Not really. It's more like what you get when you put email, wikis, and IM in a blender and set it to puree.
Really, the Firefly reference was intentional, and similar to their goal -- a combined communications "thing" that's kinda like e-mail, but multimedia and capable of being real-time.
It seems like everyone calls everything Google has done recently their "version of Facebook." Wave was, profiles were, even Buzz is, apparently. =p
You need to be clear -- the process used to move the gene from the fish to the plant and getting it to enter the plant genome properly could very well be an invention, just not the sequence of genes themselves.
Wouldn't this at least keep them from declaring that fields adjacent to fields that use their seeds and somehow end up with genes from their "sterile" plants are somehow in violation of some kind of agreement or patent, since the genetic sequence itself can't be owned by Monsanto?
I know I hated Titanic, but that had more to do with having several teenaged nieces and thus having to watch it half a dozen times a week for a several month period. It's really not a movie that any right thinking person should be subjected to so many times that you start hearing the dialog in your head before they say it, and not just for the more notable scenes. =p
What gets me is the Manchin/Raese campaigns -- seriously, all it seems like Raese says is "Manchin is just a rubber stamp for Obama" and nothing about himself, and Manchin mostly harps on Raese's attack ads. Neither says very much about themselves or their own positions, barring saying "What the other guy just said about me was wrong!"
Raese just goes to show how many votes you can get from general Obama hate and very little else. At least people have some record of what Manchin's been up to to gather expectations from (for good or ill). It's not like their campaigns tell you anything about them.
Citizens for Responsible Energy Policy (I think that's the right name, if not it's something really similar) exists solely so that Massey can spend huge amounts on politics in certain areas without the locals realizing it comes from them, because *shock* the coal company wants to do things that favor the coal industry but known that people would see it in exactly that light if they didn't hide behind a name!
Personally, we'd be better off if the expenses behind running 3rd party political ads counted as "contributions."
If government doesn't have the power to reign in corporations, then corporations won't try to buy candidates to keep them from doing so in a meaningful way?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but shouldn't the ideal be to strike a balance where corporations can't buy government effectively while government still has some capacity to keep corporations in check, because more or less no other entity can?
...but nothing stops Sony from arbitrarily removing features from such a phone, or from cutting you off from accessing their library of apps/games for the device if you refuse to submit to such an update. So, IOW, business as usual.
Just a matter of time before we see CFW for the PS3 that undoes the damage though, give it time. Patience my precioussssssss...
So, what you are saying is "We didn't feel that bringing these more serious charges to question was worthwhile (presumably because there wasn't remotely enough evidence to demonstrate your guilt, or a case of mistaken identity, or whatever), so when we punish you for the lesser charge, we're going to do so assuming you are also guilty of anything else you've been accused of" is an even remotely sane response?
So we need to take all those performance shops to court as well, since they modify cars in ways outside the warranty, and they certainly charge you for installing a performance chip. "With a computer" should not change the law.
Hell, let's just replace our elected officials with randomly selected ones -- make it like jury duty. Rotate them semi-frequently and the price to buy them out might stop being so damned worth it. =p
If it's anything like the PS3 one, then it depends on exactly what time you are looking at. At the moment of release of PSJailbreak, there was the potential for non-infringing uses, but none were extant because they simply hadn't been developed yet (shockingly software development takes nonzero time). Now, there are multiple emulators, a couple of minor games, an FTP server, and a handful of other things, all produced within the span of just a couple of months.
"True, but if they make such little money then it's fair to say they don't work full time. In that case, if they don't have enough money to pay taxes, they can do community service or some type of government sponsored work. Not too much, just enough so that the connection between "the government does stuff for me" and "but it costs me money/time" is established."
Honestly, for many types of welfare, I've thought exactly that, that requiring them to do X amount of labor for the state wasn't a terrible idea.
The "welfare as a career choice because I don't want to be bothered to work" types really piss me off though, as opposed to the ones who really do put forth every effort to try to not need it and do anyways, usually because of something outside their control, like a child with an expensive and medium-long term illness (I actually know one of those cases, they'd be off all government assistance and able to save a little even if their child wasn't sick, instead they get HUD-sponsored income-adjusted housing and food stamps).
"Hm, how many banking transactions are involved with your paycheck? I know customers have to deposit money into their accounts (1), then transfer it to my company (2), then my company transfers it to me (3), then I transfer it to pay my bills (4) and I have very little left over. Then the people I pay have to pay additional transfer taxes so they raise their prices. It seems it could become a very high tax indirectly, and it would affect regular working people maybe more than you think."
Yeah, I was considering how often transactions occur. The original claim made (before Congress shot that whole idea down) regarding that was that a 1% tax there would generate enough income to do away with income tax entirely and have a surplus to start paying down the debt with.
It's a tiny tax, but it's a tiny tax that gets applied all over the place and makes up for only generating small income per transaction by the sheer volume of transactions effected.
Depends on where you mark as "poor". If you set your "poor" marker low enough, then the answer is "because they need food, shelter, clean water, clothing and other basic needs and have very little left to really take."
If we set the bar for "poor" a little higher, then I agree with you, though I feel the need to note that even the poor pay some taxes, even if only to the state, as they're only really exempted from income tax.
That "1% on all banking transactions" thing seems more and more like a good idea the more I think about it, but it would never come to be simply because the people most effected by it would be so called "investment firms" who make hundreds+ stock market transactions every millisecond or so -- you can say they improve the market by improving liquidity, but frankly I can't think of any case where you need liquidity to the extent that waiting 1 second, or even 1 minute would be a meaningful problem with any frequency, and slowing the market down just a hair (which this would likely have the side effect of, by making huge numbers of super-rapid transactions costly) would help prevent things like that ridiculous mini-crash not all that long ago.
"The people getting shafted are the medium income earners, not the poor." -- and any attempt to reduce their burden (which is proportionately higher than that of the rich as a function of income) by lightening the tax burden of the middle class and increasing taxes on the wealthy (even if only to the point that they're both paying out a similar amount relative to income) is evil socialist wealth redistribution that will vastly increase their taxes (while leaving out the "If you net over a quarter million a year"[or whatever the mark is in this case] part). Or at least that's how it gets described by the assorted talking heads that fall into the group that would be penalized by it when persuading the much larger group who would benefit from it why it's a terrible idea and they should vote against anyone who even suggests it.
I'm starting to wonder if that "1% on all banking transactions and eliminate income tax" idea would really be so bad, assuming it would net the kind of total income that's been claimed it would.
"a government that simply wastes that money" -- this is a huge problem, and I don't see a good solution without the gov't completely changing how they hand out funding. It encourages being wasteful rather than encouraging thrift.
SeaLand is kind of a unique case though -- it was a decommissioned British naval base in international waters, bought by an individual precisely for that reason. Since it's an island (albeit an artificial one) outside of the territorial waters of any nation at the time, it belonged to no nation, and accordingly he declared it it's own. Britain has since extended their international waters after a British court came to the conclusion that the Principality of Sealand was not under Britain's jurisdiction.
Oh, now, every teabagger out there can tell you you're full of shit, NPR is part of the liberal controlled media and as such treats Obama as the messiah and hangs on his every word to fawn over it. The only truly factual news media is our friends at Fair and Balanced FOX News (Where more Americans get their news than any other source!), who have no liberal bias.
The sheet that gets fed into the locked box is the original scantron sheet fed into the machine. Paper ballets, tallied electronically with the original paper ballots stored in a secured container. That sheet itself contains no identifying data other than a serial number, which the polling location records which ones were used but not by whom.
Come to think of it though, it might be possible to link ballot to voter (or at least narrow it down to a couple) if you looked at the time arrived noted in their logbook for each voter and the list of ballot numbers used (they pull a sort of stub off of the ballot to keep track of which ballots were assigned but not to whom and ballot count =/= voter count is a sign of fraud, as is ballot stubs =/= ballots in box), and assume that the Xth ballot was given to someone within a couple positions of the Xth voter to check in. You couldn't be certain though, since the individual poll workers do not necessarily function at the same speed.
"Everyone gets taxed. Sack up. Even with 50% income tax on all income over $250,000, people making millions would still be insanely wealthy, so what's there to complain about? Yes, sure, I'll let you keep your own money, as soon as you buy your own roads, police, fire departments, and military (at a minimum)."
Even Adam Smith promoted progressive taxes, on the logic that the wealthier you are the more you benefit from the protections of government because you have more to lose, and thus derive more benefit from things like law enforcement, fire service, etc, etc. Also there's a pretty well known example of a certain extremely wealthy person arguing that our tax structure is backwards when his secretary pays a higher overall tax rate than he does. Tax the rich into the stone age indeed.
"And no one is saying that there should be equal outcomes for everything, just that a handful of people shouldn't be able to bribe (oh, sorry, "contribute to the campaign of") our elected officials."
Which is why many feel there should be a limit on the amount of wealth a given individual can spend on behalf of a candidate -- it becomes tantamount to bribery. If GP can't see that "Vote the way I tell you to vote and I'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on helping you keep your position, don't and I'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars helping get you replaced with someone will" is a problem...
You mean something like some hacker group rigging the machines so that whichever candidate they don't like gets more votes than the total population of Earth?
I've managed +1 Troll before, but that's about it. It would be amusing to arrange this intentionally, though. I wonder if it's ever happened naturally?
As I understand it, the one there that was actually complained about (rather than the plant added for the FOX interview later) had every right to be there in the strictest sense, and the only thing he actually may have been doing wrong was being dressed in a manner that could be seen as intimidating (same diff as having someone who strictly has every right to be there standing there in his Klan hood, while specifically not doing anything he isn't permitted to do, aside from being present while wearing a Klan hood) -- the question is if wearing a potentially inappropriate uniform counts as voter intimidation? If so, exactly what dress code do we require for being at a polling location?
As for your other note, other than the fact we have bubbles to fill in rather than a line, we still use exactly that system here in WV. We fill in the bubbles ala a standardized test, it gets fed through a scantron machine, with the sheet feeding out into a locked box. Scantron machine tracks the count for that site, paper ballots are kept in case there's a recount or enough write ins that it could effect the results or any other reason to contest the results.
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Not really. It's more like what you get when you put email, wikis, and IM in a blender and set it to puree.
Really, the Firefly reference was intentional, and similar to their goal -- a combined communications "thing" that's kinda like e-mail, but multimedia and capable of being real-time.
It seems like everyone calls everything Google has done recently their "version of Facebook." Wave was, profiles were, even Buzz is, apparently. =p
You need to be clear -- the process used to move the gene from the fish to the plant and getting it to enter the plant genome properly could very well be an invention, just not the sequence of genes themselves.
Wouldn't this at least keep them from declaring that fields adjacent to fields that use their seeds and somehow end up with genes from their "sterile" plants are somehow in violation of some kind of agreement or patent, since the genetic sequence itself can't be owned by Monsanto?
I thought the Google thing just warned you but gave you a "but go ahead anyways, if you're sure" option just in case of a false positive.
I know I hated Titanic, but that had more to do with having several teenaged nieces and thus having to watch it half a dozen times a week for a several month period. It's really not a movie that any right thinking person should be subjected to so many times that you start hearing the dialog in your head before they say it, and not just for the more notable scenes. =p
What gets me is the Manchin/Raese campaigns -- seriously, all it seems like Raese says is "Manchin is just a rubber stamp for Obama" and nothing about himself, and Manchin mostly harps on Raese's attack ads. Neither says very much about themselves or their own positions, barring saying "What the other guy just said about me was wrong!"
Raese just goes to show how many votes you can get from general Obama hate and very little else. At least people have some record of what Manchin's been up to to gather expectations from (for good or ill). It's not like their campaigns tell you anything about them.
Citizens for Responsible Energy Policy (I think that's the right name, if not it's something really similar) exists solely so that Massey can spend huge amounts on politics in certain areas without the locals realizing it comes from them, because *shock* the coal company wants to do things that favor the coal industry but known that people would see it in exactly that light if they didn't hide behind a name!
Personally, we'd be better off if the expenses behind running 3rd party political ads counted as "contributions."
If government doesn't have the power to reign in corporations, then corporations won't try to buy candidates to keep them from doing so in a meaningful way?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but shouldn't the ideal be to strike a balance where corporations can't buy government effectively while government still has some capacity to keep corporations in check, because more or less no other entity can?
...but nothing stops Sony from arbitrarily removing features from such a phone, or from cutting you off from accessing their library of apps/games for the device if you refuse to submit to such an update. So, IOW, business as usual.
Just a matter of time before we see CFW for the PS3 that undoes the damage though, give it time. Patience my precioussssssss...
So, what you are saying is "We didn't feel that bringing these more serious charges to question was worthwhile (presumably because there wasn't remotely enough evidence to demonstrate your guilt, or a case of mistaken identity, or whatever), so when we punish you for the lesser charge, we're going to do so assuming you are also guilty of anything else you've been accused of" is an even remotely sane response?
So we need to take all those performance shops to court as well, since they modify cars in ways outside the warranty, and they certainly charge you for installing a performance chip. "With a computer" should not change the law.
Hell, let's just replace our elected officials with randomly selected ones -- make it like jury duty. Rotate them semi-frequently and the price to buy them out might stop being so damned worth it. =p
If it's anything like the PS3 one, then it depends on exactly what time you are looking at. At the moment of release of PSJailbreak, there was the potential for non-infringing uses, but none were extant because they simply hadn't been developed yet (shockingly software development takes nonzero time). Now, there are multiple emulators, a couple of minor games, an FTP server, and a handful of other things, all produced within the span of just a couple of months.
The problem being when the "piece of meat" in one case sues for sexual harassment. =p
"True, but if they make such little money then it's fair to say they don't work full time. In that case, if they don't have enough money to pay taxes, they can do community service or some type of government sponsored work. Not too much, just enough so that the connection between "the government does stuff for me" and "but it costs me money/time" is established."
Honestly, for many types of welfare, I've thought exactly that, that requiring them to do X amount of labor for the state wasn't a terrible idea.
The "welfare as a career choice because I don't want to be bothered to work" types really piss me off though, as opposed to the ones who really do put forth every effort to try to not need it and do anyways, usually because of something outside their control, like a child with an expensive and medium-long term illness (I actually know one of those cases, they'd be off all government assistance and able to save a little even if their child wasn't sick, instead they get HUD-sponsored income-adjusted housing and food stamps).
"Hm, how many banking transactions are involved with your paycheck? I know customers have to deposit money into their accounts (1), then transfer it to my company (2), then my company transfers it to me (3), then I transfer it to pay my bills (4) and I have very little left over. Then the people I pay have to pay additional transfer taxes so they raise their prices. It seems it could become a very high tax indirectly, and it would affect regular working people maybe more than you think."
Yeah, I was considering how often transactions occur. The original claim made (before Congress shot that whole idea down) regarding that was that a 1% tax there would generate enough income to do away with income tax entirely and have a surplus to start paying down the debt with.
It's a tiny tax, but it's a tiny tax that gets applied all over the place and makes up for only generating small income per transaction by the sheer volume of transactions effected.
Depends on where you mark as "poor". If you set your "poor" marker low enough, then the answer is "because they need food, shelter, clean water, clothing and other basic needs and have very little left to really take."
If we set the bar for "poor" a little higher, then I agree with you, though I feel the need to note that even the poor pay some taxes, even if only to the state, as they're only really exempted from income tax.
That "1% on all banking transactions" thing seems more and more like a good idea the more I think about it, but it would never come to be simply because the people most effected by it would be so called "investment firms" who make hundreds+ stock market transactions every millisecond or so -- you can say they improve the market by improving liquidity, but frankly I can't think of any case where you need liquidity to the extent that waiting 1 second, or even 1 minute would be a meaningful problem with any frequency, and slowing the market down just a hair (which this would likely have the side effect of, by making huge numbers of super-rapid transactions costly) would help prevent things like that ridiculous mini-crash not all that long ago.
"The people getting shafted are the medium income earners, not the poor." -- and any attempt to reduce their burden (which is proportionately higher than that of the rich as a function of income) by lightening the tax burden of the middle class and increasing taxes on the wealthy (even if only to the point that they're both paying out a similar amount relative to income) is evil socialist wealth redistribution that will vastly increase their taxes (while leaving out the "If you net over a quarter million a year"[or whatever the mark is in this case] part). Or at least that's how it gets described by the assorted talking heads that fall into the group that would be penalized by it when persuading the much larger group who would benefit from it why it's a terrible idea and they should vote against anyone who even suggests it.
I'm starting to wonder if that "1% on all banking transactions and eliminate income tax" idea would really be so bad, assuming it would net the kind of total income that's been claimed it would.
"a government that simply wastes that money" -- this is a huge problem, and I don't see a good solution without the gov't completely changing how they hand out funding. It encourages being wasteful rather than encouraging thrift.
SeaLand is kind of a unique case though -- it was a decommissioned British naval base in international waters, bought by an individual precisely for that reason. Since it's an island (albeit an artificial one) outside of the territorial waters of any nation at the time, it belonged to no nation, and accordingly he declared it it's own. Britain has since extended their international waters after a British court came to the conclusion that the Principality of Sealand was not under Britain's jurisdiction.
Oh, now, every teabagger out there can tell you you're full of shit, NPR is part of the liberal controlled media and as such treats Obama as the messiah and hangs on his every word to fawn over it. The only truly factual news media is our friends at Fair and Balanced FOX News (Where more Americans get their news than any other source!), who have no liberal bias.
The sheet that gets fed into the locked box is the original scantron sheet fed into the machine. Paper ballets, tallied electronically with the original paper ballots stored in a secured container. That sheet itself contains no identifying data other than a serial number, which the polling location records which ones were used but not by whom.
Come to think of it though, it might be possible to link ballot to voter (or at least narrow it down to a couple) if you looked at the time arrived noted in their logbook for each voter and the list of ballot numbers used (they pull a sort of stub off of the ballot to keep track of which ballots were assigned but not to whom and ballot count =/= voter count is a sign of fraud, as is ballot stubs =/= ballots in box), and assume that the Xth ballot was given to someone within a couple positions of the Xth voter to check in. You couldn't be certain though, since the individual poll workers do not necessarily function at the same speed.
"Everyone gets taxed. Sack up. Even with 50% income tax on all income over $250,000, people making millions would still be insanely wealthy, so what's there to complain about? Yes, sure, I'll let you keep your own money, as soon as you buy your own roads, police, fire departments, and military (at a minimum)."
Even Adam Smith promoted progressive taxes, on the logic that the wealthier you are the more you benefit from the protections of government because you have more to lose, and thus derive more benefit from things like law enforcement, fire service, etc, etc. Also there's a pretty well known example of a certain extremely wealthy person arguing that our tax structure is backwards when his secretary pays a higher overall tax rate than he does. Tax the rich into the stone age indeed.
"And no one is saying that there should be equal outcomes for everything, just that a handful of people shouldn't be able to bribe (oh, sorry, "contribute to the campaign of") our elected officials."
Which is why many feel there should be a limit on the amount of wealth a given individual can spend on behalf of a candidate -- it becomes tantamount to bribery. If GP can't see that "Vote the way I tell you to vote and I'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on helping you keep your position, don't and I'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars helping get you replaced with someone will" is a problem...
More importantly, how hard would it be to get all the politicians and lawyers in the country to volunteer to be blended. Ahh, demonic smoothie...
You mean something like some hacker group rigging the machines so that whichever candidate they don't like gets more votes than the total population of Earth?
I've managed +1 Troll before, but that's about it. It would be amusing to arrange this intentionally, though. I wonder if it's ever happened naturally?
As I understand it, the one there that was actually complained about (rather than the plant added for the FOX interview later) had every right to be there in the strictest sense, and the only thing he actually may have been doing wrong was being dressed in a manner that could be seen as intimidating (same diff as having someone who strictly has every right to be there standing there in his Klan hood, while specifically not doing anything he isn't permitted to do, aside from being present while wearing a Klan hood) -- the question is if wearing a potentially inappropriate uniform counts as voter intimidation? If so, exactly what dress code do we require for being at a polling location?
As for your other note, other than the fact we have bubbles to fill in rather than a line, we still use exactly that system here in WV. We fill in the bubbles ala a standardized test, it gets fed through a scantron machine, with the sheet feeding out into a locked box. Scantron machine tracks the count for that site, paper ballots are kept in case there's a recount or enough write ins that it could effect the results or any other reason to contest the results.