House on their actual TV. Big media is not going to 'bribe' ISPs, ISPs are going to extort big media. (Along with any other big website that has money.)
Of course, big media doesn't realizes what's going to happen yet...because big media, especially the TV studios, WRT the internet, are a bunch of morons who couldn't dump water out of a shoe with instructions printed on the heel, and the shoe handed to them upside down and the water already dumped out. They'd flip the shoe back over and piss in it.
Our biggest way to avoid this is for ISPs to actually try this on big media...because big media owns a lot more politicians than ISPs, and net neutrality would magically suddenly happen.