You simply repeating, over and over, that I am wrong, without you actually demonstrating that I am, is not in any sort of discussion, and I'm not going to participate in your little idiocy anymore. I'm not even going to respond to anything that just says I'm wrong.
Saying that you want government run health care for certain individuals is not saying you want government run health care.
Yes, it does, you fucktard. If you want government run health care for certain individuals, you want government run healthcare to exist, and hence you do, in fact, want it. Um, duh. You really can't quite read what you actually write, can you? (What that has to do with my assertation I have no idea, but it's so stupidly wrong I had to mention it.)
No, they missed one seat in the senate and failed to take every seat they challenged in the entire country.
I said races they were competitive in, you fucktard, not 'challenged'. If you don't know the difference, you shouldn't be talking about elections at all.
1974 saw a bigger sweep then 2006.
The 1974 election didn't result in big gains in the Senate, you loon.
...and those were, in fact the only three things you attempted to rebut with anything more than 'You're wrong, read the news'.
I find that funny because he is constantly blasting moderates.
Um...DUUUUUH. That is my point. He attack the middle, moving it closer to where he is.
And BTW, Bill Clinton was conservative by your definition, not Americas.
*facedesks*
That is what I'm saying, except replace 'my definition' with 'the rest of the world's definition'. Do you not understand the actual words coming out of my mouth?
You see, everything you pointed out so far has been pointless one sided views that don't take things into context. The healthcare, You were misrepresenting it, almost everything you mentioned, you misrepresented.
What are you talking about? I'm not misrepresenting anything. 52% of Republicans wish that the government would take their money and spend it on health care for other people. That was the actual question. Although I'm sure some of them differ with Democrats about who those people should be, that's not really the point, as for almost a decade the message has been blasted about how all people who collect any sort of government handout are horrible wastrels and it's the liberals who want to take all your money and give it to them.
Now, you're about to argue that's not actual Republican thought, and you're probably right. But if people voted for what the parties actually did, they'd have stopped voting for Republicans a long time ago.
No, they vote for there perception of the parties, and their perception of where they fall, and the Republicans have spent a decade defining almost all 'political positions' leftward while moving themselves and the Democrats to the right, which, as I pointed out, has resulted in the Democrats standing firmly to the right of any sane political positions, and that has finally caught up with the Republicans.
You seem to be alluding to some behind the scenes reason for 2006 when the dems took a few republican seats and once again, you are wrong.
The Dems took every single Republican seat that was competitive (Maybe there was one house seat that people thought was possible they didn't get, I forget.), plus several seats no one thought was competitive. They didn't lose any seats to Republicans, including seats everyone thought they would.
Keep thinking it's a 'few' seats, though. It was one of the largest political sweeps in history. And it wasn't 'behind the scenes', although few people understand the pattern...the election was openly about Iraq and health care, and how the 'center' that the media was reporting on both those issues was insanely far to the right of what people actually think about them.
It also appears that you are either very new to the world of politics or you are purposely misstating things to advance an agenda.
Ah, you caught me. As I'm arguing the Republican party has mistakenly shifted to far to the right, I'm clearly trying to make the Republican party more liberal. Someone out there in the Republican party might be listening to me and planning to do that, you better foil me by demanding the party moves even farther to the right! (Perhaps you can oppose spending tax money on monitoring the weather. Call it Socialized Disaster Warning. I'll let you have that idea for free.)
In reality, I was just laughing along with another non-Republican who had realized what had happened: The Republicans had mistaken moving the center measurement closer to themselves for victory, when that is, in fact, defeat. (As that puts more people on the other side.) That's all.
It seems that you are ignoring the details a little too much. The line might have moved but it is where it is by default. The politicians don't move the center of the line. The people do. the politicians might be trying to misstate where they are on the line, but that doesn't control it.
You mean years and years of them talking about how 'librul' Bill Clinton (One of the most conservative Democrats ever.) was didn't move the line? You mean years of equating dissent with treason didn't move the line? You mean a decade of Rush Limbaugh didn't move the line?
Nope, sorry, you're wrong. Since 1994 or so, the sole message in this country has been 'Republicans are the moderates, Democrats are communists'. It was a steady and successful attempt to shift what things mean in politics, and it's why right-wing parties in Europe can pass for far left parties here.
But, again, arguing with you is counterproductive, it's in my best interests if Republican do not actually understand what they did to themselves and think the 'center' of America is where they've been saying it is. Feel free to believe all your little justifications about how I'm totally wrong and the American people disagree with me.
And in 2008, I'll sit here eating popcorn as I watch 2006 happen all over again, but harder. Should be a fun show. (Although, sadly, half the Republicans in Congress seem intent on ruining it by resigning in advance. Bah. Who ever heard of someone resigning a year into a six year term?)
So you cannot really claim the line was moved or anything was redefined because it is always relative to the voters and what they consider is left or right of where they are. Teh voters positions become the center. As hilarious as that sounds.
Except that Republicans have learned to play the media and redefine the terms. The American people are not notably to the right of Europeans. American politics have become amazingly so, however. The center was moved.
52% of Republicans think the government should, with their money, pay for medical treatment of people who cannot afford care. South Dakota can't get an anti-abortion bill passed. A huge majority of the population dislikes the war in Iraq and thinks we should leave. No one approves of torture, so you're being forced to redefine things to simply not be torture.
Seriously, look around. Check some polls. The permanent Republican majority was based on the concept that you could keep trashing the left, but the problem was that that presented right-wing politicians with an incentive to define the line closer to them, which undermined the Republican position so much it essentially collapsed when people actually stepped back and looked at 'the left' and 'the right' and realized how 'far left' they were. Which happened almost exactly two years ago today, as New Orleans drowned and everyone learned the government was wiretapping people without warrants.
And I'm not going to address the things where you have decided that I don't know what I'm talking about. You see, I don't care what you think.
In fact, it's actually in my best interest if you don't believe me, because then you'll just continue to ignore what I said. And you'll continue to think the solution to the GOP problems is to get 'Real Republicans' in office, when the actual problem is that you've moved the lines so far inanely right that you can't actually locate any honest right politicians that are within it (Except Ron Paul.), and are instead forced to go with pandering fools who will repeat anything they think the base wants to hear.
...damn, I really need to stop explaining this thing. I wish I could swallow my pride enough to delete this post instead of posting it, but I won't reply anymore, and hopefully you'll continue to think I'm some fool.
This, incidentally, makes the idea of 'species' almost total nonsense. If you had all of history to kidnap animals from, there is something you could breed with that could breed with something that could breed with something...that could breed with something that could breed with an gorilla. Or a cat, or a goldfish, or a spider. Or a potted plant.
It's just all those things are dead.
Any ID supporter or anyone fighting the inanity who tries to hang too much on 'species' is a fool. It's like trying to hang things on the names of colors, and arguing that while shades can change, blue can never turn into green, or that a ranch style house and a cap cod house are different. There's no such thing as those things! A species is just a term we hang on a bunch of animals that are close enough to interbreed, it's not a 'scientific concept' in any real sense.
All evolution says is that populations of interbreeding animals will, over time, suffer genetic drift towards a 'fitter' state, and sometimes this will result in them being unable to interbreed with other animals that, had they not drifted, they would have been able to interbreed with. It doesn't require a concept of species, the only reason a non-interbreeding change is interesting is because, from that point on, it changes the possible 'population of interbreeding animals'.
That's the thing people are failing to understand, why ID isn't science.
Attempting to disprove evolution is science. It's stupid, there's no good objections to it and wandering around going 'How'd this happen! AH HA! You can't instantly tell me, so you're totally wrong.', isn't science, but in theory looking for and finding things that evolution could not explain would be science. (Although the correct way to do that would be to do it within science, presenting it to the scientific establishment first, not sprout bad theories in popular media. It's called peer review, and failing it isn't a global conspiracy to shut you up, it just means you're wrong.)
But that has nothing to do with ID. ID then invents someone else and postulates that. That is just flat-out philosophy, not science, there is absolutely no evidence of anything like that. Even if tomorrow we discover that horses were roaming around on earth before fishes crawled out of the ocean, totally demolishing the theory of evolution, it doesn't demonstrate in the least that someone made them.
That's why the Intelligent Falling people have a better parody than the FSM people. They challenge gravity based on, in part, the fact we know it is incorrect: Quantum Mechanics does not allow gravity to behave how Relativity says it does. (Hence the work on quantum gravity.)
And they then immediately leap to asserting a crazy philosophical position with no evidence at all, instead of what is actually happening with gravity and what would happen with evolution if wrong: The theory is incomplete or even wrong, so we would need a new actual theory.
We wouldn't need a philosophy of 'We don't know how it works, a wizard must have done it'. That's not science, that's not even debatably science.
Not that ID is 'science' even before that point. It's the equivalent of asserting there are unicorns, and yelling to the media about how they're behind a tree over there, and making all scientists run over and demonstrate there's no unicorn there, and then you repeat with another tree. Finding a unicorn would be a legit scientific endeavor, but the correct thing to do is to actually capture and demonstrate it to scientific satisfaction, not writing books and non-peer-reviewed articles about possible unicorn sightings and how all the scientists are wrong.
OH my. So the republican party isn't able to define what or where it is now. It is all up to the omnipotent naysayers like you.
Did you not actually read what I wrote? I just said they have been incredibly efficient at defining thing. They've managed to define their positions as barely right of center, and the Democrats as left of center.
I wasn't even taking issue with that. I love it, it's hilarious. I just said that was incredibly stupid of them, as the actual positions of people, when they decided to actually think about them, are now actually to the left of the Democrats.
If you don't understand, think of a tug-of-war. The Republicans used to pull, and the Democrats used to pull. But the Republicans sneakily moved the center-line closer and closer to themselves, while they keep backing up, and the Democrats followed, so now the entire tug-of-war is happening well on the Republican side. Clever, and if you're not thinking about it, a 'victory'. It's a secret victory that keeps the Democrats in play, but that might be better than an obvious one where they all fall down and get to regroup.
The problem is that new people are walking up, or people already in the game took a short walk to clear their mind after all the recent stupidity, and they're starting off where the original tug-of-war was happening. If the center line had stayed there, about half would be Republican and half Democrat. Now, they're all finding themselves on the Democratic side, and guess which way they're pulling? They already managed to pull Congress smack over the line. (Not that hard, as the Republicans keep moving the line closer to themselves.) Until someone puts the line back where it belongs, it's going to be defeat after defeat for the Republican party.
And, hilariously, Democratic politicians appear to have unknowingly internalized so much of the shift that the dumb ones aren't going to move the line back, because they don't understand what happened. And the smart ones are just going to keep laughing on the inside and saying, yes, feeding starving children is a very very socialist concept. (And, thus, everyone who wants to do that is, ipso facto, a socialist, and belongs on the far left. Hehehehe.)
You can sit and argue it is a socialist concept, and I won't dispute it at all. (As I am also smart and like the line where it is.) In fact, I should probably shut up, I'm giving the game away, I was actually only congratulating someone else on the left who figured it out.
In fact, sorry, I just checked and I'm completely wrong. Most people don't want nationalized health care. Most people hate abortion and want abortion doctors and women who have them locked up. Most people love the war and want to torture all the bad guys. (And if you can figure out how to torture the abortion doctors, most people would be cool with that.) Most people like seeing homeless and starving people, especially children. Most people think that no one should ever extend a helping hand to anyone else because the poor are all filthy lazy scum. (Especially people here illegally, who are only here to get teh welfare.) Most people, they see saw a gay person, cross to the other side of the street.
Those are, in fact, the 'moderate' positions in this country, anyone who disagrees with those is a commie socialist anti-American liberal traitor who should leave this country right now.
(Or, more realistically, vote Democratic. Hehehehe.)
Politicians fool you once into electing them by running on a platform of smaller government and conservative values, but then build the government as large as possible while divorcing their wives, whoremongering, and accepting bribes?
Well, shame on them!
Politicians fool you one hundred and forty-one thousand, four hundred and twelve times?
Well...you're a dumbass who doesn't get to make any pithy observations about how the people everyone dislikes (Republicans) are acting like how, in your deluded mind, 'liberals' act. You've demonstrated you have no ability at critical thinking whatsoever, and couldn't tell a liberal from a conservative if they were carrying around huge flashing signs. You're at the two legs bad, four legs good level of political thought, and are confused because the pigs are walking around on two legs.
In the real, non-stupid world, you've actually somehow managed to vaguely stumble across some that is, actually true (re: stopped clock.): Republicans keep implementing discarded left ideas.
Like, oh, reshaping the middle east via force. We kicked those lunatics out during the 60s, and they stumbled across to your party and became 'neo-cons'. (I'm not speaking metaphorically, they were literally kicked out of various conventions, and it's literally the same people.) How's that working out for you?
Or the war on drugs. Prohibition was originally started as a moral campaign of the progressive movement. It was a horrible flop, with the bad greatly outweighing the good, so, of course, the right grabbed ahold of it as tight as possible and applied it to drugs instead. I'm sure we'll win the drug war any day now.
The list goes on and on. The Republicans do, in fact, implement a hell of a lot of liberal and progressive ideas, they're just really stupid ones the left gave up quite a long time ago, or never even vaguely considered because they were so obviously dumb. (Putting the left in the absurd position of having to make fucking conservative arguments in an attempt to divert the lunacy.)
But this doesn't have anything to do with the ideas you mentioned, which, it's worth pointing out, most people like. (Except no child left behind, a damn stupid way of fixing education. People want a working version of that.)
But the Republicans have defined reality where those are 'the left', which is the hilarious 'blowing their own foot off' thing I was gloating about. For too long, Republicans have apparently thought the point of politics was to move the definition of the center to their side.
No, the point is to move either the people to your side of the line, or your side of the line away from you to get more people. Moving the line towards you and leaving the people in place means the people end up on the other side of the line. Like the 70% of the population who wants some sort of national health care system.
But, anyway, thanks again to drawing the dividing line for health care firmly where 70% of the people are on the left of it. Oh, and the war. And abortion. Thanks for making those lines so incredibly clear that people can glance down and realize they're apparently standing on the left, somehow. And then 'thanks' for screwing up so horribly people actually are looking down, although we really could have done without some of the disasters.
The Republicans have, self-destructively, shifted the left and right spectrum, where what used to be be the center is now the far left. And we started with definitions where the far right was already the center, so we have, ended up, at this point, where the farthest left the Democrats go would be well on the right anywhere else, all thanks to the Republicans self-destructively redefining reality.
That worked as long as people were complete and total apolitical morons who tended to vote in 'the center'. (Some of) the Republicans would lurch right, the center would move to the Republican side, they'd vote for the 'moderate' Republicans who now were firmly right in the center, and the Democrats would eventually also lurch right, but not before the Republicans did again. By creating a moving target, they kept 'the center' on their side, on their moderates.
Ah, but I said 'self-destructive' twice there...know why? Because eventually the Republican would (and did) go so far right that even the apolitical fools who do most of the voting would actually look around and wonder what's going on. 'Luckily', Iraq caused this to happen sooner instead of later. This caused them to assess their actual beliefs, realize they wanted some sort of national health care, they wanted social security, they wanted a safety net. And they didn't care in the least about people getting abortions or gay married or people here illegally who seemed to be doing all the gruntwork.
And then they realized that, according to the political definitions in this country, they were so fucking far left that they were to the left of the Democrats, not 'centrist'.
The Republicans hilariously have tricked millions of moderate people into thinking they are far-leftists because they don't think a state of permanent war is a good idea and that the government should provide some sort of minimal safety net, and there will be millions more as it continues to self-destruct rightward. Sadly, the elected people in the Democratic party do not seem to understand what's going on either.
Kids may love competition, but what they don't love is getting involved in a moderately fun sport and then having their parents treat it like a life or death matter if they win or lose.
There's a rather large difference between them having a race amongst themselves and playing a baseball game in from of 100 screaming parents.
Non-competitiveness is, indeed, for the parents, so the parents will no long act like asses.
That exact thing happened to me WRT to math. I sorta inherently understand math up to and slightly past algebra. Never had to work at it, would end up taking a moderately long time on tests because I'd have to figure stuff out that everyone else had memorized, but I'd still turn thing in ahead of them.
I couldn't pass precalculus three times, once in HS and twice in college.
With a posted minimum of 45mph, and entrance/exit ramps have a limit of 35 (or often less), you can't physically get on or off the highway without violating one or the other.
You can't keep from violating the signs, but you're not violating the law. Almost every state gives you about 100 yards (And some states give more) to slow down in after passing a speed limit sign.
Which, incidentally, makes most exit-ramp speed-limits completely stupid and something they can never actually charge you with violating. By the time it even applies, you're on an entirely different road.
Especially since they don't usually put the sign until halfway up the exit. So even states that don't give you a buffer still give you time to slow down...it's not the whole exit that's 35, it's merely the part after the sign. Before that point, it's whatever the speed of the highway was.
There might be an argument, before the speed drops, that the default speed of the highway system applies, vs. the actual speed of the highway you existed, just like if you turn from one normal road onto another and haven't hit a speed-limit sign, but there's a difference between 'turning' and 'following one side of a fork in the road', which is what you actually did. If you don't stop or yield or 'turn', you must assume you're on the 'same road' and that the speed limit is the same...if they want to change it, they have to tell you. (Which they are, in fact, about to do, making it 35, so I think that point would stand up quite well in court.)
And, of course, it's worth pointing out that both the speed limit and minimum speed are suggested speeds, and both can be decreased because of conditions....like you're about to reach a stop light. (Think about it, there are roads with minimum speeds with stop lights.)
And, on top of that, it is a perfectly legitimate defense in court that you were presented two contradictory requirements under the law, and you cannot be fined for choosing one of them.
I'm not saying that there are not too many laws, or that the system isn't deliberately set up so we're in violation of some of them at all times, but those traffic laws are not them.
There's a difference between writing requirements for the legal system in the vernacular, and writing the actual laws in the vernacular. 'beyond a reasonable doubt' does not appear that often in the legal code.
The problem with the legal code is not specific phrases that mean certain things, it's where thing that sound like normal words are defined to mean things they do not normally.
I think an interesting law would be one requiring that all laws that define a word (Aka: For the purposes of this statue blah shall be define as...), should be required to put a little asterisk next to that word when they actually use it.
Yeah, existing laws would be so riddled with asterisks they'd be hard to read, but at least people would see the extent of the problem.
A lot of these redefinitions could be removed if they'd stop defining words with exceptions, and instead, at the start each law, just simply state 'This law applies to X, Y, and Z only under all circumstances', or 'This law never applies to V under any circumstances'. Each law should have to have either a 'only applies to' filter, a 'applies to all except' filter, or, of course, no filter.
Instead, they define X to also mean Y, and Z to never mean V, forbid X and Z, and end up with complete gibberish as the law.
This filter should be right at the start. And, of course, each section of code should have a meta-filter over the entire thing. Hopefully in a nice tree-like structure. I know that's how they pretend to do it, but you never know where they've slipped in some obscure little law that isn't what the rest of the thing is talking about...with a filter on the whole section, you could just ignore the whole thing if your activities did not fall inside the filter, as the laws could not apply to you even if they were supposed to.
And sites displaying the law could also display a cascade of all relevant filters above it.
With some sort of sane filters, maybe people could actually find all laws that apply to certain circumstances. If I was looking for laws about driving, I could glance and see that a certain law only applied to commercial shipping, and ignore it, instead of seeing 'trucks' and having to flip around until I figured out what the hell a 'truck' meant in that law. Or see the entire section of code doesn't apply to single-occupant residential buildings and hence isn't what I'm looking for, instead of reading about 'residences' for five minutes before figuring out they, thanks to redefining words, actually only mean 'apartments buildings'.
The ironic thing is, they actually do write such filters into law, but usually only that a certain law cannot override a different law, and even if it's a general rule that the law does not apply in cases of X, they put the damn filter at the end.
What is a new idea, however, is that creators can get one without government intervention, just by filling out forms or not even doing that.
You can talk all you want about how the government used to grant exclusive licenses, but the reality was those was few and far between. It's like talking about how we've had automobile driving laws since the creation of cities. I'm sure some laws pertained to driving back then, pretending anyone could drive (And self-propelled vehicles did exist at random spots throughout history, and the laws did, indeed, pertain to them.), but we didn't actually get real automobile traffic codes until at least 1910.
Likewise, the modern concept of copyright didn't start until the government granted anyone who wanted it a copyright, and it was treated as an actual property. Yes, there were special agreements, but that wasn't modern copyright anymore than a Native American tribe granting a specific family the right to fish in a certain stream would be 'land ownership'.
Arguing about the morality of copyright violations on the internet is a bit like arguing about the morality of gravity after you fall out of an airplane.
You can't sit there and arguable about inevitable thing being 'good' or 'bad'. They just are. Digital data is instantly and infinitely copyable. It's not an argument, it's not a debate, there are no pros and cons to list and weighty questions to decide on, carefully balancing the rights of each side. Copyright with no barrier except legal to copying is meaningless. Poof, copyright just vanishes into thin air.
So we have fallen out of the plane. We could, perhaps, use some sort of parachute to land slowly, or we could plummet to our death, but the plane ride is over and we are, indeed, going to end up on the ground.
Notice I am, in no way, arguing this is a good thing, so don't respond with 'You're an amoral bastard who wants to steal everything from people'. We Are Outside the Plane and Falling. That is just how it is. It is not a choice. It was an unforeseen, inevitable result of the internet.
And this may, indeed, be something entirely horrible that will destroy all artistic creativity forever, leaving us with nothing, or, worse, reality TV. I hope not. But the result of being outside the airplane and falling is not my fault, and I did not say I approved of what will happen, but, nevertheless, we are still there and still falling.
Almost all discussion that goes on here about copyright is missing this one vital fact, and is instead arguing about the in-flight meal and how we're going to build our own meals instead of eating that crap. Come on, people, pay attention, we're supposed to be smart. Did you not feel the cabin depressurized when we collided with Napster?
This is why I didn't really mind DRM. It was attempting to grab hold of the plane after we fell out, with a makeshift grappling hook build out of shoes. Not a really viable option, and obviously didn't work, but you have to give props that someone in the corporate world realized: We just fell out of the fucking airplane. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Do something!
This article, OTOH, is talking about an attempt to legislate us back into the airplane. It's somewhat sad.
Or, maybe they could take all the welfare projects, which has an even larger budget than the military, with many of the projects estimated to be over 50% fraud, and return all that money back to us, so that we can afford our own medical care.
WTF is this? A fucking contest? Gee, let's look at social services, which benefit everyone, and compare it military spending which benefits, let's admit it, absolutely no one. (At least not at this scale.)
I love the idea that these two things should be roughly equal, it's like a husband and wife arguing over their budget, with the husband talking about how the wife spends slightly more on food and bills than he spends on restoring his classic 57 Chevy, and maybe she should cut back some. Hey, dumbass, one of these things actually benefits citizens of this country, and the other does not. (In fact, the other results in their deaths, which is where the analogy breaks down.)
And, lastly, while 'many of the welfare projects' may be over 50% fraud, many of the projects are also microscopic, so I suspect that statistic was stated exactly that way for a reason. There could be dozens of tiny projects totaled two billion dollars that were 50% fraud, which would make the overall fraud roughly, oh, 0.3% of social services.
The actual large projects, social security and medicare, do not have anywhere near 50% fraud. Social security has almost no fraud whatsoever, and it's actually 'ahead' in the fraud department with the number of people who pay social security taxes to fake social security numbers. (Almost all fraud in SS there is people continuing to collect checks to the deceased, so there's almost no organized large-scale fraud, just one person collecting one check they shouldn't.) Unemployment and general welfare might have as much as 10% fraud, or as little as 2%, it depends on who you ask, but it's nowhere near 50%. Medicare doesn't have a lot of fraud, unless you include insurance companies ripping people off using Medical Part D. Sometimes doctors set up schemes, but they set those up with normal insurance companies too, or even just rip people off directly. The Federal government has no control over Medicaid distribution, so if your state has large amounts of fraud, bother them. Those programs make up more than 90% of all welfare, and, as you can see, there's nowhere near 50% fraud.
'Many of X have a 50% level of something' is a classic way to lie with statistics, even assuming it's true and you didn't pull it out of your ass. The fact you threw 'estimated' in there to try to vague it up actually just made you factually wrong, as I suspect no programs are estimated by anyone with credibility to be that wasteful. You'd have been better off leaving that word out and just asserting they were that wasteful, and then when I showed up with estimated that said they weren't, you could say the estimates were wrong.
Saddam WAS a danger to his people, of course, but no more so than any of a half-dozen leaders causing mischief throughout Africa. Then again, none of those countries have major oil reserves to plunder. Needless to say, we're in Iraq, and not in Africa.
And, incidentally, many of those African countries we could have helped with much less resources and lives. There are some places where stationing just a single four or five person squad in each of two dozen villages, a few heavily armed roadblocks, and cratering a few airstrips, would hold the line against total chaos and mass murder.
I'm not saying no soldiers would be killed, but it would be a damn lot more effective than Iraq. We've done it before.
In a lot of places, the people causing problems there have no popular support, basically, they've just managed to take control of drug production. They're essentially organized crime! If we keep them from forcing people to support them (Aka, 'protection money'.), they'll be forced to scale back operations to a few small areas, where it would be trivial to take them. It's not like Iraq where they have a popular base. People hate them and the people fighting for them are in it for the money, they wouldn't go to the hill with guerrilla operations or suicide attack.
Plus, unlike Iraq, it would actually be legal to act, as we could actually get the permission of the 'legitimate' government, or one of the claimants thereof, or at the very least argue there's already a war going on. (Joining a war already in progress that doesn't previously involve you is not a war crime like invading a country is, although it can be frowned on if you do it for the wrong reasons.)
Of course, I don't think that would have been a good idea either, I was just pointing out that if we truly wanted to help people, we could have helped half a continent and suffered much less casualties and resource drain.
BTW, my own views of Iraq are that we never should have been there (as I said before the war), but that this is a unique war which has no easy answers about what to do now. Ultimately actions are less important than intents now, and when we did make the mistake of deposing Saddam, we became responsible for the country. Although this might make our job harder in the short run, I think we need to be willing to redeploy if the Iraqi government doesn't step up to the plate regarding various offices using sectarian militas for their own internal security. We may need to leave Iraq long enough to let the current government fall apart, put together a newer, larger coalition, and move in again.
I've been saying that it's silly to threaten Iran. The Middle East country that needs to get their act together is Iraq, and if they don't, we should invade them. That place is total chaos!
But, seriously, we can't do that. If we start leaving right now, we'll have no military left by the time we finish withdrawing. (Of course, we could just lie about coming back, it could make a nice bookend when paired with lying about the invasion.)
That, of course, is a much better plan than the current one, which is apparently to run out of military while we're still there. The timer is ticking down to the middle of next year. (When does al-Sadr's six month of no attacks end, anyway?)
Iraq is harder to leave than Vietnam because we have no centralized opposition. At least when we left Vietnam, the VC could fill the power vacuum quickly but in Iraq, we will see more bloodshed, violence, and the like, and it will be our falt whether we are there or not.
No it won't. It will be the fault of the people who lied us into this war. We hung Germans who started invading countries, will we have the courage to do that to our own people without an invasion and overthrow of our government? Will we ever face exactly what this Administration did and is still doing, or will we just quietly sweep it under the carpet?
I don't know what to do about Iraq, either, but I sure as hell know what to do about the people who got us into it.
We should not be using mercinaries in Iraq any more than the Iraqi government should be using sectarian militias, and Blackwater's actions certainly suggest that wrongful death suits in both the Al-Iraqya and Nasoor Square incidents might be worth pursuing.
Private. Fucking. Armies. That is what we have come to. We train people using the military, we pay corporations huge amounts of money to hire away those trained people and pay them more, and still make insane profits.
Everyone who's operated a mercenary army should be arrested for war profiteering, and we should subject the corporation to a corporate death penalty, dissolving it and nationalizing all its assets.
Ah! So you're saying that, while blue light looks the brightest for the least light, and red doesn't screw up our night vision, (Both of which effects are because our eyes are stupid.) in actuality, vision-wise, you can distinguish stuff under green light better, because you can see more different greens?
Interesting. Is that because we have more green receptors in our eyes? Or they're fine-tuned better? I seem to recall reading something like that somewhere, although I had forgotten until now. It's the reason that 16 bit color is 5 red, 5 blue, and 6 green, right?
And, also, just like there's a theory that the blue sky being a signifier of the overall light level caused our eyes to use blue to determine how much light to let in, I recall a theory that we can distinguish better between green because of the fact almost all plants are shades of green, so it is easier to see through heavy vegetation.(1)
And, as an added bonus, it won't screw up your night vision as bad as blue or white light. (Although obviously we can distinguish stuff under white light best of all, duh.)
1) OTOH, when you consider all the animals that are colorblind in various ways, at some point you have to wonder how much we're trying to find evolutionary explanations to things that could just be completely random.
The best solution, of course, would just be to add another pin that sends an actual, large enough pulse saying 'Turn on'.
But, anyway, the thing I'm worried about is that capacitors can lose their charge, no matter what you do. But, I guess that's not really a worry, because they'd surely be designed where, if the monitor lost and regained power (Or their power switch was flipped off and back on.), they'd turn on, at least long enough to charge up the capacitor, and then cut off.
So the worse that could happen was, if you left them suspended long enough, you'd have to turn them off and back on. And by 'long enough', we're talking about weeks, right?
Hey, I don't know much about electronics, if 'supercaps' work, that's fine. I just immediately thought of the fact that we've _already_ solved the problem of low-power operating devices without mains power quite some time ago, but if something better will work, it's all good.
Incidentally, on the original topic of computer monitors, a computer suspends a monitor by, IIRC, failing to send a specific signal to it. I think it's a sync signal it stops sending, but don't quote me.
Why not skip all this silliness with solar panels and charged capacitors and just have _that_ electrical current trip a relay? Yes, I'm sure it's a tiny signal, but surely they make sensitive relays, and if worse comes to worse you can stick a capacitor in there and have it charge using that current for a tenth of a second before tripping the relay.
They have no clock, they have no IR signals to detect, there's no logical reason a computer monitor would need to use _any_ power at all when off, and by any I'm including 'Charging a capacitor in advance' or 'using a solar panel'.
What's going on is that your eyes adjust how much light to let in based on, mostly, the blue part of the spectrum. Quite possibly this has something to do with the blue sky. If you live outdoors, the brightness of the sky is what is mainly controlling what you can see. This also lets you see incredibly well under a full moon.
If you have a blue light and a red light with the same candlepower, and light a room with each, each room is equally bright in the absolute sense. But in the blue room, your irises are closed too much relative to the room light, whereas in the red room they're open too much. (So you can see a lot better in the dark, although very strong red light can actually be dangerous as your eyes stupidly do not iris closed as much as they should.)
Or, to put it another way, your eyes take the blue light, multiple it by three, and assume that's how much RGB light is in the room. Roughly. It's probably more like R: 0.3 G: 0.7 B: 2.0, I'm sure the real numbers are out there somewhere.
There's a reason lights just offstage at a theatre are often blue...you can't see as well under them (Just well enough to avoid running into people.), but it 'ruins your night vision', or, in other words, 'fixes your day vision before you walk on stage into the lights'. (While at the same time, they're dim enough that you can't actually see into them from the house.)
Whereas, if you go further backstage, you'll find red ones, when people actually do need to operate with night vision.
And sometimes you find green ones. I haven't quite figured that one out. Hunters use green, I don't know why either. Possibly because so many animals are colorblind, so maybe it works like red and doesn't affect their 'eye brightness'. Whereas I know, with people green does actually affect it somewhere.
Or, as I've been saying, a rechargeable AAA battery, replaceable by the user. (Perhaps people have a point about the self-discharge of them, though, and we should use non-rechargeable ones. OTOH, self-discharge doesn't really matter if they're coming back on at least once a week and can recharge.)
What other people don't understand, and you and I do, is not that these devices are using a lot of power. It's their power supplies that are sucking huge amount of unused power when in standby, which then just gets thrown away. (So, yes, they don't actually bother to optimize their power usage, but that would be completely pointless anyway unless the power supply worked better. It's like streamlining a Hummer.)
To make them use less power, you have to completely disconnect them from wall power. (Or build an entirely separate micro-power supply, but that's just dumb.)
And we already have a way to for devices that are not hooked to the wall to use small amounts of power....they're called 'batteries'.
OTOH, get rid of the damn LEDs regardless. I don't need a fucking LED to tell me a device is off. I don't need a dozen LED clocks running around, I know how to buy a damn clock and put it where I can see it.
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You simply repeating, over and over, that I am wrong, without you actually demonstrating that I am, is not in any sort of discussion, and I'm not going to participate in your little idiocy anymore. I'm not even going to respond to anything that just says I'm wrong.
Saying that you want government run health care for certain individuals is not saying you want government run health care.
Yes, it does, you fucktard. If you want government run health care for certain individuals, you want government run healthcare to exist, and hence you do, in fact, want it. Um, duh. You really can't quite read what you actually write, can you? (What that has to do with my assertation I have no idea, but it's so stupidly wrong I had to mention it.)
No, they missed one seat in the senate and failed to take every seat they challenged in the entire country. I said races they were competitive in, you fucktard, not 'challenged'. If you don't know the difference, you shouldn't be talking about elections at all.
1974 saw a bigger sweep then 2006.
The 1974 election didn't result in big gains in the Senate, you loon.
I find that funny because he is constantly blasting moderates.
Um...DUUUUUH. That is my point. He attack the middle, moving it closer to where he is.
And BTW, Bill Clinton was conservative by your definition, not Americas.
*facedesks*
That is what I'm saying, except replace 'my definition' with 'the rest of the world's definition'. Do you not understand the actual words coming out of my mouth?
You see, everything you pointed out so far has been pointless one sided views that don't take things into context. The healthcare, You were misrepresenting it, almost everything you mentioned, you misrepresented.
What are you talking about? I'm not misrepresenting anything. 52% of Republicans wish that the government would take their money and spend it on health care for other people. That was the actual question. Although I'm sure some of them differ with Democrats about who those people should be, that's not really the point, as for almost a decade the message has been blasted about how all people who collect any sort of government handout are horrible wastrels and it's the liberals who want to take all your money and give it to them.
Now, you're about to argue that's not actual Republican thought, and you're probably right. But if people voted for what the parties actually did, they'd have stopped voting for Republicans a long time ago.
No, they vote for there perception of the parties, and their perception of where they fall, and the Republicans have spent a decade defining almost all 'political positions' leftward while moving themselves and the Democrats to the right, which, as I pointed out, has resulted in the Democrats standing firmly to the right of any sane political positions, and that has finally caught up with the Republicans.
You seem to be alluding to some behind the scenes reason for 2006 when the dems took a few republican seats and once again, you are wrong.
The Dems took every single Republican seat that was competitive (Maybe there was one house seat that people thought was possible they didn't get, I forget.), plus several seats no one thought was competitive. They didn't lose any seats to Republicans, including seats everyone thought they would.
Keep thinking it's a 'few' seats, though. It was one of the largest political sweeps in history. And it wasn't 'behind the scenes', although few people understand the pattern...the election was openly about Iraq and health care, and how the 'center' that the media was reporting on both those issues was insanely far to the right of what people actually think about them.
It also appears that you are either very new to the world of politics or you are purposely misstating things to advance an agenda.
Ah, you caught me. As I'm arguing the Republican party has mistakenly shifted to far to the right, I'm clearly trying to make the Republican party more liberal. Someone out there in the Republican party might be listening to me and planning to do that, you better foil me by demanding the party moves even farther to the right! (Perhaps you can oppose spending tax money on monitoring the weather. Call it Socialized Disaster Warning. I'll let you have that idea for free.)
In reality, I was just laughing along with another non-Republican who had realized what had happened: The Republicans had mistaken moving the center measurement closer to themselves for victory, when that is, in fact, defeat. (As that puts more people on the other side.) That's all.
It seems that you are ignoring the details a little too much. The line might have moved but it is where it is by default. The politicians don't move the center of the line. The people do. the politicians might be trying to misstate where they are on the line, but that doesn't control it.
You mean years and years of them talking about how 'librul' Bill Clinton (One of the most conservative Democrats ever.) was didn't move the line? You mean years of equating dissent with treason didn't move the line? You mean a decade of Rush Limbaugh didn't move the line?
Nope, sorry, you're wrong. Since 1994 or so, the sole message in this country has been 'Republicans are the moderates, Democrats are communists'. It was a steady and successful attempt to shift what things mean in politics, and it's why right-wing parties in Europe can pass for far left parties here.
But, again, arguing with you is counterproductive, it's in my best interests if Republican do not actually understand what they did to themselves and think the 'center' of America is where they've been saying it is. Feel free to believe all your little justifications about how I'm totally wrong and the American people disagree with me.
And in 2008, I'll sit here eating popcorn as I watch 2006 happen all over again, but harder. Should be a fun show. (Although, sadly, half the Republicans in Congress seem intent on ruining it by resigning in advance. Bah. Who ever heard of someone resigning a year into a six year term?)
So you cannot really claim the line was moved or anything was redefined because it is always relative to the voters and what they consider is left or right of where they are. Teh voters positions become the center. As hilarious as that sounds.
Except that Republicans have learned to play the media and redefine the terms. The American people are not notably to the right of Europeans. American politics have become amazingly so, however. The center was moved.
52% of Republicans think the government should, with their money, pay for medical treatment of people who cannot afford care. South Dakota can't get an anti-abortion bill passed. A huge majority of the population dislikes the war in Iraq and thinks we should leave. No one approves of torture, so you're being forced to redefine things to simply not be torture.
Seriously, look around. Check some polls. The permanent Republican majority was based on the concept that you could keep trashing the left, but the problem was that that presented right-wing politicians with an incentive to define the line closer to them, which undermined the Republican position so much it essentially collapsed when people actually stepped back and looked at 'the left' and 'the right' and realized how 'far left' they were. Which happened almost exactly two years ago today, as New Orleans drowned and everyone learned the government was wiretapping people without warrants.
And I'm not going to address the things where you have decided that I don't know what I'm talking about. You see, I don't care what you think.
In fact, it's actually in my best interest if you don't believe me, because then you'll just continue to ignore what I said. And you'll continue to think the solution to the GOP problems is to get 'Real Republicans' in office, when the actual problem is that you've moved the lines so far inanely right that you can't actually locate any honest right politicians that are within it (Except Ron Paul.), and are instead forced to go with pandering fools who will repeat anything they think the base wants to hear.
This, incidentally, makes the idea of 'species' almost total nonsense. If you had all of history to kidnap animals from, there is something you could breed with that could breed with something that could breed with something...that could breed with something that could breed with an gorilla. Or a cat, or a goldfish, or a spider. Or a potted plant.
It's just all those things are dead.
Any ID supporter or anyone fighting the inanity who tries to hang too much on 'species' is a fool. It's like trying to hang things on the names of colors, and arguing that while shades can change, blue can never turn into green, or that a ranch style house and a cap cod house are different. There's no such thing as those things! A species is just a term we hang on a bunch of animals that are close enough to interbreed, it's not a 'scientific concept' in any real sense.
All evolution says is that populations of interbreeding animals will, over time, suffer genetic drift towards a 'fitter' state, and sometimes this will result in them being unable to interbreed with other animals that, had they not drifted, they would have been able to interbreed with. It doesn't require a concept of species, the only reason a non-interbreeding change is interesting is because, from that point on, it changes the possible 'population of interbreeding animals'.
That's the thing people are failing to understand, why ID isn't science.
Attempting to disprove evolution is science. It's stupid, there's no good objections to it and wandering around going 'How'd this happen! AH HA! You can't instantly tell me, so you're totally wrong.', isn't science, but in theory looking for and finding things that evolution could not explain would be science. (Although the correct way to do that would be to do it within science, presenting it to the scientific establishment first, not sprout bad theories in popular media. It's called peer review, and failing it isn't a global conspiracy to shut you up, it just means you're wrong.)
But that has nothing to do with ID. ID then invents someone else and postulates that. That is just flat-out philosophy, not science, there is absolutely no evidence of anything like that. Even if tomorrow we discover that horses were roaming around on earth before fishes crawled out of the ocean, totally demolishing the theory of evolution, it doesn't demonstrate in the least that someone made them.
That's why the Intelligent Falling people have a better parody than the FSM people. They challenge gravity based on, in part, the fact we know it is incorrect: Quantum Mechanics does not allow gravity to behave how Relativity says it does. (Hence the work on quantum gravity.)
And they then immediately leap to asserting a crazy philosophical position with no evidence at all, instead of what is actually happening with gravity and what would happen with evolution if wrong: The theory is incomplete or even wrong, so we would need a new actual theory.
We wouldn't need a philosophy of 'We don't know how it works, a wizard must have done it'. That's not science, that's not even debatably science.
Not that ID is 'science' even before that point. It's the equivalent of asserting there are unicorns, and yelling to the media about how they're behind a tree over there, and making all scientists run over and demonstrate there's no unicorn there, and then you repeat with another tree. Finding a unicorn would be a legit scientific endeavor, but the correct thing to do is to actually capture and demonstrate it to scientific satisfaction, not writing books and non-peer-reviewed articles about possible unicorn sightings and how all the scientists are wrong.
OH my. So the republican party isn't able to define what or where it is now. It is all up to the omnipotent naysayers like you.
Did you not actually read what I wrote? I just said they have been incredibly efficient at defining thing. They've managed to define their positions as barely right of center, and the Democrats as left of center.
I wasn't even taking issue with that. I love it, it's hilarious. I just said that was incredibly stupid of them, as the actual positions of people, when they decided to actually think about them, are now actually to the left of the Democrats.
If you don't understand, think of a tug-of-war. The Republicans used to pull, and the Democrats used to pull. But the Republicans sneakily moved the center-line closer and closer to themselves, while they keep backing up, and the Democrats followed, so now the entire tug-of-war is happening well on the Republican side. Clever, and if you're not thinking about it, a 'victory'. It's a secret victory that keeps the Democrats in play, but that might be better than an obvious one where they all fall down and get to regroup.
The problem is that new people are walking up, or people already in the game took a short walk to clear their mind after all the recent stupidity, and they're starting off where the original tug-of-war was happening. If the center line had stayed there, about half would be Republican and half Democrat. Now, they're all finding themselves on the Democratic side, and guess which way they're pulling? They already managed to pull Congress smack over the line. (Not that hard, as the Republicans keep moving the line closer to themselves.) Until someone puts the line back where it belongs, it's going to be defeat after defeat for the Republican party.
And, hilariously, Democratic politicians appear to have unknowingly internalized so much of the shift that the dumb ones aren't going to move the line back, because they don't understand what happened. And the smart ones are just going to keep laughing on the inside and saying, yes, feeding starving children is a very very socialist concept. (And, thus, everyone who wants to do that is, ipso facto, a socialist, and belongs on the far left. Hehehehe.)
You can sit and argue it is a socialist concept, and I won't dispute it at all. (As I am also smart and like the line where it is.) In fact, I should probably shut up, I'm giving the game away, I was actually only congratulating someone else on the left who figured it out.
In fact, sorry, I just checked and I'm completely wrong. Most people don't want nationalized health care. Most people hate abortion and want abortion doctors and women who have them locked up. Most people love the war and want to torture all the bad guys. (And if you can figure out how to torture the abortion doctors, most people would be cool with that.) Most people like seeing homeless and starving people, especially children. Most people think that no one should ever extend a helping hand to anyone else because the poor are all filthy lazy scum. (Especially people here illegally, who are only here to get teh welfare.) Most people, they see saw a gay person, cross to the other side of the street.
Those are, in fact, the 'moderate' positions in this country, anyone who disagrees with those is a commie socialist anti-American liberal traitor who should leave this country right now.
(Or, more realistically, vote Democratic. Hehehehe.)
Sorry, bub, no one's buying it anymore.
Politicians fool you once into electing them by running on a platform of smaller government and conservative values, but then build the government as large as possible while divorcing their wives, whoremongering, and accepting bribes?
Well, shame on them!
Politicians fool you one hundred and forty-one thousand, four hundred and twelve times?
Well...you're a dumbass who doesn't get to make any pithy observations about how the people everyone dislikes (Republicans) are acting like how, in your deluded mind, 'liberals' act. You've demonstrated you have no ability at critical thinking whatsoever, and couldn't tell a liberal from a conservative if they were carrying around huge flashing signs. You're at the two legs bad, four legs good level of political thought, and are confused because the pigs are walking around on two legs.
In the real, non-stupid world, you've actually somehow managed to vaguely stumble across some that is, actually true (re: stopped clock.): Republicans keep implementing discarded left ideas.
Like, oh, reshaping the middle east via force. We kicked those lunatics out during the 60s, and they stumbled across to your party and became 'neo-cons'. (I'm not speaking metaphorically, they were literally kicked out of various conventions, and it's literally the same people.) How's that working out for you?
Or the war on drugs. Prohibition was originally started as a moral campaign of the progressive movement. It was a horrible flop, with the bad greatly outweighing the good, so, of course, the right grabbed ahold of it as tight as possible and applied it to drugs instead. I'm sure we'll win the drug war any day now.
The list goes on and on. The Republicans do, in fact, implement a hell of a lot of liberal and progressive ideas, they're just really stupid ones the left gave up quite a long time ago, or never even vaguely considered because they were so obviously dumb. (Putting the left in the absurd position of having to make fucking conservative arguments in an attempt to divert the lunacy.)
But this doesn't have anything to do with the ideas you mentioned, which, it's worth pointing out, most people like. (Except no child left behind, a damn stupid way of fixing education. People want a working version of that.)
But the Republicans have defined reality where those are 'the left', which is the hilarious 'blowing their own foot off' thing I was gloating about. For too long, Republicans have apparently thought the point of politics was to move the definition of the center to their side.
No, the point is to move either the people to your side of the line, or your side of the line away from you to get more people. Moving the line towards you and leaving the people in place means the people end up on the other side of the line. Like the 70% of the population who wants some sort of national health care system.
But, anyway, thanks again to drawing the dividing line for health care firmly where 70% of the people are on the left of it. Oh, and the war. And abortion. Thanks for making those lines so incredibly clear that people can glance down and realize they're apparently standing on the left, somehow. And then 'thanks' for screwing up so horribly people actually are looking down, although we really could have done without some of the disasters.
I'm glad some people are paying attention.
The Republicans have, self-destructively, shifted the left and right spectrum, where what used to be be the center is now the far left. And we started with definitions where the far right was already the center, so we have, ended up, at this point, where the farthest left the Democrats go would be well on the right anywhere else, all thanks to the Republicans self-destructively redefining reality.
That worked as long as people were complete and total apolitical morons who tended to vote in 'the center'. (Some of) the Republicans would lurch right, the center would move to the Republican side, they'd vote for the 'moderate' Republicans who now were firmly right in the center, and the Democrats would eventually also lurch right, but not before the Republicans did again. By creating a moving target, they kept 'the center' on their side, on their moderates.
Ah, but I said 'self-destructive' twice there...know why? Because eventually the Republican would (and did) go so far right that even the apolitical fools who do most of the voting would actually look around and wonder what's going on. 'Luckily', Iraq caused this to happen sooner instead of later. This caused them to assess their actual beliefs, realize they wanted some sort of national health care, they wanted social security, they wanted a safety net. And they didn't care in the least about people getting abortions or gay married or people here illegally who seemed to be doing all the gruntwork.
And then they realized that, according to the political definitions in this country, they were so fucking far left that they were to the left of the Democrats, not 'centrist'.
The Republicans hilariously have tricked millions of moderate people into thinking they are far-leftists because they don't think a state of permanent war is a good idea and that the government should provide some sort of minimal safety net, and there will be millions more as it continues to self-destruct rightward. Sadly, the elected people in the Democratic party do not seem to understand what's going on either.
Kids may love competition, but what they don't love is getting involved in a moderately fun sport and then having their parents treat it like a life or death matter if they win or lose.
There's a rather large difference between them having a race amongst themselves and playing a baseball game in from of 100 screaming parents.
Non-competitiveness is, indeed, for the parents, so the parents will no long act like asses.
That exact thing happened to me WRT to math. I sorta inherently understand math up to and slightly past algebra. Never had to work at it, would end up taking a moderately long time on tests because I'd have to figure stuff out that everyone else had memorized, but I'd still turn thing in ahead of them.
I couldn't pass precalculus three times, once in HS and twice in college.
With a posted minimum of 45mph, and entrance/exit ramps have a limit of 35 (or often less), you can't physically get on or off the highway without violating one or the other.
You can't keep from violating the signs, but you're not violating the law. Almost every state gives you about 100 yards (And some states give more) to slow down in after passing a speed limit sign.
Which, incidentally, makes most exit-ramp speed-limits completely stupid and something they can never actually charge you with violating. By the time it even applies, you're on an entirely different road.
Especially since they don't usually put the sign until halfway up the exit. So even states that don't give you a buffer still give you time to slow down...it's not the whole exit that's 35, it's merely the part after the sign. Before that point, it's whatever the speed of the highway was.
There might be an argument, before the speed drops, that the default speed of the highway system applies, vs. the actual speed of the highway you existed, just like if you turn from one normal road onto another and haven't hit a speed-limit sign, but there's a difference between 'turning' and 'following one side of a fork in the road', which is what you actually did. If you don't stop or yield or 'turn', you must assume you're on the 'same road' and that the speed limit is the same...if they want to change it, they have to tell you. (Which they are, in fact, about to do, making it 35, so I think that point would stand up quite well in court.)
And, of course, it's worth pointing out that both the speed limit and minimum speed are suggested speeds, and both can be decreased because of conditions....like you're about to reach a stop light. (Think about it, there are roads with minimum speeds with stop lights.)
And, on top of that, it is a perfectly legitimate defense in court that you were presented two contradictory requirements under the law, and you cannot be fined for choosing one of them.
I'm not saying that there are not too many laws, or that the system isn't deliberately set up so we're in violation of some of them at all times, but those traffic laws are not them.
There's a difference between writing requirements for the legal system in the vernacular, and writing the actual laws in the vernacular. 'beyond a reasonable doubt' does not appear that often in the legal code.
The problem with the legal code is not specific phrases that mean certain things, it's where thing that sound like normal words are defined to mean things they do not normally.
I think an interesting law would be one requiring that all laws that define a word (Aka: For the purposes of this statue blah shall be define as...), should be required to put a little asterisk next to that word when they actually use it.
Yeah, existing laws would be so riddled with asterisks they'd be hard to read, but at least people would see the extent of the problem.
A lot of these redefinitions could be removed if they'd stop defining words with exceptions, and instead, at the start each law, just simply state 'This law applies to X, Y, and Z only under all circumstances', or 'This law never applies to V under any circumstances'. Each law should have to have either a 'only applies to' filter, a 'applies to all except' filter, or, of course, no filter.
Instead, they define X to also mean Y, and Z to never mean V, forbid X and Z, and end up with complete gibberish as the law.
This filter should be right at the start. And, of course, each section of code should have a meta-filter over the entire thing. Hopefully in a nice tree-like structure. I know that's how they pretend to do it, but you never know where they've slipped in some obscure little law that isn't what the rest of the thing is talking about...with a filter on the whole section, you could just ignore the whole thing if your activities did not fall inside the filter, as the laws could not apply to you even if they were supposed to.
And sites displaying the law could also display a cascade of all relevant filters above it.
With some sort of sane filters, maybe people could actually find all laws that apply to certain circumstances. If I was looking for laws about driving, I could glance and see that a certain law only applied to commercial shipping, and ignore it, instead of seeing 'trucks' and having to flip around until I figured out what the hell a 'truck' meant in that law. Or see the entire section of code doesn't apply to single-occupant residential buildings and hence isn't what I'm looking for, instead of reading about 'residences' for five minutes before figuring out they, thanks to redefining words, actually only mean 'apartments buildings'.
The ironic thing is, they actually do write such filters into law, but usually only that a certain law cannot override a different law, and even if it's a general rule that the law does not apply in cases of X, they put the damn filter at the end.
Copyright is dead
It doesn't really matter what anyone says, or how horrible this is, or what's going to happen next, or anything. Game over.
What is a new idea, however, is that creators can get one without government intervention, just by filling out forms or not even doing that.
You can talk all you want about how the government used to grant exclusive licenses, but the reality was those was few and far between. It's like talking about how we've had automobile driving laws since the creation of cities. I'm sure some laws pertained to driving back then, pretending anyone could drive (And self-propelled vehicles did exist at random spots throughout history, and the laws did, indeed, pertain to them.), but we didn't actually get real automobile traffic codes until at least 1910.
Likewise, the modern concept of copyright didn't start until the government granted anyone who wanted it a copyright, and it was treated as an actual property. Yes, there were special agreements, but that wasn't modern copyright anymore than a Native American tribe granting a specific family the right to fish in a certain stream would be 'land ownership'.
Arguing about the morality of copyright violations on the internet is a bit like arguing about the morality of gravity after you fall out of an airplane.
You can't sit there and arguable about inevitable thing being 'good' or 'bad'. They just are. Digital data is instantly and infinitely copyable. It's not an argument, it's not a debate, there are no pros and cons to list and weighty questions to decide on, carefully balancing the rights of each side. Copyright with no barrier except legal to copying is meaningless. Poof, copyright just vanishes into thin air.
So we have fallen out of the plane. We could, perhaps, use some sort of parachute to land slowly, or we could plummet to our death, but the plane ride is over and we are, indeed, going to end up on the ground.
Notice I am, in no way, arguing this is a good thing, so don't respond with 'You're an amoral bastard who wants to steal everything from people'. We Are Outside the Plane and Falling. That is just how it is. It is not a choice. It was an unforeseen, inevitable result of the internet.
And this may, indeed, be something entirely horrible that will destroy all artistic creativity forever, leaving us with nothing, or, worse, reality TV. I hope not. But the result of being outside the airplane and falling is not my fault, and I did not say I approved of what will happen, but, nevertheless, we are still there and still falling.
Almost all discussion that goes on here about copyright is missing this one vital fact, and is instead arguing about the in-flight meal and how we're going to build our own meals instead of eating that crap. Come on, people, pay attention, we're supposed to be smart. Did you not feel the cabin depressurized when we collided with Napster?
This is why I didn't really mind DRM. It was attempting to grab hold of the plane after we fell out, with a makeshift grappling hook build out of shoes. Not a really viable option, and obviously didn't work, but you have to give props that someone in the corporate world realized: We just fell out of the fucking airplane. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Do something!
This article, OTOH, is talking about an attempt to legislate us back into the airplane. It's somewhat sad.
Or, maybe they could take all the welfare projects, which has an even larger budget than the military, with many of the projects estimated to be over 50% fraud, and return all that money back to us, so that we can afford our own medical care.
WTF is this? A fucking contest? Gee, let's look at social services, which benefit everyone, and compare it military spending which benefits, let's admit it, absolutely no one. (At least not at this scale.)
I love the idea that these two things should be roughly equal, it's like a husband and wife arguing over their budget, with the husband talking about how the wife spends slightly more on food and bills than he spends on restoring his classic 57 Chevy, and maybe she should cut back some. Hey, dumbass, one of these things actually benefits citizens of this country, and the other does not. (In fact, the other results in their deaths, which is where the analogy breaks down.)
And, lastly, while 'many of the welfare projects' may be over 50% fraud, many of the projects are also microscopic, so I suspect that statistic was stated exactly that way for a reason. There could be dozens of tiny projects totaled two billion dollars that were 50% fraud, which would make the overall fraud roughly, oh, 0.3% of social services.
The actual large projects, social security and medicare, do not have anywhere near 50% fraud. Social security has almost no fraud whatsoever, and it's actually 'ahead' in the fraud department with the number of people who pay social security taxes to fake social security numbers. (Almost all fraud in SS there is people continuing to collect checks to the deceased, so there's almost no organized large-scale fraud, just one person collecting one check they shouldn't.) Unemployment and general welfare might have as much as 10% fraud, or as little as 2%, it depends on who you ask, but it's nowhere near 50%. Medicare doesn't have a lot of fraud, unless you include insurance companies ripping people off using Medical Part D. Sometimes doctors set up schemes, but they set those up with normal insurance companies too, or even just rip people off directly. The Federal government has no control over Medicaid distribution, so if your state has large amounts of fraud, bother them. Those programs make up more than 90% of all welfare, and, as you can see, there's nowhere near 50% fraud.
'Many of X have a 50% level of something' is a classic way to lie with statistics, even assuming it's true and you didn't pull it out of your ass. The fact you threw 'estimated' in there to try to vague it up actually just made you factually wrong, as I suspect no programs are estimated by anyone with credibility to be that wasteful. You'd have been better off leaving that word out and just asserting they were that wasteful, and then when I showed up with estimated that said they weren't, you could say the estimates were wrong.
Saddam WAS a danger to his people, of course, but no more so than any of a half-dozen leaders causing mischief throughout Africa. Then again, none of those countries have major oil reserves to plunder. Needless to say, we're in Iraq, and not in Africa.
And, incidentally, many of those African countries we could have helped with much less resources and lives. There are some places where stationing just a single four or five person squad in each of two dozen villages, a few heavily armed roadblocks, and cratering a few airstrips, would hold the line against total chaos and mass murder.
I'm not saying no soldiers would be killed, but it would be a damn lot more effective than Iraq. We've done it before.
In a lot of places, the people causing problems there have no popular support, basically, they've just managed to take control of drug production. They're essentially organized crime! If we keep them from forcing people to support them (Aka, 'protection money'.), they'll be forced to scale back operations to a few small areas, where it would be trivial to take them. It's not like Iraq where they have a popular base. People hate them and the people fighting for them are in it for the money, they wouldn't go to the hill with guerrilla operations or suicide attack.
Plus, unlike Iraq, it would actually be legal to act, as we could actually get the permission of the 'legitimate' government, or one of the claimants thereof, or at the very least argue there's already a war going on. (Joining a war already in progress that doesn't previously involve you is not a war crime like invading a country is, although it can be frowned on if you do it for the wrong reasons.)
Of course, I don't think that would have been a good idea either, I was just pointing out that if we truly wanted to help people, we could have helped half a continent and suffered much less casualties and resource drain.
BTW, my own views of Iraq are that we never should have been there (as I said before the war), but that this is a unique war which has no easy answers about what to do now. Ultimately actions are less important than intents now, and when we did make the mistake of deposing Saddam, we became responsible for the country. Although this might make our job harder in the short run, I think we need to be willing to redeploy if the Iraqi government doesn't step up to the plate regarding various offices using sectarian militas for their own internal security. We may need to leave Iraq long enough to let the current government fall apart, put together a newer, larger coalition, and move in again.
I've been saying that it's silly to threaten Iran. The Middle East country that needs to get their act together is Iraq, and if they don't, we should invade them. That place is total chaos!
But, seriously, we can't do that. If we start leaving right now, we'll have no military left by the time we finish withdrawing. (Of course, we could just lie about coming back, it could make a nice bookend when paired with lying about the invasion.)
That, of course, is a much better plan than the current one, which is apparently to run out of military while we're still there. The timer is ticking down to the middle of next year. (When does al-Sadr's six month of no attacks end, anyway?)
Iraq is harder to leave than Vietnam because we have no centralized opposition. At least when we left Vietnam, the VC could fill the power vacuum quickly but in Iraq, we will see more bloodshed, violence, and the like, and it will be our falt whether we are there or not.
No it won't. It will be the fault of the people who lied us into this war. We hung Germans who started invading countries, will we have the courage to do that to our own people without an invasion and overthrow of our government? Will we ever face exactly what this Administration did and is still doing, or will we just quietly sweep it under the carpet?
I don't know what to do about Iraq, either, but I sure as hell know what to do about the people who got us into it.
We should not be using mercinaries in Iraq any more than the Iraqi government should be using sectarian militias, and Blackwater's actions certainly suggest that wrongful death suits in both the Al-Iraqya and Nasoor Square incidents might be worth pursuing.
Private. Fucking. Armies. That is what we have come to. We train people using the military, we pay corporations huge amounts of money to hire away those trained people and pay them more, and still make insane profits.
Everyone who's operated a mercenary army should be arrested for war profiteering, and we should subject the corporation to a corporate death penalty, dissolving it and nationalizing all its assets.
To quote BNL: There's no need to draft them, you could hear us laughing: The poor and black all need their room and board.
Ah! So you're saying that, while blue light looks the brightest for the least light, and red doesn't screw up our night vision, (Both of which effects are because our eyes are stupid.) in actuality, vision-wise, you can distinguish stuff under green light better, because you can see more different greens?
Interesting. Is that because we have more green receptors in our eyes? Or they're fine-tuned better? I seem to recall reading something like that somewhere, although I had forgotten until now. It's the reason that 16 bit color is 5 red, 5 blue, and 6 green, right?
And, also, just like there's a theory that the blue sky being a signifier of the overall light level caused our eyes to use blue to determine how much light to let in, I recall a theory that we can distinguish better between green because of the fact almost all plants are shades of green, so it is easier to see through heavy vegetation.(1)
And, as an added bonus, it won't screw up your night vision as bad as blue or white light. (Although obviously we can distinguish stuff under white light best of all, duh.)
1) OTOH, when you consider all the animals that are colorblind in various ways, at some point you have to wonder how much we're trying to find evolutionary explanations to things that could just be completely random.
The best solution, of course, would just be to add another pin that sends an actual, large enough pulse saying 'Turn on'.
But, anyway, the thing I'm worried about is that capacitors can lose their charge, no matter what you do. But, I guess that's not really a worry, because they'd surely be designed where, if the monitor lost and regained power (Or their power switch was flipped off and back on.), they'd turn on, at least long enough to charge up the capacitor, and then cut off.
So the worse that could happen was, if you left them suspended long enough, you'd have to turn them off and back on. And by 'long enough', we're talking about weeks, right?
Hey, I don't know much about electronics, if 'supercaps' work, that's fine. I just immediately thought of the fact that we've _already_ solved the problem of low-power operating devices without mains power quite some time ago, but if something better will work, it's all good.
Incidentally, on the original topic of computer monitors, a computer suspends a monitor by, IIRC, failing to send a specific signal to it. I think it's a sync signal it stops sending, but don't quote me.
Why not skip all this silliness with solar panels and charged capacitors and just have _that_ electrical current trip a relay? Yes, I'm sure it's a tiny signal, but surely they make sensitive relays, and if worse comes to worse you can stick a capacitor in there and have it charge using that current for a tenth of a second before tripping the relay.
They have no clock, they have no IR signals to detect, there's no logical reason a computer monitor would need to use _any_ power at all when off, and by any I'm including 'Charging a capacitor in advance' or 'using a solar panel'.
What's going on is that your eyes adjust how much light to let in based on, mostly, the blue part of the spectrum. Quite possibly this has something to do with the blue sky. If you live outdoors, the brightness of the sky is what is mainly controlling what you can see. This also lets you see incredibly well under a full moon.
If you have a blue light and a red light with the same candlepower, and light a room with each, each room is equally bright in the absolute sense. But in the blue room, your irises are closed too much relative to the room light, whereas in the red room they're open too much. (So you can see a lot better in the dark, although very strong red light can actually be dangerous as your eyes stupidly do not iris closed as much as they should.)
Or, to put it another way, your eyes take the blue light, multiple it by three, and assume that's how much RGB light is in the room. Roughly. It's probably more like R: 0.3 G: 0.7 B: 2.0, I'm sure the real numbers are out there somewhere.
There's a reason lights just offstage at a theatre are often blue...you can't see as well under them (Just well enough to avoid running into people.), but it 'ruins your night vision', or, in other words, 'fixes your day vision before you walk on stage into the lights'. (While at the same time, they're dim enough that you can't actually see into them from the house.)
Whereas, if you go further backstage, you'll find red ones, when people actually do need to operate with night vision.
And sometimes you find green ones. I haven't quite figured that one out. Hunters use green, I don't know why either. Possibly because so many animals are colorblind, so maybe it works like red and doesn't affect their 'eye brightness'. Whereas I know, with people green does actually affect it somewhere.
Or, as I've been saying, a rechargeable AAA battery, replaceable by the user. (Perhaps people have a point about the self-discharge of them, though, and we should use non-rechargeable ones. OTOH, self-discharge doesn't really matter if they're coming back on at least once a week and can recharge.)
What other people don't understand, and you and I do, is not that these devices are using a lot of power. It's their power supplies that are sucking huge amount of unused power when in standby, which then just gets thrown away. (So, yes, they don't actually bother to optimize their power usage, but that would be completely pointless anyway unless the power supply worked better. It's like streamlining a Hummer.)
To make them use less power, you have to completely disconnect them from wall power. (Or build an entirely separate micro-power supply, but that's just dumb.)
And we already have a way to for devices that are not hooked to the wall to use small amounts of power....they're called 'batteries'.
OTOH, get rid of the damn LEDs regardless. I don't need a fucking LED to tell me a device is off. I don't need a dozen LED clocks running around, I know how to buy a damn clock and put it where I can see it.