It's not even the constitution they need to understand. It's the laws themselves.
What's interesting is that not only was the entire program illegal, but they had the AG sign off on it claiming it was legal, every 45 days, so they could claim they were following the law. The law actually only allows the AG to sign of on wiretapping if the AG asserts that no Americans will be tapped, like they're bugging the Chinese embassy or something. But the AG illegal signed off on the tapping anyway, giving himself quite a lot of civil liability. This was, of course, still illegal, it's not 'The AG signs off on any wiretapping, then it's legal', it's 'The AG signs off on wiretapping and make a specific claim, under threat of perjury, that X is true, then it's legal.', which he did not.
But the telecoms could at least pretend they were following the law. If anyone asked, the had the AG on record that the law was being followed, and anyone asking would just assume that by that they meant the specific exception under the law, not the words 'Do it.' and a signature. They got that every 45 days.
But then Comey, acting AG, refused to sign off on it. There's an interesting theory that Rumsfeld couldn't, for some reason, couldn't stop authorizing the program, (Perhaps blackmail?) so deliberately rendered himself unable to be AG during a time when the papers had to be signed. (Otherwise, it's hard to figure out why he didn't just re-authorize it in advance. It had to be every 45 days, but nothing stopped him from authorizing it at 40 or 35 days for another 45 days if he knew he'd be having surgery. He could have signed the papers right before he temporarily stepped aside as AG. It wasn't emergency surgery, and he knew Comey was opposed to it.)
Whatever the reason, the program was operated for at least 24 hours, maybe up to a week, starting on March 11, 2004, without even a pretend legal justification. The White House said to do it, the AG said no. This was flatly, completely, inarguably illegally. There is absolutely no legal question about it. (1)
That time period is for what the telecoms need immunity. All the other time, they can argue 'Oh, we had the AG's assurance this was legal.', even though they didn't actually, under statue, have it. (He must make specific assurances to them that were not made, and both they and him knew it. They have a damn form letter for it.)
They thought they could weasel out, but, then, at one point in March 2004, they asked for the pretend authorization and didn't get it, and let the government keep operating, thus totally blowing any claims they might have that they were operating legally.
1) And it's fucking insane that Congress hasn't already started impeachments over that specific incidence. Forget arguing the legality of the program when it was signed off on. The President can weasel out of the rest of the time by pointing to the AG's signature, and we can spend years arguing over who did what.
But during that specific time the White House, by itself, ordered the wiretapping, over the objections of the AG. Even if the wiretapping was on foreign nationals and even if that means the president has the inherent power to do it (Neither of which have been demonstrated.), he still has to follow the process laid out in law...if he disapproved of the AG he should have fired him.
Oh, and he deserves props for, back in 1994, not supporting an Idaho voter initiative to ban gay marriage. (Among other horrible things on it.) It didn't make any different, it was for the voters to decide, but he (mildly) came out against it.
He didn't do it in 'publications' or in Congress. He did it in his campaigns, every time he's been asked about rumors he's gay.
However, yes, at least he's not an insane hypocrite running around proposing restrictions on gays. And I think we can assume the 'I'm not one of those horrible gay people' claims were based on the fact he actually is and was in denial.
He's not, say, Vitter, who found it necessary to protect marriages because he was visiting hookers.
If you want to have some fun, don't phrase it as outrage at the store's policy.
Phrase it like they have the right to search your bags. Don't dispute that in the slightest, agree that if you are leaving with stuff you just bought, they have the right to look in your bag. You fully understand all that.
However, you can't agree to let them look in the bag, so the only solution is for them to return your money and you return the stuff. Whereupon they can look in the bag all they want, as you will return it with the other stuff.
No harm, no foul. You didn't realize that was store policy, but now that you do, you will only come back when you are mentally prepared to let other people look in bags you own.
It'd be pretty funny to watch them react to that.
Why? It's easy for someone to justify himself to his management when someone is saying 'I want a refund because this store's searching sucks!'. It's a lot harder when they're saying 'Well, I guess I'm going to have to get a refund because this store won't let me leave with my stuff, which is obviously entirely legal and justified.'.
Alternately, when they ask you, pull another bag out of your pocket (They compress very small.), put all the stuff from the bag they gave you into your bag, and then hand them your bag and tell them that not only can they look in it, they can keep it, as a gift from you.
It is to prove that employees are honest. Employees can't just walk out of the front door of a store with goods, and, trust me, the back is usually tightly locked up, someone goes out back there and they set off alarms.
Employee theft mainly happens by employees not ringing things up. You show up at the register with a PS3 and three games, and your drinking buddy, who runs the register, doesn't scan the PS3.
I'm not saying anything about the legality of them checking the register, but it's not to stop the absurd idea of you trying to shoplift somehow via the shopping bag. It's to make sure that if you have eight items in your bag, you have eight items on your receipt, and the cashier didn't 'forget' to scan one of them.
However, there are plenty of non-invasive ways to do the same check. They almost always have cameras pointed at the register. If they're missing some PS3s, they just need to pull up the camera on the PS3s, wait until one of them disappears, and then see when it shows up at the register. And then pull up that transaction and see if there's a PS3 on it.
See, the joke is they don't need to catch the people in real time. It's their employees who are doing the stealing, and they can have the police there ready to arrest them when they show up for work.
The guy who walked out with the thing is completely unimportant. Give the video to the police when you turn the employee in, they'll quickly locate the co-conspirator and charge him.
But the problem is that my method would actually take some modest skill, whereas someone standing at the door takes no skill at all. They don't even have to check the receipt actually, they just have to pretend to do so and the plan will be foiled when first conceived.
It doesn't matter anyway. If you sign something with something that you intend someone else to understand as your signature, it is your signature, legally. It doesn't matter if it matches your normal signature or is actually your name or whatever. An X is a legal signature. (And, no, you don't need it witnessed, you're signing it in front of someone, you already have a witness.)
It also is supposed to be, according to the CC company, used by the store to make sure you haven't stolen the card, but as they are the ones that clearly don't want to do that, I don't really see how it's any sort of moral victory over them if they don't. It's the store pulling one over on the CC company, not you pulling one over on the store, and their 'victory' means that stolen cards are less likely to be detected.
Incidentally, when I worked at Wal-Mart, I would have been one of the people who caught him. I actually did look at signatures and ask for ID if they didn't seem to match and you'd signed the back of the card, or always checked if someone had written 'check ID'. (If they didn't sign their card, they obviously didn't care if someone had stolen it.)
Granted, I had no 'signature comparison' training, and basically, if it was mostly the same style, I was fine with it. I think I only checked ID a dozen times, not counting 'check ID' people. But it was interesting to watch people realize the reason I was still holding their card and hadn't given it back to them yet was that I was waiting for them to sign the paper so I could glance at them both.
It was also interesting the number of 'check ID' people who expressed gratitude and amazement that I actually check their ID. (Yes, I'm aware, legally, there's no requirement even if they write that, but it's common courtesy.)
Craig didn't just oppose 'gay marriage', he's specifically condemned gay people for being gay. It's the Democrats (And admittedly a few Republicans) who says 'I don't want there to be gay marriage, not that there's anything wrong with being gay'. If one of them was outed as gay, that's not that hypocritical unless they want to get married.
Craig, OTOH, is a 'Gay people are all degenerate immorals and we shouldn't be encouraging them by letting them marry' -type Republican. He's opposed to gay marriage as part of being opposed to homosexuality in general. Not all Republicans, not even all of them opposed to gay marriage, are like that, but Craig is.
But, of course, this is moot because he's Not Gay(TM). I mean, he keeps saying that, it must be true. He just like to have sex with men, which is completely unrelated to homosexuality he's repeatedly condemned. Those people choose to call themselves gay, whereas he chooses to not call himself gay. See, it is a choice whether or not someone is gay.(1)
At some point the American people are going to realize that a good many Republicans are professional projectors. Not the things that display movies, people who run around projecting their wants and desires on others.
1) Which brings up an interesting solution to this whole 'gay marriage' thing. Let's just call them 'marriages', without the word 'gay', that would solve the entire issue. Or even 'not gay marriages' just to make sure. (Misc-sex marriage? No-sex marriage? No, wait.)
It's not so much the different sizes as the unneeded different sizes. I at least understand the rational for a smaller plug. A big plug for easy of use with 90% of stuff, and a tiny plug when the device itself is tiny. (Although I will point out that damn USB hubs are not tiny. By definition, they can fit the big connectors, because, duh, that's how you plug into them.)
But WTF is up with the large square connector? Is it really so important to have male connectors at both ends?(1) That was a stupid decisions to start with. People are not idiots, and they perfectly understand the idea that all cables are 'extension' cables. In fact, they probably understand that idea better than random connector changes. That's how serial cables worked for years.
Or the other smaller connector that a mp3 player of mine had? I think this is some absurd change of the tiny port from one plug to another, but I have idea why, as it's not noticeable smaller.
1) Male and female always confused me on USB, because there's male and female of the outside, which is what actually counts for the named gender, but inside that each side has something sticking out, and, what's worse, on the female plug, that little prong is what holds the male in place, from the inside. For a while I didn't grasp it was the metal shield that counted as the 'prong' for the purposes of gender, because on things like serial connectors it doesn't, the metal bits inside do.
3) The laptop. The usable laptop. Not to resell, just to have a laptop, or to resell to someone else so that person can have a laptop. They don't know about tracking software, they aren't even thinking about stuff like that.
As for 2), a lot of thieves aren't that smart and even if they're after personal information, they'll use your OS to get it. They'll fire it up, check your email, check your browser history and try to figure out if they can get into accounts that would be useful. Yes, if we were criminals, we wouldn't do that.
And even if it's 1) they're after, and have a brand new counterfeit OS and everything to put on there, are you willing to bet they won't boot it at least once to see if you have anything useful on there? Like a stolen car, maybe they're planning on selling it to a 'repackager' where it will end up on a pawnshop with a new OS on it, but they can't resist booting it up to see if you've got any cool games.
Criminals often behave very stupidly, and saying 'They wouldn't be that dumb' is crazy. I think if someone published statistics of what percentage of computer with tracking software that got stolen were recovered, it'd be near 50%.
Of course, I don't know what these places charge, and if they're actually any good. (If they were smart, they'd already have existing agreements with ISP to track down physical locations of addresses.) I'm willing to bet a free program could be almost as useful, with maybe a bit more work if the thing is stolen.
Perhaps there are kids who think they'll work in the video game industry just because they like playing games, but they're just fat uncoordinated versions of those doofuses who think they'll become professional skateboarders or basketball players after high school.
What do you mean, 'perhaps'? Haven't you seen the ads?
Linus himself is actually pretty impartial when it comes to schedulers, considering that in 2.4 the scheduler he original wrote was widely revealed to be somewhat crappy and it was replaced with a selection of three others. (Or maybe what they replaced was a scheduler that replaced his original. Or more!)
He has very high standards when it comes to code, and a few strict concepts of what should and shouldn't be in the kernel (1), but isn't wielded to any particular existing code (At this point, he's written very little of the actual code that's in there.) and is usually pretty impartial about things, although he's somewhat pro-status quo...if you can't convince him something is wrong, he's not going to swap out an entire subsystem.
If Linux says 'No', it's almost always one of four reason: a) It's crap code, b) It's doing something the wrong way, c) It's fixing something that isn't broken, and/or d) It's something that doesn't belong in the kernel at all.
Most of the distro patchsets are patches that are a) or b), but the distros want them enough that they're willing to overlook that.
1) For example, he flatly refuses to implement an unchanging ABI for binary modules, despite the fact it would not be incredibly hard. OTOH, he got talked into framebuffers, devfs, and even tux, all of which he originally opposed.
Well, first of all, you'd do something less fucking retarded than that, like get a window manager or patch X itself to raise the priority of the current window. Or just have high-priority processes raise it themselves when in the foreground.
What is this, some universe where the foreground window changes ten times a second, fast enough that renicing it isn't possible? We're talking about something like a game or video, right? Why not just raise it when it starts? Most window managers can handle that, and many programs that it matters for, like media players and games, can do it themselves.
Plus, if it's a video or music, you want it high priority while in the background too. It'd be incredibly annoying if you were, say, browsing the web and listening to music and the web browser had priority over the music, making it stutter every time you loaded a new page.
Is that what this is about? Good Lord, I can see why Linus refused to put that in the kernel. The kernel shouldn't know a damn thing about X, much less which process is in the foreground. I'm surprised that's even possible, the kernel would either have to 'spy' on X, risking that X changes would break it, or communicate with X like a normal program, which would add a good deal of overhead. However it does it, it's certainly not a good idea!
The problem is that some people have really shitty hardware and would like various user applications to receive interrupts faster, so their mouse and video and whatnot respond faster.
Which of course slows everything down on real hardware. You don't stop every nanosecond to see if someone wants to a keystroke to show up.
So for the longest time, there was a debate about, exactly, what the kernel should optimize for...average overall speed, or slightly lower overall speed but a boost to responsiveness. It really is a tradeoff, and it's not really a tradeoff between desktop and server, it's a tradeoff between, on crappy hardware, which works worse. (And there's a lot of validity in the pro-server side. There are a lot of people running crap Pentiums or 486s as routers who need max throughput, a lot more than running them as desktops and expecting responsiveness.)
However, mostly that has been fixed, you can tell the kernel to be preemptable. Turn that on, more responsiveness less throughput, turn it off, less and more. And a lot of general fixes for everything, like the scheduler, which was completely broken and could screw up both server and desktop stuff. There are now three working schedulers, each for different people, one optimized for desktops.
So mostly these people still complaining are complete idiots or people trying to listen to mp3s on 486-100s and failing to understand that is simply not likely to work. The linux kernel is way more customizable as to priorities than Windows or any other OS.
The guy this article is talking about didn't have his stuff rejected because Linus doesn't want to support desktops, he was rejected because it was poorly coded and he didn't want to work on it until it got to the point hat Linus would accept it.
Regardless its their Linux and they will have to name it something people will cleary understand is not Linus.
While Linus has the trademark for Linux, he doesn't really care if you fork and call it Linux unless it can't run Linux applications. (And, honestly, that's more a glibc plus ABI issue than a 'kernel' issue.) All the big distros maintain a kernel fork and have no problem calling it 'Linux'.
MS does not have different kernels for different OSes. In fact, they specifically removed the 'Home' and 'Professional' label on the boot screen of XP in service pack 2 so they could ship the exact same binary image.
And while the Windows kernel doesn't contain as much as the Linux kernel, none of the drivers differ either.
And Vista is the same way. Same kernel.
Now, granted, they sometimes come out with server specific version of Windows in general, like Windows 2003 Server, but those don't have any magical server optimizations in them either. They have different settings, but the kernel is wherever the kernel is evolved to...the same kernel has moved from XP to 2003 to Vista, although hopefully getting 'better and better', there's not a server kernel and a desktop kernel. The closest thing was the 9x kernel vs. the NT kernel.
Wikipedia's wrong, because there is quite a lot of off-the-books spending that doesn't show up.
But taking the US government at their word, it's worth noting that, literally, the country everyone thinks is the biggest military threat to the US, the only one that might invade us, China, spend 8% of what we do on their military. That's total, not relative to their and ours economy. As they have a much bigger army than ours, it basically means their entire army is very poorly equipped and wouldn't last an hour.
The only ones between us and China are the UK, France, Germany, and Japan, in that order, with the UK at the biggest with 12% of our spending.
The only entity that is even plausibly a threat to the US is all of Europe, which combined spends 54% of the US.
That the developed world has choked off supplies of DDT to the developing world, without providing much in the way of a replacement (ironically, many of the replacements for DDT are much more toxic than DDT is) is a travesty.
What the fuck are you talking about? DDT is being used right now to fight malaria, and most of the current problem is that mosquitoes that have been heavily sprayed (Aka, the ones carrying malaria) have developed a resistance to DDT, dumbass. And it happened exactly why everyone thought it would, and why DDT was banned in the first place: It hangs around in the environment. Not just messing with other animals, but resulting in immune insects.
Yes, the US doesn't manufacture it at all, but plenty of other places do. And it's hard to see how a larger supply of DDT would help anything, or would have helped anything at any point.
And there are plenty of replacements for DDT, some of which work much better at the moment, and many of which are less toxic. The problem is trying to build one with a built-in expiration date so that it doesn't cause the same problems and immunity as DDT.
But no pesticide will ever be the solution to malaria. The solution to malaria is to buy enough anti-malaria drugs to given them to entire areas at risk at once for long enough to kill the malaria, area by area, until the entire world has been covered. It sounds expensive, but wouldn't cost that much in the long run.
It didn't matter there were arguments it was nonsense. It demonstratably was true, which I actually wrote about in my last comment but deleted because confusing. The problems already existed, Einstein just explained them.
You can be a superstar scientist in two ways. You can demonstrate how factually a certain theory is untrue, or you can come up with a theory that explains the known facts better. Einstein did both, he came up with a theory for relativity that explained already-known weirdness, but got his Nobel price for simply demonstrating that QM existed, without explaining it. (And, again, others had already seen the effect there, but he proved it had to require light be quantized and not merely waves, whereas others were not sure. Requiring light come in quanta completely broke all existing theories of light.)
What you can't do is come up with a theory that doesn't fit known facts and requires other theories to be wrong, which is what all pseudoscience does.
No one in the real scientific community will listen to any theory that does not fit known facts, so if you're going to come up with one, you damn well better prove the facts are other than they currently known first.
Homeopathy does both at the same time. It invents a new fact, 'water has structures', which has never been observed in science, and then doesn't bother to even try to explain this within current theory.
That's where people completely get science wrong. There is a difference between an observed fact and a theory. Theories explain observations. You can't make a theory that has no grounds in observations, it will be shot down instantly.
OTOH, if you make an observation that cannot exist in theory, which can be replicated, than you don't need any damn theories, science will be leaping to attention. It doesn't matter how insane your theories are, or even if you have a theory, unless someone can come up with better ones to explain this new observation.
Theories, in science, are a little game, with scientists pulling them this way and that, eventually getting somewhere they all agree. But observations aren't, and all theories are based on them. Theories that contradict or ignore or just don't have any observation that support them are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Is that a new version of Oscam's razor, "the only theory you can think up has to be the correct one"?
Um, technically, according to Occam's razor, as the only theory you can come up with is the simplest one out of all the theories you've come up with, it is indeed the most likely to be correct. Although a theory being the 'most likely' out of one possible candidates is sorta an insane concept.
But if we only have one theory, obviously we should use it until it fails to work or someone has a better idea.
how is this, CO2 absorbs infrared in three narrow bands corresponding to the molecules stretch, wag and scissoring but it also emits radiation in those same bands, I could argue that the CO2 in the atmosphere effectively increases the radiative surface of the Earth and would therefore cause cooling or I could argue that water being lighter than CO2 would tend to carry heat above the CO2 rich lower atmosphere and cool the globe as well.
You can argue it all you want, but until you do the math and figure out if that would actually work, it's a bit pointless. I'm not the guy you need to convince, and I don't know nearly enough about the math to judge any theory at all. And, I suspect, neither do you.
From what I do understand, trying to think of some rational reason we haven't all had the surface of our planet boiling hot and the air ice cold is somewhat difficult, and it took quite a long time to actually figure out a theory that explains that. (And explains Venus, and Mercury, and Mars and how they differ from each other and us.)
I don't think we are even that certain of the planets albedo yet.
I can't imagine why we wouldn't be certain of that. It's not hard to check, it's not like we've never seen the planet from the outside.
If someone did propose a spacecraft that could move in space, one of the first questions anyone should ask is 'What does it push against?'.
And, as anyone who designs spacecraft should be able to explain, it pushes against the propellant it spews out. That gets pushed one way, it gets pushed another. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's not rocket science, Newton would have been able to figure it out once you explained 'vacuum' to him. (And informed him he was right the first time, there is no aether.) He'd immediately see you could throw things out the back of the ship to move, and almost as immediately think of using expanding gas.
However, there have, indeed, been crazy rocket engines proposed that somehow don't need propellants, that that exact question has arisen, and most of those have consequently been dismissed as pseudoscience. (Sometimes the crazies manage to invent other things that, in theory, could produce movement, like pulling themselves towards other things by gravity, so they can't be instantly dismissed, even though that's absurd as we have absolutely no ability to create or even manipulate gravity except via the mass possessing it.)
The fact someone can ask patently obvious questions about scientific claims doesn't prove anything. It's when the person proposing the theory is unable to answer them that the entire thing begins to look a little shaky.
It's too bad the term "holistic" seems to have been hijacked by these quacks, because there's some promising stuff there that doesn't rely on unscientific conjecture.
Exactly. I'm of the opinion that health is affected slightly by a lot of things we don't realize, from not getting enough sleep to dust in the environment to chemicals in food to irregular eating habits to bad lighting, and I'd like that more people look at their health 'holistically' instead of wandering from illness to illness.
I'd also like more research done in that field. (Instead of curing sickness, which is where literally all medical research is done, because that makes the money.) A lot of small things would have to be studied separately, and it would be a lot of work, but it would be nice to know that the odds of getting disease X can be increased by skipping meals, whereas if you don't get enough sleep, you're not more likely to get disease Y, but if you do, it's likely to last 25% longer befoe you recover.
We actually have already done this sort of work on vitamins, and it's the reason we all eat, for example, iodized salt. And a lot of it is already known, I'd just like more research in that field, a field that logically should be called 'holistic medicine'.
But I'll be DAMNED if I have anything to do with 95% of the 'alternative medicine' crackpots out there.
There might, and I repeat might, be some useful chemicals in herbs we haven't discovered yet, although anyone who thinks that's a better method of distribution is a crackpot...I'll take consistent and known doses of medication, thank you. Anyone selling herbs that propose to do something are either liars or doing something extremely dangerous, basically selling unknown doses of untested medicine.
And acupuncture and chiropracty might have some stress/pain relief possiblities. But so does a good massage, and I'm not calling that 'medicine'.
Not only that, they're assuming their structures are the only ones that exist, when if imprints were left on water, any water would be full of them, thanks to everything it comes in contact with.
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It's not even the constitution they need to understand. It's the laws themselves.
What's interesting is that not only was the entire program illegal, but they had the AG sign off on it claiming it was legal, every 45 days, so they could claim they were following the law. The law actually only allows the AG to sign of on wiretapping if the AG asserts that no Americans will be tapped, like they're bugging the Chinese embassy or something. But the AG illegal signed off on the tapping anyway, giving himself quite a lot of civil liability. This was, of course, still illegal, it's not 'The AG signs off on any wiretapping, then it's legal', it's 'The AG signs off on wiretapping and make a specific claim, under threat of perjury, that X is true, then it's legal.', which he did not.
But the telecoms could at least pretend they were following the law. If anyone asked, the had the AG on record that the law was being followed, and anyone asking would just assume that by that they meant the specific exception under the law, not the words 'Do it.' and a signature. They got that every 45 days.
But then Comey, acting AG, refused to sign off on it. There's an interesting theory that Rumsfeld couldn't, for some reason, couldn't stop authorizing the program, (Perhaps blackmail?) so deliberately rendered himself unable to be AG during a time when the papers had to be signed. (Otherwise, it's hard to figure out why he didn't just re-authorize it in advance. It had to be every 45 days, but nothing stopped him from authorizing it at 40 or 35 days for another 45 days if he knew he'd be having surgery. He could have signed the papers right before he temporarily stepped aside as AG. It wasn't emergency surgery, and he knew Comey was opposed to it.)
Whatever the reason, the program was operated for at least 24 hours, maybe up to a week, starting on March 11, 2004, without even a pretend legal justification. The White House said to do it, the AG said no. This was flatly, completely, inarguably illegally. There is absolutely no legal question about it. (1)
That time period is for what the telecoms need immunity. All the other time, they can argue 'Oh, we had the AG's assurance this was legal.', even though they didn't actually, under statue, have it. (He must make specific assurances to them that were not made, and both they and him knew it. They have a damn form letter for it.)
They thought they could weasel out, but, then, at one point in March 2004, they asked for the pretend authorization and didn't get it, and let the government keep operating, thus totally blowing any claims they might have that they were operating legally.
1) And it's fucking insane that Congress hasn't already started impeachments over that specific incidence. Forget arguing the legality of the program when it was signed off on. The President can weasel out of the rest of the time by pointing to the AG's signature, and we can spend years arguing over who did what.
But during that specific time the White House, by itself, ordered the wiretapping, over the objections of the AG. Even if the wiretapping was on foreign nationals and even if that means the president has the inherent power to do it (Neither of which have been demonstrated.), he still has to follow the process laid out in law...if he disapproved of the AG he should have fired him.
Oh, and he deserves props for, back in 1994, not supporting an Idaho voter initiative to ban gay marriage. (Among other horrible things on it.) It didn't make any different, it was for the voters to decide, but he (mildly) came out against it.
Oh, it annoy me, I was just explaining it. I didn't understand what the hell they were doing either until the first time this story was here.
He didn't do it in 'publications' or in Congress. He did it in his campaigns, every time he's been asked about rumors he's gay.
However, yes, at least he's not an insane hypocrite running around proposing restrictions on gays. And I think we can assume the 'I'm not one of those horrible gay people' claims were based on the fact he actually is and was in denial.
He's not, say, Vitter, who found it necessary to protect marriages because he was visiting hookers.
If you want to have some fun, don't phrase it as outrage at the store's policy.
Phrase it like they have the right to search your bags. Don't dispute that in the slightest, agree that if you are leaving with stuff you just bought, they have the right to look in your bag. You fully understand all that.
However, you can't agree to let them look in the bag, so the only solution is for them to return your money and you return the stuff. Whereupon they can look in the bag all they want, as you will return it with the other stuff.
No harm, no foul. You didn't realize that was store policy, but now that you do, you will only come back when you are mentally prepared to let other people look in bags you own.
It'd be pretty funny to watch them react to that.
Why? It's easy for someone to justify himself to his management when someone is saying 'I want a refund because this store's searching sucks!'. It's a lot harder when they're saying 'Well, I guess I'm going to have to get a refund because this store won't let me leave with my stuff, which is obviously entirely legal and justified.'.
Alternately, when they ask you, pull another bag out of your pocket (They compress very small.), put all the stuff from the bag they gave you into your bag, and then hand them your bag and tell them that not only can they look in it, they can keep it, as a gift from you.
It is to prove that employees are honest. Employees can't just walk out of the front door of a store with goods, and, trust me, the back is usually tightly locked up, someone goes out back there and they set off alarms.
Employee theft mainly happens by employees not ringing things up. You show up at the register with a PS3 and three games, and your drinking buddy, who runs the register, doesn't scan the PS3.
I'm not saying anything about the legality of them checking the register, but it's not to stop the absurd idea of you trying to shoplift somehow via the shopping bag. It's to make sure that if you have eight items in your bag, you have eight items on your receipt, and the cashier didn't 'forget' to scan one of them.
However, there are plenty of non-invasive ways to do the same check. They almost always have cameras pointed at the register. If they're missing some PS3s, they just need to pull up the camera on the PS3s, wait until one of them disappears, and then see when it shows up at the register. And then pull up that transaction and see if there's a PS3 on it.
See, the joke is they don't need to catch the people in real time. It's their employees who are doing the stealing, and they can have the police there ready to arrest them when they show up for work.
The guy who walked out with the thing is completely unimportant. Give the video to the police when you turn the employee in, they'll quickly locate the co-conspirator and charge him.
But the problem is that my method would actually take some modest skill, whereas someone standing at the door takes no skill at all. They don't even have to check the receipt actually, they just have to pretend to do so and the plan will be foiled when first conceived.
It doesn't matter anyway. If you sign something with something that you intend someone else to understand as your signature, it is your signature, legally. It doesn't matter if it matches your normal signature or is actually your name or whatever. An X is a legal signature. (And, no, you don't need it witnessed, you're signing it in front of someone, you already have a witness.)
It also is supposed to be, according to the CC company, used by the store to make sure you haven't stolen the card, but as they are the ones that clearly don't want to do that, I don't really see how it's any sort of moral victory over them if they don't. It's the store pulling one over on the CC company, not you pulling one over on the store, and their 'victory' means that stolen cards are less likely to be detected.
Incidentally, when I worked at Wal-Mart, I would have been one of the people who caught him. I actually did look at signatures and ask for ID if they didn't seem to match and you'd signed the back of the card, or always checked if someone had written 'check ID'. (If they didn't sign their card, they obviously didn't care if someone had stolen it.)
Granted, I had no 'signature comparison' training, and basically, if it was mostly the same style, I was fine with it. I think I only checked ID a dozen times, not counting 'check ID' people. But it was interesting to watch people realize the reason I was still holding their card and hadn't given it back to them yet was that I was waiting for them to sign the paper so I could glance at them both.
It was also interesting the number of 'check ID' people who expressed gratitude and amazement that I actually check their ID. (Yes, I'm aware, legally, there's no requirement even if they write that, but it's common courtesy.)
Craig didn't just oppose 'gay marriage', he's specifically condemned gay people for being gay. It's the Democrats (And admittedly a few Republicans) who says 'I don't want there to be gay marriage, not that there's anything wrong with being gay'. If one of them was outed as gay, that's not that hypocritical unless they want to get married.
Craig, OTOH, is a 'Gay people are all degenerate immorals and we shouldn't be encouraging them by letting them marry' -type Republican. He's opposed to gay marriage as part of being opposed to homosexuality in general. Not all Republicans, not even all of them opposed to gay marriage, are like that, but Craig is.
But, of course, this is moot because he's Not Gay(TM). I mean, he keeps saying that, it must be true. He just like to have sex with men, which is completely unrelated to homosexuality he's repeatedly condemned. Those people choose to call themselves gay, whereas he chooses to not call himself gay. See, it is a choice whether or not someone is gay.(1)
At some point the American people are going to realize that a good many Republicans are professional projectors. Not the things that display movies, people who run around projecting their wants and desires on others.
1) Which brings up an interesting solution to this whole 'gay marriage' thing. Let's just call them 'marriages', without the word 'gay', that would solve the entire issue. Or even 'not gay marriages' just to make sure. (Misc-sex marriage? No-sex marriage? No, wait.)
It's not so much the different sizes as the unneeded different sizes. I at least understand the rational for a smaller plug. A big plug for easy of use with 90% of stuff, and a tiny plug when the device itself is tiny. (Although I will point out that damn USB hubs are not tiny. By definition, they can fit the big connectors, because, duh, that's how you plug into them.)
But WTF is up with the large square connector? Is it really so important to have male connectors at both ends?(1) That was a stupid decisions to start with. People are not idiots, and they perfectly understand the idea that all cables are 'extension' cables. In fact, they probably understand that idea better than random connector changes. That's how serial cables worked for years.
Or the other smaller connector that a mp3 player of mine had? I think this is some absurd change of the tiny port from one plug to another, but I have idea why, as it's not noticeable smaller.
1) Male and female always confused me on USB, because there's male and female of the outside, which is what actually counts for the named gender, but inside that each side has something sticking out, and, what's worse, on the female plug, that little prong is what holds the male in place, from the inside. For a while I didn't grasp it was the metal shield that counted as the 'prong' for the purposes of gender, because on things like serial connectors it doesn't, the metal bits inside do.
Um, no.
A sizable portion of laptops are stolen for:
3) The laptop. The usable laptop. Not to resell, just to have a laptop, or to resell to someone else so that person can have a laptop. They don't know about tracking software, they aren't even thinking about stuff like that.
As for 2), a lot of thieves aren't that smart and even if they're after personal information, they'll use your OS to get it. They'll fire it up, check your email, check your browser history and try to figure out if they can get into accounts that would be useful. Yes, if we were criminals, we wouldn't do that.
And even if it's 1) they're after, and have a brand new counterfeit OS and everything to put on there, are you willing to bet they won't boot it at least once to see if you have anything useful on there? Like a stolen car, maybe they're planning on selling it to a 'repackager' where it will end up on a pawnshop with a new OS on it, but they can't resist booting it up to see if you've got any cool games.
Criminals often behave very stupidly, and saying 'They wouldn't be that dumb' is crazy. I think if someone published statistics of what percentage of computer with tracking software that got stolen were recovered, it'd be near 50%.
Of course, I don't know what these places charge, and if they're actually any good. (If they were smart, they'd already have existing agreements with ISP to track down physical locations of addresses.) I'm willing to bet a free program could be almost as useful, with maybe a bit more work if the thing is stolen.
Perhaps there are kids who think they'll work in the video game industry just because they like playing games, but they're just fat uncoordinated versions of those doofuses who think they'll become professional skateboarders or basketball players after high school.
What do you mean, 'perhaps'? Haven't you seen the ads?
Telling people about this bug can be considered a criminal act under the DMCA.
Linus himself is actually pretty impartial when it comes to schedulers, considering that in 2.4 the scheduler he original wrote was widely revealed to be somewhat crappy and it was replaced with a selection of three others. (Or maybe what they replaced was a scheduler that replaced his original. Or more!)
He has very high standards when it comes to code, and a few strict concepts of what should and shouldn't be in the kernel (1), but isn't wielded to any particular existing code (At this point, he's written very little of the actual code that's in there.) and is usually pretty impartial about things, although he's somewhat pro-status quo...if you can't convince him something is wrong, he's not going to swap out an entire subsystem.
If Linux says 'No', it's almost always one of four reason: a) It's crap code, b) It's doing something the wrong way, c) It's fixing something that isn't broken, and/or d) It's something that doesn't belong in the kernel at all.
Most of the distro patchsets are patches that are a) or b), but the distros want them enough that they're willing to overlook that.
1) For example, he flatly refuses to implement an unchanging ABI for binary modules, despite the fact it would not be incredibly hard. OTOH, he got talked into framebuffers, devfs, and even tux, all of which he originally opposed.
Well, first of all, you'd do something less fucking retarded than that, like get a window manager or patch X itself to raise the priority of the current window. Or just have high-priority processes raise it themselves when in the foreground.
What is this, some universe where the foreground window changes ten times a second, fast enough that renicing it isn't possible? We're talking about something like a game or video, right? Why not just raise it when it starts? Most window managers can handle that, and many programs that it matters for, like media players and games, can do it themselves.
Plus, if it's a video or music, you want it high priority while in the background too. It'd be incredibly annoying if you were, say, browsing the web and listening to music and the web browser had priority over the music, making it stutter every time you loaded a new page.
Is that what this is about? Good Lord, I can see why Linus refused to put that in the kernel. The kernel shouldn't know a damn thing about X, much less which process is in the foreground. I'm surprised that's even possible, the kernel would either have to 'spy' on X, risking that X changes would break it, or communicate with X like a normal program, which would add a good deal of overhead. However it does it, it's certainly not a good idea!
The problem is that some people have really shitty hardware and would like various user applications to receive interrupts faster, so their mouse and video and whatnot respond faster.
Which of course slows everything down on real hardware. You don't stop every nanosecond to see if someone wants to a keystroke to show up.
So for the longest time, there was a debate about, exactly, what the kernel should optimize for...average overall speed, or slightly lower overall speed but a boost to responsiveness. It really is a tradeoff, and it's not really a tradeoff between desktop and server, it's a tradeoff between, on crappy hardware, which works worse. (And there's a lot of validity in the pro-server side. There are a lot of people running crap Pentiums or 486s as routers who need max throughput, a lot more than running them as desktops and expecting responsiveness.)
However, mostly that has been fixed, you can tell the kernel to be preemptable. Turn that on, more responsiveness less throughput, turn it off, less and more. And a lot of general fixes for everything, like the scheduler, which was completely broken and could screw up both server and desktop stuff. There are now three working schedulers, each for different people, one optimized for desktops.
So mostly these people still complaining are complete idiots or people trying to listen to mp3s on 486-100s and failing to understand that is simply not likely to work. The linux kernel is way more customizable as to priorities than Windows or any other OS.
The guy this article is talking about didn't have his stuff rejected because Linus doesn't want to support desktops, he was rejected because it was poorly coded and he didn't want to work on it until it got to the point hat Linus would accept it.
Regardless its their Linux and they will have to name it something people will cleary understand is not Linus.
While Linus has the trademark for Linux, he doesn't really care if you fork and call it Linux unless it can't run Linux applications. (And, honestly, that's more a glibc plus ABI issue than a 'kernel' issue.) All the big distros maintain a kernel fork and have no problem calling it 'Linux'.
MS does not have different kernels for different OSes. In fact, they specifically removed the 'Home' and 'Professional' label on the boot screen of XP in service pack 2 so they could ship the exact same binary image.
And while the Windows kernel doesn't contain as much as the Linux kernel, none of the drivers differ either.
And Vista is the same way. Same kernel.
Now, granted, they sometimes come out with server specific version of Windows in general, like Windows 2003 Server, but those don't have any magical server optimizations in them either. They have different settings, but the kernel is wherever the kernel is evolved to...the same kernel has moved from XP to 2003 to Vista, although hopefully getting 'better and better', there's not a server kernel and a desktop kernel. The closest thing was the 9x kernel vs. the NT kernel.
Except that that plan is merely a proposal by a non-partisan body, one that's chaired by a Republican, and has no legislative support.
Why are Republicans always projecting their faults onto everyone else?
Wikipedia's wrong, because there is quite a lot of off-the-books spending that doesn't show up.
But taking the US government at their word, it's worth noting that, literally, the country everyone thinks is the biggest military threat to the US, the only one that might invade us, China, spend 8% of what we do on their military. That's total, not relative to their and ours economy. As they have a much bigger army than ours, it basically means their entire army is very poorly equipped and wouldn't last an hour.
The only ones between us and China are the UK, France, Germany, and Japan, in that order, with the UK at the biggest with 12% of our spending.
The only entity that is even plausibly a threat to the US is all of Europe, which combined spends 54% of the US.
That the developed world has choked off supplies of DDT to the developing world, without providing much in the way of a replacement (ironically, many of the replacements for DDT are much more toxic than DDT is) is a travesty.
What the fuck are you talking about? DDT is being used right now to fight malaria, and most of the current problem is that mosquitoes that have been heavily sprayed (Aka, the ones carrying malaria) have developed a resistance to DDT, dumbass. And it happened exactly why everyone thought it would, and why DDT was banned in the first place: It hangs around in the environment. Not just messing with other animals, but resulting in immune insects.
Yes, the US doesn't manufacture it at all, but plenty of other places do. And it's hard to see how a larger supply of DDT would help anything, or would have helped anything at any point.
And there are plenty of replacements for DDT, some of which work much better at the moment, and many of which are less toxic. The problem is trying to build one with a built-in expiration date so that it doesn't cause the same problems and immunity as DDT.
But no pesticide will ever be the solution to malaria. The solution to malaria is to buy enough anti-malaria drugs to given them to entire areas at risk at once for long enough to kill the malaria, area by area, until the entire world has been covered. It sounds expensive, but wouldn't cost that much in the long run.
It didn't matter there were arguments it was nonsense. It demonstratably was true, which I actually wrote about in my last comment but deleted because confusing. The problems already existed, Einstein just explained them.
You can be a superstar scientist in two ways. You can demonstrate how factually a certain theory is untrue, or you can come up with a theory that explains the known facts better. Einstein did both, he came up with a theory for relativity that explained already-known weirdness, but got his Nobel price for simply demonstrating that QM existed, without explaining it. (And, again, others had already seen the effect there, but he proved it had to require light be quantized and not merely waves, whereas others were not sure. Requiring light come in quanta completely broke all existing theories of light.)
What you can't do is come up with a theory that doesn't fit known facts and requires other theories to be wrong, which is what all pseudoscience does.
No one in the real scientific community will listen to any theory that does not fit known facts, so if you're going to come up with one, you damn well better prove the facts are other than they currently known first.
Homeopathy does both at the same time. It invents a new fact, 'water has structures', which has never been observed in science, and then doesn't bother to even try to explain this within current theory.
That's where people completely get science wrong. There is a difference between an observed fact and a theory. Theories explain observations. You can't make a theory that has no grounds in observations, it will be shot down instantly.
OTOH, if you make an observation that cannot exist in theory, which can be replicated, than you don't need any damn theories, science will be leaping to attention. It doesn't matter how insane your theories are, or even if you have a theory, unless someone can come up with better ones to explain this new observation.
Theories, in science, are a little game, with scientists pulling them this way and that, eventually getting somewhere they all agree. But observations aren't, and all theories are based on them. Theories that contradict or ignore or just don't have any observation that support them are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Is that a new version of Oscam's razor, "the only theory you can think up has to be the correct one"?
Um, technically, according to Occam's razor, as the only theory you can come up with is the simplest one out of all the theories you've come up with, it is indeed the most likely to be correct. Although a theory being the 'most likely' out of one possible candidates is sorta an insane concept.
But if we only have one theory, obviously we should use it until it fails to work or someone has a better idea.
how is this, CO2 absorbs infrared in three narrow bands corresponding to the molecules stretch, wag and scissoring but it also emits radiation in those same bands, I could argue that the CO2 in the atmosphere effectively increases the radiative surface of the Earth and would therefore cause cooling or I could argue that water being lighter than CO2 would tend to carry heat above the CO2 rich lower atmosphere and cool the globe as well.
You can argue it all you want, but until you do the math and figure out if that would actually work, it's a bit pointless. I'm not the guy you need to convince, and I don't know nearly enough about the math to judge any theory at all. And, I suspect, neither do you.
From what I do understand, trying to think of some rational reason we haven't all had the surface of our planet boiling hot and the air ice cold is somewhat difficult, and it took quite a long time to actually figure out a theory that explains that. (And explains Venus, and Mercury, and Mars and how they differ from each other and us.)
I don't think we are even that certain of the planets albedo yet.
I can't imagine why we wouldn't be certain of that. It's not hard to check, it's not like we've never seen the planet from the outside.
If someone did propose a spacecraft that could move in space, one of the first questions anyone should ask is 'What does it push against?'.
And, as anyone who designs spacecraft should be able to explain, it pushes against the propellant it spews out. That gets pushed one way, it gets pushed another. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's not rocket science, Newton would have been able to figure it out once you explained 'vacuum' to him. (And informed him he was right the first time, there is no aether.) He'd immediately see you could throw things out the back of the ship to move, and almost as immediately think of using expanding gas.
However, there have, indeed, been crazy rocket engines proposed that somehow don't need propellants, that that exact question has arisen, and most of those have consequently been dismissed as pseudoscience. (Sometimes the crazies manage to invent other things that, in theory, could produce movement, like pulling themselves towards other things by gravity, so they can't be instantly dismissed, even though that's absurd as we have absolutely no ability to create or even manipulate gravity except via the mass possessing it.)
The fact someone can ask patently obvious questions about scientific claims doesn't prove anything. It's when the person proposing the theory is unable to answer them that the entire thing begins to look a little shaky.
It's too bad the term "holistic" seems to have been hijacked by these quacks, because there's some promising stuff there that doesn't rely on unscientific conjecture.
Exactly. I'm of the opinion that health is affected slightly by a lot of things we don't realize, from not getting enough sleep to dust in the environment to chemicals in food to irregular eating habits to bad lighting, and I'd like that more people look at their health 'holistically' instead of wandering from illness to illness.
I'd also like more research done in that field. (Instead of curing sickness, which is where literally all medical research is done, because that makes the money.) A lot of small things would have to be studied separately, and it would be a lot of work, but it would be nice to know that the odds of getting disease X can be increased by skipping meals, whereas if you don't get enough sleep, you're not more likely to get disease Y, but if you do, it's likely to last 25% longer befoe you recover.
We actually have already done this sort of work on vitamins, and it's the reason we all eat, for example, iodized salt. And a lot of it is already known, I'd just like more research in that field, a field that logically should be called 'holistic medicine'.
But I'll be DAMNED if I have anything to do with 95% of the 'alternative medicine' crackpots out there.
There might, and I repeat might, be some useful chemicals in herbs we haven't discovered yet, although anyone who thinks that's a better method of distribution is a crackpot...I'll take consistent and known doses of medication, thank you. Anyone selling herbs that propose to do something are either liars or doing something extremely dangerous, basically selling unknown doses of untested medicine.
And acupuncture and chiropracty might have some stress/pain relief possiblities. But so does a good massage, and I'm not calling that 'medicine'.
Anything else is a scam, flat out.
Not only that, they're assuming their structures are the only ones that exist, when if imprints were left on water, any water would be full of them, thanks to everything it comes in contact with.