No, if the artic melts enough it could screw up the gulf stream, freezing half of Europe. (This will, of course, be presented as evidence there's no such thing as global warming.)
Of course, the collapse of the gulf stream would leave all the warm water over here, off the east coasts of the North America, but the good news is that all the hurricanes that would cause would dispense it over the US. Wait, that's not good news at all.
Sea levels rising is just the most obvious and well defined aspect of global warming. If just that, and slightly higher average temperatures, was all that was happening, we could just all frickin move inland and wear short sleeves.
But the temperatures of a lot of places is due to very finely balanced variables and things working together. Screw up a few of them, and global weather patterns could just, well, randomly shift. Suddenly you can live in Siberia and not in Canada, the Sahari Desert has leapt Gibraltar and is in Spain, and the climate of Kansas has moved to Texas and Mexico, or other such semi-random weather changes.
Who the hell predicted NL would 'gradually' disappear?
I'm pretty sure you guys will violently disappear as each dike floods. 'Oh, look, the sea level went up half an inch, it went over the dike when the tide came in, 1/10th the country is now underwater.'
After that, sure, maybe the rest of it will be slow.
I was under the impression that Civil Rights refers to inalienable rights guaranteed by the constitution and its ammendments. Copyright is one such right with constitutional authority, as denoted in Article 1, Section 8, clause 8 - though it is not a civil right as specified by the original ten ammendments.
Copyright is not a civil right, it is a power of the government, specifically, to grant people the ability to restrict the rights of others. It is not more a civil right than the post office.
The first amendment, in lue of copyright, allows anyone to copy anything they wish. That is an actual civil right. Copyright is a limitation of that right although it's a legal limitation because it's in the constitution.
Expanding a power of the government, or a power granted to specific people by the government over other, at the expense of a civil right, is, indeed, 'a civil rights coup'.
What happens when MP3s shared via normal file sharing get DRM wrapped on them, like Zune does? What happens when all MP3s have DRM put on them when read from disk to 'stop file sharing', and things that access low-level access the CD drive have to be approved apps?
We can all see where this train is going, and Microsoft makes the OS. It's not going to happen retrooactively in XP, even with WMP updates, and it probably won't happen in Vista. But we're all going to have to get off at some point in time.
Those home users will not be using Windows 98. The people using Windows 98 are the people who use a computer to use email and look up information online, type nice letters in Word 97, and play some solitaire every once in a while. There's a 50% chance they still have dialup or no internet at all. They got the computer six years ago, it works, they aren't changing it.
Almost no one using Windows 98 to telecommute. And we're not talking about people who use computers in their work, we're talking about people like my mother, a school teacher, who has no clue what OS she's using at any time. Her laptop came with XP, but if it had come with 98, she'd still be running 98. She'll get a new computer when the old one dies, and won't have the slightest clue what it runs either. As long as she can get to her webmail and use webpages, and open the Office documents she gets emailed sometimes, she's fine with it, and, guess what? Linux can do all that.
Of course, the concept is a bit silly, as people who are happy with 98 aren't going to change their OS because it stopped being supported. But that's what the article is talking about, whether the idea is correct or not. Not people who actually know things about computers, because those people aren't running 98. (I say, a bit unfairly, because I'm sure there's someone out there running 98 who knows exactly what he's doing. But he's probably running Linux on another computer, and BSD on another, and all sorts of random OSes. And VMWare is making having a standalone 98 box sillier and sillier.)
As for VB, no, you're just wrong. Those little custom apps existed in DOS, all over the place. They were written in dBase or Clipper or Foxpro or other xBase languages. And Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic, and later QBasic. And others I can't think of right now. Or were custom WordPerfect macros, they could get pretty complicated.
And, like I said, plenty of companies had entire TUIs (Text User Interfaces) with linedraw characters, arrow keys, hilighted selections, all sorts of stuff, in batch files. (Culminating, because MS can never stand competition, in DOSShell which came with MS-DOS 5.0, within which everyone would have started writing those UIs if everyone hadn't started moving to Win 3.0 at that time.)
All this was back before Windows 3.0. It had mostly vanished by the release of 3.1, replaced with, yes, Visual Basic and Delphi.
Home users still using 98, which are who we are talking about, have no 'internal apps'.
As for VB, you are ignorant. I'm sorry, but I have to say it. Shell scripts allows that sort of thing way before Windows existed. It was a nice Windows got something that let companies do the same sort of thing on Windows, but it was only a 'watershed' and 'an amazing point in computer history' if you had no conceptualization of computer history outside of PCs.
Hell, that's not even accurate. Batch files let you do the same sort of thing on PCs. I can't count how many companies ran PC with a batch file front end along with 'keystroke input' program that let you get input in the middle of a batch file. (Microsoft eventually included one of those in later DOSes.) They output text menus to do all sort of maintence activities and launch the three or fours programs needed. Some of them were thousands of lines total, launching other batch files and whatnot, or starting up tiny BASIC programs to do stuff even batch files couldn't, like POKE video mode changes.
VB was only innovative because MS forgot to create anything to do that for Windows, except their lame-ass 'Recorder' application which didn't work right. So they came out with a product to do that, and charged for it, which was rather egotistical, as until that point everyone had had those types of tools for free.
Later, VB became a pretty nice language that you could actually write professional apps in, just in case anyone things I have anything against VB. I don't, but it wasn't some amazing innovation. It was batch files for Windows, at least to start with.
The failure of TNT2 to be supported by nVidia doesn't mean it was dropped from the 2.6 kernel. That was never in the kernel in the first place, it was a proprietary driver. Using proprietary drivers means you exist solely at the whim of the people writing them.
Exactly. A passion, not just 'Let's produce something to sell'.
I also like people who can actually sing, instead of having their voice 'fixed' by computer, and people who can play an instrument. People who write their own music are a bonus.
Right now I'm listening to Aimee Mann a lot. I have no idea how cool or uncool that is. Barenaked Ladies are fun, too, although I've overlistened to them so I'm taking a break.
OTOH, sometimes I throw on the Pussycat Doll's version of Tainted Love or Wang Chung's Everybody Have Fun Tonight. Whatever.
That's an interesting way to think about it. All my life I've been told, "you need an ID to register, you need an ID to vote". Kinda like breathing.
Like I said, I'm not opposed to it.
And I suspect your state is like mine, where you don't need an ID to vote, you just sometimes get asked for an ID, but you have the option of just swearing under penalty of perjury that you are the person you say you are. (In the rural areas, they had me swear instead of even bothering to ask for ID, because it was easier for them, whereas in the urban areas, they just had the people with IDs flashing them because it was faster.)
And we've never required ID to register. Like I said, we don't really have any fraud there, so we've never seen a reason to tighten it up. It's also a reason I keep saying 'We can do this whole thing slowly' instead of implimenting this huge change in such a way as to disenfranchise a large section of the population next election.
However, it's state law that you have a polling station per X number of people.
I'm sure we have some sort of law to that effect, too. However, it must be some absurdly high amount of voters, like 5,000. And we also have a law saying 'You must have them so no one has to travel more than X miles', probably about 3.
So in the urban areas, 5,000 voters try to filter through one station. In rural areas, you have all the voters within 3 miles, which comes to about 20. In the 'large rural cities', there probably is a wait, but even the somewhat large rural city I live near has 3500 people, which comes to like 700 voters.
The numbers are wrong I'm sure, but that's what's going on. We have laws, and they are heavily biased towards 'You must have polling stations close to where people live' (1) and almost completely ignore the actual population.
Not that I care rural polling stations have no wait. I'm just saying, they need more in the cities, and the fact this problem continues to exist is because most of the state considers the actual population of Atlanta to be poor black people. And the population of Gainesville to be poor Hispanic people. Those people vote in a different way than 'us', so we'll just leave it hard for them to vote.
1) Like everyone in rural areas doesn't have the ability to get into the nearest town in this day and age. The ironic thing is that walking three miles in a rural area is much easier than in a big urban area. Although there's the bus, although, heh, another poll tax. But that's just being silly.
You earlier said that Atlanta is at war with the Republican administration. How can it be an old war if a Republican have been in office for only 3 years?
What? The war has long been going on. The Republicans, for once, are winning in their attempt to control the state.
If you've got a better idea on how to prevent such fraud, I'd love to hear it.
Well, like I said, correctly rolled-out voter ID requirements are a good idea. Let's say 2010, we can get everyone IDs by then. Make sure the news covers it correctly. (Another handy vote supression tactic from the last time. They passed a law saying you needed IDs. The news covered it. The courts said 'You can't require people to buy IDs, that's a poll tax'. The news didn't cover it. How many people didn't bother to show up because they didn't have IDs?)
And focusing on 'fraud' is focusing on how the Democrats supposedly illegitmately gain votes, and ignoring the actual vote supression that happens here. This isn't Chicago, there haven't been any suggestions of organized fraud of that type.
However, I've voted in Cobb Country, a predominately black urban area, and stood in line for three hours. And I've voted in Lumpkin Country, a predominately white rural area, and had no line at all. Granted, the population difference is huge, but it's not like it's a secret population difference. There's absolutely no reason I needed to stand in line that long, and, yes, people left because they had to get back to work.
I.e., let's focus on the large voting manipulation, the organized stuff, before we worry about hypothetical ways people could be manipulting the vote. If this was Chicago, it'd be the dead voting. If this was Florida, it would be people being illegally removed from the voter rolls.
It's not. Here in Atlanta, let's do something about the fact the cities don't have their vote counted because the state doesn't actually bother putting up enough places to vote. (And, like I said, now they're trying to require ID, which they don't have enough places for either!)
There's only been a Republican governor for 3 years. Republicans have had a legislative majority for, what, 15 years max?
Huh? I didn't say it was a new war.
Did they close other Atlanta DMV offices because of "budget cuts"? Or has there always only been 1 DMV office in Atlanta?
I have no idea. I do know there is also only one DMV in Gainesville. And don't get me wrong. There's only one in the city limits of Atlanta, but the city limits are not anywhere close to the actual size of the city. There's at least one more someone else in the actual city.
And I'm not saying the low number of DMVs is delibrate in Atlanta. The entire state has nowhere near the amount it needs. But a new big office opened halfway up SR-400, five miles north of where all the suburbs are of the people who commute to Atlanta, and about 10 miles north of the last mass transit.(1) Instead of closer to Atlanta. Make of it what you will.
Like I said somewhere else, I'd be fine with photo IDs if they didn't keep trying to impliment them three months before an election they're required for, and if they'd actual open up either more DMVs, or just tiny mobile ID places that came to every precinct a few times, and stayed for a week, letting people get IDs. (Hell, we can move voting booths around, and not data entry machines and a camera?)
Voter ID is one of those ideas that seems perfectly reasonable, and could be perfectly reasonable, but it is repeatedly being suggested in such a manner as to disenfranchise the poor. It's not a coincidence.
1) If you do the math there, you'll realize that our mass transit doesn't reach our suburbs. Yup.
Do you get that? The Conventions apply only to those who accept and apply the provisions themselves.
No. The rules about POWs apply only to countries that have accepted the convention, those captured who are 'POWs'. That's defined in Article 4 of the 3rd Convention, and describes the protection in the rest of the 3rd convention, whenever they refer to 'POWs'.
I quoted Article 3. Article 3 isn't about two parties to a conflict at all. That's what 'Not of international nature means'. It means there is only one actual country involved. It can't fail to be valid when the 'other side' doesn't sign or follow the convention, because non-countries can't sign the convention. (And thus can't follow it, in the legal sense.)
It said there is a minimum standard of care, period. It's much much much much laxer than the POW standard, but it exists for anyone who's been fighting and no longer does so. Because, in this case, they were captured.
And, no, it's not trying to reference civilians. They're over in the 4th convention.
Would you agree that the majority of those detained by the US are indeed illegal combatants?
No, I wouldn't. First of all, there's no such thing as 'illegal combatants', that's just gibberish. You can't illegally shoot at an invading army. You can fight a war using illegal tactics like terrorism, but are you actually asserting that most of them have engaged in terrorism? Until they've actually done so, they can't have fought in an illegal manner. They can be 'terrorists', at least in training, they can't be 'illegal combatants'.
Second, we have no actual evidence for most of these people, because they were turned in by other people with the assertation they were 'terrorists'.
I'm this fucking close to urging people to 'Wreck the Vote' by destroying electronic voting machines, either in a blatant civil disobediance manner, or 'accidentally'.
John Yoo, for those who don't know who that is, is one of the major architeches of the presidents 'Unified executive' gibberish. See here.
And he's not asserting the president has the right to crush terrorists or even suspected terrorists testicles. He's asserting the president has the right to crush the testicles of people we know are innocent if that will make other people reveal information.
People, like, oh, you. If a terrorist likes you, Bush has the right to torture and mutilate you to make him talk, even if you have absolutely no connection to said terrorist.
And people think I'm being partisan when I talk about this administration literally being insane. That's even past '24' ground, it's into 'Evil Overlord' ground, where the villian menaces the love interest to make the hero talk.
You can argue all you want about why we did it and should we have... the problem is we are there now and you can't go back in time and make it not happen. You have to base policy on where we are, not where you want us to be. Further, bailing out now would make a bigger loss regardless of whether you think we are winning or losing the war at this point.
A bigger loss than what?
We've destroyed Iraq. It is in flames. The country is lost, period. Something might eventually rise from the ashes, who knows.
What we can do is stop pouring gasoline on it. While we're standing in it.
And we can certainly get rid of the fuckups who ever throught that would be a good idea in the first place and ramrodded and deceived this country into it, and are making motions about doing it again, to a country that manages to be at least twice as unsuited to it, Iran. (Hey, at least that won't turn into civil war. They'll be unified in their hatred of us. They can even join with the southeastern third of Iraq! That will make it real handy when we're listing our enemies.)
If all you ever do is make threats or minor skirmishes, you'll be seen as spineless and simply putting on a show that you're not willing to follow through with. At some point, you need to show your enemies that you're going to take off the gloves and punch them square in the face if they continue to attack you or they won't ever take you seriously.
Except Israel didn't make threats. They grumbled a lot, but no actual threats.
You think it's sorta like someone hauling off and hitting a bully. It's not. It's more akin to, to continue the analogy, what happened at Columbine. There's a reason the word 'disproportional' keeps getting thrown around. If you've constantly engaged in prisoner exchanges, it might be smart to, you know, indicate you won't do that anymore.
Unlike how Hezbollah is portrayed, they don't give a flying fuck about Israel as long as Israel isn't in Lebanon. They were happy running their half of the country. Israel would kidnap some of them, they'd kidnap some Israelis, trade them back and forth, and fun was had by all in sort of a very low-level continual border war. It made it hard for tourists to drive between Lebanon and Israel, and resulted in maybe ten dead soldiers a year, but, hey, everyone needs a hobby.
Then, Israel, at the urging of Bush, planned an invasion and flattening of Lebanon. They had it planned for months, just waiting for an excuse. The whole setup was quite delibrate.
As Hezbollah itself said, if they knew that was going to happen, they wouldn't have done it. It was like you're trading friendly insults about each other mothers and suddenly a SWAT team rolls out of the bushes and starts shooting at you and everyone near you. It's a 'WTF?' moment. Sadly for Israel, you had a gun, too.
Which makes it all the more interesting they didn't win. Oh, sure, they flattened the country, exactly like they wanted, but failed to either stop Hezbollah's rockets (Which they didn't even know about.) or retreive the soldiers. (Which obviously weren't part of the plan.)
Israel had at least two sane strageties. A ground invasion of the Hezbollah areas until the soldiers were found or returned, aka, an actual punch in the face. Or it could have cooperated with Lebanon to get rid of Hezbollah, and it could have done this months ago, instead of planning an invasion. It didn't do either of those.
Please explain to me which of the following Geneva Convention categories applies to captured terrorists:
You are confused as to which violation of Geneva I was talking about. I wasn't talking about imprisoning people because we say they're 'enemy illegal combatants', although that is additionally illegal, as everyone imprisoned is supposed to have a normal military trial to confirm that status, which we flatly refuse to do:
A person who takes part in hostilities and falls into the power of an adverse Party shall be presumed to be a prisoner of war, and therefore shall be protected by the Third Convention, if he claims the status of prisoner of war, or if he appears to be entitled to such status, or if the Party on which he depends claims such status on his behalf by notification to the detaining Power or to the Protecting Power. Should any doubt arise as to whether any such person is entitled to the status of prisoner of war, he shall continue to have such status and, therefore, to be protected by the Third Convention and this Protocol until such time as his status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
But, anyway, that's actually not the violation of the Geneva convention I was talkin about. I was talking about torturing people, which is flatly, period, illegal, no exceptions:
Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
And, no, international in the Geneva conventions means 'between nations'. The fight with al-Qeada is not 'international', the Adminstration already tried that specific loophole. Now they're trying to redefine 'outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;' with a bill in Congress. Or have you not been paying attention?
Please explain to me the incentive for obeying the Conventions if you can reap the benefits without even paying lip service to its requirements?
Yes, how dare innocent people not get imprisoned and tortured!
Here is a treaty for you. 'Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction' The first line of the preamble 'Determined to act with a view to achieving effective progress towards general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, including the prohibition and elimination of all types of weapons of mass destruction,'.
NBC weapons are three classes of weapons. WMDs are weapons with certain effects. Almost all WMDs are in the nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon classes, but they don't have to be. Almost all nuclear and biological weapons would be WMDs, and most chemical weapons are WMDs. That does not make WMD and NBC synonyms, and it doesn't mean that 'WMDs' started getting used because it was 'more scary'.
That is, the term didn't get selected. It has been used to a rather absurd amount, considing that WMD have not, in fact, been used in recent history.
Please do not taunt the reality-challenged. Yes, I said something to do with the Anbar province was 'news', and thus would logically expect all people operating in reality who had not heard anything recently about the Anbar province to go find out what news that would be.
But bringing it up to people not operating in reality is just silly. What's the point? They can have faith the war is going forward, and we can have reality that it's not. It's not like it matters. People aren't going to die because they're misinformed.
Except soldiers, I guess, but luckily the Republicans abstractly 'support the troups', so that counters out soldiers who just happen to die fighting for the delusion we can win in Iraq.
Breaking Geneva isn't some minor thing we can recover from by saying 'Oh, heh, we didn't mean that'. Creating international law took us fifty something years.
And the president doing illegal and unconstitional things and never being challenged isn't something we can recover from, that sets a very very scary precedent. That must be challenged and stopped.
And a whole generation of terrorists isn't just going to vanish. We've got people in Gitmo who hate us with every fiber of their being because they were some innocent goat herder who got captured by a local warlord and turned over the Americans with the false label of 'terrorist'. We've got families of the people we've killed in Iraq. We have generated a lot of hate in the Arab world, which to this point was pretty much content to view us merely with distaste. But kill and torture enough people, and, hey, they're willing to start hating you.
And letting them invade Iran isn't just going to vanish..it's going to be hard enough, quite possibly impossible, to 'undo' the invasion of Iraq. Invading Iran would just completely fuck us up. We'd have no military left.
The theft is, possibly, undoable, with quite a lot of presecution, but it needs to start now.
And it's the Republicans who are playing the emotional politics. They're the ones painting people as traitors for opposing them, they're the ones with public figures who can call for the execution of Surpreme Court judges, they're the ones ramping up the fear at every election.
Yes, lets hand Iraq over to the extremists who attacked us because we didn't have the balls to stand up to them in the first place.
That was pretty fucking stupid. Why did we do it?
Oh, wait. Are you under the impression we haven't lost the war? Or that 'al-Qeada in Iraq' was there before we attacked?
Lets see... if capturing 1 soldier will get 1000 of your operatives freed, why would you ever stop taking hostages? Diplomacy only works if backed by the threat of military retaliation. I presume you would have preferred to see Neville Chamberlain's policy triump over Winston Churchill's?
Good question. Now, here's the question: Why'd Israel not ramp up the threats, instead of instantly bombing Lebanon flat? Why not the minor ground invasions they did before, sweeping house to house, except extending them?
Oh, wait. Are you under the impression that Israel won that war? That they defeated Hezbollah? We know they defeated Lebanon, which they, in theory, were on the same side as, but that can only help Hezbollah.
Sorry, I keep having to check the reality level of the person I'm talking to when discussing politics.
There is a minor war going on between the now Republican-dominated state government and the Democratic city government. (And an entirely different war going on between the city of Atlanta and the surrounding counties.)
I agree it's pathetic, and I actually think having everyone get photo ID for voting would be a good idea...within the next ten years, and if photo ID places would show up in local communities and let people get photo IDs there. For free. Over, like I said, the next ten years.
If getting photo ID imposes a temporal hardship on the voter, though, it is a poll tax, just a very sneaky one.
What's more, it's being used as a poll tax, as this entire issue has been explained repeated to the people pushing it. Like I said, the first time this went through, which was attempted for, I think, the 2002 election, they didn't even bother to make the damn photo IDs free. Yes, technically, if you can't afford a photo ID, the DMV has always supposed to issue one for free, but in practice, they don't actually appear to do that, and even people who 'can' pay aren't supposed to have a poll tax!
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No, if the artic melts enough it could screw up the gulf stream, freezing half of Europe. (This will, of course, be presented as evidence there's no such thing as global warming.)
Of course, the collapse of the gulf stream would leave all the warm water over here, off the east coasts of the North America, but the good news is that all the hurricanes that would cause would dispense it over the US. Wait, that's not good news at all.
Sea levels rising is just the most obvious and well defined aspect of global warming. If just that, and slightly higher average temperatures, was all that was happening, we could just all frickin move inland and wear short sleeves.
But the temperatures of a lot of places is due to very finely balanced variables and things working together. Screw up a few of them, and global weather patterns could just, well, randomly shift. Suddenly you can live in Siberia and not in Canada, the Sahari Desert has leapt Gibraltar and is in Spain, and the climate of Kansas has moved to Texas and Mexico, or other such semi-random weather changes.
Who the hell predicted NL would 'gradually' disappear?
I'm pretty sure you guys will violently disappear as each dike floods. 'Oh, look, the sea level went up half an inch, it went over the dike when the tide came in, 1/10th the country is now underwater.'
After that, sure, maybe the rest of it will be slow.
I was under the impression that Civil Rights refers to inalienable rights guaranteed by the constitution and its ammendments. Copyright is one such right with constitutional authority, as denoted in Article 1, Section 8, clause 8 - though it is not a civil right as specified by the original ten ammendments.
Copyright is not a civil right, it is a power of the government, specifically, to grant people the ability to restrict the rights of others. It is not more a civil right than the post office.
The first amendment, in lue of copyright, allows anyone to copy anything they wish. That is an actual civil right. Copyright is a limitation of that right although it's a legal limitation because it's in the constitution.
Expanding a power of the government, or a power granted to specific people by the government over other, at the expense of a civil right, is, indeed, 'a civil rights coup'.
Oh, sure, it's not an issue now.
What happens when MP3s shared via normal file sharing get DRM wrapped on them, like Zune does? What happens when all MP3s have DRM put on them when read from disk to 'stop file sharing', and things that access low-level access the CD drive have to be approved apps?
We can all see where this train is going, and Microsoft makes the OS. It's not going to happen retrooactively in XP, even with WMP updates, and it probably won't happen in Vista. But we're all going to have to get off at some point in time.
Yes, home users can be all of that.
Those home users will not be using Windows 98. The people using Windows 98 are the people who use a computer to use email and look up information online, type nice letters in Word 97, and play some solitaire every once in a while. There's a 50% chance they still have dialup or no internet at all. They got the computer six years ago, it works, they aren't changing it.
Almost no one using Windows 98 to telecommute. And we're not talking about people who use computers in their work, we're talking about people like my mother, a school teacher, who has no clue what OS she's using at any time. Her laptop came with XP, but if it had come with 98, she'd still be running 98. She'll get a new computer when the old one dies, and won't have the slightest clue what it runs either. As long as she can get to her webmail and use webpages, and open the Office documents she gets emailed sometimes, she's fine with it, and, guess what? Linux can do all that.
Of course, the concept is a bit silly, as people who are happy with 98 aren't going to change their OS because it stopped being supported. But that's what the article is talking about, whether the idea is correct or not. Not people who actually know things about computers, because those people aren't running 98. (I say, a bit unfairly, because I'm sure there's someone out there running 98 who knows exactly what he's doing. But he's probably running Linux on another computer, and BSD on another, and all sorts of random OSes. And VMWare is making having a standalone 98 box sillier and sillier.)
As for VB, no, you're just wrong. Those little custom apps existed in DOS, all over the place. They were written in dBase or Clipper or Foxpro or other xBase languages. And Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic, and later QBasic. And others I can't think of right now. Or were custom WordPerfect macros, they could get pretty complicated.
And, like I said, plenty of companies had entire TUIs (Text User Interfaces) with linedraw characters, arrow keys, hilighted selections, all sorts of stuff, in batch files. (Culminating, because MS can never stand competition, in DOSShell which came with MS-DOS 5.0, within which everyone would have started writing those UIs if everyone hadn't started moving to Win 3.0 at that time.)
All this was back before Windows 3.0. It had mostly vanished by the release of 3.1, replaced with, yes, Visual Basic and Delphi.
You paid 70 dollars for a serial to USB converter?
I don't know when that was, but it's crazy. You can get them for 13 bucks at tigerdirect. When they first came out, they were like 30 dollars, IIRC.
For 70 dollars, I'd be expecting a whole breakout box, with serial, parallel, network, and even sound.
Home users still using 98, which are who we are talking about, have no 'internal apps'.
As for VB, you are ignorant. I'm sorry, but I have to say it. Shell scripts allows that sort of thing way before Windows existed. It was a nice Windows got something that let companies do the same sort of thing on Windows, but it was only a 'watershed' and 'an amazing point in computer history' if you had no conceptualization of computer history outside of PCs.
Hell, that's not even accurate. Batch files let you do the same sort of thing on PCs. I can't count how many companies ran PC with a batch file front end along with 'keystroke input' program that let you get input in the middle of a batch file. (Microsoft eventually included one of those in later DOSes.) They output text menus to do all sort of maintence activities and launch the three or fours programs needed. Some of them were thousands of lines total, launching other batch files and whatnot, or starting up tiny BASIC programs to do stuff even batch files couldn't, like POKE video mode changes.
VB was only innovative because MS forgot to create anything to do that for Windows, except their lame-ass 'Recorder' application which didn't work right. So they came out with a product to do that, and charged for it, which was rather egotistical, as until that point everyone had had those types of tools for free.
Later, VB became a pretty nice language that you could actually write professional apps in, just in case anyone things I have anything against VB. I don't, but it wasn't some amazing innovation. It was batch files for Windows, at least to start with.
The failure of TNT2 to be supported by nVidia doesn't mean it was dropped from the 2.6 kernel. That was never in the kernel in the first place, it was a proprietary driver. Using proprietary drivers means you exist solely at the whim of the people writing them.
Shaved sheep?
That's just perverted!
You can't cover your slip that easily.
Exactly. A passion, not just 'Let's produce something to sell'.
I also like people who can actually sing, instead of having their voice 'fixed' by computer, and people who can play an instrument. People who write their own music are a bonus.
Right now I'm listening to Aimee Mann a lot. I have no idea how cool or uncool that is. Barenaked Ladies are fun, too, although I've overlistened to them so I'm taking a break.
OTOH, sometimes I throw on the Pussycat Doll's version of Tainted Love or Wang Chung's Everybody Have Fun Tonight. Whatever.
That's an interesting way to think about it. All my life I've been told, "you need an ID to register, you need an ID to vote". Kinda like breathing.
Like I said, I'm not opposed to it.
And I suspect your state is like mine, where you don't need an ID to vote, you just sometimes get asked for an ID, but you have the option of just swearing under penalty of perjury that you are the person you say you are. (In the rural areas, they had me swear instead of even bothering to ask for ID, because it was easier for them, whereas in the urban areas, they just had the people with IDs flashing them because it was faster.)
And we've never required ID to register. Like I said, we don't really have any fraud there, so we've never seen a reason to tighten it up. It's also a reason I keep saying 'We can do this whole thing slowly' instead of implimenting this huge change in such a way as to disenfranchise a large section of the population next election.
However, it's state law that you have a polling station per X number of people.
I'm sure we have some sort of law to that effect, too. However, it must be some absurdly high amount of voters, like 5,000. And we also have a law saying 'You must have them so no one has to travel more than X miles', probably about 3.
So in the urban areas, 5,000 voters try to filter through one station. In rural areas, you have all the voters within 3 miles, which comes to about 20. In the 'large rural cities', there probably is a wait, but even the somewhat large rural city I live near has 3500 people, which comes to like 700 voters.
The numbers are wrong I'm sure, but that's what's going on. We have laws, and they are heavily biased towards 'You must have polling stations close to where people live' (1) and almost completely ignore the actual population.
Not that I care rural polling stations have no wait. I'm just saying, they need more in the cities, and the fact this problem continues to exist is because most of the state considers the actual population of Atlanta to be poor black people. And the population of Gainesville to be poor Hispanic people. Those people vote in a different way than 'us', so we'll just leave it hard for them to vote.
1) Like everyone in rural areas doesn't have the ability to get into the nearest town in this day and age. The ironic thing is that walking three miles in a rural area is much easier than in a big urban area. Although there's the bus, although, heh, another poll tax. But that's just being silly.
You earlier said that Atlanta is at war with the Republican administration. How can it be an old war if a Republican have been in office for only 3 years?
What? The war has long been going on. The Republicans, for once, are winning in their attempt to control the state.
If you've got a better idea on how to prevent such fraud, I'd love to hear it.
Well, like I said, correctly rolled-out voter ID requirements are a good idea. Let's say 2010, we can get everyone IDs by then. Make sure the news covers it correctly. (Another handy vote supression tactic from the last time. They passed a law saying you needed IDs. The news covered it. The courts said 'You can't require people to buy IDs, that's a poll tax'. The news didn't cover it. How many people didn't bother to show up because they didn't have IDs?)
And focusing on 'fraud' is focusing on how the Democrats supposedly illegitmately gain votes, and ignoring the actual vote supression that happens here. This isn't Chicago, there haven't been any suggestions of organized fraud of that type.
However, I've voted in Cobb Country, a predominately black urban area, and stood in line for three hours. And I've voted in Lumpkin Country, a predominately white rural area, and had no line at all. Granted, the population difference is huge, but it's not like it's a secret population difference. There's absolutely no reason I needed to stand in line that long, and, yes, people left because they had to get back to work.
I.e., let's focus on the large voting manipulation, the organized stuff, before we worry about hypothetical ways people could be manipulting the vote. If this was Chicago, it'd be the dead voting. If this was Florida, it would be people being illegally removed from the voter rolls.
It's not. Here in Atlanta, let's do something about the fact the cities don't have their vote counted because the state doesn't actually bother putting up enough places to vote. (And, like I said, now they're trying to require ID, which they don't have enough places for either!)
There's only been a Republican governor for 3 years. Republicans have had a legislative majority for, what, 15 years max?
Huh? I didn't say it was a new war.
Did they close other Atlanta DMV offices because of "budget cuts"? Or has there always only been 1 DMV office in Atlanta?
I have no idea. I do know there is also only one DMV in Gainesville. And don't get me wrong. There's only one in the city limits of Atlanta, but the city limits are not anywhere close to the actual size of the city. There's at least one more someone else in the actual city.
And I'm not saying the low number of DMVs is delibrate in Atlanta. The entire state has nowhere near the amount it needs. But a new big office opened halfway up SR-400, five miles north of where all the suburbs are of the people who commute to Atlanta, and about 10 miles north of the last mass transit.(1) Instead of closer to Atlanta. Make of it what you will.
Like I said somewhere else, I'd be fine with photo IDs if they didn't keep trying to impliment them three months before an election they're required for, and if they'd actual open up either more DMVs, or just tiny mobile ID places that came to every precinct a few times, and stayed for a week, letting people get IDs. (Hell, we can move voting booths around, and not data entry machines and a camera?)
Voter ID is one of those ideas that seems perfectly reasonable, and could be perfectly reasonable, but it is repeatedly being suggested in such a manner as to disenfranchise the poor. It's not a coincidence.
1) If you do the math there, you'll realize that our mass transit doesn't reach our suburbs. Yup.
Do you get that? The Conventions apply only to those who accept and apply the provisions themselves.
No. The rules about POWs apply only to countries that have accepted the convention, those captured who are 'POWs'. That's defined in Article 4 of the 3rd Convention, and describes the protection in the rest of the 3rd convention, whenever they refer to 'POWs'.
I quoted Article 3. Article 3 isn't about two parties to a conflict at all. That's what 'Not of international nature means'. It means there is only one actual country involved. It can't fail to be valid when the 'other side' doesn't sign or follow the convention, because non-countries can't sign the convention. (And thus can't follow it, in the legal sense.)
It said there is a minimum standard of care, period. It's much much much much laxer than the POW standard, but it exists for anyone who's been fighting and no longer does so. Because, in this case, they were captured.
And, no, it's not trying to reference civilians. They're over in the 4th convention.
Would you agree that the majority of those detained by the US are indeed illegal combatants?
No, I wouldn't. First of all, there's no such thing as 'illegal combatants', that's just gibberish. You can't illegally shoot at an invading army. You can fight a war using illegal tactics like terrorism, but are you actually asserting that most of them have engaged in terrorism? Until they've actually done so, they can't have fought in an illegal manner. They can be 'terrorists', at least in training, they can't be 'illegal combatants'.
Second, we have no actual evidence for most of these people, because they were turned in by other people with the assertation they were 'terrorists'.
I'm this fucking close to urging people to 'Wreck the Vote' by destroying electronic voting machines, either in a blatant civil disobediance manner, or 'accidentally'.
And read that carefully, everyone.
John Yoo, for those who don't know who that is, is one of the major architeches of the presidents 'Unified executive' gibberish. See here.
And he's not asserting the president has the right to crush terrorists or even suspected terrorists testicles. He's asserting the president has the right to crush the testicles of people we know are innocent if that will make other people reveal information.
People, like, oh, you. If a terrorist likes you, Bush has the right to torture and mutilate you to make him talk, even if you have absolutely no connection to said terrorist.
And people think I'm being partisan when I talk about this administration literally being insane. That's even past '24' ground, it's into 'Evil Overlord' ground, where the villian menaces the love interest to make the hero talk.
Oh, oh, I have this one! The one thing the president cannot do in a time of war?
Raise taxes.
You can argue all you want about why we did it and should we have... the problem is we are there now and you can't go back in time and make it not happen. You have to base policy on where we are, not where you want us to be. Further, bailing out now would make a bigger loss regardless of whether you think we are winning or losing the war at this point.
A bigger loss than what?
We've destroyed Iraq. It is in flames. The country is lost, period. Something might eventually rise from the ashes, who knows.
What we can do is stop pouring gasoline on it. While we're standing in it.
And we can certainly get rid of the fuckups who ever throught that would be a good idea in the first place and ramrodded and deceived this country into it, and are making motions about doing it again, to a country that manages to be at least twice as unsuited to it, Iran. (Hey, at least that won't turn into civil war. They'll be unified in their hatred of us. They can even join with the southeastern third of Iraq! That will make it real handy when we're listing our enemies.)
If all you ever do is make threats or minor skirmishes, you'll be seen as spineless and simply putting on a show that you're not willing to follow through with. At some point, you need to show your enemies that you're going to take off the gloves and punch them square in the face if they continue to attack you or they won't ever take you seriously.
Except Israel didn't make threats. They grumbled a lot, but no actual threats.
You think it's sorta like someone hauling off and hitting a bully. It's not. It's more akin to, to continue the analogy, what happened at Columbine. There's a reason the word 'disproportional' keeps getting thrown around. If you've constantly engaged in prisoner exchanges, it might be smart to, you know, indicate you won't do that anymore.
Unlike how Hezbollah is portrayed, they don't give a flying fuck about Israel as long as Israel isn't in Lebanon. They were happy running their half of the country. Israel would kidnap some of them, they'd kidnap some Israelis, trade them back and forth, and fun was had by all in sort of a very low-level continual border war. It made it hard for tourists to drive between Lebanon and Israel, and resulted in maybe ten dead soldiers a year, but, hey, everyone needs a hobby.
Then, Israel, at the urging of Bush, planned an invasion and flattening of Lebanon. They had it planned for months, just waiting for an excuse. The whole setup was quite delibrate.
As Hezbollah itself said, if they knew that was going to happen, they wouldn't have done it. It was like you're trading friendly insults about each other mothers and suddenly a SWAT team rolls out of the bushes and starts shooting at you and everyone near you. It's a 'WTF?' moment. Sadly for Israel, you had a gun, too.
Which makes it all the more interesting they didn't win. Oh, sure, they flattened the country, exactly like they wanted, but failed to either stop Hezbollah's rockets (Which they didn't even know about.) or retreive the soldiers. (Which obviously weren't part of the plan.)
Israel had at least two sane strageties. A ground invasion of the Hezbollah areas until the soldiers were found or returned, aka, an actual punch in the face. Or it could have cooperated with Lebanon to get rid of Hezbollah, and it could have done this months ago, instead of planning an invasion. It didn't do either of those.
Please explain to me which of the following Geneva Convention categories applies to captured terrorists:
You are confused as to which violation of Geneva I was talking about. I wasn't talking about imprisoning people because we say they're 'enemy illegal combatants', although that is additionally illegal, as everyone imprisoned is supposed to have a normal military trial to confirm that status, which we flatly refuse to do:
A person who takes part in hostilities and falls into the power of an adverse Party shall be presumed to be a prisoner of war, and therefore shall be protected by the Third Convention, if he claims the status of prisoner of war, or if he appears to be entitled to such status, or if the Party on which he depends claims such status on his behalf by notification to the detaining Power or to the Protecting Power. Should any doubt arise as to whether any such person is entitled to the status of prisoner of war, he shall continue to have such status and, therefore, to be protected by the Third Convention and this Protocol until such time as his status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
But, anyway, that's actually not the violation of the Geneva convention I was talkin about. I was talking about torturing people, which is flatly, period, illegal, no exceptions:
Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
And, no, international in the Geneva conventions means 'between nations'. The fight with al-Qeada is not 'international', the Adminstration already tried that specific loophole. Now they're trying to redefine 'outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;' with a bill in Congress. Or have you not been paying attention?
Please explain to me the incentive for obeying the Conventions if you can reap the benefits without even paying lip service to its requirements?
Yes, how dare innocent people not get imprisoned and tortured!
Here is a treaty for you. 'Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction' The first line of the preamble 'Determined to act with a view to achieving effective progress towards general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, including the prohibition and elimination of all types of weapons of mass destruction,'.
NBC weapons are three classes of weapons. WMDs are weapons with certain effects. Almost all WMDs are in the nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon classes, but they don't have to be. Almost all nuclear and biological weapons would be WMDs, and most chemical weapons are WMDs. That does not make WMD and NBC synonyms, and it doesn't mean that 'WMDs' started getting used because it was 'more scary'.
That is, the term didn't get selected. It has been used to a rather absurd amount, considing that WMD have not, in fact, been used in recent history.
Please do not taunt the reality-challenged. Yes, I said something to do with the Anbar province was 'news', and thus would logically expect all people operating in reality who had not heard anything recently about the Anbar province to go find out what news that would be.
But bringing it up to people not operating in reality is just silly. What's the point? They can have faith the war is going forward, and we can have reality that it's not. It's not like it matters. People aren't going to die because they're misinformed.
Except soldiers, I guess, but luckily the Republicans abstractly 'support the troups', so that counters out soldiers who just happen to die fighting for the delusion we can win in Iraq.
I'm sorry, but that's just dumb.
Breaking Geneva isn't some minor thing we can recover from by saying 'Oh, heh, we didn't mean that'. Creating international law took us fifty something years.
And the president doing illegal and unconstitional things and never being challenged isn't something we can recover from, that sets a very very scary precedent. That must be challenged and stopped.
And a whole generation of terrorists isn't just going to vanish. We've got people in Gitmo who hate us with every fiber of their being because they were some innocent goat herder who got captured by a local warlord and turned over the Americans with the false label of 'terrorist'. We've got families of the people we've killed in Iraq. We have generated a lot of hate in the Arab world, which to this point was pretty much content to view us merely with distaste. But kill and torture enough people, and, hey, they're willing to start hating you.
And letting them invade Iran isn't just going to vanish..it's going to be hard enough, quite possibly impossible, to 'undo' the invasion of Iraq. Invading Iran would just completely fuck us up. We'd have no military left.
The theft is, possibly, undoable, with quite a lot of presecution, but it needs to start now.
And it's the Republicans who are playing the emotional politics. They're the ones painting people as traitors for opposing them, they're the ones with public figures who can call for the execution of Surpreme Court judges, they're the ones ramping up the fear at every election.
Yes, lets hand Iraq over to the extremists who attacked us because we didn't have the balls to stand up to them in the first place.
That was pretty fucking stupid. Why did we do it?
Oh, wait. Are you under the impression we haven't lost the war? Or that 'al-Qeada in Iraq' was there before we attacked?
Lets see... if capturing 1 soldier will get 1000 of your operatives freed, why would you ever stop taking hostages? Diplomacy only works if backed by the threat of military retaliation. I presume you would have preferred to see Neville Chamberlain's policy triump over Winston Churchill's?
Good question. Now, here's the question: Why'd Israel not ramp up the threats, instead of instantly bombing Lebanon flat? Why not the minor ground invasions they did before, sweeping house to house, except extending them?
Oh, wait. Are you under the impression that Israel won that war? That they defeated Hezbollah? We know they defeated Lebanon, which they, in theory, were on the same side as, but that can only help Hezbollah.
Sorry, I keep having to check the reality level of the person I'm talking to when discussing politics.
There is a minor war going on between the now Republican-dominated state government and the Democratic city government. (And an entirely different war going on between the city of Atlanta and the surrounding counties.)
I agree it's pathetic, and I actually think having everyone get photo ID for voting would be a good idea...within the next ten years, and if photo ID places would show up in local communities and let people get photo IDs there. For free. Over, like I said, the next ten years.
If getting photo ID imposes a temporal hardship on the voter, though, it is a poll tax, just a very sneaky one.
What's more, it's being used as a poll tax, as this entire issue has been explained repeated to the people pushing it. Like I said, the first time this went through, which was attempted for, I think, the 2002 election, they didn't even bother to make the damn photo IDs free. Yes, technically, if you can't afford a photo ID, the DMV has always supposed to issue one for free, but in practice, they don't actually appear to do that, and even people who 'can' pay aren't supposed to have a poll tax!