Yes, but the issue wasn't actually who paid for the phone calls, it was what kind of phone calls they were. He paid for the calls, at the time he made them, which is a detail that is usually left out of the story.
No, the question was: There is a law that prohibits Federal employees from soliciting for campaign contributions on Federal property. The President and Vice President are not subject to this law. However, Gore did it for others, which, as it turns out, may not be legal. Or it may be, who knows?
The intent of the law was to stop people from getting campaign contributions under a guise of authority using Federal resources. It's not legal for someone who works at the FBI to put up posters and solicit contributions from visitors at the FBI.
Gore's behavior wasn't anywhere near that. He didn't solicit donations from people in the White House, visitors or staff. He didn't use government money, he didn't use government resources except for a phone, (Which he is allowed to make any personal calls he wants to on, as long as he pays for them.) he didn't even do it on the clock as, of course, Vice Presidents punch no clock.
Even if the law disallows the Vice President from campaigning on behalf of others, which it's not at all clear it does, and even if Gore knew the money he was collecting was hard money that would go to specific candidates, vs. soft money which would go to the party as a whole (Which the law did not cover), which it's not clear he knew, it's really hard to read anything unethical into his behavior. He was advised it was legal, when he was told it might not be, he stopped. Like he said, there hadn't been any case law on the topic whatsoever. (Which was presented as some sort of legal nitpicking by the media.)
The whole thing was a non-issue. It wasn't worth an actual investigation, it certainly wasn't worth the media time. But so was 80% of the stuff investigated by the Republicans under the Clinton administration.
That's not to say the other 20% ended up being bad stuff, but I'm a guy who thinks there should be investigations by Congress if there is the appearance of the slightest bit of wrongdoing, and the fact that fully 80% of the investigations failed to met my fairly low bar shows how silly they were.
Meanwhile, there had been literally dozens of things Bush did that should have been investigated. I'm not even talking about the obvious ones, like illegal wiretaps, torture, and this new mail thing, but even crap like no-bid contracts and other spend-government-money-by-throwing-it-at-my-friend s stuff. I don't know to what extend there was wrongdoing, but there are more than five things I've heard Bush admit doing that sound a hell of a lot more illegal than anything Clinton did, and quite a lot more I've read about.
Tools that don't care about legacy support are unaffected by this; they can just pick the closest modern option to whatever the legacy flag calls for on input, and not output documents that use them.
And thus tools, legally, are not OOXML, and won't qualify for purchasing by companies that specify OOXML. Which is the entire point.
There's a difference between 'We need to make sure that old documents can be converted correctly.', and 'We will literally convert old documents into a new representation that contains all their weirdness, and we won't explain how to implement said weirdness in the standard.'.
What Microsoft has produced is not even a standard. Standards must specify everything, or reference other standards that specify everything. They can't reference applications.
If Microsoft wants to keep secret how to turn Office 95 documents into OOXML, fine. Producing a standard doesn't mean you have to explain how to convert things into that standard.
It does, however, mean you have to explain exactly what should happen if mwSmallCaps is true, to the pixel. You can't just pawn it off on the unexplained hypothetical behavior of some other application.
That's where all these crazy circumstances about ticking bombs and stuff falls apart.
If it truly was needed, the correct procedure, under a government of laws and trials by jury, is to break the law, and explain it to the court later.
And, yes, arguing 'I had to commit that crime to prevent a larger one' is a perfectly valid legal defense, even when there's no specific law to that effect. I.e., self-defense would be, and was for longest time, legal under English common law without any specific law to that effect.
Of course, get anywhere past assault of someone, and what is a 'larger' crime is up for debate. It probably wouldn't be okay to burn down a house to stop someone from jaywalking. It probably is okay to burn down a house to stop a whole neighborhood from burning down, but I wouldn't recommend trying it out in court.
Anyway, we don't need to make laws allowing people to do whatever they want in emergencies, because we already have a check on the law when reasonable people would allow lawbreaking in emergencies, and it's called 'a jury'.
Of course, the very concept of a jury requires an arrest and a trial, which requires not doing it in fucking secret. You want to torture someone to stop a nuclear bomb going off, or whatever the crazy concept is this week, fine. Do it. Then turn yourself in to the police. Don't pass laws saying you can do it with no review, in secret, whenever you say it's important enough.
It's not paradoxical at all, when you learn the history of neocons.
You see, neocons used to be liberals, way way back in the 60s. They were very pro-Israel, and this was when Israel was doing some really really bad stuff. Basically, their idea was to remake the Middle East into some liberal paradise, where 'liberal' is being used in the traditional sense of 'enlightenment freedom of mankind, John Locke and all men are created equal stuff', and not the current sense, which is more 'progressive'. The left was very 'liberal' at the time, with equality for women and blacks and all sorts of things, so the neocons said, hey, good idea, let's do the same for the entire Middle East. By invading and occupying it.
This idea was, because liberals have at least nominal critical thinking skills, recognized as fucking batshit insane, so the liberals kicked them out, despite them being generally supportive of Israel in principle, if not in their specific actions.
They then drifted over to the right, who weren't big fans of Israel, but luckily they were big enemies of Communism, which was meddling in the middle east, so the US meddled back. I suspect the religious loons' gains in that time frame were due to the neocons, who realized they could make Israel a religious issue if they framed it as some biblical thing. (Plus, Jew-hating was so passe by that time, thanks to that 'Hitler' chap, so the religious loons had mostly given it up.)
But, anyway, neocons are liberals, in that, their ideas, or at least what they claim are their ideas, are 'to promote freedom'. That is, technically, all liberalism is. Everything else on the left, like I said, is more 'progressivism', which is attempting to fix problems. For example, liberal thought would disagree with affirmative action, because it does not treat all equally, progressive thought might like it, because it attempts to fix problems. (Of course, progressives could disagree that it works, or that said problems exist.)
Of course, they aren't actually promoting freedom, nor are they doing it to promote freedom. Die-hard ones are doing it because they support Israel 100%, and the rest are doing it so they can war profiteer.
But if you've ever wondered how 'conservatives' could critize Clinton's tiny force in Bosnia, which cost almost no American lives and actually worked in fixing that nation, but support the Iraq invasion, that's the reason for the disconnect. Pat Buchanan, of all the people I never though I'd agree with, gets it too, although his solution is to do nothing, whereas I think sometimes it's okay to keep the peace.
It's also why we're screwing around with Iran possible-sometime-in-the-future WMDs and ignoring North Korea actually-have-them-now WMDs. Or ignoring Darfur and Somalia as they collapse. Somalia is so full of terrorists that normal people are fleeing to, of all places, Ethiopia. Or all the terrorists in Pakistan, because Pakistan is nominally 'friendly' towards Israel, at least until the next military coup.
You are, of course, absolutely right that the left can be equally as idiotic as the right. Probably for many of the same reasons. I used to believe differently, but painful experience has taught me the truth.
Only if, by 'the left', you mean some crazy-ass professor at some California college or some guy on some blog somewhere or Joe Liberman. The actual left is not idiotic at all. (Parts of the Democratic party itself are, but they are mainly idiotic in how they keep promoting the same losing stragities.)
OTOH, the right hold up quite idiotic people, like Ann Coulter.
In order to translate from right-wingenese to reality-speak, just assume that whatever a right-winger says to others actually applies to himself.
The rest of your post is flamebait, but this is actually almost 100% true, at least for the politicians on the right.
Seriously. Look at the last 40 years of Republican presidents. Name me one beside Ford that didn't break the law in a fairly obvious manner. I mean explicit laws passed to control their behavior that they then blatantly broke. Nixon with invading Cambodia, Reagan and H. W. Bush with Iran Contra, W. Bush with...um...everything.
Now let's look at the investigations. Nixon started things off, then...well, Ford pardoned him. Reagan and H. W. Bush were investigated, Bush fired the investigator when he got into office. W. Bush, of course, hasn't been investigated at all, for anything, thanks to the Republicans.
Conclusion: Republican Presidents break the law.
Now, on the other side, we have Carter and Clinton. Carter didn't do anything, and wasn't investigated that much, but possibly the Republicans were still getting up to speed.
Clinton, of course, was investigated constantly, and I mean constantly. Every single damn thing he did, they investigated, and we all know how that ended up. That perjury, and misleading the court during the Paula Jones case, were the only things that he was actually found to have done, although he did settle the sexual harrassment claim out of court eventually.(1) They investigated the White House Christmas card list, they investigated Whitewater, they investigated whether or not the Sock's the Cat fan club was using government resources. They managed to get the right-wing talk radio wackjobs, which they had just invented, to accuse him of multiple murders with regard to Vince Foster, although they intelligently didn't actually investigate that.(2)
Conclusion: Republicans, after 40 years of their own party's presidential lawbreaking, are projecting that lawbreaking onto Democratic presidents. Republican politicians keep this at somewhat sane levels, Republican mouthpieces feel free to get as crazy as possible.
And that's not the only instances of the Republicans doing what psychologists call 'projection'. Seriously, at times, it's almost surreal. Does anyone remember the 'Contract with America'? Anyone remember number one on the list? 'A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.'. It's almost cute.
In fact, do you remember that whole election cycle, how they kept talking about lobbyists and professional politicians?
1) Which doesn't mean he was guilty. The courts had actually dismissed the charges by that point, because even if her story was 100% true, she hadn't demonstrated that she was actually damaged by it, which I personally agree with. But she had appealed it, and it looked like the appeals court might undismiss it. However, all that's sorta moot, as none of that had anything to do with the presidency.
2) They also investigated Al Gore, and actually managed to catch him in a few things, like using his official phone to make non-official calls, which I'm sure is right up there legally with 'illegally invading Cambodia' and 'selling cocaine to finance the overthrow of Iran'. I mean, I sometimes print personal stuff using work printers, and just last election cycle I was able to hire assassins to take out the sheriff using proceeds from my meth lab, allowing me to install my own puppet in the sheriff's office. Who hasn't bent the law in some way or another?
"if we believe there's a ticking bomb in a letter we will send the bomb squad in first and resolve the legal issues later", there is no controversey.
No, please don't spread such silliness around. We already have quite reasonable procedures to deal with dangerous mail.
Bush's enablers, and I know you're not one, but bear with me, like to come up with absurd situations, then say 'In such a situation, do we really have time to follow legal niceties?', and want everyone to repeat them to put doubt out there. There are two problems. The first is that we already can deal with 99% of these absurd situations in the law. We've had no problem intercepting dangerous mail int he past, so obviously there's legal way to do it, probably via the Postmaster General's Office.
And, more to the point, we already have a process for dealing with edge cases when the law doesn't deal with them. We break the law, and then throw ourselves on a mercy of the court. If there really was some situation, in some utterly surreal universe, where searching the mail or tapping phones or torturing people was required to save hundreds of thousands of people, the correct process is to break the law, and then explain it in court, not to legalize the behavior in any circumstances the president sees fit.
You think Anakin's motivations in RotS were well-realized? Huh?
And Palpatine just wanted to take over, and wove a nice and complex plot to do so, I admit. But that plot isn't 'motive', the motive is the incredibly simple 'I wish to rule the galaxy as a Sith'.
I personally get excited about the potential birth of freedom in a formerly murderous dictorship.
You've got some mighty interesting definition of 'freedom' there. Although, in a sense, the ability to kill anyone for any reason whatsoever is really the ultimate in freedom.
Although you are correct about the 'formerly murderous dictorship'. It is now, of course, a 'murderous anarchy' evolving into a 'murderous theocracy'. Yay us!
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
I know that's how I justify all my murders of random people. They were being oppressed!
Actually, the originals took place in the 30s. The last in 1938.
I think they've said the new film will take place in the 1950s, just in time for the Commies to the villians. Too bad, I think Indy would have a lot of fun on campus in the 1960s, assuming he's still teaching.
And, BTW, can I suggest giving the dude a kid or something? This is supposed to be a serial, and Lucas has already proved he can do young stories in that vein with Young Indy.
Since they have to do the cliched 'He's settled down (Probably with Karen Allen, as it's rumored she's back too.), he's a family man, now he's getting pulled back out of retirement' start, all they have to do is show two minutes of young kid of his, and, presto, they want to make another movie, well, it's now 15 years later and that kid grew up. (Obviously, recast the actor.) Get Ford back for two minutes at the start of that movie, set it in the last 60s/early 70s, make another trilogy out of it.
And, checking IMDb to check that Karen Allen rumor, I see someone has rumored putting Natalie Portman as his daughter. Okay, first of all, that's stupid, second of all, she's a little too old, and third of all, the point is to cast some young kid so you can recast whoever you want to star in the actual movie. (In fact, give him both a son and daughter so you can have either star.) OTOH, I suspect this rumor not only has no actual grounding in reality, it was created solely to post on IMDb.
Nonono, you've confused the order. The grail already had the attribute of immortality granting if you drank from it daily. That was the point. It got the power when Jesus used it in the Lord's Supper.(1)
God figured out this was a bad idea to leave laying around, so he had some knights collect it and store it, and, just in case they failed, he added an off switch, where it couldn't leave the cave.
Why he didn't just zap it to start with or hide it inside a mountain, I don't know. But the point wasn't to give anyone immortality, the point was to keep something safe and hidden that already gave people immortality.
1) Actually, stories of 'the cup that grants eternal life or just unlimited clean water when you drink from it' predate Christianity, and got sucked into the mythology of Christianity like a lot of other things.
I also doubt we'll ever give up on spying on nations we are not at war with, just out of fear of WMD and terrorists.
Yeah, but everyone does that, and everyone knows everyone does that, so I don't see what us admitting it is going to do.
And like I said, active intelligence gathering is one of the few areas I'm willing to keep things classified. The American people do not need to know how and when we spied on other countries, as long as such spying would not provoke war. We, presumably, are okay with the 'standard' level of spying.
However, assassination and coup attempts are not 'intelligence gathering'. Any 'actions' we take against other countries need to be declassified almost immediately, as in, within a month.
Yes, yes, spying is an 'action', but the CIA actually already has them divided out fairly well, even into various subclassifications. And, yes, there are problems still, like what about when an asset kills some people, and we keep working with them and protecting them, and crap like that.
But it would be a damn sight better than the system now.
And I'm not certain anything the FBI does should be classified unless it's still part of an actual current criminal investigation. No, not even the names of paid informants, because I seriously disapprove of that entire concept, and we should stop using them.
Unless they're investigating a theft at a government lab or something, I'm hard pressed to see how the FBI could get their hands on external information that is classified, and everything they do is supposed to be within the law and the court system, both of which are public. It's not like they have magical telepathy crime fighting powers they have to keep secret, everything they can do is public knowledge. The only secret stuff is 'Subject A's phone is tapped, right now', and that only needs to be secret as long as the phone actually is tapped. It should, and in fact has to be, released when they actually arrest subject A or decide the case is not worth pursuing.
Theres only three things that shouldn't automatically be declassified after 25 years: The names of operatives and assets, and blueprints of weapons and stuff, and intelligence gathering methods, like the fact we have a tap hooked into the closed circuit TV in a certain hotel in London that ambassadors always stay at.
Anything else should be public, and I personally think 25 years is way too damn long. Let's go for five years. This is our country, we are in charge, and we can't make decisions without knowing what's going on, as I think Iraq has adequately demonstrated. (And I just realized five years would almost exactly hit the start of the Iraq war, but I swear I just chose that number randomly.)
Yes, that means that covert opts will be harder to keep secret. But I might suggest we should only do opts against people we're at war with, not, for example, Castro.
However, note I said automatically. I'm not trying to change the whole system at once. Anything the government agencies felt was actually worth classifying they could keep reapplying every 5 years.
Clinton gave a nice start, such a nice one that Bush hasn't managed to fight it so far. What Bush himself does he's classifying, but meanwhile the background 'automatic review and declassify' thing Clinton got started kept running.
What we really need is laws about what type of information can be classified, and how long. Congress at least has a law saying that you can't classify something just because it's politically embarrassing that has no national security aspects, but there's almost no enforcement of that. But we need more laws about what kinds of things you can't keep secret, like government contracts.
Oh, yes, I know what you mean. I hate it when I'm near a crosswalk and I look at a car passing on the other side and they slow down to let me by.
Not only would I sometimes have been able to walk sooner if they'd just kept going, I now not only have to wait for the other lane to clear, I have to constantly watch them to make sure they haven't given up and decided to go. If they'd just gone, their side of the road would be clear.
I solve the problem by looking like I'm not crossing the road until I actually am about to step out into the road, aka, when my side of the road is cleared.
People should make a conscious effort to telegraph where they're going, by standing back from the curb unless they are actually crossing, and only interact-by-looking with traffic when they need to establish right-of-ways for situtations where they aren't sure if the automobile saw them. Aka, 'I have stepped in front of you, are you now stopping?'. Don't look at them before that and give them the chance to argue with you, and don't look at them before that if you are not, in fact, ready to go.
However, my point was about people walking slowly up the rows in parking lots. They are already in front of traffic. They 'won' the contest. It's not like, if they were to catch my eye, I might nod them out of the way and then accelerate straight through where they are, expecting them to get out of the way. (If I were going to do that, I'd just honk repeatedly and do it anyway, wouldn't I? Why would I wait for them to look at me if I were that crazy?)
Common courtesy has them at least attempting to move closer to one side or another so I can drive past, but as common courtesy and simple consideration for other human beings is, apparently, dead, I don't actually expect that. Common sense, however, is that when someone is coming up behind you in a car, you might want to check and see if they have noticed you, especially in a parking lot, where a lot of drivers don't appear to know they are operating a motor vehicle.
I want to know why I can't run my air compressor off the battery and an electric motor.
Would it just draw too much power? From what I can tell, my alternator is connected all the time, and hence I almost always have spare energy that is not going into the battery.
I've never understood why all the other accessories use the huge amount of excess electricity floating around in a car, but not the air conditioner, unless we're talking a huge difference in power.
Doing the math using wall AC units, some of them take as little as 1000 watts. (And surely it takes less energy to cool a car than even the smallest room. A car is literally the smallest compartment you will spend large amounts of time in outside of a womb.) My inverter can pull 750 watts (Obviously when hooked directly to the battery), but I've seen 1000 ones. I've seen thirty amp sound systems, and cigarette lighters can suck fifteen amps, and that's almost 400 and 200 watts respectively, and no one seems to ever be running their batteries dead while their car is running.
Is there some logical reason it's a bad idea to run the AC off the alternator, which is always already sucking torque?
We need electric cars combined with mass transit. No one should ever have to drive more than 40 or so miles to the nearest town or bus/rail terminal.
Seriously, the entire model needs changing. Something like 3/4 of my travel is 8 miles to the nearest town. I could do fine with an electric car, even one that only went 40 mph. The rest of my travel is 40+ miles towards 'the big city', aka, Atlanta, down an incredibly common corridor, GA-400, with no mass transit at all until the end.
People in Europe get by fine without cars. We can't entirely do the same, because we're more spread out, but electric cars should remedy that.
With correctly planned mass transit of light rail and small bus routes, and electric cars with a range of 100 miles (and parking structures with the ability to recharge them), we could cover something like 95% of the transportation needs in this country.(1) As for the rest, well, you rent a car, or have a group of people who own one and trade it around. (Like my extended family does with the truck. You need a truck, you borrow it.) Or, hell, you just own one, it's not like it wastes energy to have a car just sit there, and the current cars aren't going anywhere.
But, anyway, we should slowly consider phasing that in, and there are some things to think about:
For example, we'd need shopping cart-like things that we can take on the bus and train, to remove one of the major problems. It would be really nice if they were standardized little rental things, and obviously buses need to be designed to accommodate them. (With the added bonus of them accommodating people in wheelchairs.)
Oh, and we'd sometimes need some sort of electric car rental place at the end. Which is why we need to gradually phase this in, so we can figure if it makes sense to have, say, a bus route, a taxi service, and/or a car rental place in a certain specific small town.
However, the start of this plan: Buses in major cities, we mostly already have, and light rail down major corridors, we mostly somewhat have, we just need to finish and the rest sorta springs from there. First you get a shuttle bus to take people to the light-rail from nearby cities, then bus routes around those cities, etc, and then we have to start saying 'I want a electric-only car that gets much better energy mileage than my hybrid, because it's not hauling around an ICE. I don't care my range is only 100 miles, I don't drive that far anyway.'
But, as most importantly, to get this plan off the ground, we have to make using mass transit cheaper than driving.
The gas mileage of my car is 28/20 mpg, and I normally get 28 mpg, but right now I'm getting around 24 or so. That may just be winter, though. If it doesn't fix by spring I'm getting someone to look at it.
Of course, my driving usually is at 50 mpg, five over the speed limit to town, and about 2/3rd of it is on a road with no stops. So I have ideal conditions.
OTOH, I don't know where the hell '20' came from. I've never gotten anything that absurdly low.
And, yes, I always notice my gas mileage, because my damn gas gauge is screwed. It shows 120% when full (Yes,the needle goes way past 'full'), 100% when 3/4 full, 80% when 1/2 full, 50% when 1/4, 45% when 1/8, and 20% when 0. (I get about panicked when it starts to plummet down to 20% for the last twenty miles, and sometimes it's fun convincing passengers I need to stop for gas right now when I have a quarter of a tank showing. It's shifted upward by 20 percent and it's non-linear! Wheee!) So I just buy a full tank of gas every 300 miles, and end up putting in about 11 or 12 gallons.
Seriously, it amazes me how totally blithe people are around cars. Any car that's able to hit me in the next 60 seconds makes me nervous, and I, you know, pay attention to it. Same anywhere there might be a car, like a road, until I verify there is not, in fact, a car there. I practice defensive not-being-hit-by-a-car.
And I drive my somewhat noisy car literally up people's asses in parking lots and they don't only not get out of the way, which is common courtesy, they don't even look at me. I'm not going to run them over, but how do they know I'm not some idiot chatting on a cellphone, looking through my shopping bags, and taking care of a baby at the same time? I've slowly less-than-idled behind people strolling along for fifty feet without them looking at me. Unless they have some damn magical ears, or mirrored sunglasses, that can tell how close an unknown car is behind them without looking, they were risking their lives, or at least their legs, with the assumption that I wasn't slowly idling straight into them.
I once had someone almost hit my car with their car by them turning too sharply to the left at a stop sign with my car parked behind the line. And they had just looked at me to see who got to go first. We got there at the same time, they were to the right, they went first while talking on a cell phone, they managed to stop less than a foot from my front bumper. (1) They had to back up to go around me, although at least they had the decency to look embarrassed at it.
If people sometimes don't see a damn car exactly where a car is supposed to be and they know it to be, I don't know why people would expect them always to see tiny people walking up the middle of the lane in a parking lot at Target. I personally try not to stick out more than a foot past the parked cars.
1) While I had one of those 'Oh, shit, they are going to hit me, how fast can I hit reverse? Foot already on brake, grab shift knob, push button, don't go too far that's park, too late they're here!' moments. And, somewhere in the middle of that, I was mildly relieved that this was clearly their fault, and considering letting them hit because the headlight area of my car was messed up from a previous crash and this would pay to fix it. It's amazing how much you can think in two seconds, although you cannot, for future reference, actually shift into reverse and back up fast enough to avoid a car five feet away.
You can't make there be less new cars by purchasing a used one. That's insane. It's like moving into an already constructed house in a subdivision vs. purchasing an empty lot before the house in constructed. Yeah, good plan to save resources there.
There are a set number of cars people wish to own. There are a set number of operatable cars. There is a set number of cars that are too expensive to maintain, and fall off that second list. Ergo, there are new cars created to fill the gap.
The whole concept of buying used cars to save energy doesn't make any sense at all. Obviously if you have a working car, you shouldn't throw it in the trash and buy a new or used one. But as almost no one in the entire history of the planet has thrown away a working car, choosing rather to sell or give it to someone else, that seems a rather moot point.
Now, if you want to encourage people to maintain their car longer before giving up on it, whatever. But when they do give up on it, no matter what car they choose to buy, a car will be manufactured to replace it, or we quite obviously would run out of cars rather quickly. If we are the one replacing it in the car market, we can choose to purchase a new one that's energy efficient. (Which will not literally change the type cars manufactured currently, but will help decide manufacturing runs in the future.) If we are buying used, we don't get to choose what kind of car will be manufactured to replace it, whoever ended up buying a new car after the inevitable trade of used cars shifts through society gets to decide what kind.
I'm suddenly imagining all people who care about the environment purchasing only used cars for two years, at which point the car companies realize, hey, almost no one's buying energy efficient cars, why the hell are we still making them? Let the fools who apparently don't know that oil is running out run all the used cars into the ground, while people who do care attempt to get the new cars using less of it. The other way around makes no sense at all.
Although if you really want to help the environment, purchase used cars, give them emission tests and lower their waste, and then resell them for the same, or lower, price.
Cars don't work that way, solely because people do not 'discard' cars.
All cars are traded around until the point they do not work anymore, and cost more to repair than to replace. And, as was pointed out, at that point, they're major pollutants anyway. Something like 50% of all automobile pollution is generated by 5% of old cars.
Not to mention the amount of resources it takes to manufacture and ship parts for almost a century of cars.
Until we have piles of functional used cars laying around, or being literally thrown away, because everyone's using new ones, the theory that you can 'reuse' cars is nonsensical. Selling your car to someone else and buying a new one is reusing the old one. In fact, most of the 'thrown away because they are no longer functional' cars are reused, piece by piece. It's called a 'scrapyard'. And when they're done there, they're melted down and recycled.
The only things I can think of that are even reused half as much as cars are houses and pianos. And books.
Cars are reused until the cost in dollars exceeds the cost of fixing them. Yes, it'd be nice if we could reuse them until the cost in energy and waste exceeded the cost of fixing them, but that's going to require quite a bit of magic to determine, and it's already pretty close. You want to make it closer, figure out a way to tax company's uses or resources and pollution, not worry about who's driving what car.
Although if what you're going to do will make used cars more likely to be maintained than currently, I strongly suggest mandatory emission testing for every car in existence. We've already got enough of a problem, we don't need any more clunkers traveling a five miles on one gallon of gas, a half a liter of oil, a liter of antifreeze, and a hole in the exhaust before the catalytic converter.
That's not 'deep-linking', you moron, because it's not linking at all.
A 'link', in HTML, is a <a href="...">, or, as not often used, <link href="..."> in the head. And sometimes the longdesc attribute that absolutely no one uses, and probably some other obscure things. That is what 'linking' is.
Including images is not 'linking', of any sort. Embedding video is not 'linking', of any sort. A 'link' is something end users follow in HTML to go somewhere else. But let's just see what the w3c says about in the link I have cleverly provided. Then read here to see what it says about images and see if it calls including images 'linking' to them. It says images can have links around them, and they can have image maps with links, but absolutely no reference to <img> or <object> as 'links'.
'Deep-linking', as is commonly used, means 'linking into a web site far away from the root', where 'far away' is somewhat subjective. It does not mean 'representing another site's content as your own', for the obvious reasons that doesn't even make any sense...what if you presented their front page or an image on their front page, from their root, as your own? That could hardly be called 'deep'.
This site did deep-link, in the correct sense...it was to non-html documents, but they were, indeed, links and not included within a web page.
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Yes, but the issue wasn't actually who paid for the phone calls, it was what kind of phone calls they were. He paid for the calls, at the time he made them, which is a detail that is usually left out of the story.
No, the question was: There is a law that prohibits Federal employees from soliciting for campaign contributions on Federal property. The President and Vice President are not subject to this law. However, Gore did it for others, which, as it turns out, may not be legal. Or it may be, who knows?
The intent of the law was to stop people from getting campaign contributions under a guise of authority using Federal resources. It's not legal for someone who works at the FBI to put up posters and solicit contributions from visitors at the FBI.
Gore's behavior wasn't anywhere near that. He didn't solicit donations from people in the White House, visitors or staff. He didn't use government money, he didn't use government resources except for a phone, (Which he is allowed to make any personal calls he wants to on, as long as he pays for them.) he didn't even do it on the clock as, of course, Vice Presidents punch no clock.
Even if the law disallows the Vice President from campaigning on behalf of others, which it's not at all clear it does, and even if Gore knew the money he was collecting was hard money that would go to specific candidates, vs. soft money which would go to the party as a whole (Which the law did not cover), which it's not clear he knew, it's really hard to read anything unethical into his behavior. He was advised it was legal, when he was told it might not be, he stopped. Like he said, there hadn't been any case law on the topic whatsoever. (Which was presented as some sort of legal nitpicking by the media.)
The whole thing was a non-issue. It wasn't worth an actual investigation, it certainly wasn't worth the media time. But so was 80% of the stuff investigated by the Republicans under the Clinton administration.
That's not to say the other 20% ended up being bad stuff, but I'm a guy who thinks there should be investigations by Congress if there is the appearance of the slightest bit of wrongdoing, and the fact that fully 80% of the investigations failed to met my fairly low bar shows how silly they were.
Meanwhile, there had been literally dozens of things Bush did that should have been investigated. I'm not even talking about the obvious ones, like illegal wiretaps, torture, and this new mail thing, but even crap like no-bid contracts and other spend-government-money-by-throwing-it-at-my-friend s stuff. I don't know to what extend there was wrongdoing, but there are more than five things I've heard Bush admit doing that sound a hell of a lot more illegal than anything Clinton did, and quite a lot more I've read about.
Tools that don't care about legacy support are unaffected by this; they can just pick the closest modern option to whatever the legacy flag calls for on input, and not output documents that use them.
And thus tools, legally, are not OOXML, and won't qualify for purchasing by companies that specify OOXML. Which is the entire point.
There's a difference between 'We need to make sure that old documents can be converted correctly.', and 'We will literally convert old documents into a new representation that contains all their weirdness, and we won't explain how to implement said weirdness in the standard.'.
What Microsoft has produced is not even a standard. Standards must specify everything, or reference other standards that specify everything. They can't reference applications.
If Microsoft wants to keep secret how to turn Office 95 documents into OOXML, fine. Producing a standard doesn't mean you have to explain how to convert things into that standard.
It does, however, mean you have to explain exactly what should happen if mwSmallCaps is true, to the pixel. You can't just pawn it off on the unexplained hypothetical behavior of some other application.
Saying 'If X, then imitate the behavior of some other application in a way we're not specifying exactly', is not a specification, you idiot.
That's where all these crazy circumstances about ticking bombs and stuff falls apart.
If it truly was needed, the correct procedure, under a government of laws and trials by jury, is to break the law, and explain it to the court later.
And, yes, arguing 'I had to commit that crime to prevent a larger one' is a perfectly valid legal defense, even when there's no specific law to that effect. I.e., self-defense would be, and was for longest time, legal under English common law without any specific law to that effect.
Of course, get anywhere past assault of someone, and what is a 'larger' crime is up for debate. It probably wouldn't be okay to burn down a house to stop someone from jaywalking. It probably is okay to burn down a house to stop a whole neighborhood from burning down, but I wouldn't recommend trying it out in court.
Anyway, we don't need to make laws allowing people to do whatever they want in emergencies, because we already have a check on the law when reasonable people would allow lawbreaking in emergencies, and it's called 'a jury'.
Of course, the very concept of a jury requires an arrest and a trial, which requires not doing it in fucking secret. You want to torture someone to stop a nuclear bomb going off, or whatever the crazy concept is this week, fine. Do it. Then turn yourself in to the police. Don't pass laws saying you can do it with no review, in secret, whenever you say it's important enough.
It's not paradoxical at all, when you learn the history of neocons.
You see, neocons used to be liberals, way way back in the 60s. They were very pro-Israel, and this was when Israel was doing some really really bad stuff. Basically, their idea was to remake the Middle East into some liberal paradise, where 'liberal' is being used in the traditional sense of 'enlightenment freedom of mankind, John Locke and all men are created equal stuff', and not the current sense, which is more 'progressive'. The left was very 'liberal' at the time, with equality for women and blacks and all sorts of things, so the neocons said, hey, good idea, let's do the same for the entire Middle East. By invading and occupying it.
This idea was, because liberals have at least nominal critical thinking skills, recognized as fucking batshit insane, so the liberals kicked them out, despite them being generally supportive of Israel in principle, if not in their specific actions.
They then drifted over to the right, who weren't big fans of Israel, but luckily they were big enemies of Communism, which was meddling in the middle east, so the US meddled back. I suspect the religious loons' gains in that time frame were due to the neocons, who realized they could make Israel a religious issue if they framed it as some biblical thing. (Plus, Jew-hating was so passe by that time, thanks to that 'Hitler' chap, so the religious loons had mostly given it up.)
But, anyway, neocons are liberals, in that, their ideas, or at least what they claim are their ideas, are 'to promote freedom'. That is, technically, all liberalism is. Everything else on the left, like I said, is more 'progressivism', which is attempting to fix problems. For example, liberal thought would disagree with affirmative action, because it does not treat all equally, progressive thought might like it, because it attempts to fix problems. (Of course, progressives could disagree that it works, or that said problems exist.)
Of course, they aren't actually promoting freedom, nor are they doing it to promote freedom. Die-hard ones are doing it because they support Israel 100%, and the rest are doing it so they can war profiteer.
But if you've ever wondered how 'conservatives' could critize Clinton's tiny force in Bosnia, which cost almost no American lives and actually worked in fixing that nation, but support the Iraq invasion, that's the reason for the disconnect. Pat Buchanan, of all the people I never though I'd agree with, gets it too, although his solution is to do nothing, whereas I think sometimes it's okay to keep the peace.
It's also why we're screwing around with Iran possible-sometime-in-the-future WMDs and ignoring North Korea actually-have-them-now WMDs. Or ignoring Darfur and Somalia as they collapse. Somalia is so full of terrorists that normal people are fleeing to, of all places, Ethiopia. Or all the terrorists in Pakistan, because Pakistan is nominally 'friendly' towards Israel, at least until the next military coup.
You are, of course, absolutely right that the left can be equally as idiotic as the right. Probably for many of the same reasons. I used to believe differently, but painful experience has taught me the truth.
Only if, by 'the left', you mean some crazy-ass professor at some California college or some guy on some blog somewhere or Joe Liberman. The actual left is not idiotic at all. (Parts of the Democratic party itself are, but they are mainly idiotic in how they keep promoting the same losing stragities.)
OTOH, the right hold up quite idiotic people, like Ann Coulter.
In order to translate from right-wingenese to reality-speak, just assume that whatever a right-winger says to others actually applies to himself.
The rest of your post is flamebait, but this is actually almost 100% true, at least for the politicians on the right.
Seriously. Look at the last 40 years of Republican presidents. Name me one beside Ford that didn't break the law in a fairly obvious manner. I mean explicit laws passed to control their behavior that they then blatantly broke. Nixon with invading Cambodia, Reagan and H. W. Bush with Iran Contra, W. Bush with...um...everything.
Now let's look at the investigations. Nixon started things off, then...well, Ford pardoned him. Reagan and H. W. Bush were investigated, Bush fired the investigator when he got into office. W. Bush, of course, hasn't been investigated at all, for anything, thanks to the Republicans.
Conclusion: Republican Presidents break the law.
Now, on the other side, we have Carter and Clinton. Carter didn't do anything, and wasn't investigated that much, but possibly the Republicans were still getting up to speed.
Clinton, of course, was investigated constantly, and I mean constantly. Every single damn thing he did, they investigated, and we all know how that ended up. That perjury, and misleading the court during the Paula Jones case, were the only things that he was actually found to have done, although he did settle the sexual harrassment claim out of court eventually.(1) They investigated the White House Christmas card list, they investigated Whitewater, they investigated whether or not the Sock's the Cat fan club was using government resources. They managed to get the right-wing talk radio wackjobs, which they had just invented, to accuse him of multiple murders with regard to Vince Foster, although they intelligently didn't actually investigate that.(2)
Conclusion: Republicans, after 40 years of their own party's presidential lawbreaking, are projecting that lawbreaking onto Democratic presidents. Republican politicians keep this at somewhat sane levels, Republican mouthpieces feel free to get as crazy as possible.
And that's not the only instances of the Republicans doing what psychologists call 'projection'. Seriously, at times, it's almost surreal. Does anyone remember the 'Contract with America'? Anyone remember number one on the list? 'A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.'. It's almost cute.
In fact, do you remember that whole election cycle, how they kept talking about lobbyists and professional politicians?
1) Which doesn't mean he was guilty. The courts had actually dismissed the charges by that point, because even if her story was 100% true, she hadn't demonstrated that she was actually damaged by it, which I personally agree with. But she had appealed it, and it looked like the appeals court might undismiss it. However, all that's sorta moot, as none of that had anything to do with the presidency.
2) They also investigated Al Gore, and actually managed to catch him in a few things, like using his official phone to make non-official calls, which I'm sure is right up there legally with 'illegally invading Cambodia' and 'selling cocaine to finance the overthrow of Iran'. I mean, I sometimes print personal stuff using work printers, and just last election cycle I was able to hire assassins to take out the sheriff using proceeds from my meth lab, allowing me to install my own puppet in the sheriff's office. Who hasn't bent the law in some way or another?
"if we believe there's a ticking bomb in a letter we will send the bomb squad in first and resolve the legal issues later", there is no controversey.
No, please don't spread such silliness around. We already have quite reasonable procedures to deal with dangerous mail.
Bush's enablers, and I know you're not one, but bear with me, like to come up with absurd situations, then say 'In such a situation, do we really have time to follow legal niceties?', and want everyone to repeat them to put doubt out there. There are two problems. The first is that we already can deal with 99% of these absurd situations in the law. We've had no problem intercepting dangerous mail int he past, so obviously there's legal way to do it, probably via the Postmaster General's Office.
And, more to the point, we already have a process for dealing with edge cases when the law doesn't deal with them. We break the law, and then throw ourselves on a mercy of the court. If there really was some situation, in some utterly surreal universe, where searching the mail or tapping phones or torturing people was required to save hundreds of thousands of people, the correct process is to break the law, and then explain it in court, not to legalize the behavior in any circumstances the president sees fit.
You think Anakin's motivations in RotS were well-realized? Huh?
And Palpatine just wanted to take over, and wove a nice and complex plot to do so, I admit. But that plot isn't 'motive', the motive is the incredibly simple 'I wish to rule the galaxy as a Sith'.
I personally get excited about the potential birth of freedom in a formerly murderous dictorship.
You've got some mighty interesting definition of 'freedom' there. Although, in a sense, the ability to kill anyone for any reason whatsoever is really the ultimate in freedom.
Although you are correct about the 'formerly murderous dictorship'. It is now, of course, a 'murderous anarchy' evolving into a 'murderous theocracy'. Yay us!
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
I know that's how I justify all my murders of random people. They were being oppressed!
Lucas can conceptualize great.
He just can't actually write characters or dialog.
Either you're lying, or you've just disproved the existence of a just God.
I like how people think that Jones could just wander around enemy encampments during a war.
The Nazis in Indiana Jones movies were comical, but not that comical.
Actually, the originals took place in the 30s. The last in 1938.
I think they've said the new film will take place in the 1950s, just in time for the Commies to the villians. Too bad, I think Indy would have a lot of fun on campus in the 1960s, assuming he's still teaching.
And, BTW, can I suggest giving the dude a kid or something? This is supposed to be a serial, and Lucas has already proved he can do young stories in that vein with Young Indy.
Since they have to do the cliched 'He's settled down (Probably with Karen Allen, as it's rumored she's back too.), he's a family man, now he's getting pulled back out of retirement' start, all they have to do is show two minutes of young kid of his, and, presto, they want to make another movie, well, it's now 15 years later and that kid grew up. (Obviously, recast the actor.) Get Ford back for two minutes at the start of that movie, set it in the last 60s/early 70s, make another trilogy out of it.
And, checking IMDb to check that Karen Allen rumor, I see someone has rumored putting Natalie Portman as his daughter. Okay, first of all, that's stupid, second of all, she's a little too old, and third of all, the point is to cast some young kid so you can recast whoever you want to star in the actual movie. (In fact, give him both a son and daughter so you can have either star.) OTOH, I suspect this rumor not only has no actual grounding in reality, it was created solely to post on IMDb.
Nonono, you've confused the order. The grail already had the attribute of immortality granting if you drank from it daily. That was the point. It got the power when Jesus used it in the Lord's Supper.(1)
God figured out this was a bad idea to leave laying around, so he had some knights collect it and store it, and, just in case they failed, he added an off switch, where it couldn't leave the cave.
Why he didn't just zap it to start with or hide it inside a mountain, I don't know. But the point wasn't to give anyone immortality, the point was to keep something safe and hidden that already gave people immortality.
1) Actually, stories of 'the cup that grants eternal life or just unlimited clean water when you drink from it' predate Christianity, and got sucked into the mythology of Christianity like a lot of other things.
I also doubt we'll ever give up on spying on nations we are not at war with, just out of fear of WMD and terrorists.
Yeah, but everyone does that, and everyone knows everyone does that, so I don't see what us admitting it is going to do.
And like I said, active intelligence gathering is one of the few areas I'm willing to keep things classified. The American people do not need to know how and when we spied on other countries, as long as such spying would not provoke war. We, presumably, are okay with the 'standard' level of spying.
However, assassination and coup attempts are not 'intelligence gathering'. Any 'actions' we take against other countries need to be declassified almost immediately, as in, within a month.
Yes, yes, spying is an 'action', but the CIA actually already has them divided out fairly well, even into various subclassifications. And, yes, there are problems still, like what about when an asset kills some people, and we keep working with them and protecting them, and crap like that.
But it would be a damn sight better than the system now.
And I'm not certain anything the FBI does should be classified unless it's still part of an actual current criminal investigation. No, not even the names of paid informants, because I seriously disapprove of that entire concept, and we should stop using them.
Unless they're investigating a theft at a government lab or something, I'm hard pressed to see how the FBI could get their hands on external information that is classified, and everything they do is supposed to be within the law and the court system, both of which are public. It's not like they have magical telepathy crime fighting powers they have to keep secret, everything they can do is public knowledge. The only secret stuff is 'Subject A's phone is tapped, right now', and that only needs to be secret as long as the phone actually is tapped. It should, and in fact has to be, released when they actually arrest subject A or decide the case is not worth pursuing.
No shit.
Theres only three things that shouldn't automatically be declassified after 25 years: The names of operatives and assets, and blueprints of weapons and stuff, and intelligence gathering methods, like the fact we have a tap hooked into the closed circuit TV in a certain hotel in London that ambassadors always stay at.
Anything else should be public, and I personally think 25 years is way too damn long. Let's go for five years. This is our country, we are in charge, and we can't make decisions without knowing what's going on, as I think Iraq has adequately demonstrated. (And I just realized five years would almost exactly hit the start of the Iraq war, but I swear I just chose that number randomly.)
Yes, that means that covert opts will be harder to keep secret. But I might suggest we should only do opts against people we're at war with, not, for example, Castro.
However, note I said automatically. I'm not trying to change the whole system at once. Anything the government agencies felt was actually worth classifying they could keep reapplying every 5 years.
Clinton gave a nice start, such a nice one that Bush hasn't managed to fight it so far. What Bush himself does he's classifying, but meanwhile the background 'automatic review and declassify' thing Clinton got started kept running.
What we really need is laws about what type of information can be classified, and how long. Congress at least has a law saying that you can't classify something just because it's politically embarrassing that has no national security aspects, but there's almost no enforcement of that. But we need more laws about what kinds of things you can't keep secret, like government contracts.
Oh, yes, I know what you mean. I hate it when I'm near a crosswalk and I look at a car passing on the other side and they slow down to let me by.
Not only would I sometimes have been able to walk sooner if they'd just kept going, I now not only have to wait for the other lane to clear, I have to constantly watch them to make sure they haven't given up and decided to go. If they'd just gone, their side of the road would be clear.
I solve the problem by looking like I'm not crossing the road until I actually am about to step out into the road, aka, when my side of the road is cleared.
People should make a conscious effort to telegraph where they're going, by standing back from the curb unless they are actually crossing, and only interact-by-looking with traffic when they need to establish right-of-ways for situtations where they aren't sure if the automobile saw them. Aka, 'I have stepped in front of you, are you now stopping?'. Don't look at them before that and give them the chance to argue with you, and don't look at them before that if you are not, in fact, ready to go.
However, my point was about people walking slowly up the rows in parking lots. They are already in front of traffic. They 'won' the contest. It's not like, if they were to catch my eye, I might nod them out of the way and then accelerate straight through where they are, expecting them to get out of the way. (If I were going to do that, I'd just honk repeatedly and do it anyway, wouldn't I? Why would I wait for them to look at me if I were that crazy?)
Common courtesy has them at least attempting to move closer to one side or another so I can drive past, but as common courtesy and simple consideration for other human beings is, apparently, dead, I don't actually expect that. Common sense, however, is that when someone is coming up behind you in a car, you might want to check and see if they have noticed you, especially in a parking lot, where a lot of drivers don't appear to know they are operating a motor vehicle.
I want to know why I can't run my air compressor off the battery and an electric motor.
Would it just draw too much power? From what I can tell, my alternator is connected all the time, and hence I almost always have spare energy that is not going into the battery.
I've never understood why all the other accessories use the huge amount of excess electricity floating around in a car, but not the air conditioner, unless we're talking a huge difference in power.
Doing the math using wall AC units, some of them take as little as 1000 watts. (And surely it takes less energy to cool a car than even the smallest room. A car is literally the smallest compartment you will spend large amounts of time in outside of a womb.) My inverter can pull 750 watts (Obviously when hooked directly to the battery), but I've seen 1000 ones. I've seen thirty amp sound systems, and cigarette lighters can suck fifteen amps, and that's almost 400 and 200 watts respectively, and no one seems to ever be running their batteries dead while their car is running.
Is there some logical reason it's a bad idea to run the AC off the alternator, which is always already sucking torque?
Forget hybrids. The entire model is screwy.
We need electric cars combined with mass transit. No one should ever have to drive more than 40 or so miles to the nearest town or bus/rail terminal.
Seriously, the entire model needs changing. Something like 3/4 of my travel is 8 miles to the nearest town. I could do fine with an electric car, even one that only went 40 mph. The rest of my travel is 40+ miles towards 'the big city', aka, Atlanta, down an incredibly common corridor, GA-400, with no mass transit at all until the end.
People in Europe get by fine without cars. We can't entirely do the same, because we're more spread out, but electric cars should remedy that.
With correctly planned mass transit of light rail and small bus routes, and electric cars with a range of 100 miles (and parking structures with the ability to recharge them), we could cover something like 95% of the transportation needs in this country.(1) As for the rest, well, you rent a car, or have a group of people who own one and trade it around. (Like my extended family does with the truck. You need a truck, you borrow it.) Or, hell, you just own one, it's not like it wastes energy to have a car just sit there, and the current cars aren't going anywhere.
But, anyway, we should slowly consider phasing that in, and there are some things to think about:
For example, we'd need shopping cart-like things that we can take on the bus and train, to remove one of the major problems. It would be really nice if they were standardized little rental things, and obviously buses need to be designed to accommodate them. (With the added bonus of them accommodating people in wheelchairs.)
Oh, and we'd sometimes need some sort of electric car rental place at the end. Which is why we need to gradually phase this in, so we can figure if it makes sense to have, say, a bus route, a taxi service, and/or a car rental place in a certain specific small town.
However, the start of this plan: Buses in major cities, we mostly already have, and light rail down major corridors, we mostly somewhat have, we just need to finish and the rest sorta springs from there. First you get a shuttle bus to take people to the light-rail from nearby cities, then bus routes around those cities, etc, and then we have to start saying 'I want a electric-only car that gets much better energy mileage than my hybrid, because it's not hauling around an ICE. I don't care my range is only 100 miles, I don't drive that far anyway.'
But, as most importantly, to get this plan off the ground, we have to make using mass transit cheaper than driving.
The gas mileage of my car is 28/20 mpg, and I normally get 28 mpg, but right now I'm getting around 24 or so. That may just be winter, though. If it doesn't fix by spring I'm getting someone to look at it.
Of course, my driving usually is at 50 mpg, five over the speed limit to town, and about 2/3rd of it is on a road with no stops. So I have ideal conditions.
OTOH, I don't know where the hell '20' came from. I've never gotten anything that absurdly low.
And, yes, I always notice my gas mileage, because my damn gas gauge is screwed. It shows 120% when full (Yes,the needle goes way past 'full'), 100% when 3/4 full, 80% when 1/2 full, 50% when 1/4, 45% when 1/8, and 20% when 0. (I get about panicked when it starts to plummet down to 20% for the last twenty miles, and sometimes it's fun convincing passengers I need to stop for gas right now when I have a quarter of a tank showing. It's shifted upward by 20 percent and it's non-linear! Wheee!) So I just buy a full tank of gas every 300 miles, and end up putting in about 11 or 12 gallons.
Or have someone walk ahead waving a lantern.
Seriously, it amazes me how totally blithe people are around cars. Any car that's able to hit me in the next 60 seconds makes me nervous, and I, you know, pay attention to it. Same anywhere there might be a car, like a road, until I verify there is not, in fact, a car there. I practice defensive not-being-hit-by-a-car.
And I drive my somewhat noisy car literally up people's asses in parking lots and they don't only not get out of the way, which is common courtesy, they don't even look at me. I'm not going to run them over, but how do they know I'm not some idiot chatting on a cellphone, looking through my shopping bags, and taking care of a baby at the same time? I've slowly less-than-idled behind people strolling along for fifty feet without them looking at me. Unless they have some damn magical ears, or mirrored sunglasses, that can tell how close an unknown car is behind them without looking, they were risking their lives, or at least their legs, with the assumption that I wasn't slowly idling straight into them.
I once had someone almost hit my car with their car by them turning too sharply to the left at a stop sign with my car parked behind the line. And they had just looked at me to see who got to go first. We got there at the same time, they were to the right, they went first while talking on a cell phone, they managed to stop less than a foot from my front bumper. (1) They had to back up to go around me, although at least they had the decency to look embarrassed at it.
If people sometimes don't see a damn car exactly where a car is supposed to be and they know it to be, I don't know why people would expect them always to see tiny people walking up the middle of the lane in a parking lot at Target. I personally try not to stick out more than a foot past the parked cars.
1) While I had one of those 'Oh, shit, they are going to hit me, how fast can I hit reverse? Foot already on brake, grab shift knob, push button, don't go too far that's park, too late they're here!' moments. And, somewhere in the middle of that, I was mildly relieved that this was clearly their fault, and considering letting them hit because the headlight area of my car was messed up from a previous crash and this would pay to fix it. It's amazing how much you can think in two seconds, although you cannot, for future reference, actually shift into reverse and back up fast enough to avoid a car five feet away.
You can't make there be less new cars by purchasing a used one. That's insane. It's like moving into an already constructed house in a subdivision vs. purchasing an empty lot before the house in constructed. Yeah, good plan to save resources there.
There are a set number of cars people wish to own. There are a set number of operatable cars. There is a set number of cars that are too expensive to maintain, and fall off that second list. Ergo, there are new cars created to fill the gap.
The whole concept of buying used cars to save energy doesn't make any sense at all. Obviously if you have a working car, you shouldn't throw it in the trash and buy a new or used one. But as almost no one in the entire history of the planet has thrown away a working car, choosing rather to sell or give it to someone else, that seems a rather moot point.
Now, if you want to encourage people to maintain their car longer before giving up on it, whatever. But when they do give up on it, no matter what car they choose to buy, a car will be manufactured to replace it, or we quite obviously would run out of cars rather quickly. If we are the one replacing it in the car market, we can choose to purchase a new one that's energy efficient. (Which will not literally change the type cars manufactured currently, but will help decide manufacturing runs in the future.) If we are buying used, we don't get to choose what kind of car will be manufactured to replace it, whoever ended up buying a new car after the inevitable trade of used cars shifts through society gets to decide what kind.
I'm suddenly imagining all people who care about the environment purchasing only used cars for two years, at which point the car companies realize, hey, almost no one's buying energy efficient cars, why the hell are we still making them? Let the fools who apparently don't know that oil is running out run all the used cars into the ground, while people who do care attempt to get the new cars using less of it. The other way around makes no sense at all.
Although if you really want to help the environment, purchase used cars, give them emission tests and lower their waste, and then resell them for the same, or lower, price.
Cars don't work that way, solely because people do not 'discard' cars.
All cars are traded around until the point they do not work anymore, and cost more to repair than to replace. And, as was pointed out, at that point, they're major pollutants anyway. Something like 50% of all automobile pollution is generated by 5% of old cars.
Not to mention the amount of resources it takes to manufacture and ship parts for almost a century of cars.
Until we have piles of functional used cars laying around, or being literally thrown away, because everyone's using new ones, the theory that you can 'reuse' cars is nonsensical. Selling your car to someone else and buying a new one is reusing the old one. In fact, most of the 'thrown away because they are no longer functional' cars are reused, piece by piece. It's called a 'scrapyard'. And when they're done there, they're melted down and recycled.
The only things I can think of that are even reused half as much as cars are houses and pianos. And books.
Cars are reused until the cost in dollars exceeds the cost of fixing them. Yes, it'd be nice if we could reuse them until the cost in energy and waste exceeded the cost of fixing them, but that's going to require quite a bit of magic to determine, and it's already pretty close. You want to make it closer, figure out a way to tax company's uses or resources and pollution, not worry about who's driving what car.
Although if what you're going to do will make used cars more likely to be maintained than currently, I strongly suggest mandatory emission testing for every car in existence. We've already got enough of a problem, we don't need any more clunkers traveling a five miles on one gallon of gas, a half a liter of oil, a liter of antifreeze, and a hole in the exhaust before the catalytic converter.
That's not 'deep-linking', you moron, because it's not linking at all.
A 'link', in HTML, is a <a href="...">, or, as not often used, <link href="..."> in the head. And sometimes the longdesc attribute that absolutely no one uses, and probably some other obscure things. That is what 'linking' is.
Including images is not 'linking', of any sort. Embedding video is not 'linking', of any sort. A 'link' is something end users follow in HTML to go somewhere else. But let's just see what the w3c says about in the link I have cleverly provided. Then read here to see what it says about images and see if it calls including images 'linking' to them. It says images can have links around them, and they can have image maps with links, but absolutely no reference to <img> or <object> as 'links'.
'Deep-linking', as is commonly used, means 'linking into a web site far away from the root', where 'far away' is somewhat subjective. It does not mean 'representing another site's content as your own', for the obvious reasons that doesn't even make any sense...what if you presented their front page or an image on their front page, from their root, as your own? That could hardly be called 'deep'.
This site did deep-link, in the correct sense...it was to non-html documents, but they were, indeed, links and not included within a web page.