It really is possible to love someone your entire life.
That's entirely subjective.
Global Warming really is the biggest problem facing the planet today.
The are libertarians and thus idiots on this. (The biggest? Let's just say one of the top five.)
Secondhand smoke actually causes cancer.
Secondhand smoke causes cancer when you sit next to someone smoking day-in and day-out. It does not cause cancer because someone lit up within ten feet of you outside. Not having seen that episode, I don't know which stance they took.
AA really does help a huge number of Alcoholics quit.
According to AA's own logic, AA has never helped anyone ever quit at all, because you cannot quit being an alcoholic. I don't know what Penn and Teller said, though. But South Park got that one right on the money.
The Boy Scouts are not ran by the Mormon Church.
They are not 'run' by it, no, which isn't what anyone asserted. If you're asserting in the last twenty years the Scouts haven't started all sorts of fuckary WRT conservative viewpoints and whatnot, you're not paying attention, they've been repeatedly sued. I say this as someone who was in the Scouts (Before any of these issues really were noticed.) and someone who does not support them today because of their homophobia and religious bigotry, and, no I learned about this crap entirely independent of P&T.
We really are getting fatter as a nation
I doubt they said that.
the Americans with Disabilities Act is a good thing
This goes along with their libertarian stupidity.
When P&T are doing shows about religion or bigotry or sex, they tend to make good points. When they aren't, when they're talking about government regulation, like the ADA show, they say a lot of interesting things that are mostly true, and then, somehow, pretend that what they just showed people isn't important. (The big thing on the ADA show was some lawyer suing an entire town under it as part of a scam, and some handicapped moron who said the ADA wasn't important just because.)
I.e, when they're attacking concepts, they're almost entirely on the right side. When they start attacking implimentations, instead of the concept they claim to be attacking, you know they're in the wrong but won't admit it.
With the Walmart show, they did about half and half. They're right, Walmart isn't as bad for communities as people make it out to be, which is the specific idea they attacked. That doesn't change the fact that Walmart is known for illegal union busting and deliberately reducing positions that give benefits and all sorts of anti-employee behavior. Which, mysteriously, P&T didn't address at all, because it would cut into their libertarian ideas.
P&T are, in a way, perfect libertarians. Totally social liberal and totally fiscally conservative. It's actually a pretty amazing show to watch if you watch it from that POV.
Walmart does not have benefits unless you'll full-time, and they're constantly reducing those positions to the point that I'd be really surprised if they have any no in management. And they do not pay 'far more' than the minimum wage, unless 'far more' is another dollar and a half an hour.
It's obvious why it looks around in the profile directories if you know the slightest bit about Skype.
Here's a hint for those that do not: Skype installs a protocol handler called skype:, in Firefox, so you can click on links and connect to people. Now, class, how would Skype go about doing that, or verify that it's already done it?
Also, there's a Skype toolbar that may or may not be installed. I don't know of offhand why the Skype program would need to know if that's installed, but it's not that hard to imagine a logical reason.
Um, because it wanted to refer to you as using real name, which is the entire damn point of having the field in/etc/passwd? Or even your username?
Without looking in/etc/passwd all it would know is your UID.
Or perhaps it's not even the thing doing it, perhaps it's using a shell script to see if the skype: handler is registered in Skype, and that script does 'ls -l' to check file sizes.
What I'd be interested in figuring out is exactly the fuck confidential information people think is hanging out in/etc/password? We all know that there are actually no passwords in that file, right?
And everyone know that programs access it all the time, right? Which is why it's deliberately world-readable?
Seriously, this entire article was made by someone who knows how to use strace but hasn't bothered running it on other programs, and has no idea what/etc/passwd is for.
Yeah! Eventually I'm sure the Iraqis will surrender! Again! And then we win! Again! And we can put an actual democratic government in place! Again! And then we can...leave then?
No, wait, we're fighting in Iraqi with people who do not recognize the Iraqi government. They don't like us because we are propping it up, but have no quarrel with us in general.
Well, at least, they started out with no quarrel, but they're getting more and more pissed at us. We can either help that along or just leave.
However, my original post wasn't about whether or not we should leave Iraq, it was just explaining why people were not thinking highly of the Democrats, because regardless of what you think, the American people actually do want to leave.
We've liberated the French two times and they were selling Stinger missiles to Saddam during the arms embargo via the 'oil-for-food' program, promulgating the largest fraud in world history.
We cut off their cash cow...of course they're pissed.
You need to do a bit more research. Their fraud with food-for-oil was our fraud. Consider the entire setup was somehow magically operating right through our checkpoints in Northern Iraq and the Gulf, and that the vast majority of the oil ended up with our oil companies somehow, there's a damn good reason that the investigation got shutdown at the UN.
The investigation lasted just long enough to pin it entirely on the other countries involved.
Well, on other countries opposing the Iraq invasion, and 'or enemies', oddly enough we seem to have let Australia completely off the list, despite recent evidence that has turned up that their government was involved at very high levels.
Not really. The GOP have unwavering people supporting them, and it's unlikely, at this point, that anything would make them change their minds.
Whereas the low ratings of Congress are due entirely to the fact that Democratic voters do not view the Democrats in Congress anything but scorn, because said Democrats are apparently fucking morons who don't have the slightest idea how to end a war. (Hint: You all could literally stay at home 24 hours a day and the war would end because it would become unfunded. You don't even need to do any active work at all.)
The GOP supporters, however, have no such discernment WRT to the actions of their leadership, (The ones that do, duh, have left already.) and would continue to support their politicians no matter what they do, be it invade Iran, withdrawal all troops from Iraq, or nuke Canada. If some stuff shows up and personally affects enough people, like the upcoming collapse of the economy and all their houses being foreclosed on, maybe those people will change their minds, but it seems a long shot at this point. (Changing their minds does. A recession is almost inevitable.) The GOP approval ratings may slowly slide down a percentage point or two every year, but they are not going to go down much more than that.
As a reducio-ad-absurdum example, one could almost argue that shipping a product with the power switch in the off position is an "effective technical protection method". Having the power switch in the off is indeed "effective" in prevent the copying of something, and you do indeed need to "apply some process or method" (i.e. switching the device on) to circumvent the technical protection method and copy something.
I don't think you quite understand the concept of reductio-ad-absurdum. That would be an argument carried to the logical, absurd conclusion, resulting in something so absurd everyone must agree the premise in invalid.
Whereas your example has, in fact, already happened, with people disabling autoplay on their computer being in violation of the DMCA.
The 'they want to introduce Sharia law' is exceptionally idiotic. There are a few non-integrated loons in various European countries who want to do that. There are probably more people in the US who want to implement Christian law of some sort, but you'll notice both groups are making exactly the same sort of headway, because, duh, no country is ever going to do that.
But, more to the point, Sharia law requires Muslim religious leaders. How the hell would this even work for 95% of the communities in the US, which have, you know, absolutely no Mosques or anything? Sharia law isn't 'Let's make the laws on the books match the Koran', it's 'Let us use Islam for the legal system'. You cannot have it, at all, without local Muslim leaders to do it.
Muslim countries under Sharia law, and, in fact, more theocracies, do not go around making laws that match their religion. They, instead, pass normal laws, but also give the power to a church to punish people. Without a very large systems of Mosques in this country, it would literally be impossible to implement any sort of Sharia law, because there wouldn't be anyone around to run said law.
And, more to the point, while Islam needs to be modernized, it already is modernized to the important extent that in most sane Muslim countries, even ones under Sharia law, said law only applies to Muslims in the first place. Yes, it's not ideal, because you can't 'unMuslim' yourself and opt out, but those countries happily have Christians and Jews and Hindus living among them.
That's how a lot of theocracies work, in fact. During most of Christendom in most of Christendom, when all of Europe was essentially a theocracy, Jews and 'Mussellmen' and 'Hindoo' were able to live somewhat openly and not expected to attend (mandatory) Church services and whatnot. Yes, sometimes the majority got riled up and there were problems and pomgroms, but it's hard to figure out how that would happen in America, when the majority under this absurd hypothetical theocracy would be Christians.
I propose the following since corporations don't pay taxes, only customers do, Corporations just pass on the added cost of additional taxes to customers, duh. We drop all corporate taxes and tax the shit out of ever citizen.
I know you're being sarcastic, but have you ever noticed that, of the people who say 'corporations don't pay taxes, they just pass them to along to employees and customers, we should stop double and triple taxing everyone', no one ever says, "So, um, why don't we just tax the corporations,and only the corporations, then?"
This solution would seem the most logical of all. No individual has to worry about taxes unless they're running a business, and, hell, people running businesses already have to worry about a lot of paperwork. But normal people wouldn't have to worry about withholding or deductions or any paperwork, and wouldn't have to figure out their income after taxes when job hunting and budget making, it seems like it would be sane to put all the taxes on the entities already doing the paperwork.
I mean, companies shouldn't mind, they 'aren't paying the taxes' to start with. And, yet, they apparently do mind, which suggests there's something slightly wrong with the concept they can and do just pass them on to other people.
You know, I don't agree with almost anything Ron Paul, and I'm not 'supporting' him, but at least if he got the Republican nomination we'd be free to stop worried about that loon Giuliani being elected.
Person who believes that the only morally justifiable things for the government to meddle in are those things which mainly help the rich keep the poor from taking their stuff, such as police powers and a military. At the same time, the government must not, under any circumstances, do anything that would help all members of society equally or society as a whole.
There are many gray areas. Such as roads, whereas despite the fact that cars are sometimes affordable by the lower classes, most of their maintenance costs comes from large trucks owned by the rich, so that has reluctantly been deemed acceptable. The courts were allowed, after a penalty was called, at the last minute when it was pointed out that, while anyone could use them, only the rich could afford lawyers to win in them.
Things like free or cheap health care that would help everyone? Don't be stupid, that's an absurd socialist idea.
Oddly enough, many people asserting they're libertarians do not appear to understand where the boundaries lines have actually come from, and thus can be trivially tripped up when discussing whether or not something is a libertarian idea, like invading Afghanistan. They do not know the correct question to ask of any government policy: Is it something that mostly benefits the rich, and, if so, how do we state it as some sort of moral principle to fool everyone?
During that time, they will sometimes become violent, and have thirty-year wars and people nailing things to Mosque doors and all sorts of problems, and then come out with a fairly modern religion. In many places, that process is already started, in some places is almost over. (Just walk into most American Mosques.)
Or, at least, that would happen if we'd leave them the fuck alone. Giving them an external enemy and trying to modernize them at gunpoint is exactly the opposite of useful behavior.
Because this time the guardsmen at Kent State will have much better weaponry, and they'll use hand signals so that nobody can record them being ordered to fire.
<sarcasm>Well, thank God we've killed all the Guard and used up all their equipment in Iraq then!</sarcasm>
They could just start that draft they've been talking about again.(1) I'm sure people drafted against their will will be perfectly willing to fire on people protesting the draft.
1) I'm sure a loyal, but out-of-date, Bushie is about to burst in here and says there's absolutely no possibility of them starting a draft, that's just liberal slander, blah blah blah, until someone points out that, in fact, the Administration recently has not only said they might start one, but it's always been a possibility, at which point the draft will magically turn into some great idea and everyone opposing it is a terrorist.
Maybe some "abstract concept" isn't "winning" but by any standard the 19 hijackers couldn't have asked for a reaction from the United States that would be more damaging to the United States.
Like I've been saying for a while, often you can take a Bush policy, look at it, and realize it is, literally, the Most Harmful Policy they could have done. They often walk the fine line of doing the most damage, while carefully being short of something that people would have risen up and stopped. It's a very fine line, and it's possible they've accidentally wandered over it too often for a Democratic Congress, but there are things that are very hard to explain.
For example, the response to Katrina. No, Bush doesn't dislike black people that much, and, as others have pointed out, that was known-in-advance disaster (At least, a known minor disaster, and, remember, people thought the hurricane itself would hit New Orleans until right at the end, so everyone thought there would be a different disaster, a leveled city instead of a flooded one.), and a great photo op. He could have ridden in mere hours after the hurricane, with food and water for everyone, yammered about God sparing the city, and then, when the flooding started and everyone realize what was going, been taken pictures of while handing babies up into helicopters and all sorts of shit, even giving people rides in Air Force One.
For someone whose ratings were starting to slip, it would have been very helpful and not the least bit dangerous to him. Hell, just a normal response would have been non-harmful. Instead he 'completely fucked it up' in ways that are near incomprehensible.
Other people attribute this sort of stuff to greed, or stupidity, or incompetence, or lunacy, or pettiness. An entire industry has sprung up to attempt to explain the policy decisions of this Administration, and people trying to explain each tree need to take a step back and look at the forest: George W. Bush, or at least his administration, is attempting to destroy this county. It's not a side-effect of anything, it is the actual goal.
There's even some fairly interesting circumstantial evidence of this: The right, for as long as I can remember, has projected their behaviors on the left. (The list is too long to go into, here, I have to run, but people know what I'm talking about. Think Foley, think K Street, think current obstructionism in the Senate, think Whitewater investigations into land deal vs. Sen. Steven's and others very real corrupt 'deals'. Things the right often does, the left mainly doesn't, and the right accuses the left of all the time.)
Well, how long as the right been accusing the left of hating America and attempting to destroy it? Did that little concept finally just click into place for you?
I don't know why they're doing this and I don't know what the end result is supposed to be. I suspect they think they can take and hold control once all faith in the current Republic is lost.
Next probable step in this process: Invade Iran. We're not losing Iraq fast enough, we need to get drawn into an even bigger war.
They don't want to do this at all. bin Laden's been quite clear about what he wants, he wrote a damn letter on it.
The only mention of Sharia law in that is that he wants western governments to stop meddling in Islamic nations and let them introduce Sharia law if they want. I.e., he wants self-determination for Middle-East countries, which he believes, and looking at them he's probably right, will involve them deciding on some form of religious-based law.
He has never given the slightest indication he's interested in the Sharia law for Western countries. In fact, as Sharia law only applies to Muslim and can only be done by Muslims, it would literally be impossible to implement it in most Western countries, and rather pointless.
That's not to say there aren't idiots in various Western countries (Not the US, countries like France that don't integrate their Muslim immigrants.) that want it for their little subculture, but that's not what 'the terrorists' want. The terrorists don't want the US to have anything the fuck to do with them or their countries.
Incidentally, thanks to the fact FTP works backwards, running an 'FTP server' on your computer is only a small violation of the contract, whereas someone on that box downloading something using FTP, from somewhere else, is a huge violation, if the violation is decided in terms of 'an open port on your machine that someone connected to and sent data over'. Normal FTP works by someone opening a control connection to the server, but, when files are uploaded or download, the server opens a connection back to that person. So the actual bandwidth usage is not used by 'the server'.
Which also means, if you're smart, you can open an outgoing ssh tunnel to some low-cost shell account, and forward a port on that computer to your FTP server's control, and not run an 'FTP server', but use a hell of a lot of bandwidth, in both directions, in outgoing connections you make.
In a technical sense, you're running a server, but it only reachable locally, and it wouldn't be that hard to connect forwarded ports on the external computer to the actual FTP program (Normally launched by inetd) instead of just forwarding to a port, and then you're not, under any logical interpetation, running a 'server'. I'd like to see how an outgoing ssh connection and random outgoing connections dumping files on people's computer is a 'server'.
Of course, bittorrent isn't a server either if you turn off incoming connections.
Those Democrats? Yeah, they're getting kicked out next election.
Just because some Bush-water-carriers snuck in, or, mostly, just retained their offices last election because no one challenged them, don't go around blaming the huge majority of Democrats who voted against this crap.
If you think Democrats aren't seriously about that, ask Mr. Not-A-Democrat Lieberman. Yeah, the Republicans managed to get him elected anyway, but I think the point was made that you cannot suck up to Bush and remain a Democrat.
And he's just the start. Vote like a fucking Democrat or you're out the next election, period. They'd rather have a damn Republican or 'Independent' in the seat than a stab-in-the-back Democrat who's going to working against them.
The Democratic Party was Republican-lite for almost a decade. When they decided they couldn't or wouldn't do anything about Bush, the actual Democratic voters said 'Fuck the existing party' and started randomly electing anyone who seemed moderately intelligent and willing to stand up for people. Even running them against Democrats.
You really should look at the 2006 election before claiming there is only one party in this country. There are two: The Big Business/Republican/Democratic party is one, and the Democratic netroots, which is very very quickly eating the existing Democratic party from the inside, is the other.
The administration likes to claim it's only applying to international traffic, so that's how some people refer to it.
However a) the NSA has repeatedly admitted it doesn't have the technology to just intercept international calls, b) there is no oversight, and c) the Bush administration just rammed a bill through Congress letting them tap people without a warrant as long as the target is not in the US.
For those who don't know what that means, 'targets' of a tap do not, in fact, have to be at either ends of the actual tap. If they are targetting someone who might call you via unknown means, they can tap all your incoming phone calls, even when that person is not, in fact, calling. Aka, if you know a non-citizen, they can tap all your calls if they want, even domestic ones.
And there's actually quite a lot of evidence to suggest they are, in actuality, tapping whoever the fuck they want to at any time at they want to. The top of the Justice department doesn't threaten to resign because you're tapping foreigners.
They actually did that bus jump. It's real. And, no, they didn't edit out any ramps.
They had to used CGI to edit the landing area shorter, to make it look like it landed closer to the edge than it actually did, because the bus actually jumped farther than it should have. (And they edited out the camera rig it smashed into.)
How? The gap is not level. Yes, it looks that way on film from certain angles if you're not paying attention, but the starting end was a several yards higher than the back end. Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
About the only physics that stunt played fast and lose with was by weighing down the back somewhat so the bus wouldn't rotate forward, and, thus, still be movable after landing.
State revenues in MN have exploded under the current administration. The problem is, as Sowell points out, that the legislature has misdirected funding. It's a typical tactic to start taking hostages anytime revenue needs to be raised: it's usually emergency rooms and cops, and in this case it was funding for NEW road projects, not maintenance.
MN has run a budget surplus for quite a few years, and, as I pointed out, the people wanted increased taxes so much they passed a constitutional amendment.
Don't run around blaming the Democrats because the governor signed 'wasteful' (Which, incidentally, are only wasteful in your mind, and appear to be exactly what the residents of MN wanted.) spending bills, but didn't sign the needed transportation bills until they were slashed in half.
Especially don't blame him when his issue was, as I said, not how much they spent, but how the collected it, by new taxes, when he wanted to pay for it by borrowing and using the surplus so that he could not have 'new taxes'.
I know, in the Republican universe, that taxes are always too high, but the people of MN completely disagree, they disagree so much they passed a constitutional amendment requiring the collection of taxes, something I'm not entirely sure I've ever seen before, because their legislature couldn't get any tax increase past their governor. Not 'allowing' the collection of taxes, it actually required the collection of taxes and spending of those taxes so that the legislature wouldn't have to pass a law, and hence it couldn't be vetoed.
I do like the anti-democratic idea that somehow people in a society don't have the right to collect taxes on themselves, though, because all taxes are evil and must be forced lower, no matter what the people in that society actually want. Thank you, Pawlenty, for defending that ideology instead of actually doing things that are the best for society, like good politicians, or even what they want you to do, like mediocre politicians.
There is NOTHING to suggest that there were bridge maintenance issues related to lack of funding. Nothing. Incompetence, maybe. Besides - the bill you referenced was just vetoed.
I know it was vetoed, that's what I said. The stupid 'No new taxes' governor vetoed it! Do you even read what I write?
Minnesota elected a loony. They thought they had elected one with Ventura, but no, he actually was mostly okay. But then they elected Pawlenty, who ran on 'no new taxes' and got into power. And then, to everyone's horror, people realized he actually meant it. As Minnesota actually needed more revenue at the time, because Ventura didn't have very good spending policies, they then spent the next three years fighting the insanity so they actually had a functioning state.
I actually don't know. I know there's a way to upgrade some of the more powerful ones to player other types of media that they were not designed to do, like FLAC. And FLAC actually takes more CPU than MP3. So if the CPU is there, I can't imagine them putting another chip in to do it. Yeah, it'd increase battery life, probably, but still.
Some stuff, like DRM WMAs, has only recently had chips comes out that can do it. (It and MP3 in the same chip.), so previous players had to have real CPUs in them that did that.
There are a few low-powered CPUs that have no problem decoding MP3s and aren't much more expensive than the CPUs needed to drive the GUI.
In fact, my category of 'cheap ones' might be almost completely empty at this point in time..there might only be 'very cheap ones' MP3 players with no UI, or rather a hardware one (Like all MP3 CD players, that are just normal CD players that have two extra chips, one to read a ISO9660 filesystem and maybe read IDv3, and one to decode MP3 streams.), and 'expensive ones' that do everything in a CPU.
Almost no digital watches are computers. A few, not many, older cellphones are not computers. Older car computers aren't, IIRC. (Some of them aren't anything except recording devices!)
A computer is a general purpose computing device, and must be Turing-complete. It has to be able to execute arbitrary code. (Even if there's no way to easily get the code in there.) There are plenty of electronic devices that are not computers, that are simply a few specific ICs thrown together.
General rule of thumb: If it has no ROM, it isn't a computer, because it has nowhere to store instructions, and hence can't be executing instructions. (That doesn't mean if it does have ROM, it is one...it might be storing something besides CPU instructions there.)
Many things that are computer aren't computers in the place it counts. Like cellphones...they don't actually use their CPU for anything to do with actually talking on the phone...the CPU is running the UI and phonebook and stuff like that, but hardwired ICs are running the compression and radio. Likewise with MP3 players...the very cheap ones have no computer, the cheap ones use a computer to pick a song and stuff, and only the expensive ones with excess CPU actually use the CPU to decode the MP3. The rest use cheap little MP3-decoding chips that get fed a compressed stream and output an uncompressed one, and that's all they can do.
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It really is possible to love someone your entire life.
That's entirely subjective.
Global Warming really is the biggest problem facing the planet today.
The are libertarians and thus idiots on this. (The biggest? Let's just say one of the top five.)
Secondhand smoke actually causes cancer.
Secondhand smoke causes cancer when you sit next to someone smoking day-in and day-out. It does not cause cancer because someone lit up within ten feet of you outside. Not having seen that episode, I don't know which stance they took.
AA really does help a huge number of Alcoholics quit.
According to AA's own logic, AA has never helped anyone ever quit at all, because you cannot quit being an alcoholic. I don't know what Penn and Teller said, though. But South Park got that one right on the money.
The Boy Scouts are not ran by the Mormon Church.
They are not 'run' by it, no, which isn't what anyone asserted. If you're asserting in the last twenty years the Scouts haven't started all sorts of fuckary WRT conservative viewpoints and whatnot, you're not paying attention, they've been repeatedly sued. I say this as someone who was in the Scouts (Before any of these issues really were noticed.) and someone who does not support them today because of their homophobia and religious bigotry, and, no I learned about this crap entirely independent of P&T.
We really are getting fatter as a nation
I doubt they said that.
the Americans with Disabilities Act is a good thing
This goes along with their libertarian stupidity.
When P&T are doing shows about religion or bigotry or sex, they tend to make good points. When they aren't, when they're talking about government regulation, like the ADA show, they say a lot of interesting things that are mostly true, and then, somehow, pretend that what they just showed people isn't important. (The big thing on the ADA show was some lawyer suing an entire town under it as part of a scam, and some handicapped moron who said the ADA wasn't important just because.)
I.e, when they're attacking concepts, they're almost entirely on the right side. When they start attacking implimentations, instead of the concept they claim to be attacking, you know they're in the wrong but won't admit it.
With the Walmart show, they did about half and half. They're right, Walmart isn't as bad for communities as people make it out to be, which is the specific idea they attacked. That doesn't change the fact that Walmart is known for illegal union busting and deliberately reducing positions that give benefits and all sorts of anti-employee behavior. Which, mysteriously, P&T didn't address at all, because it would cut into their libertarian ideas.
P&T are, in a way, perfect libertarians. Totally social liberal and totally fiscally conservative. It's actually a pretty amazing show to watch if you watch it from that POV.
Walmart does not have benefits unless you'll full-time, and they're constantly reducing those positions to the point that I'd be really surprised if they have any no in management. And they do not pay 'far more' than the minimum wage, unless 'far more' is another dollar and a half an hour.
It's obvious why it looks around in the profile directories if you know the slightest bit about Skype.
Here's a hint for those that do not: Skype installs a protocol handler called skype:, in Firefox, so you can click on links and connect to people. Now, class, how would Skype go about doing that, or verify that it's already done it?
Also, there's a Skype toolbar that may or may not be installed. I don't know of offhand why the Skype program would need to know if that's installed, but it's not that hard to imagine a logical reason.
Um, because it wanted to refer to you as using real name, which is the entire damn point of having the field in /etc/passwd? Or even your username?
Without looking in /etc/passwd all it would know is your UID.
Or perhaps it's not even the thing doing it, perhaps it's using a shell script to see if the skype: handler is registered in Skype, and that script does 'ls -l' to check file sizes.
What I'd be interested in figuring out is exactly the fuck confidential information people think is hanging out in /etc/password? We all know that there are actually no passwords in that file, right?
And everyone know that programs access it all the time, right? Which is why it's deliberately world-readable?
Seriously, this entire article was made by someone who knows how to use strace but hasn't bothered running it on other programs, and has no idea what /etc/passwd is for.
Yeah! Eventually I'm sure the Iraqis will surrender! Again! And then we win! Again! And we can put an actual democratic government in place! Again! And then we can...leave then?
No, wait, we're fighting in Iraqi with people who do not recognize the Iraqi government. They don't like us because we are propping it up, but have no quarrel with us in general.
Well, at least, they started out with no quarrel, but they're getting more and more pissed at us. We can either help that along or just leave.
However, my original post wasn't about whether or not we should leave Iraq, it was just explaining why people were not thinking highly of the Democrats, because regardless of what you think, the American people actually do want to leave.
We've liberated the French two times and they were selling Stinger missiles to Saddam during the arms embargo via the 'oil-for-food' program, promulgating the largest fraud in world history.
We cut off their cash cow...of course they're pissed.
You need to do a bit more research. Their fraud with food-for-oil was our fraud. Consider the entire setup was somehow magically operating right through our checkpoints in Northern Iraq and the Gulf, and that the vast majority of the oil ended up with our oil companies somehow, there's a damn good reason that the investigation got shutdown at the UN.
The investigation lasted just long enough to pin it entirely on the other countries involved.
Well, on other countries opposing the Iraq invasion, and 'or enemies', oddly enough we seem to have let Australia completely off the list, despite recent evidence that has turned up that their government was involved at very high levels.
Not really. The GOP have unwavering people supporting them, and it's unlikely, at this point, that anything would make them change their minds.
Whereas the low ratings of Congress are due entirely to the fact that Democratic voters do not view the Democrats in Congress anything but scorn, because said Democrats are apparently fucking morons who don't have the slightest idea how to end a war. (Hint: You all could literally stay at home 24 hours a day and the war would end because it would become unfunded. You don't even need to do any active work at all.)
The GOP supporters, however, have no such discernment WRT to the actions of their leadership, (The ones that do, duh, have left already.) and would continue to support their politicians no matter what they do, be it invade Iran, withdrawal all troops from Iraq, or nuke Canada. If some stuff shows up and personally affects enough people, like the upcoming collapse of the economy and all their houses being foreclosed on, maybe those people will change their minds, but it seems a long shot at this point. (Changing their minds does. A recession is almost inevitable.) The GOP approval ratings may slowly slide down a percentage point or two every year, but they are not going to go down much more than that.
As a reducio-ad-absurdum example, one could almost argue that shipping a product with the power switch in the off position is an "effective technical protection method". Having the power switch in the off is indeed "effective" in prevent the copying of something, and you do indeed need to "apply some process or method" (i.e. switching the device on) to circumvent the technical protection method and copy something.
I don't think you quite understand the concept of reductio-ad-absurdum. That would be an argument carried to the logical, absurd conclusion, resulting in something so absurd everyone must agree the premise in invalid.
Whereas your example has, in fact, already happened, with people disabling autoplay on their computer being in violation of the DMCA.
I suspect this is exactly the sort of thing the DMCA was meant to apply to. Let's check the list:
1) Is there a large organization?
2) Is there a customer of that organization?
3) Did the entity in 2) do something the entity in 1) didn't like?
Check, check, and check. DMCA violation.
No shit.
The 'they want to introduce Sharia law' is exceptionally idiotic. There are a few non-integrated loons in various European countries who want to do that. There are probably more people in the US who want to implement Christian law of some sort, but you'll notice both groups are making exactly the same sort of headway, because, duh, no country is ever going to do that.
But, more to the point, Sharia law requires Muslim religious leaders. How the hell would this even work for 95% of the communities in the US, which have, you know, absolutely no Mosques or anything? Sharia law isn't 'Let's make the laws on the books match the Koran', it's 'Let us use Islam for the legal system'. You cannot have it, at all, without local Muslim leaders to do it.
Muslim countries under Sharia law, and, in fact, more theocracies, do not go around making laws that match their religion. They, instead, pass normal laws, but also give the power to a church to punish people. Without a very large systems of Mosques in this country, it would literally be impossible to implement any sort of Sharia law, because there wouldn't be anyone around to run said law.
And, more to the point, while Islam needs to be modernized, it already is modernized to the important extent that in most sane Muslim countries, even ones under Sharia law, said law only applies to Muslims in the first place. Yes, it's not ideal, because you can't 'unMuslim' yourself and opt out, but those countries happily have Christians and Jews and Hindus living among them.
That's how a lot of theocracies work, in fact. During most of Christendom in most of Christendom, when all of Europe was essentially a theocracy, Jews and 'Mussellmen' and 'Hindoo' were able to live somewhat openly and not expected to attend (mandatory) Church services and whatnot. Yes, sometimes the majority got riled up and there were problems and pomgroms, but it's hard to figure out how that would happen in America, when the majority under this absurd hypothetical theocracy would be Christians.
I propose the following since corporations don't pay taxes, only customers do, Corporations just pass on the added cost of additional taxes to customers, duh. We drop all corporate taxes and tax the shit out of ever citizen.
I know you're being sarcastic, but have you ever noticed that, of the people who say 'corporations don't pay taxes, they just pass them to along to employees and customers, we should stop double and triple taxing everyone', no one ever says, "So, um, why don't we just tax the corporations,and only the corporations, then?"
This solution would seem the most logical of all. No individual has to worry about taxes unless they're running a business, and, hell, people running businesses already have to worry about a lot of paperwork. But normal people wouldn't have to worry about withholding or deductions or any paperwork, and wouldn't have to figure out their income after taxes when job hunting and budget making, it seems like it would be sane to put all the taxes on the entities already doing the paperwork.
I mean, companies shouldn't mind, they 'aren't paying the taxes' to start with. And, yet, they apparently do mind, which suggests there's something slightly wrong with the concept they can and do just pass them on to other people.
You know, I don't agree with almost anything Ron Paul, and I'm not 'supporting' him, but at least if he got the Republican nomination we'd be free to stop worried about that loon Giuliani being elected.
libertarian: noun,
Person who believes that the only morally justifiable things for the government to meddle in are those things which mainly help the rich keep the poor from taking their stuff, such as police powers and a military. At the same time, the government must not, under any circumstances, do anything that would help all members of society equally or society as a whole.
There are many gray areas. Such as roads, whereas despite the fact that cars are sometimes affordable by the lower classes, most of their maintenance costs comes from large trucks owned by the rich, so that has reluctantly been deemed acceptable. The courts were allowed, after a penalty was called, at the last minute when it was pointed out that, while anyone could use them, only the rich could afford lawyers to win in them.
Things like free or cheap health care that would help everyone? Don't be stupid, that's an absurd socialist idea.
Oddly enough, many people asserting they're libertarians do not appear to understand where the boundaries lines have actually come from, and thus can be trivially tripped up when discussing whether or not something is a libertarian idea, like invading Afghanistan. They do not know the correct question to ask of any government policy: Is it something that mostly benefits the rich, and, if so, how do we state it as some sort of moral principle to fool everyone?
Islam is going to need 50-100 years to modernize.
During that time, they will sometimes become violent, and have thirty-year wars and people nailing things to Mosque doors and all sorts of problems, and then come out with a fairly modern religion. In many places, that process is already started, in some places is almost over. (Just walk into most American Mosques.)
Or, at least, that would happen if we'd leave them the fuck alone. Giving them an external enemy and trying to modernize them at gunpoint is exactly the opposite of useful behavior.
Minor correction: Those states already serve as a breeding and training ground for militant groups.
In fact, we'd call them 'terrorists', except they are, apparently, on the right, so they're, I dunno, 'slightly bad people'.
Because this time the guardsmen at Kent State will have much better weaponry, and they'll use hand signals so that nobody can record them being ordered to fire.
<sarcasm>Well, thank God we've killed all the Guard and used up all their equipment in Iraq then!</sarcasm>
They could just start that draft they've been talking about again.(1) I'm sure people drafted against their will will be perfectly willing to fire on people protesting the draft.
1) I'm sure a loyal, but out-of-date, Bushie is about to burst in here and says there's absolutely no possibility of them starting a draft, that's just liberal slander, blah blah blah, until someone points out that, in fact, the Administration recently has not only said they might start one, but it's always been a possibility, at which point the draft will magically turn into some great idea and everyone opposing it is a terrorist.
Maybe some "abstract concept" isn't "winning" but by any standard the 19 hijackers couldn't have asked for a reaction from the United States that would be more damaging to the United States.
Like I've been saying for a while, often you can take a Bush policy, look at it, and realize it is, literally, the Most Harmful Policy they could have done. They often walk the fine line of doing the most damage, while carefully being short of something that people would have risen up and stopped. It's a very fine line, and it's possible they've accidentally wandered over it too often for a Democratic Congress, but there are things that are very hard to explain.
For example, the response to Katrina. No, Bush doesn't dislike black people that much, and, as others have pointed out, that was known-in-advance disaster (At least, a known minor disaster, and, remember, people thought the hurricane itself would hit New Orleans until right at the end, so everyone thought there would be a different disaster, a leveled city instead of a flooded one.), and a great photo op. He could have ridden in mere hours after the hurricane, with food and water for everyone, yammered about God sparing the city, and then, when the flooding started and everyone realize what was going, been taken pictures of while handing babies up into helicopters and all sorts of shit, even giving people rides in Air Force One.
For someone whose ratings were starting to slip, it would have been very helpful and not the least bit dangerous to him. Hell, just a normal response would have been non-harmful. Instead he 'completely fucked it up' in ways that are near incomprehensible.
Other people attribute this sort of stuff to greed, or stupidity, or incompetence, or lunacy, or pettiness. An entire industry has sprung up to attempt to explain the policy decisions of this Administration, and people trying to explain each tree need to take a step back and look at the forest: George W. Bush, or at least his administration, is attempting to destroy this county. It's not a side-effect of anything, it is the actual goal.
There's even some fairly interesting circumstantial evidence of this: The right, for as long as I can remember, has projected their behaviors on the left. (The list is too long to go into, here, I have to run, but people know what I'm talking about. Think Foley, think K Street, think current obstructionism in the Senate, think Whitewater investigations into land deal vs. Sen. Steven's and others very real corrupt 'deals'. Things the right often does, the left mainly doesn't, and the right accuses the left of all the time.)
Well, how long as the right been accusing the left of hating America and attempting to destroy it? Did that little concept finally just click into place for you?
I don't know why they're doing this and I don't know what the end result is supposed to be. I suspect they think they can take and hold control once all faith in the current Republic is lost.
Next probable step in this process: Invade Iran. We're not losing Iraq fast enough, we need to get drawn into an even bigger war.
They don't want to do this at all. bin Laden's been quite clear about what he wants, he wrote a damn letter on it.
The only mention of Sharia law in that is that he wants western governments to stop meddling in Islamic nations and let them introduce Sharia law if they want. I.e., he wants self-determination for Middle-East countries, which he believes, and looking at them he's probably right, will involve them deciding on some form of religious-based law.
He has never given the slightest indication he's interested in the Sharia law for Western countries. In fact, as Sharia law only applies to Muslim and can only be done by Muslims, it would literally be impossible to implement it in most Western countries, and rather pointless.
That's not to say there aren't idiots in various Western countries (Not the US, countries like France that don't integrate their Muslim immigrants.) that want it for their little subculture, but that's not what 'the terrorists' want. The terrorists don't want the US to have anything the fuck to do with them or their countries.
Incidentally, thanks to the fact FTP works backwards, running an 'FTP server' on your computer is only a small violation of the contract, whereas someone on that box downloading something using FTP, from somewhere else, is a huge violation, if the violation is decided in terms of 'an open port on your machine that someone connected to and sent data over'. Normal FTP works by someone opening a control connection to the server, but, when files are uploaded or download, the server opens a connection back to that person. So the actual bandwidth usage is not used by 'the server'.
Which also means, if you're smart, you can open an outgoing ssh tunnel to some low-cost shell account, and forward a port on that computer to your FTP server's control, and not run an 'FTP server', but use a hell of a lot of bandwidth, in both directions, in outgoing connections you make.
In a technical sense, you're running a server, but it only reachable locally, and it wouldn't be that hard to connect forwarded ports on the external computer to the actual FTP program (Normally launched by inetd) instead of just forwarding to a port, and then you're not, under any logical interpetation, running a 'server'. I'd like to see how an outgoing ssh connection and random outgoing connections dumping files on people's computer is a 'server'.
Of course, bittorrent isn't a server either if you turn off incoming connections.
There were only a few Democrats who helped.
Those Democrats? Yeah, they're getting kicked out next election.
Just because some Bush-water-carriers snuck in, or, mostly, just retained their offices last election because no one challenged them, don't go around blaming the huge majority of Democrats who voted against this crap.
If you think Democrats aren't seriously about that, ask Mr. Not-A-Democrat Lieberman. Yeah, the Republicans managed to get him elected anyway, but I think the point was made that you cannot suck up to Bush and remain a Democrat.
And he's just the start. Vote like a fucking Democrat or you're out the next election, period. They'd rather have a damn Republican or 'Independent' in the seat than a stab-in-the-back Democrat who's going to working against them.
The Democratic Party was Republican-lite for almost a decade. When they decided they couldn't or wouldn't do anything about Bush, the actual Democratic voters said 'Fuck the existing party' and started randomly electing anyone who seemed moderately intelligent and willing to stand up for people. Even running them against Democrats.
You really should look at the 2006 election before claiming there is only one party in this country. There are two: The Big Business/Republican/Democratic party is one, and the Democratic netroots, which is very very quickly eating the existing Democratic party from the inside, is the other.
The administration likes to claim it's only applying to international traffic, so that's how some people refer to it.
However a) the NSA has repeatedly admitted it doesn't have the technology to just intercept international calls, b) there is no oversight, and c) the Bush administration just rammed a bill through Congress letting them tap people without a warrant as long as the target is not in the US.
For those who don't know what that means, 'targets' of a tap do not, in fact, have to be at either ends of the actual tap. If they are targetting someone who might call you via unknown means, they can tap all your incoming phone calls, even when that person is not, in fact, calling. Aka, if you know a non-citizen, they can tap all your calls if they want, even domestic ones.
And there's actually quite a lot of evidence to suggest they are, in actuality, tapping whoever the fuck they want to at any time at they want to. The top of the Justice department doesn't threaten to resign because you're tapping foreigners.
They actually did that bus jump. It's real. And, no, they didn't edit out any ramps.
They had to used CGI to edit the landing area shorter, to make it look like it landed closer to the edge than it actually did, because the bus actually jumped farther than it should have. (And they edited out the camera rig it smashed into.)
How? The gap is not level. Yes, it looks that way on film from certain angles if you're not paying attention, but the starting end was a several yards higher than the back end. Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
About the only physics that stunt played fast and lose with was by weighing down the back somewhat so the bus wouldn't rotate forward, and, thus, still be movable after landing.
State revenues in MN have exploded under the current administration. The problem is, as Sowell points out, that the legislature has misdirected funding. It's a typical tactic to start taking hostages anytime revenue needs to be raised: it's usually emergency rooms and cops, and in this case it was funding for NEW road projects, not maintenance.
MN has run a budget surplus for quite a few years, and, as I pointed out, the people wanted increased taxes so much they passed a constitutional amendment.
Don't run around blaming the Democrats because the governor signed 'wasteful' (Which, incidentally, are only wasteful in your mind, and appear to be exactly what the residents of MN wanted.) spending bills, but didn't sign the needed transportation bills until they were slashed in half.
Especially don't blame him when his issue was, as I said, not how much they spent, but how the collected it, by new taxes, when he wanted to pay for it by borrowing and using the surplus so that he could not have 'new taxes'.
I know, in the Republican universe, that taxes are always too high, but the people of MN completely disagree, they disagree so much they passed a constitutional amendment requiring the collection of taxes, something I'm not entirely sure I've ever seen before, because their legislature couldn't get any tax increase past their governor. Not 'allowing' the collection of taxes, it actually required the collection of taxes and spending of those taxes so that the legislature wouldn't have to pass a law, and hence it couldn't be vetoed.
I do like the anti-democratic idea that somehow people in a society don't have the right to collect taxes on themselves, though, because all taxes are evil and must be forced lower, no matter what the people in that society actually want. Thank you, Pawlenty, for defending that ideology instead of actually doing things that are the best for society, like good politicians, or even what they want you to do, like mediocre politicians.
There is NOTHING to suggest that there were bridge maintenance issues related to lack of funding. Nothing. Incompetence, maybe. Besides - the bill you referenced was just vetoed.
I know it was vetoed, that's what I said. The stupid 'No new taxes' governor vetoed it! Do you even read what I write?
Minnesota elected a loony. They thought they had elected one with Ventura, but no, he actually was mostly okay. But then they elected Pawlenty, who ran on 'no new taxes' and got into power. And then, to everyone's horror, people realized he actually meant it. As Minnesota actually needed more revenue at the time, because Ventura didn't have very good spending policies, they then spent the next three years fighting the insanity so they actually had a functioning state.
They failed.
I actually don't know. I know there's a way to upgrade some of the more powerful ones to player other types of media that they were not designed to do, like FLAC. And FLAC actually takes more CPU than MP3. So if the CPU is there, I can't imagine them putting another chip in to do it. Yeah, it'd increase battery life, probably, but still.
Some stuff, like DRM WMAs, has only recently had chips comes out that can do it. (It and MP3 in the same chip.), so previous players had to have real CPUs in them that did that.
There are a few low-powered CPUs that have no problem decoding MP3s and aren't much more expensive than the CPUs needed to drive the GUI.
In fact, my category of 'cheap ones' might be almost completely empty at this point in time..there might only be 'very cheap ones' MP3 players with no UI, or rather a hardware one (Like all MP3 CD players, that are just normal CD players that have two extra chips, one to read a ISO9660 filesystem and maybe read IDv3, and one to decode MP3 streams.), and 'expensive ones' that do everything in a CPU.
Almost no digital watches are computers. A few, not many, older cellphones are not computers. Older car computers aren't, IIRC. (Some of them aren't anything except recording devices!)
A computer is a general purpose computing device, and must be Turing-complete. It has to be able to execute arbitrary code. (Even if there's no way to easily get the code in there.) There are plenty of electronic devices that are not computers, that are simply a few specific ICs thrown together.
General rule of thumb: If it has no ROM, it isn't a computer, because it has nowhere to store instructions, and hence can't be executing instructions. (That doesn't mean if it does have ROM, it is one...it might be storing something besides CPU instructions there.)
Many things that are computer aren't computers in the place it counts. Like cellphones...they don't actually use their CPU for anything to do with actually talking on the phone...the CPU is running the UI and phonebook and stuff like that, but hardwired ICs are running the compression and radio. Likewise with MP3 players...the very cheap ones have no computer, the cheap ones use a computer to pick a song and stuff, and only the expensive ones with excess CPU actually use the CPU to decode the MP3. The rest use cheap little MP3-decoding chips that get fed a compressed stream and output an uncompressed one, and that's all they can do.