I shouldn't do that, but let's dissect this troll.
Like making 100,000 on a 1,000 cattle futures investment (where can I get a deal like that!);
Stupidest. Conspiracy. Ever. First of all, the cattles future market was insane at that time. Hillary did, indeed, make that much money. In fact, she had to have made that money, you can't just magically get money out of a futures market. What she shouldn't have been able to do is trade on margin like she did. But a) she didn't break that rule, her broker did, and b) that rule is to keep problem from happening when people can't cover losses, which Hillary Clinton certanly could have done. Of course, all this was in 1979.
egregiously firing the WH travel office staff w/o any justification whatever;
Um, you mean the White House Travel staff that is the personal staff of the president, and traditionally gets replaced at each new administration? The travel staff that was already under investigation for misdeed done under a previous administration?
supposedly lost law firm billing records miraculously showing up in the WH living quarters year later;
You mean the billing records that...um...revealed nothing? (Why you think it's amazing that personal records of the president would be in the presidental living quarters is a bit beyond me.)
Webster Hubble in jail;
Okay, now I'm confused. You think he shouldn't be? He defrauded people and evaded taxes! I understand, though if you're saying it sucked that the Clintons misjudged him as trustworthy. (OTOH, don't start 'Clinton was friends with criminals'. You know the expression about what people in glass houses shouldn't do.)
Craig Livingstone(!);
Yup. Filegate sucked, and the Clintons might have been involved. And now I must point out 'glass houses' again with the fact the current president is wiretapping whoever he wants to.
a president lying in front of a grand jury about a stupid affair w/ an intern during the same timeframe as our embassies and barracks are bombed in the ME and Africa by the folks who would eventually take down the WTC;
Yes, because logically if he'd been telling the truth, that...no, wait, he'd still been questioned. Well, surely if he hadn't been doing anything illegal he wouldn't have been questioned...no, wait, he wasn't doing anything illegal before testifying. What was the claim again? The president was distracted by people making random and eventually disproven accusations against him? Well, that's hardly his fault, is it? You can complaing about The Lie, but The Lie is not a cause of the distraction.
illegally obtaining FBI records of the majority of republican lawmakers to dig up embarrasing dirt (unreal, and you guys piss and moan about wiretapping a few arabs with terrorist ties. the fucking gall!).
Yes, because we know for a fact that's all Bush is doing, because the process is so open.
Maybe if your buddy Bill had been more concerned about national security as opposed to getting his cock sucked 3000 people wouldn't have died.
Are we talking about the same Bill here? Because the Bill I know did do something about national security...he arrested the WTC bombers, for one thing. He repeatedly went after bin Laden, although at the time that was called 'wagging the dog' to try to distract everyone from his multiple murders or whatever. He warned the next president, he even made a plan for the invasion of Afganistan.
And interesting universe you live in where a blowjob is too time consuming, especially when you consider that Bush has now put in more vacation time than any two term president in history, and still has two years to go.
Maybe if Al Fucking Gore hadn't contested the election the GWB administration would have been put together in the normal timeframe, and we'd have been a couple of months up on the disaster of a National Security policy that w
WMD does not mean NBC. There are, for example, chemical weapons that are not considered WMDs, like mustard gas. Hell, tear gas and mace are a chemical weapons.
While a lot of talk of WMDs is political, WMD is a term with meaning under quite a lot of treaties. You are arguing an incorrect point, and I say that as someone who is probably on your side.
You are 90% correct, in that the two parties are mostly the same. However, the Administration we have is insane, and doesn't actually match either party, either what they actually believe or even claim to believe. One party is John Jackson, and one party is Jack Johnson, and the Administation is evil Richard Nixon, to make a Futurama reference.
But the Republicans won't get rid of the Administration or even restrain it. They are enabling it to completely beat our military up against rocks until it breaks. They are enabling it to cause terrorism, and violating everything we stand for, by imprisoning innnocent people. They are enabling it to debate torture like it's some sort of fucking game that we might allow for political reasons, where there is no legal reason that Bush can't crush the testicles of innocent children if he thinks it might get us useful information.(1) They are enabling it to arguing that, yeah, wiretapping without warrant is illegal, but not the 'illegal' kind of illegal. They are enabling it to rip off the entire nation with no-bid contracts. They are enabling it to replace competant people, even in traditionally non-political ares of the executive branch, with incompetant cronies. They are enabling the Administration to literally destroy this nation.
I don't get a flying fuck about what the Republicans 'policies' are at this point. I tended to agree with them about half the time, and the Democrats about half the time, but they have betrayed their duty to their country because of their loyality to party. If they'd have reversed course earlier, okay, they made a mistake. But it's too late now. I'll never vote for anyone who's still enabling the Administration ever again, under any circumstances, Democrat or Republican. I'll vote for the fucking Nazi party first...at least they're honest.
You're fighting a problem that doesn't exist. People do not register under different names and vote repeatedly to steal elections. And if they do, they do it absentee, which mysteriously doesn't require ID, probably because only rich people do that.
Until you can demonstate that that problem is more widespread than people without ID who legitimately need to vote, kindly shut the fuck up about your poll tax.
And, yes, it is a poll tax. The state I am in, Georgia, has large segments of the population without driver's licenses, because they live in Atlanta and use the buses and trains. Even if the ID was free, which it wasn't the last time requiring ID was proposed, Atlanta has...one DMV. It can take hours to get an ID. Fine for most people, impossible if you're working jobs that don't allow you to take hours off of work in the middle of the day.
I'm okay with requiring ID, but the idea that you need a photo ID, instead of, oh, the documents you could have used to get said ID, is idiotic. It's a way to surpress the vote of people who can't waste their time, aka, poor people. They can barely manage to spend the time voting itself, and you've just made it take twice as long.
And your literacy test is unconstitutional. It's not just illegal vote supression, it's literally banned in the constitution, you dumbass.
You posted exactly the comment I was going to. But Democrats do have a plan.
Democrats have a plan. It is a very simple plan. It is one sentence. Very simple. The plan is:
WE SHOULD STOP DOING STUPID SHIT.
It's not goddamn rocket science. The Democrats don't need a plan to fix the stupid shit as long as they are competing against Republicans who won't stop doing it. It's like being beaten by attackers and refusing to flee from them unless the place you're fleeing to will treat your injury for free. What the fuck kind of logic is that?
Even if the Democrats got into office and did nothing except evacuate our troups in Iraq and then sit on their ass for two years, it would be better than Bush, who's looking like he wants to invade fucking Iran. Invading Iran has, in my opinion, at least a 1% risk they'll come over here and kick our ass, because we have no working military anymore.(1) We're literally talking about national suicide. We are past any sort of semblence of sanity on the part of the administration.
We all hope the Democrats will also restore competency to the government, start restoration of our national image by returning to standards like not torturing suspects or imprisoning people without trials or wiretapping without warrants, get rid of the war/New Orleans profitering, and soften the housing market crash that's happening right now.
Eventually, the actual Democrats are probably sorta hoping they can, you know, get to their actual platform like health care and whatever, after they have glued the government back together. Everyone else voting for them is probably hoping they don't, but willing to accept it as collateral damage for saving the fucking country.
We're way past quibbling about how the two parties are the same, or how the evil Democrats are supporting teh gays, or whatever. The Administration is competely insane and the Republicans in Congress won't get rid of them, or even stop going along with their stupid ideas. We must replace the Republicans with anyone willing to do it. Seriously.
1) Incidentally, the Israel invasion of Lebanon was encouraged by the administration (As opposed to Israel's normal response to kidnapping, outraged demands, follwed by a prisoner exchange.) as a 'test' for the theory of invasion of Iran. No, I'm not kidding. The Lebanon invasion, of course, failed horrible. What did the Administration learn from this? Jack shit.
Hey! The neocons can run a war just fine! They're making plenty of money!
In related news, we've apparently completely lost the Anbar province, the entire western third of Iraqi, to 'al-Qaeda in Iraq'.(1) We no longer are bothering to even try to control Anbar, and apparently can't according to some recently leaked classified reports, so no longer have to drive across that damn desert anymore, and, hell, they didn't even have any oil.
And the north, of course, is happily in the hands of the Kurds, where they're having lots of fun advertising on TV and infiltrating across to Turkey and blowing up them up. I'm hoping it will be Turkey/Kurdistan trying for a 1980 Lebanon/Israel, where Turkey invades(2) and controls them for a few decades, and experiences even more and more terrorist working with native Turkey Kurds. They'll have their work cut out for them, because Lebanon is back in the game, baby, and they're not about to let their title get taken away sitting down!
And Iran is stepping in to control the remainer of the country. Luckily, they have experience at running oil wells, so that should work out nicely. Perhaps in a few years, they could remain themselves Iranq or Ira? The Kurds, of course, are 'Kurdistan', leaving 'Iraq' for the west, if they want it.
See, we should be entirely out of Iraq really soon, because soon the Iraqis will be able to fight the war all by themselves. Is it a civil war if there are three sides? Maybe a trivil war?
1) You know, the organization that didn't even exist until two years ago. Luckily, right now they're just killing us over there, and I'm sure they won't come over here, because...well..I forget, but I'm sure there's a good reason they won't. Probably they're scared of flying, what with all those airplanes flying into buildings. (And most soldiers are poor, anyway, so does it really matter if they die?)
2) We could complain, but seem to recall us invading a country just a few years ago because they supported terrorists, although I forget the name.(3) Starts with an A. Man am I glad that war was over, although it sucks we lost and the Taliban are back in charge. It probably wasn't that important, though. I mean, what did the Taliban ever do to anyone? They did blow up those giant Buddhas, but, frankly, those statues didn't look anything like Buddha anyway.
3) Not that we could complain if they just invaded for no reason at all. They could always assert that Kurdistan is hiding, for example, a black hole and a slingshot to launch it at them.
Of course, even if the election of 1960 was stolen, it was to get JFK in office isntead of Nixon, whereas the election of 2004 was to keep GWB in office instead of any other random person.
It's akin to the difference between robbing a bank so you can live in the Caymans the rest of your life, vs. robbing a bank so you can purchase and torture small children(1). The means might be identical, even the ends might be the same, being president, but the actual results varied rather largely.
And now I'm imagining paranoid Nixon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1) Like John Yoo says, the president is legally allowed to crush the testicles of the children of people we suspect of being terrorists to make the parents talk.
RSS feeds do make sense, but not the way a lot of people use them.
I use them in two ways...I have them in Google, which is my start page, so a quick glance will tell me if anything interesting is happening. I don't actually even know if those are RSS, they're just the boxes Google provides. But I think I can put my own custom feeds in there, assuming I had one I wanted that Google didn't have.
Then I have an RSS reader, that I use, basically, like a Usenet reader. It collects articles on a bunch of different feeds, and I go through and read them, or don't.
Lots of epople seem to use RSS feeds in utterly weird ways that I don't understand what they're doing.
I think you're in some sort of alternate reality where people agree with the concept that this is bad.
NO ONE DOES.
However, it's exactly the argument that was used to shut down Grokster and Napster. Slashdotters are just saying, 'Hey, wait, you guys already said that it was illegal to create devices that are used to violate copyright.'.
No, he's thinking of dissociative identity disorder.
There's no such think as multiple personality [disorder]. There's just dissociative disorder, which can express itself as 'dissociative identity disorder', where a person switches between different sets of memories and self-identities, some of which are aware of each other and some aren't. Dissociative disorder also contains dissociative fugue, which is where, basically, they just throw their life away and make up a new one (You know, where someone discovers a long-lost person living in another town under another name with no memory of their other life.), and dissociative amnesia, where they throw their life away and don't make up a new one, and depersonalization disorder, where people feel if they're watching themselves from the outside. (People on both illicit drugs and anesthesia get that one a lot)
Incidentally, everyone dissociates every once in a while. If you've ever been driving down the road and realized you seem to be missing the memory of the last ten minutes, while you quite obviously were driving and even making turns, you just dissociated. (Either that, or you just got wacked over the head and your short-term memory reset.) It happens other times, too, but that example is a good one because you obviously didn't fall asleep, which is what dissociating is often mistaken for.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm nitpicking a nitpick of a joke. Sue me.
There is no legitimate reason to strip the DRM from iTunes Store purchases.
Some of us use MP3 players not produced by Apple, or OSes that Apple has refused to produce a player for.
Of course, some of us also don't buy damn crippled music from Apple, but claiming there is 'no legitimate reason' for stripping DRM is idiotic. It's format shifting, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to do it. Hell, maybe we want to use it as a ringtone.
I find it sort of funny that it's magically okay to take a legally purchased song from a CD and copy and alter the data to get it on an iPod, but it's not okay to take a legally purchased song from Apple and copy and alter the data to get it on a different brand of portable music device.
I mean, it was one thing when the record industry was arguing that any copying was illegal. That stance was at least consistent. Now they're letting Apple sell music using software with features explicitly designed to copy CDs, but somehow it's 'wrong' to do a different format shift.
I guess slapping the logo 'DRM' on it makes it somehow morally different.
DRM means the vast majority of people purchasing from iTunes can't share their music on P2P. However, the vast majority of people purchasing from iTunes wouldn't P2P share their music anyway.
Meanwhile, it does nothing to stop people who download music. The music is still out there. Yes, even ripped from iTunes.
I can't even vaguely begin to guess what iTune's DRM is supposed to be accomplishing, what obstacles it is putting in the way.
I didn't mean that voting was the same level of complexity, I meant the design was. Hell, cash registers have to retain running totals of the cash in the drawer and thus keep track of every transaction, so it would easier to build...it just prints a ballot and then resets.
It wouldn't be more complicated to use, and in fact could use exactly the same interface, as current electronic voting devices.
You can trivally solve that problem by making computers print the finished ballot. A perfectly clear, line by line, printout of who was voted for. You use a standard laser printer, each ballot should fit on a (watermarked, obviously) sheet of paper, because you're just printing the office and candidate who won.(1)
Forget these comparisons to ATMs. It's the same level of complexity as a fucking computerized cash register.
You then look at it, and see if it appears to be correct and readable. If it's not correct, you rip it in half to mark it as void and put it in the 'discard' box. If it's not readable, you do that, and you then report the machine. Then you go back and print another ballot. (The printer being outside the booth, so people can't tamper with them. It just feeds into the booth.)
You can make it complicated and have the machine print a random code on each ballot, and keep track of each vote, and have OCR devices read the ballot, but, you know what? Fuck that, we don't actually need it.
You can either read these ballots with OCR software, or you can read them with the human eye. I recommend both.
1) No, we don't need to into physical security for the ballots. We've mastered hard-to-replicate ballots, and the physical security to deal with them, for decades, I'm not suggesting we use normal paper. Just something that can work in a normal laser printer.
The most logical thing would be to transfer the files compressed with lossless compression. If someone wanted them uncompressed, they could always do it themselves...they get back the same file.
Although I can't imagine the amount of people who would want to double their music collection's size to save 3% of their CPU while playing music actually number more than two. In theory, you might have some hardcore gamers trying to squeeze every cycle from their box, but in reality, if they're that hardcode, they aren't fricking playing music while they game, or playing it off a CD player or something.
Actually, come to think of it, I suspect that doubling the size of the file would produce more disk activity and disk caching, so you might not actually come out ahead with that tradeoff anyway.
These same people will swear to differences in wires, even what kind of knob is on the audio gear... there really is no end to the silliness.
I realize that recently when I noticed 'high quality, gold-plated, digital cables' that 'minimize interference'.
Um. Digital cables can't suffer from noise. The data either gets there, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, I think you'd notice the dropouts and buzzes and pops as the audio desynced. What is this, homeopathic sound reproduction, where a 1 that get turned into a 1.000001 and corrected back to a 1 at the end is no long the same as a 1 that stayed the same voltage? While we're at it, let's keep CDs out of magnetic fields, too, just in case they get magnetized and their spinning creates interference in the drive electronics! In fact, let's not exist at all, as our gravitional pull might be affecting the flow of electrons through the speaker wires! Wooo woo wibble wibble wibble.
And, yeah, tubes aren't 'better'. They have slightly different sound when you overdrive them, which audiophiles are careful not to do anyway!(1) Not better, just different.
It's the same thing with vinyl. Vinyl isn't 'better'. It's just decoded slightly different, and, incidentally, that difference is objectively 'wrong', as in, it's not exactly what the microphone picked up.
Audiophiles are lunatics. They are literally insane, operating in crazyland. They wear cheese sandwiches and eat combs. Nothing they believe makes any sense, and they refuse to do blind tests of their equipment, because when they do blind tests, they run smack into the realization that you can trivially add vinyl and tube distortion and 'warmth' to modern playback, which no one does, because that's not correctly reproducing the sound.
And, hey, no one's saying they have to listen to the sound exactly as it's recorded. But don't pretend it's 'better' and everyone else is getting some cheap imitation. It's a frickin sound wave, it's not magic. As long as a capable DAC is handing it, the amp isn't putting in any hum, and the speakers are good, it will all sound the same.
And now some 'audiophile' is going to respond to this with some well-reasoned nonsense from crazyland, about how the moon is really made of balsa wood and pennies are heavier than sheep and boinga boinga boinga wub.
1) And, as all computer programmers know, when you operate something in a non-permitted mode, there is no 'right' and 'wrong' behavior for it. It is acceptable for it to spew pea soup in your face or destroy the universe. The actual 'best' behavior when you overdrive would be for the system to malfunction in some identifable way, so you could fix it to not do that.
No kidding. Linus can actually recognize competant people and assign them to useful domains, as opposed using things like FEMA for political purposes. I suspect he'd have a better foreign policy, but frickin Pat Buchanan has a better foreign policy than out current president, so the bar is pretty low. Of course, he can't be president, he wasn't born here.
I don't know about Larry Flynt, but at least he's pretty successful at his business, and we won't have idiotic pretend pandering to the religious right.
Which is why cameras are forbidden within the booth, and they've been talking about banning cell phones with cameras.
However, the ability to 'prove' who you voted for (Note cameras can't do it, as people could just take the picture and get a new ballot.) isn't the same as any random person being about to find out who you voted for.
There is no 100% surefire method of making a vote secret in all circumstances. Hell, just making people swear a statement as to how they voted would probably get mostly the truth. But having someone demand to know how you voted for is obviously improper, either by making you 'prove' it while in the booth, or just threatening you if you don't tell them, even if you can lie.
What we can do is make other people doing this obvious to the voter, which can't happen if the votes are publically associated with the voter. If anyone can look it up, and suddenly you're being passed up for promotion after an election, you'll wonder 'Is this because I voted for X?' especially after you look up your boss and the people who get promoted and find they vote for Y. Whereas if they would have required your cooperation to find out how you voted, and didn't try, well, then, it's not.
And just putting their name on it is 'publically associated' if people can watch the counting. (Which they have to be able to do, or you're inviting even more fraud.)
This is why absentee ballots aren't a big deal. Right now, people could demand others vote absentee and show their ballots before sending it off. But it is obviously improper for someone to even ask you to do that, and thus people don't. Whereas if they just 'knew' how you voted, without your participation, you'd never know if they even had looked or not, which would produce a rather obvious chilling effect on voting.
Some old guy told a me a story once I wish I could recall correctly, about how the external hard drives of a mainframe he once worked on attacked one of his co-workers. They had some sort of sudden inbalance and leap at a guy behind them attempting to figure out what was going on with them. They literally pinned him in a corner by his leg for minutes while everyone tried to pry them away, but the drives had gotten wedged behind some wiring and they finally had to unplug them to release him.
Amazingly enough, they not only continued to work throughout that, they worked afterwards, once they'd been bolted to the floor and positioned against the wall in the direction they were trying to move.
It could be safe to reverse the reaction to 85%, and no more, with 86% containing enough of a certain chemical to cause an explosion. Or perhaps the 'charged' chemicals take up more volume than the uncharged ones, and the container can only hold 85% charge.
Alternately, full charge could indeed be 100% reversed, and if you try to reverse it more and there isn't any more chemical to alter to that, you end up altering some other chemical in a bad way. I.e., what happens to stars when they run out of hydrogen and start fusing helium instead.
There are plenty of ways for useful reactions to reach points they should not be continued past at the risk of catastrophic failure. All you have to do to prove that is to shake a Coke can until it explodes in your hand.
Yeah, but why do loyal hourly employees only get up to 16 weeks? Are people who've worked in management for 12 years actually more than twice as important as hourly people who worked there for 25? (Note that's on top of the difference in salary they'll be paid for those weeks.)
And WTF is with 'one to three weeks' per year? That seems somewhat vague.
I'm also vaguely confused as to how hourly employees get 'weeks' of pay. Shouldn't they get hours of pay? I mean, what if they said 'Okay, you get six weeks of pay, and we've scheduled you to work...two hours each week'. They're obviously not doing that, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I shouldn't do that, but let's dissect this troll.
Like making 100,000 on a 1,000 cattle futures investment (where can I get a deal like that!);
Stupidest. Conspiracy. Ever. First of all, the cattles future market was insane at that time. Hillary did, indeed, make that much money. In fact, she had to have made that money, you can't just magically get money out of a futures market. What she shouldn't have been able to do is trade on margin like she did. But a) she didn't break that rule, her broker did, and b) that rule is to keep problem from happening when people can't cover losses, which Hillary Clinton certanly could have done. Of course, all this was in 1979.
egregiously firing the WH travel office staff w/o any justification whatever;
Um, you mean the White House Travel staff that is the personal staff of the president, and traditionally gets replaced at each new administration? The travel staff that was already under investigation for misdeed done under a previous administration?
supposedly lost law firm billing records miraculously showing up in the WH living quarters year later;
You mean the billing records that...um...revealed nothing? (Why you think it's amazing that personal records of the president would be in the presidental living quarters is a bit beyond me.)
Webster Hubble in jail;
Okay, now I'm confused. You think he shouldn't be? He defrauded people and evaded taxes! I understand, though if you're saying it sucked that the Clintons misjudged him as trustworthy. (OTOH, don't start 'Clinton was friends with criminals'. You know the expression about what people in glass houses shouldn't do.)
Craig Livingstone(!);
Yup. Filegate sucked, and the Clintons might have been involved. And now I must point out 'glass houses' again with the fact the current president is wiretapping whoever he wants to.
a president lying in front of a grand jury about a stupid affair w/ an intern during the same timeframe as our embassies and barracks are bombed in the ME and Africa by the folks who would eventually take down the WTC;
Yes, because logically if he'd been telling the truth, that...no, wait, he'd still been questioned. Well, surely if he hadn't been doing anything illegal he wouldn't have been questioned...no, wait, he wasn't doing anything illegal before testifying. What was the claim again? The president was distracted by people making random and eventually disproven accusations against him? Well, that's hardly his fault, is it? You can complaing about The Lie, but The Lie is not a cause of the distraction.
illegally obtaining FBI records of the majority of republican lawmakers to dig up embarrasing dirt (unreal, and you guys piss and moan about wiretapping a few arabs with terrorist ties. the fucking gall!).
Yes, because we know for a fact that's all Bush is doing, because the process is so open.
Maybe if your buddy Bill had been more concerned about national security as opposed to getting his cock sucked 3000 people wouldn't have died.
Are we talking about the same Bill here? Because the Bill I know did do something about national security...he arrested the WTC bombers, for one thing. He repeatedly went after bin Laden, although at the time that was called 'wagging the dog' to try to distract everyone from his multiple murders or whatever. He warned the next president, he even made a plan for the invasion of Afganistan.
And interesting universe you live in where a blowjob is too time consuming, especially when you consider that Bush has now put in more vacation time than any two term president in history, and still has two years to go.
Maybe if Al Fucking Gore hadn't contested the election the GWB administration would have been put together in the normal timeframe, and we'd have been a couple of months up on the disaster of a National Security policy that w
WMD does not mean NBC. There are, for example, chemical weapons that are not considered WMDs, like mustard gas. Hell, tear gas and mace are a chemical weapons.
While a lot of talk of WMDs is political, WMD is a term with meaning under quite a lot of treaties. You are arguing an incorrect point, and I say that as someone who is probably on your side.
No. Just, no.
You are 90% correct, in that the two parties are mostly the same. However, the Administration we have is insane, and doesn't actually match either party, either what they actually believe or even claim to believe. One party is John Jackson, and one party is Jack Johnson, and the Administation is evil Richard Nixon, to make a Futurama reference.
But the Republicans won't get rid of the Administration or even restrain it. They are enabling it to completely beat our military up against rocks until it breaks. They are enabling it to cause terrorism, and violating everything we stand for, by imprisoning innnocent people. They are enabling it to debate torture like it's some sort of fucking game that we might allow for political reasons, where there is no legal reason that Bush can't crush the testicles of innocent children if he thinks it might get us useful information.(1) They are enabling it to arguing that, yeah, wiretapping without warrant is illegal, but not the 'illegal' kind of illegal. They are enabling it to rip off the entire nation with no-bid contracts. They are enabling it to replace competant people, even in traditionally non-political ares of the executive branch, with incompetant cronies. They are enabling the Administration to literally destroy this nation.
I don't get a flying fuck about what the Republicans 'policies' are at this point. I tended to agree with them about half the time, and the Democrats about half the time, but they have betrayed their duty to their country because of their loyality to party. If they'd have reversed course earlier, okay, they made a mistake. But it's too late now. I'll never vote for anyone who's still enabling the Administration ever again, under any circumstances, Democrat or Republican. I'll vote for the fucking Nazi party first...at least they're honest.
1) I'm not kidding. Google it.
You're fighting a problem that doesn't exist. People do not register under different names and vote repeatedly to steal elections. And if they do, they do it absentee, which mysteriously doesn't require ID, probably because only rich people do that.
Until you can demonstate that that problem is more widespread than people without ID who legitimately need to vote, kindly shut the fuck up about your poll tax.
And, yes, it is a poll tax. The state I am in, Georgia, has large segments of the population without driver's licenses, because they live in Atlanta and use the buses and trains. Even if the ID was free, which it wasn't the last time requiring ID was proposed, Atlanta has...one DMV. It can take hours to get an ID. Fine for most people, impossible if you're working jobs that don't allow you to take hours off of work in the middle of the day.
I'm okay with requiring ID, but the idea that you need a photo ID, instead of, oh, the documents you could have used to get said ID, is idiotic. It's a way to surpress the vote of people who can't waste their time, aka, poor people. They can barely manage to spend the time voting itself, and you've just made it take twice as long.
And your literacy test is unconstitutional. It's not just illegal vote supression, it's literally banned in the constitution, you dumbass.
You posted exactly the comment I was going to. But Democrats do have a plan.
Democrats have a plan. It is a very simple plan. It is one sentence. Very simple. The plan is:
WE SHOULD STOP DOING STUPID SHIT.
It's not goddamn rocket science. The Democrats don't need a plan to fix the stupid shit as long as they are competing against Republicans who won't stop doing it. It's like being beaten by attackers and refusing to flee from them unless the place you're fleeing to will treat your injury for free. What the fuck kind of logic is that?
Even if the Democrats got into office and did nothing except evacuate our troups in Iraq and then sit on their ass for two years, it would be better than Bush, who's looking like he wants to invade fucking Iran. Invading Iran has, in my opinion, at least a 1% risk they'll come over here and kick our ass, because we have no working military anymore.(1) We're literally talking about national suicide. We are past any sort of semblence of sanity on the part of the administration.
We all hope the Democrats will also restore competency to the government, start restoration of our national image by returning to standards like not torturing suspects or imprisoning people without trials or wiretapping without warrants, get rid of the war/New Orleans profitering, and soften the housing market crash that's happening right now.
Eventually, the actual Democrats are probably sorta hoping they can, you know, get to their actual platform like health care and whatever, after they have glued the government back together. Everyone else voting for them is probably hoping they don't, but willing to accept it as collateral damage for saving the fucking country.
We're way past quibbling about how the two parties are the same, or how the evil Democrats are supporting teh gays, or whatever. The Administration is competely insane and the Republicans in Congress won't get rid of them, or even stop going along with their stupid ideas. We must replace the Republicans with anyone willing to do it. Seriously.
1) Incidentally, the Israel invasion of Lebanon was encouraged by the administration (As opposed to Israel's normal response to kidnapping, outraged demands, follwed by a prisoner exchange.) as a 'test' for the theory of invasion of Iran. No, I'm not kidding. The Lebanon invasion, of course, failed horrible. What did the Administration learn from this? Jack shit.
Hey! The neocons can run a war just fine! They're making plenty of money!
In related news, we've apparently completely lost the Anbar province, the entire western third of Iraqi, to 'al-Qaeda in Iraq'.(1) We no longer are bothering to even try to control Anbar, and apparently can't according to some recently leaked classified reports, so no longer have to drive across that damn desert anymore, and, hell, they didn't even have any oil.
And the north, of course, is happily in the hands of the Kurds, where they're having lots of fun advertising on TV and infiltrating across to Turkey and blowing up them up. I'm hoping it will be Turkey/Kurdistan trying for a 1980 Lebanon/Israel, where Turkey invades(2) and controls them for a few decades, and experiences even more and more terrorist working with native Turkey Kurds. They'll have their work cut out for them, because Lebanon is back in the game, baby, and they're not about to let their title get taken away sitting down!
And Iran is stepping in to control the remainer of the country. Luckily, they have experience at running oil wells, so that should work out nicely. Perhaps in a few years, they could remain themselves Iranq or Ira? The Kurds, of course, are 'Kurdistan', leaving 'Iraq' for the west, if they want it.
See, we should be entirely out of Iraq really soon, because soon the Iraqis will be able to fight the war all by themselves. Is it a civil war if there are three sides? Maybe a trivil war?
1) You know, the organization that didn't even exist until two years ago. Luckily, right now they're just killing us over there, and I'm sure they won't come over here, because...well..I forget, but I'm sure there's a good reason they won't. Probably they're scared of flying, what with all those airplanes flying into buildings. (And most soldiers are poor, anyway, so does it really matter if they die?)
2) We could complain, but seem to recall us invading a country just a few years ago because they supported terrorists, although I forget the name.(3) Starts with an A. Man am I glad that war was over, although it sucks we lost and the Taliban are back in charge. It probably wasn't that important, though. I mean, what did the Taliban ever do to anyone? They did blow up those giant Buddhas, but, frankly, those statues didn't look anything like Buddha anyway.
3) Not that we could complain if they just invaded for no reason at all. They could always assert that Kurdistan is hiding, for example, a black hole and a slingshot to launch it at them.
Of course, even if the election of 1960 was stolen, it was to get JFK in office isntead of Nixon, whereas the election of 2004 was to keep GWB in office instead of any other random person.
It's akin to the difference between robbing a bank so you can live in the Caymans the rest of your life, vs. robbing a bank so you can purchase and torture small children(1). The means might be identical, even the ends might be the same, being president, but the actual results varied rather largely.
And now I'm imagining paranoid Nixon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1) Like John Yoo says, the president is legally allowed to crush the testicles of the children of people we suspect of being terrorists to make the parents talk.
RSS feeds do make sense, but not the way a lot of people use them.
I use them in two ways...I have them in Google, which is my start page, so a quick glance will tell me if anything interesting is happening. I don't actually even know if those are RSS, they're just the boxes Google provides. But I think I can put my own custom feeds in there, assuming I had one I wanted that Google didn't have.
Then I have an RSS reader, that I use, basically, like a Usenet reader. It collects articles on a bunch of different feeds, and I go through and read them, or don't.
Lots of epople seem to use RSS feeds in utterly weird ways that I don't understand what they're doing.
That was either astonishing satire, or amazing silliness. Congrats.
I think you're in some sort of alternate reality where people agree with the concept that this is bad.
NO ONE DOES.
However, it's exactly the argument that was used to shut down Grokster and Napster. Slashdotters are just saying, 'Hey, wait, you guys already said that it was illegal to create devices that are used to violate copyright.'.
No, he's thinking of dissociative identity disorder.
There's no such think as multiple personality [disorder]. There's just dissociative disorder, which can express itself as 'dissociative identity disorder', where a person switches between different sets of memories and self-identities, some of which are aware of each other and some aren't. Dissociative disorder also contains dissociative fugue, which is where, basically, they just throw their life away and make up a new one (You know, where someone discovers a long-lost person living in another town under another name with no memory of their other life.), and dissociative amnesia, where they throw their life away and don't make up a new one, and depersonalization disorder, where people feel if they're watching themselves from the outside. (People on both illicit drugs and anesthesia get that one a lot)
Incidentally, everyone dissociates every once in a while. If you've ever been driving down the road and realized you seem to be missing the memory of the last ten minutes, while you quite obviously were driving and even making turns, you just dissociated. (Either that, or you just got wacked over the head and your short-term memory reset.) It happens other times, too, but that example is a good one because you obviously didn't fall asleep, which is what dissociating is often mistaken for.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm nitpicking a nitpick of a joke. Sue me.
There is no legitimate reason to strip the DRM from iTunes Store purchases.
Some of us use MP3 players not produced by Apple, or OSes that Apple has refused to produce a player for.
Of course, some of us also don't buy damn crippled music from Apple, but claiming there is 'no legitimate reason' for stripping DRM is idiotic. It's format shifting, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to do it. Hell, maybe we want to use it as a ringtone.
I find it sort of funny that it's magically okay to take a legally purchased song from a CD and copy and alter the data to get it on an iPod, but it's not okay to take a legally purchased song from Apple and copy and alter the data to get it on a different brand of portable music device.
I mean, it was one thing when the record industry was arguing that any copying was illegal. That stance was at least consistent. Now they're letting Apple sell music using software with features explicitly designed to copy CDs, but somehow it's 'wrong' to do a different format shift.
I guess slapping the logo 'DRM' on it makes it somehow morally different.
No, I don't see how.
DRM means the vast majority of people purchasing from iTunes can't share their music on P2P. However, the vast majority of people purchasing from iTunes wouldn't P2P share their music anyway.
Meanwhile, it does nothing to stop people who download music. The music is still out there. Yes, even ripped from iTunes.
I can't even vaguely begin to guess what iTune's DRM is supposed to be accomplishing, what obstacles it is putting in the way.
I didn't mean that voting was the same level of complexity, I meant the design was. Hell, cash registers have to retain running totals of the cash in the drawer and thus keep track of every transaction, so it would easier to build...it just prints a ballot and then resets.
It wouldn't be more complicated to use, and in fact could use exactly the same interface, as current electronic voting devices.
And the other error, in this case at least, was using computers in the first place.
You can trivally solve that problem by making computers print the finished ballot. A perfectly clear, line by line, printout of who was voted for. You use a standard laser printer, each ballot should fit on a (watermarked, obviously) sheet of paper, because you're just printing the office and candidate who won.(1)
Forget these comparisons to ATMs. It's the same level of complexity as a fucking computerized cash register.
You then look at it, and see if it appears to be correct and readable. If it's not correct, you rip it in half to mark it as void and put it in the 'discard' box. If it's not readable, you do that, and you then report the machine. Then you go back and print another ballot. (The printer being outside the booth, so people can't tamper with them. It just feeds into the booth.)
You can make it complicated and have the machine print a random code on each ballot, and keep track of each vote, and have OCR devices read the ballot, but, you know what? Fuck that, we don't actually need it.
You can either read these ballots with OCR software, or you can read them with the human eye. I recommend both.
1) No, we don't need to into physical security for the ballots. We've mastered hard-to-replicate ballots, and the physical security to deal with them, for decades, I'm not suggesting we use normal paper. Just something that can work in a normal laser printer.
The most logical thing would be to transfer the files compressed with lossless compression. If someone wanted them uncompressed, they could always do it themselves...they get back the same file.
Although I can't imagine the amount of people who would want to double their music collection's size to save 3% of their CPU while playing music actually number more than two. In theory, you might have some hardcore gamers trying to squeeze every cycle from their box, but in reality, if they're that hardcode, they aren't fricking playing music while they game, or playing it off a CD player or something.
Actually, come to think of it, I suspect that doubling the size of the file would produce more disk activity and disk caching, so you might not actually come out ahead with that tradeoff anyway.
These same people will swear to differences in wires, even what kind of knob is on the audio gear... there really is no end to the silliness.
I realize that recently when I noticed 'high quality, gold-plated, digital cables' that 'minimize interference'.
Um. Digital cables can't suffer from noise. The data either gets there, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, I think you'd notice the dropouts and buzzes and pops as the audio desynced. What is this, homeopathic sound reproduction, where a 1 that get turned into a 1.000001 and corrected back to a 1 at the end is no long the same as a 1 that stayed the same voltage? While we're at it, let's keep CDs out of magnetic fields, too, just in case they get magnetized and their spinning creates interference in the drive electronics! In fact, let's not exist at all, as our gravitional pull might be affecting the flow of electrons through the speaker wires! Wooo woo wibble wibble wibble.
And, yeah, tubes aren't 'better'. They have slightly different sound when you overdrive them, which audiophiles are careful not to do anyway!(1) Not better, just different.
It's the same thing with vinyl. Vinyl isn't 'better'. It's just decoded slightly different, and, incidentally, that difference is objectively 'wrong', as in, it's not exactly what the microphone picked up.
Audiophiles are lunatics. They are literally insane, operating in crazyland. They wear cheese sandwiches and eat combs. Nothing they believe makes any sense, and they refuse to do blind tests of their equipment, because when they do blind tests, they run smack into the realization that you can trivially add vinyl and tube distortion and 'warmth' to modern playback, which no one does, because that's not correctly reproducing the sound.
And, hey, no one's saying they have to listen to the sound exactly as it's recorded. But don't pretend it's 'better' and everyone else is getting some cheap imitation. It's a frickin sound wave, it's not magic. As long as a capable DAC is handing it, the amp isn't putting in any hum, and the speakers are good, it will all sound the same.
And now some 'audiophile' is going to respond to this with some well-reasoned nonsense from crazyland, about how the moon is really made of balsa wood and pennies are heavier than sheep and boinga boinga boinga wub.
1) And, as all computer programmers know, when you operate something in a non-permitted mode, there is no 'right' and 'wrong' behavior for it. It is acceptable for it to spew pea soup in your face or destroy the universe. The actual 'best' behavior when you overdrive would be for the system to malfunction in some identifable way, so you could fix it to not do that.
No kidding. Linus can actually recognize competant people and assign them to useful domains, as opposed using things like FEMA for political purposes. I suspect he'd have a better foreign policy, but frickin Pat Buchanan has a better foreign policy than out current president, so the bar is pretty low. Of course, he can't be president, he wasn't born here.
I don't know about Larry Flynt, but at least he's pretty successful at his business, and we won't have idiotic pretend pandering to the religious right.
Which is why cameras are forbidden within the booth, and they've been talking about banning cell phones with cameras.
However, the ability to 'prove' who you voted for (Note cameras can't do it, as people could just take the picture and get a new ballot.) isn't the same as any random person being about to find out who you voted for.
There is no 100% surefire method of making a vote secret in all circumstances. Hell, just making people swear a statement as to how they voted would probably get mostly the truth. But having someone demand to know how you voted for is obviously improper, either by making you 'prove' it while in the booth, or just threatening you if you don't tell them, even if you can lie.
What we can do is make other people doing this obvious to the voter, which can't happen if the votes are publically associated with the voter. If anyone can look it up, and suddenly you're being passed up for promotion after an election, you'll wonder 'Is this because I voted for X?' especially after you look up your boss and the people who get promoted and find they vote for Y. Whereas if they would have required your cooperation to find out how you voted, and didn't try, well, then, it's not.
And just putting their name on it is 'publically associated' if people can watch the counting. (Which they have to be able to do, or you're inviting even more fraud.)
This is why absentee ballots aren't a big deal. Right now, people could demand others vote absentee and show their ballots before sending it off. But it is obviously improper for someone to even ask you to do that, and thus people don't. Whereas if they just 'knew' how you voted, without your participation, you'd never know if they even had looked or not, which would produce a rather obvious chilling effect on voting.
Some old guy told a me a story once I wish I could recall correctly, about how the external hard drives of a mainframe he once worked on attacked one of his co-workers. They had some sort of sudden inbalance and leap at a guy behind them attempting to figure out what was going on with them. They literally pinned him in a corner by his leg for minutes while everyone tried to pry them away, but the drives had gotten wedged behind some wiring and they finally had to unplug them to release him.
Amazingly enough, they not only continued to work throughout that, they worked afterwards, once they'd been bolted to the floor and positioned against the wall in the direction they were trying to move.
Idiots are very, very clever.
Who said it was past 100%?
It could be safe to reverse the reaction to 85%, and no more, with 86% containing enough of a certain chemical to cause an explosion. Or perhaps the 'charged' chemicals take up more volume than the uncharged ones, and the container can only hold 85% charge.
Alternately, full charge could indeed be 100% reversed, and if you try to reverse it more and there isn't any more chemical to alter to that, you end up altering some other chemical in a bad way. I.e., what happens to stars when they run out of hydrogen and start fusing helium instead.
There are plenty of ways for useful reactions to reach points they should not be continued past at the risk of catastrophic failure. All you have to do to prove that is to shake a Coke can until it explodes in your hand.
Yeah, but why do loyal hourly employees only get up to 16 weeks? Are people who've worked in management for 12 years actually more than twice as important as hourly people who worked there for 25? (Note that's on top of the difference in salary they'll be paid for those weeks.)
And WTF is with 'one to three weeks' per year? That seems somewhat vague.
I'm also vaguely confused as to how hourly employees get 'weeks' of pay. Shouldn't they get hours of pay? I mean, what if they said 'Okay, you get six weeks of pay, and we've scheduled you to work...two hours each week'. They're obviously not doing that, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
See, I don't get this.
Why the hell would you have some many spare employees laying around? Wouldn't it make more sense to slowly get rid of extraneous positions?