If the Royal family isn't living on the platform, a way for England to get it back is to send people out there to live, have them 'start a coup', and take over the country, and then request to join England.
Hey, it worked for Hawaii.
And, frankly, a popular coup by people leasing and working 'the land' against a royal family that hang out in another country and give orders isn't really that farfetched, and would look a lot better in the history books than England just invading Sealand.
Technically, instead of asking to join England, they could just dismantle the platform with enough explosives after the coup. I'm not sure, legally, what happens to a country when it stops occuping any surface area, but it would stop annoying England.
Why bother? There are countries where gambling is legal. Just set up shop there.
Considering you'd have to fly under someone's flag or risk getting sunk immediately by every country's navy as a pirate vessel, you'd need a country to sail under where gambling was legal anyway. (Which, incidentally, includes the US. Gambling is legal in 'the US', it's just not legal in most states.)
Oh, please. How much of a credit rating can Sealand have to start with?
The idea is implausible because no one will give you a loan to do this, but if you actually did, Sealand voiding your loan isn't going to void their credit, because it's obviously a personal loan they're voiding. Call it a 'bankruptcy law' if it makes you feel any better.;)
Yeah, but if they're not living there, and you are, you can just declare a coup and that you are now president-for-life, then fight them off when they attempt to come back. I'm sure it would be pretty easy to smuggle weapons onto the platform, considering there's probably not even room for a port authority.
Considering the traditional way of determining the actual 'government' is 'who is in physical control of the country', you are now the ruler of Sealand. They are the 'government in exile'.
Are members of Congress officially members in the time between two congresses? She might have stopped being a member when the 109 ended, and started again being a member when the 110 got sworn in?
OTOH, I suspect that, yeah, the 109 was officially 'Congress' until the second 110 started, because otherwise we'd have no successor to the President/Vice President.
The FCC shouldn't regulate content. I have no problem with the legal right of ABC to air the show.
However, the FCC should step in when broadcasters start attempting to silence critics in such an obviously bogus manner. Part of the requirements of owning and operating a broadcasting license is presenting opposing viewpoints, and the fact they would attempt to silence them off the air strongly implies they wouldn't let such viewpoints on the air in the first place.
If they don't want to do that, ABC/Disney should feel free to sell or return their broadcasting licenses and just produce content for others to broadcast.
Unlike the 'can't show a nipple' and 'can't say fuck' rules that the FCC have, over time, made up, the 'multiple viewpoints' concept is one of the basic reasons that television and radio networks have their spectrum for so incredibly cheap. They agreed to show multiple viewpoints, display content that people would enjoy, and inform them with news programs.
In other words, showing 15 minutes of commericals is much more a violation of the intent of their license agreement than showing 15 minutes of hardcore porn. Not that either would be a good thing, but at least some people want porn.
Arguing what is 'useful' and 'enjoyable' is always questionable, but the FCC doesn't even try anymore, instead enforcing rules it basically made up in the 1950s about 'decency'. The FCC has constantly drifted away from the original mission over the decades. One supreme court decision based on the idea that TV broadcasts magically show up in people's homes, instead of them, I dunno, having to tune a television receiver to them, completely screwed up broadcast TV for all time.
Alternately, we can end this absurd give-away and charge broadcasters full price for the spectrum, which would effectively drive them out of business.
Candidate B: 'Hi, I'm going to lower taxes while raising government spending while continuing my invasions of a random countries. Yee-ha!'
Candidate K: 'My opponent, if elected, is, by his own words, going to send us deeper into debt while killing American soldiers for no defined purpose. Also, 'yee-ha' is not a valid debating argument.'
Who to vote for, who to vote for...
Next election:
Candidate Y: 'Hi, if elected I'm going to eat kittens day in and day out, and rape puppies, and I'm going to give every American a free spaceship. Also immortality!'
Candidate Z: 'Please do not vote for my opponent, he is, apparently, going to eat kittens and rape puppies. Also, he's lying about the spaceship, there's no way we could possible afford to give everyone a free spaceship, and that wouldn't be a good idea even if we could, because you need hundreds of acres of land and millions of dollars of fuel to operate a spaceship. I don't know about the immortality thing, but Y constantly votes against health care and funding medical research.'
Candidate Y: 'The space program made America great! Why do you hate America? And what do you have against kittens?'
Z isn't going to do anything for me! He's just calling Y a liar and saying his ideas are bad! I'm voting for Y!
I really wish people would stop comparing lawyers to 'whores'. It's incredibly offensive to people who do what they have to to survive, but more to the point provide a useful service, vs people who are willing to hurt anyone to make a buck.
And anyone working in the legal department of a corporation certainly has enough influence to say 'No, we can't get them for this.'.
And the reason you're repeating this comment about a completely different radio station is what, exactly?
Incidentally, (2) He insists that the Americans are the primary agent preventing the third world from becoming prosperous. is at least debatable, true. I wouldn't say 'primary', but it's certainly in the top ten reasons. Just ask the people of Columbia or any of the other South American countries we've constantly overthrown if you need an example.
WTF does being ashamed to be an American have to do with being ashamed of free speech? We're ashamed of his opinions, that a society like ours could produce an idiot such as him. We're ashamed he's popular enough to have a fucking radio show.
We're not ashamed he has the right to say what he says. We're glad he does, so we know who to shun.
And forget 'America'. I'm ashamed the human race produces people like him.
That's the great thing about blogs. You can read people talking about about what incredibly stupid thing the Right thinks (Like the AP making up Jamal Hussian), without actually reading their whole stuff, or listening to their whole shows.
And Muslims, even the radical Sunnis who attacked us, have no problem with us being Christians. They could give a damn if we were Christians or Hindus or Buddhists. We're all not Muslims, but that really doesn't matter, as even the most radical of Muslim isn't trying to convert people, because attacking people certainly wouldn't be a logical way to do it.
What they care about is our culture influencing theirs, and our constant and continual meddling in the middle east, which includes overthrowing governments and installing dictators, and our propping up of Israel. They indeed are 'at war' with 'the West', not with Christianity, because they see 'the West', not Christianity, at war with them. (Of course, fools like you are attempting to make it Christianity they are at war with, in which case I kindly suggest you go find another damn country to use, one that officially believes in Christ.)
Anyway, no religion in the history of the planet has ever tried to convert a population by starting a war that isn't a war of invasion with them, and I'm not sure why you think this has happened now considering it doesn't make any sense. Forced conversions happen only when a country is ruled by members of that religion, like Spain by Islam or Native Americans by Christians. It's not 'I'm attempting to kill you, but while I'm at it I'll send Islamic vibes at you to see if you'll convert before you die'.
Incidentally, the idea we're 'at war' with anyone is itself a bit goofy. Someone attacking you exactly once is not 'a war', it is 'an attack'. Radical Sunnis in the form of al Qaeada got off one punch.
OTOH, you could be suggesting that this is a prelude to an invasion. Which, along with the fact you apparently have no idea of why various middle east countries seem pissed at us, shows exactly how much in touch with reality you are.
"The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -Anatole France
Or you can just regard 75% of the Old Testament, and maybe 50% of the New, as written by power-mad lunatics.
Seriously. Look at the laws in the Torah, the five five books of the bible, and see if you can find any of them attributed. The only ones 'from God' were the ten commandments, everything else just mysteriously showed up as rules of God, without, apparently, God having to actually tell them to us. Or they are, alternately, society's operating rules, and they weren't that bad a set of operating rules, got written down as 'God's law' by priests. I find that a little more believable.
It's the same thing in the New Testament. Half the 'laws' are compromises reached between the Roman Christians and the Hebrew Christians, have nothing at all to do with anything Jesus did or said, and aren't particularly relevant today. A lot of them were written by Paul, who was a religious fanatic who never met Jesus in his entire life.
If you look at the actual words of Jesus, and nothing else, you get a pretty good religion as an end result. Once you start including everything else in 'the Bible' you can get pretty much anywhere you want.
And I'm sure someone's pointed this out, but 'an eye for an eye' is not only Old Testament, it's maximum retribution, not minimum. It's not saying 'You should punish someone as they punish you', it's saying 'Under no circumstances can you kill a man for taking your eye', which was acceptable before then.
And it's one of the few OT laws Jesus directly addressed, saying if someone takes one of your eyes, you should offer them the chance to take your other, and not wish for any sort of venegance. A very hard idea to live with.
That is, in fact, how diesel trains already work, so it's obviously feasible. They have an electric motor on each wheel, which would result in some interesting car engineering changes if that was implemented, but nothing requires switching away from a traditional drivetrain for now. (Although having four motors would be a great safety feature. If you lost one motor, they could cut out the matching motor on the other wheel, and you'd still have two to drive to safety.)
What would be really cool is if they actually made a car with the ability to remove the turbine, generator, gas tank, everything, for short trips, and put it back in if you needed to drive long distances. I mean, it's just attached electrically, so it's not like there need to be tight mechanical threshholds to hook it in.
It could take up half the engine compartment, and essentially just sticks supports downward, you swing the front bumper open or something, and back up, leaving it in place. Either in your garage or build a way to lock it in place if it's outside, probably by attaching it to rings set in poured concrete. (Not that people would be likely to steal them at first, they'd weigh like 500 pounds and have no obvious way to move it. People don't normally steal car engines sitting on the side of the road for the good reason that it's really really hard. But eventually they'd figure out a way.)
Actually, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with extra batteries, too. Think about it. You have once set of batteries that gets you 40 miles, you have another set you can put in that gets you another 35 miles (Reduced because of the added weight), or you can put in a generator instead that gets you 25 miles on the battery but also holds 5 gallons of gas to get you another 150 miles on a single tank, and of course you can buy gas.
And it's trivially upgradable to the 'buy batteries on the side of the road' model of electric cars. In fact, let's just build those cars, with the automated replacement systems and all that, and make sure we can put self-contained generators in in place of batteries. Maybe instead of 50/50 that I was talking about, maybe have a very very small battery, and a large battery swappable for a generator, where the generator is designed to provide enough power to run 75 down the highway and 55 up mountains and essentially runs all the time, and the small battery is just a buffer.
That way the biggest complaint of electric cars, that you need at least one non-electric car to hand driving to grandmothers or whatever, is removed. You can get to work, and you can get anywhere else with five minutes of work. Not only that, but when you drive cross country for a week with the relatives, you can remove your generator there and tool around totally electric until you need to leave again.
CSS does, barring a few places that were unclear and can be intepeted in multiple ways, which have mostly been cleared up now.
Just because it's not 100% clear sometimes, and just because no one implements it correctly, doesn't mean it's not attempting define everything to the pixel.
Which OOXML is not even vaguely trying to do.
It's like if CSS defined things like:
netscape-2.0-border-color-behavior: true|false; If true, color the borders as Netscape 2.0 did.
Let's look at this logically. They had 19 people, willing to die. That means each attacker killed only 150 people.
Think about it: If you were willing to die, and wanted to take out as many people as possible, couldn't you, with no planning or real resources, figure out a way to take out 150 or so?
150 people per dead person spent is nothing. Seriously. There's probably some crazy absurd statistic I could come up with that 150 people a day die from being mauled by bears or whatever, but seriously, folks. You can't destroy the US by killing incredibly small amounts of people, especially if you have to find people willing to die to do it.
Heh. If it's one thing I've learned from Iraq, it's just how wrong I could be.
Not invading Iraq, I thought that was a bad idea, I thought weapon inspections could still 'work'. (I had fallen for the lie that they had, somehow, not worked so far.). But I used to think '2nd amendment is the ultimate check on the government' people were crazy. I was against gun control because it didn't work, not because I ever thought that any random force of people could stand up to the US military armed only with small arms and improvised weapons. I thought such concept were deluded rantings.
It may, possibly, be legal for the president and executive branch to choose not to enforce the law in certain circumstances. It may even be possible for the president to direct the executive branch not to enforce the law.
What is certain is that it is 100% not within the president's power to direct the executive branch to break the law, and even if he does so, it is still illegal for them to do it. (And he can be impeached as well.)
In other words, if Congress passes a law saying that jaywalking is a felony punishable by 15 years in prison, it might, in theory, be legally possible for the president to direct that no one under him arrest anyone for jaywalking. Note, legally, this is actually untested, the courts have ruled rather erratically on this, some affirming the power of the executive branch to operate however it wants within the law, and some claiming the legislative branch has ultimate control. If it ever got a crisis point, Congress could just attach rules to each and every spending bill directing where the money has to be spent, but it's really been a somewhat give and take situation.
However, it is not possible for him to order people under him to jaywalk, and thus make their jaywalking legal. Period. It is not possible under any logical interpetation of the constitution and how the government works.
There have been other signing statements before Bush, and all of them were directives at how the executive branch should interpret laws with regard to enforcing them. Sometimes laws are confusing to start with, so the president needs to say 'As I understand the law, we need to do this'.
None of them asserted the right to break laws aimed at controlling the executive branch. There have been challenges to laws controlling the executive branch, but they've all happened in the courts, not by just asserting things in signing statements that tell everyone in the executive branch to break the law.
Executive orders are the same idea. The president directs the executive branch to do things that are legal, but not required by law as passed. You can't issue executive orders that violate the law either.
If MS doesn't know what's going on in the.doc format, they had a perfectly logical way to do everything:
They could have written a standard that included generic workarounds, like 'offset this data one pixel upward' or 'put this footnote here, instead of over there where it logically belongs', to cope with some random behavior of some version of Word that no one knows about.
Then their converter could just add that in when converting, and other people who've already reverse-engineered.doc readers could too, or just not bother, and everyone could display the stuff properly once converted.
Instead, now we have all producers of products that read OOXML have to reverse engineer all versions of Word and even WordPerfect. If I'm writing a new word processor that doesn't read Word 95 files, why the hell do I need to know how Word 95 formatted something to implement OOXML?
Someone writing a converter obviously will need to know that, and put in generic layout workarounds that fix specific problems, but the whole damn point of open standards is that we start using them so every word processing application doesn't have to be able to know eight million formats, and Microsoft managed to make an 'open standard' that requires exactly that.
well, yeah, you can always find lunatics. I'm sure you can find someone who advocates the forced inter-breeding of all races so skin color doesn't matter anymore, but that doesn't mean people who are anti-racism are idiots.
And lunatics on the left are more 'colorful', whereas lunatics on the right are usually just religious fanatics and the media doesn't like poking religious fanatics, because religious fanatics have vast networks of people willing to leap into action at any perceived oppression.
This is because the right takes their lunatics more seriously than the left. They give them radio shows, they feed them talking points. They link together vast networks of lunatics that repeat whatever talking points they are handed.
It's a delibrate attempt to drive 'mainstream' thought to the right. After all, if ten thousand people think all Muslims should be, for example, flayed alive, then that moves the average distrust of Muslims by he American people slightly up. If they can get ten thousand people asserting they think abortion is murder and that abortion doctors should be arrested, than that move the average slightly to the right.
There probably is something comparable on the left, possibly in California. It's not being feed by the Democrats, it probably comprises four hundred people, instead of the hundreds of thousands the one on the right has, and it's mainly just an echo chamber with nothing escaping, until some crazy-ass person is quoted by the Republicans as 'Look at what the evil liberals think!'.
Almost all Americans are in the middle of every issue, or were in the middle until Republican successfully moved the middle. Which appears, hilariously, to have backfired in the last election, as people who were originally leaning 10% towards the right now find themselves closer to the left. They moved 'the middle', which the media played along with and actually helped, and thus they moved the framing of every issue to include quite absurd things like 'How much should we torture people?', but they didn't managed to actually move the American public.;)
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If the Royal family isn't living on the platform, a way for England to get it back is to send people out there to live, have them 'start a coup', and take over the country, and then request to join England.
Hey, it worked for Hawaii.
And, frankly, a popular coup by people leasing and working 'the land' against a royal family that hang out in another country and give orders isn't really that farfetched, and would look a lot better in the history books than England just invading Sealand.
Technically, instead of asking to join England, they could just dismantle the platform with enough explosives after the coup. I'm not sure, legally, what happens to a country when it stops occuping any surface area, but it would stop annoying England.
Why bother? There are countries where gambling is legal. Just set up shop there.
Considering you'd have to fly under someone's flag or risk getting sunk immediately by every country's navy as a pirate vessel, you'd need a country to sail under where gambling was legal anyway. (Which, incidentally, includes the US. Gambling is legal in 'the US', it's just not legal in most states.)
Oh, please. How much of a credit rating can Sealand have to start with?
The idea is implausible because no one will give you a loan to do this, but if you actually did, Sealand voiding your loan isn't going to void their credit, because it's obviously a personal loan they're voiding. Call it a 'bankruptcy law' if it makes you feel any better. ;)
Yeah, but if they're not living there, and you are, you can just declare a coup and that you are now president-for-life, then fight them off when they attempt to come back. I'm sure it would be pretty easy to smuggle weapons onto the platform, considering there's probably not even room for a port authority.
Considering the traditional way of determining the actual 'government' is 'who is in physical control of the country', you are now the ruler of Sealand. They are the 'government in exile'.
Actually, she wasn't even that, was she?
Are members of Congress officially members in the time between two congresses? She might have stopped being a member when the 109 ended, and started again being a member when the 110 got sworn in?
OTOH, I suspect that, yeah, the 109 was officially 'Congress' until the second 110 started, because otherwise we'd have no successor to the President/Vice President.
The FCC shouldn't regulate content. I have no problem with the legal right of ABC to air the show.
However, the FCC should step in when broadcasters start attempting to silence critics in such an obviously bogus manner. Part of the requirements of owning and operating a broadcasting license is presenting opposing viewpoints, and the fact they would attempt to silence them off the air strongly implies they wouldn't let such viewpoints on the air in the first place.
If they don't want to do that, ABC/Disney should feel free to sell or return their broadcasting licenses and just produce content for others to broadcast.
Unlike the 'can't show a nipple' and 'can't say fuck' rules that the FCC have, over time, made up, the 'multiple viewpoints' concept is one of the basic reasons that television and radio networks have their spectrum for so incredibly cheap. They agreed to show multiple viewpoints, display content that people would enjoy, and inform them with news programs.
In other words, showing 15 minutes of commericals is much more a violation of the intent of their license agreement than showing 15 minutes of hardcore porn. Not that either would be a good thing, but at least some people want porn.
Arguing what is 'useful' and 'enjoyable' is always questionable, but the FCC doesn't even try anymore, instead enforcing rules it basically made up in the 1950s about 'decency'. The FCC has constantly drifted away from the original mission over the decades. One supreme court decision based on the idea that TV broadcasts magically show up in people's homes, instead of them, I dunno, having to tune a television receiver to them, completely screwed up broadcast TV for all time.
Alternately, we can end this absurd give-away and charge broadcasters full price for the spectrum, which would effectively drive them out of business.
Which, as you may note, cleverly had no sponsors.
In other words, they paid to air lies.
Candidate B: 'Hi, I'm going to lower taxes while raising government spending while continuing my invasions of a random countries. Yee-ha!'
Candidate K: 'My opponent, if elected, is, by his own words, going to send us deeper into debt while killing American soldiers for no defined purpose. Also, 'yee-ha' is not a valid debating argument.'
Who to vote for, who to vote for...
Next election:
Candidate Y: 'Hi, if elected I'm going to eat kittens day in and day out, and rape puppies, and I'm going to give every American a free spaceship. Also immortality!'
Candidate Z: 'Please do not vote for my opponent, he is, apparently, going to eat kittens and rape puppies. Also, he's lying about the spaceship, there's no way we could possible afford to give everyone a free spaceship, and that wouldn't be a good idea even if we could, because you need hundreds of acres of land and millions of dollars of fuel to operate a spaceship. I don't know about the immortality thing, but Y constantly votes against health care and funding medical research.'
Candidate Y: 'The space program made America great! Why do you hate America? And what do you have against kittens?'
Z isn't going to do anything for me! He's just calling Y a liar and saying his ideas are bad! I'm voting for Y!
I really wish people would stop comparing lawyers to 'whores'. It's incredibly offensive to people who do what they have to to survive, but more to the point provide a useful service, vs people who are willing to hurt anyone to make a buck.
And anyone working in the legal department of a corporation certainly has enough influence to say 'No, we can't get them for this.'.
And the reason you're repeating this comment about a completely different radio station is what, exactly?
Incidentally, (2) He insists that the Americans are the primary agent preventing the third world from becoming prosperous. is at least debatable, true. I wouldn't say 'primary', but it's certainly in the top ten reasons. Just ask the people of Columbia or any of the other South American countries we've constantly overthrown if you need an example.
WTF does being ashamed to be an American have to do with being ashamed of free speech? We're ashamed of his opinions, that a society like ours could produce an idiot such as him. We're ashamed he's popular enough to have a fucking radio show.
We're not ashamed he has the right to say what he says. We're glad he does, so we know who to shun.
And forget 'America'. I'm ashamed the human race produces people like him.
That's the great thing about blogs. You can read people talking about about what incredibly stupid thing the Right thinks (Like the AP making up Jamal Hussian), without actually reading their whole stuff, or listening to their whole shows.
Not only is that a parable, as others have pointed out, it's a quote in a parable.
We aren't a Christian nation, you idiot.
And Muslims, even the radical Sunnis who attacked us, have no problem with us being Christians. They could give a damn if we were Christians or Hindus or Buddhists. We're all not Muslims, but that really doesn't matter, as even the most radical of Muslim isn't trying to convert people, because attacking people certainly wouldn't be a logical way to do it.
What they care about is our culture influencing theirs, and our constant and continual meddling in the middle east, which includes overthrowing governments and installing dictators, and our propping up of Israel. They indeed are 'at war' with 'the West', not with Christianity, because they see 'the West', not Christianity, at war with them. (Of course, fools like you are attempting to make it Christianity they are at war with, in which case I kindly suggest you go find another damn country to use, one that officially believes in Christ.)
Anyway, no religion in the history of the planet has ever tried to convert a population by starting a war that isn't a war of invasion with them, and I'm not sure why you think this has happened now considering it doesn't make any sense. Forced conversions happen only when a country is ruled by members of that religion, like Spain by Islam or Native Americans by Christians. It's not 'I'm attempting to kill you, but while I'm at it I'll send Islamic vibes at you to see if you'll convert before you die'.
Incidentally, the idea we're 'at war' with anyone is itself a bit goofy. Someone attacking you exactly once is not 'a war', it is 'an attack'. Radical Sunnis in the form of al Qaeada got off one punch.
OTOH, you could be suggesting that this is a prelude to an invasion. Which, along with the fact you apparently have no idea of why various middle east countries seem pissed at us, shows exactly how much in touch with reality you are.
Umm, who are you to judge who is "real christian" or not (where's that part in the bible about judging others).
You don't have to 'judge' people morally to see they aren't following the same path as you.
"The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -Anatole France
Or you can just regard 75% of the Old Testament, and maybe 50% of the New, as written by power-mad lunatics.
Seriously. Look at the laws in the Torah, the five five books of the bible, and see if you can find any of them attributed. The only ones 'from God' were the ten commandments, everything else just mysteriously showed up as rules of God, without, apparently, God having to actually tell them to us. Or they are, alternately, society's operating rules, and they weren't that bad a set of operating rules, got written down as 'God's law' by priests. I find that a little more believable.
It's the same thing in the New Testament. Half the 'laws' are compromises reached between the Roman Christians and the Hebrew Christians, have nothing at all to do with anything Jesus did or said, and aren't particularly relevant today. A lot of them were written by Paul, who was a religious fanatic who never met Jesus in his entire life.
If you look at the actual words of Jesus, and nothing else, you get a pretty good religion as an end result. Once you start including everything else in 'the Bible' you can get pretty much anywhere you want.
And I'm sure someone's pointed this out, but 'an eye for an eye' is not only Old Testament, it's maximum retribution, not minimum. It's not saying 'You should punish someone as they punish you', it's saying 'Under no circumstances can you kill a man for taking your eye', which was acceptable before then.
And it's one of the few OT laws Jesus directly addressed, saying if someone takes one of your eyes, you should offer them the chance to take your other, and not wish for any sort of venegance. A very hard idea to live with.
That is, in fact, how diesel trains already work, so it's obviously feasible. They have an electric motor on each wheel, which would result in some interesting car engineering changes if that was implemented, but nothing requires switching away from a traditional drivetrain for now. (Although having four motors would be a great safety feature. If you lost one motor, they could cut out the matching motor on the other wheel, and you'd still have two to drive to safety.)
What would be really cool is if they actually made a car with the ability to remove the turbine, generator, gas tank, everything, for short trips, and put it back in if you needed to drive long distances. I mean, it's just attached electrically, so it's not like there need to be tight mechanical threshholds to hook it in.
It could take up half the engine compartment, and essentially just sticks supports downward, you swing the front bumper open or something, and back up, leaving it in place. Either in your garage or build a way to lock it in place if it's outside, probably by attaching it to rings set in poured concrete. (Not that people would be likely to steal them at first, they'd weigh like 500 pounds and have no obvious way to move it. People don't normally steal car engines sitting on the side of the road for the good reason that it's really really hard. But eventually they'd figure out a way.)
Actually, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with extra batteries, too. Think about it. You have once set of batteries that gets you 40 miles, you have another set you can put in that gets you another 35 miles (Reduced because of the added weight), or you can put in a generator instead that gets you 25 miles on the battery but also holds 5 gallons of gas to get you another 150 miles on a single tank, and of course you can buy gas.
And it's trivially upgradable to the 'buy batteries on the side of the road' model of electric cars. In fact, let's just build those cars, with the automated replacement systems and all that, and make sure we can put self-contained generators in in place of batteries. Maybe instead of 50/50 that I was talking about, maybe have a very very small battery, and a large battery swappable for a generator, where the generator is designed to provide enough power to run 75 down the highway and 55 up mountains and essentially runs all the time, and the small battery is just a buffer.
That way the biggest complaint of electric cars, that you need at least one non-electric car to hand driving to grandmothers or whatever, is removed. You can get to work, and you can get anywhere else with five minutes of work. Not only that, but when you drive cross country for a week with the relatives, you can remove your generator there and tool around totally electric until you need to leave again.
CSS does, barring a few places that were unclear and can be intepeted in multiple ways, which have mostly been cleared up now.
Just because it's not 100% clear sometimes, and just because no one implements it correctly, doesn't mean it's not attempting define everything to the pixel.
Which OOXML is not even vaguely trying to do.
It's like if CSS defined things like:
netscape-2.0-border-color-behavior: true|false;
If true, color the borders as Netscape 2.0 did.
I'm sure Hawaii is happy to know that.
Let's look at this logically. They had 19 people, willing to die. That means each attacker killed only 150 people.
Think about it: If you were willing to die, and wanted to take out as many people as possible, couldn't you, with no planning or real resources, figure out a way to take out 150 or so?
150 people per dead person spent is nothing. Seriously. There's probably some crazy absurd statistic I could come up with that 150 people a day die from being mauled by bears or whatever, but seriously, folks. You can't destroy the US by killing incredibly small amounts of people, especially if you have to find people willing to die to do it.
Heh. If it's one thing I've learned from Iraq, it's just how wrong I could be.
Not invading Iraq, I thought that was a bad idea, I thought weapon inspections could still 'work'. (I had fallen for the lie that they had, somehow, not worked so far.). But I used to think '2nd amendment is the ultimate check on the government' people were crazy. I was against gun control because it didn't work, not because I ever thought that any random force of people could stand up to the US military armed only with small arms and improvised weapons. I thought such concept were deluded rantings.
Damn, do I feel stupid or what?
An important note about signing statements:
It may, possibly, be legal for the president and executive branch to choose not to enforce the law in certain circumstances. It may even be possible for the president to direct the executive branch not to enforce the law. What is certain is that it is 100% not within the president's power to direct the executive branch to break the law, and even if he does so, it is still illegal for them to do it. (And he can be impeached as well.)
In other words, if Congress passes a law saying that jaywalking is a felony punishable by 15 years in prison, it might, in theory, be legally possible for the president to direct that no one under him arrest anyone for jaywalking. Note, legally, this is actually untested, the courts have ruled rather erratically on this, some affirming the power of the executive branch to operate however it wants within the law, and some claiming the legislative branch has ultimate control. If it ever got a crisis point, Congress could just attach rules to each and every spending bill directing where the money has to be spent, but it's really been a somewhat give and take situation.
However, it is not possible for him to order people under him to jaywalk, and thus make their jaywalking legal. Period. It is not possible under any logical interpetation of the constitution and how the government works.
There have been other signing statements before Bush, and all of them were directives at how the executive branch should interpret laws with regard to enforcing them. Sometimes laws are confusing to start with, so the president needs to say 'As I understand the law, we need to do this'.
None of them asserted the right to break laws aimed at controlling the executive branch. There have been challenges to laws controlling the executive branch, but they've all happened in the courts, not by just asserting things in signing statements that tell everyone in the executive branch to break the law.
Executive orders are the same idea. The president directs the executive branch to do things that are legal, but not required by law as passed. You can't issue executive orders that violate the law either.
If MS doesn't know what's going on in the .doc format, they had a perfectly logical way to do everything:
They could have written a standard that included generic workarounds, like 'offset this data one pixel upward' or 'put this footnote here, instead of over there where it logically belongs', to cope with some random behavior of some version of Word that no one knows about.
Then their converter could just add that in when converting, and other people who've already reverse-engineered .doc readers could too, or just not bother, and everyone could display the stuff properly once converted.
Instead, now we have all producers of products that read OOXML have to reverse engineer all versions of Word and even WordPerfect. If I'm writing a new word processor that doesn't read Word 95 files, why the hell do I need to know how Word 95 formatted something to implement OOXML?
Someone writing a converter obviously will need to know that, and put in generic layout workarounds that fix specific problems, but the whole damn point of open standards is that we start using them so every word processing application doesn't have to be able to know eight million formats, and Microsoft managed to make an 'open standard' that requires exactly that.
well, yeah, you can always find lunatics. I'm sure you can find someone who advocates the forced inter-breeding of all races so skin color doesn't matter anymore, but that doesn't mean people who are anti-racism are idiots.
And lunatics on the left are more 'colorful', whereas lunatics on the right are usually just religious fanatics and the media doesn't like poking religious fanatics, because religious fanatics have vast networks of people willing to leap into action at any perceived oppression.
This is because the right takes their lunatics more seriously than the left. They give them radio shows, they feed them talking points. They link together vast networks of lunatics that repeat whatever talking points they are handed.
It's a delibrate attempt to drive 'mainstream' thought to the right. After all, if ten thousand people think all Muslims should be, for example, flayed alive, then that moves the average distrust of Muslims by he American people slightly up. If they can get ten thousand people asserting they think abortion is murder and that abortion doctors should be arrested, than that move the average slightly to the right.
There probably is something comparable on the left, possibly in California. It's not being feed by the Democrats, it probably comprises four hundred people, instead of the hundreds of thousands the one on the right has, and it's mainly just an echo chamber with nothing escaping, until some crazy-ass person is quoted by the Republicans as 'Look at what the evil liberals think!'.
Almost all Americans are in the middle of every issue, or were in the middle until Republican successfully moved the middle. Which appears, hilariously, to have backfired in the last election, as people who were originally leaning 10% towards the right now find themselves closer to the left. They moved 'the middle', which the media played along with and actually helped, and thus they moved the framing of every issue to include quite absurd things like 'How much should we torture people?', but they didn't managed to actually move the American public. ;)