Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed 172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw numbers there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.
About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people.
[/WaPo]
According to FBI statistics, 52.2% of all murder/manslaughter was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population. According to FBI statistics, 56.4% of all robbery was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population. According to FBI statistics, 31.3% of all rape was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population. According to FBI statistics, 33.9% of all aggravated assault was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population.
On the positive side, the FBI says many of those crimes are highly concentrated in a small fraction of the black population in criminal gangs, where they most often prey on each other. The larger black population is no more criminal than the rest of the populace.
FBI statistics also indicate that black commit extremely disproportionately skewed numbers of murders & manslaughter (52.2% of all murder/manslaughter committed by blacks), rapes (31.3% of all rapes committed by blacks), robbery (56.4% of all robbery committed by blacks), assault (33.9% of all assaults committed by blacks). On the positive side, only 12.5% of DWI are committed by blacks.
As a part of the overall population, blacks are about 13.5% of the US population, but commit more than half of all homicides and robberies, and one-third of all rapes and assaults.
Also on the positive side, the FBI asserts that a hugely disproportionate number of those crimes attributed to blacks are largely concentrated within a few hundred thousand young men involved in gangs. And largely victimize other black people.
Maybe they started using the old GE strategy of firing th bottom x% of the workforce as a matter of preventative maintenance?
"Stack ranking, also referred to as forced ranking, where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve, has been a controversial management technique since then GE CEO Jack Welch popularized it in the 1980s.
"Only a small percentage of employees, typically about 10%, can be designated as top performers. Meanwhile, a set number must be labeled as low performers and are often fired or pushed out, giving the system the popular nickname "rank and yank."
It certainly seems to me that the crux of your argument is that we can use backup solar plants elsewhere for periods of time where local solar plants are not keeping up, for example because they are under clouds. As you say, it's never cloudy over the whole country.
If you're not concerned about clouds covering all your backup solar plants--because hey, there's never clouds over the whole country, right?--it seems to me that you're dismissing the larger and far more regular impact of darkness due to it being nighttime would have on your solar plants. To the point where backup solar plants far away are just as incapacitated as your local solar plants due to darkness.
Clouds over your solar plant during the day are certainly less of an impact that the sun being on the other side of the planet, but we'd still need power during the night, right? And a solar plant on the other side of the country doesn't help. Or more to the point, if your solution for diminished capacity due to clouds is a remote backup solar plant that is (hopefully) not also under cloud cover, I simply fail to see that it helpful. We've got to cover the problem of nighttime power generation, and if we can cover that then periods of clouds are certainly not an issue.
The answer to these problems is not a backup solar plant on the other side of the country, but adequate storage to cover diminished capacities, e.g. due to nighttime, clouds, sandstorms, what have you. Obviously the normal daylight load capacity must be able to support both live load and filling the storage, whether that should be batteries, water pumped uphill, etc. Wind power, unlike solar, is available during the nighttime.
Any solution that covers nighttime outages of solar plants should obviate the similar problem of cloudiness, and far better than remote backup solar plants and crossing fingers about it not being cloudy there too.
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again. When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?
Not disagreeing with storage, per se, just his stupid questions and "solution".
The withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq was a contentious issue in the United States for much of the 2000s. As the war progressed from its initial invasion phase in 2003 to a nearly decade-long occupation, American public opinion shifted towards favoring a troop withdrawal; in May 2007, 55% of Americans believed that the Iraq War was a mistake, and 51% of registered voters favored troop withdrawal.[7] In late April 2007 Congress passed a supplementary spending bill for Iraq that set a deadline for troop withdrawal but President Bush vetoed this bill, citing his concerns about setting a withdrawal deadline.[8][9][10] The Bush Administration later sought an agreement with the Iraqi government, and in 2008 George W. Bush signed the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement. It included a deadline of 31 December 2011, before which "all the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory".[11][12][13] The last U.S. troops left Iraq on 18 December 2011, in accordance with this agreement.
So yeah, Obama just continued with Bush's plans for Iraq. To be fair, he moved the final withdrawal date up by a whole 13 days...
"Let's face it, you don't see assistant camera operators getting Oscars, and yet movies (given all their special effects) are now more of a team effort than ever before."
Indeed. Avatar won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, but only Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones are named for it. How many CGI effects grunts worked on this movie?
Article is just one big "WAAAAHHHH, it's not FAIR what THEY did with THEIR money!"
He didn't win the money race, but Donald Trump will be the next president of the U.S. In the primaries and general election, he defied conventional wisdom, besting better financed candidates by dominating the air waves for free. Trump also put to use his own cash, as well as the assets and infrastructure of his businesses, in unprecedented fashion. He donated $66 million of his own money, flew across the country in his private jet, and used his resorts to stage campaign events. At the same time, the billionaire was able to draw about $280 million from small donors giving $200 or less. Super-PACs, which can take contributions unlimited in size, were similarly skewed toward his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Ultimately, Trump won the presidency despite having raised less than any major party presidential nominee since John McCain in 2008, the last to accept federal funds to pay for his general election contest.
Clinton and her super-PACs raised a total of $1.2 billion, less than President Barack Obama raised in 2012. Her sophisticated fundraising operation included a small army of wealthy donors who wrote seven-figure checks, hundreds of bundlers who raised $100,000 or more from their own networks, and a small-dollar donor operation modeled on the one used by Obama in 2012. She spent heavily on television advertising and her get-out-the-vote operation, but in the end, her fundraising edge wasn't enough to overcome Trump's ability to dominate headlines and the airwaves.
On Dec. 8, campaigns and super-PACs filed their post-election reports on fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Commission from Oct. 20 through Nov. 28. Here's where they stood at the end of the race:
Hillary Clinton TOTAL RAISED $1,191M Candidate Raised to Date* $973.2M Spent $969.1M Cash on Hand $4.1M
Super-PACs Raised to Date $217.5M Spent $215.1M Cash on Hand $3.7M
Total Raised to Date $1,190.7M Total Spent $1,184.1M Total Cash on Hand $7.8M
Donald Trump TOTAL RAISED $646.8M Candidate Raised to Date* $564.3M Spent $531.0M Cash on Hand $33.3M
Super-PACs Raised to Date $82.3M Spent $85.5M Cash on Hand -$1.8M
Total Raised to Date $646.8M Total Spent $616.5M Total Cash on Hand $31.5M
Remove the 3M illegal immigrants from the state. Presumably they take their pollution with them. They represent somewhere north of 6% of the population at last check. But that's probably low, since there are around 1M illegal immigrants with drivers licenses.
"Nearly a million undocumented drivers could be licensed in California by the end of the year. Through June 2017, the Department of Motor Vehicles has issued approximately 905,000 driver’s licenses under Assembly Bill 60, the law requiring applicants to prove only their identity and California residency, rather than their legal presence in the state.
"Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. . . . Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
And sure, Amazon is not the NSA, but if you think the NSA is not going to exploit this tech, well then I've got a bridge I can sell you...
Remember when Mitt Romney sai Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat to the US? Remember how he was mocked mercilessly for his views?
President Barack Obama, among others, mocked the Republican candidate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the cold war’s been over for 20 years”.
Vice President Joe Biden opined that Romney belonged to “a small group of Cold War holdovers.”
John Kerry said “Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching ‘Rocky IV,’”
Rachel Maddow: “He read about Reagan’s private, outside-the-CIA cabal of team-B zealots who were telling him that Russia had all the stuff they didn’t have so he could justify a giant defense budget,”
Chris Matthews: “I don’t know what decade this guy’s living in. Is he trying to play Ronald Reagan here, or what?”
And then, of course, we have President Obama telling the Russian President that if he (Obama) was re-elected, he'd be able to cut more deals with Russia... 'I'll have more flexibility after election' President Barack Obama was caught on microphone telling Dmitry Medvedev.
The about-face by Democrats may have caused them whiplash...
The NY Times described it thusly: "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal"
"Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation's donors."
"Uranium investors' efforts to buy mining assets in Kazakhstan and the United States led to a takeover bid by a Russian state-owned energy company. The investors gave millions to the Clinton Foundation over the same period, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's office was involved with approving the Russian bid.
SEPTEMBER 2005 Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier, wins a major uranium deal in Kazakhstan for his company, UrAsia, days after visiting the country with former President Bill Clinton.
2006 Mr. Giustra donates $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.
JUNE 2008 Negotations begin for an investment in Uranium One by the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom.
2008-2010 Uranium One and former UrAsia investors make $8.65 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One investors stand to profit on a Rosatom deal.
2010-2011 Investors give millions more in donations to the Clinton Foundation.
JUNE 2010 Rosatom seeks majority ownership of Uranium One, pending approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, of which the State Department is a member.
JUNE 29, 2010 Bill Clinton is paid $500,000 for a speech in Moscow by a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin that assigned a buy rating to Uranium One stock.
OCTOBER 2010 Rosatom's majority ownership approved by Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
The truth is, I never left you All through my wild days, my mad existence I kept my promise Don't keep your distance And as for fortune, and as for fame I never invited them in
Once again this proves that there is no technological solution to stupid human problems.
OTOH, a simple rule in the username/password database that prohibits admin/admin and other similar things like root/root could help. But then you'd just have people using their birthday or somesuch.
Bush didn't need any help. It was overwhelming passed by Congress, all he had to do was ask for it and sign it.
These are the 98 U.S. senators for voted in favor of the US Patriot Act of 2001 (Senator Landrieu (D-LA) did not vote) Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act on October 24, of 2001.
Very few of the Democrats in the Senate learned their lesson, and so voted to reauthorize it by close to the same numbers in 2006, and Obama signed off on at least one more renewal (I've lost track).
The list of two-time Yeas includes Hillary Cllnton, Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Rockefeller, Sarbane, both Nelsons, Diane Feinstein, Max Baucus, Joe Lieberman,...
The House was a tad better as far as Dems voting Nay, it passed the House 357-66 in 2001 and 280-138 in 2006.
Taco Bell Food that can be purchased with EBT card: Chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks
Not to keep picking on Taco Bell, but if the program was serious about being supplemental nutrition for homeless, elderly, and disabled, I can see no reason why the program limits Taco Bell's EBT patrons--and let's keep pretending that every one of them is truly homeless, elderly, or disabled--to "Chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks" It seems to me that those are exactly the foods we should *not* be allowing on EBT. Those items are simply not nutritious.
If you want to let people on EBT eat at Taco Bell, they should be buying food like shredded chicken Fresco Soft Taco or Black Bean Burrito or Fresco Fire Grilled Chicken Power Bowl. Not Cinnibon Bites and Mountain Dew Baja Blast Freeze.
Actually, it was part of a multi-year pilot program in a limited number of states. And sure, that's what they say they are limited to.
But if they only worked that way, then we would know that since vendors are not supposed to give cash for footstamps, then there's no arbitrage of foodstamp benefits either--no fraud ever because that's against the rules. But we know there's about $1B of such fraud every year.
Consider for example, how is Taco Bell supposed to ensure that the person purchasing "Chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks" with EBT is actually "homeless, elderly, or disabled"? "Excuse me sir, you can only use EBT at Taco Bell to purchase chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks and only if you're homeless, elderly, or disabled." Surely the answer could be a simple lie: "Yeah, I'm homeless. I'll take large nachos and some cinnamon twists, and a Mountain Dew® Baja Blast Freeze."
And you think there's no reason at all why the Obama administration proposed cracking down on foodstamp use at restaurants?
And you think Yum! Brands — the owners of Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver’s — is lobbying to get in the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) so that more "impoverished" Americans can use their food stamps to buy fast food in all 50 states because they simply have the best interests of homeless, elderly, and disabled people in mind?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeesh. You think the face she puts on every morning is "natural"? Without makeup she looks like Palpatine.
Why are you so focused on the color of his skin?
[WaPo]
Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed 172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw numbers there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.
About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people.
[/WaPo]
According to FBI statistics, 52.2% of all murder/manslaughter was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population.
According to FBI statistics, 56.4% of all robbery was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population.
According to FBI statistics, 31.3% of all rape was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population.
According to FBI statistics, 33.9% of all aggravated assault was committed by blacks. Blacks are 13.5% of the population.
On the positive side, the FBI says many of those crimes are highly concentrated in a small fraction of the black population in criminal gangs, where they most often prey on each other. The larger black population is no more criminal than the rest of the populace.
FBI statistics also indicate that black commit extremely disproportionately skewed numbers of murders & manslaughter (52.2% of all murder/manslaughter committed by blacks), rapes (31.3% of all rapes committed by blacks), robbery (56.4% of all robbery committed by blacks), assault (33.9% of all assaults committed by blacks). On the positive side, only 12.5% of DWI are committed by blacks.
As a part of the overall population, blacks are about 13.5% of the US population, but commit more than half of all homicides and robberies, and one-third of all rapes and assaults.
Also on the positive side, the FBI asserts that a hugely disproportionate number of those crimes attributed to blacks are largely concentrated within a few hundred thousand young men involved in gangs. And largely victimize other black people.
Maybe they started using the old GE strategy of firing th bottom x% of the workforce as a matter of preventative maintenance?
"Stack ranking, also referred to as forced ranking, where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve, has been a controversial management technique since then GE CEO Jack Welch popularized it in the 1980s.
"Only a small percentage of employees, typically about 10%, can be designated as top performers. Meanwhile, a set number must be labeled as low performers and are often fired or pushed out, giving the system the popular nickname "rank and yank."
It certainly seems to me that the crux of your argument is that we can use backup solar plants elsewhere for periods of time where local solar plants are not keeping up, for example because they are under clouds. As you say, it's never cloudy over the whole country.
If you're not concerned about clouds covering all your backup solar plants--because hey, there's never clouds over the whole country, right?--it seems to me that you're dismissing the larger and far more regular impact of darkness due to it being nighttime would have on your solar plants. To the point where backup solar plants far away are just as incapacitated as your local solar plants due to darkness.
Clouds over your solar plant during the day are certainly less of an impact that the sun being on the other side of the planet, but we'd still need power during the night, right? And a solar plant on the other side of the country doesn't help. Or more to the point, if your solution for diminished capacity due to clouds is a remote backup solar plant that is (hopefully) not also under cloud cover, I simply fail to see that it helpful. We've got to cover the problem of nighttime power generation, and if we can cover that then periods of clouds are certainly not an issue.
The answer to these problems is not a backup solar plant on the other side of the country, but adequate storage to cover diminished capacities, e.g. due to nighttime, clouds, sandstorms, what have you. Obviously the normal daylight load capacity must be able to support both live load and filling the storage, whether that should be batteries, water pumped uphill, etc. Wind power, unlike solar, is available during the nighttime.
Any solution that covers nighttime outages of solar plants should obviate the similar problem of cloudiness, and far better than remote backup solar plants and crossing fingers about it not being cloudy there too.
OP:
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?
Not disagreeing with storage, per se, just his stupid questions and "solution".
Pretty much every night all of Africa is in the dark. Same in the US.
Having a backup solar plant in California doesn't do South Carolina much good if the one in Cali goes dark just 3 hours later...
"Mass manufacturing and a switch by governments away from fixed payments for renewables forced down the cost of wind and solar technology. "
So government subsidies were keeping the prices of wind and solar inflated? Who'd'a thought?
Wikipedia--
The withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq was a contentious issue in the United States for much of the 2000s. As the war progressed from its initial invasion phase in 2003 to a nearly decade-long occupation, American public opinion shifted towards favoring a troop withdrawal; in May 2007, 55% of Americans believed that the Iraq War was a mistake, and 51% of registered voters favored troop withdrawal.[7] In late April 2007 Congress passed a supplementary spending bill for Iraq that set a deadline for troop withdrawal but President Bush vetoed this bill, citing his concerns about setting a withdrawal deadline.[8][9][10] The Bush Administration later sought an agreement with the Iraqi government, and in 2008 George W. Bush signed the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement. It included a deadline of 31 December 2011, before which "all the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory".[11][12][13] The last U.S. troops left Iraq on 18 December 2011, in accordance with this agreement.
So yeah, Obama just continued with Bush's plans for Iraq. To be fair, he moved the final withdrawal date up by a whole 13 days...
"Let's face it, you don't see assistant camera operators getting Oscars, and yet movies (given all their special effects) are now more of a team effort than ever before."
Indeed. Avatar won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, but only Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones are named for it. How many CGI effects grunts worked on this movie?
Article is just one big "WAAAAHHHH, it's not FAIR what THEY did with THEIR money!"
Or Steve Jobs. Or Mark Zuckerburg. Or Bill Gates. Or...
Misrepresents Citizens United.
And money doesn't necessarily translate to wins.
Bloomberg:
He didn't win the money race, but Donald Trump will be the next president of the U.S. In the primaries and general election, he defied conventional wisdom, besting better financed candidates by dominating the air waves for free. Trump also put to use his own cash, as well as the assets and infrastructure of his businesses, in unprecedented fashion. He donated $66 million of his own money, flew across the country in his private jet, and used his resorts to stage campaign events. At the same time, the billionaire was able to draw about $280 million from small donors giving $200 or less. Super-PACs, which can take contributions unlimited in size, were similarly skewed toward his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Ultimately, Trump won the presidency despite having raised less than any major party presidential nominee since John McCain in 2008, the last to accept federal funds to pay for his general election contest.
Clinton and her super-PACs raised a total of $1.2 billion, less than President Barack Obama raised in 2012. Her sophisticated fundraising operation included a small army of wealthy donors who wrote seven-figure checks, hundreds of bundlers who raised $100,000 or more from their own networks, and a small-dollar donor operation modeled on the one used by Obama in 2012. She spent heavily on television advertising and her get-out-the-vote operation, but in the end, her fundraising edge wasn't enough to overcome Trump's ability to dominate headlines and the airwaves.
On Dec. 8, campaigns and super-PACs filed their post-election reports on fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Commission from Oct. 20 through Nov. 28. Here's where they stood at the end of the race:
Hillary Clinton
TOTAL RAISED
$1,191M
Candidate Raised to Date* $973.2M
Spent $969.1M
Cash on Hand $4.1M
Super-PACs Raised to Date $217.5M
Spent $215.1M
Cash on Hand $3.7M
Total Raised to Date $1,190.7M
Total Spent $1,184.1M
Total Cash on Hand $7.8M
Donald Trump
TOTAL RAISED
$646.8M
Candidate Raised to Date* $564.3M
Spent $531.0M
Cash on Hand $33.3M
Super-PACs Raised to Date $82.3M
Spent $85.5M
Cash on Hand -$1.8M
Total Raised to Date $646.8M
Total Spent $616.5M
Total Cash on Hand $31.5M
GPS denial or GPS spoofing are very real and very much in view of military planners, trainers, etc.
Maybe some ship captains were not keeping up with training for these cases as they should have been?
Remove the 3M illegal immigrants from the state. Presumably they take their pollution with them. They represent somewhere north of 6% of the population at last check. But that's probably low, since there are around 1M illegal immigrants with drivers licenses.
"Nearly a million undocumented drivers could be licensed in California by the end of the year. Through June 2017, the Department of Motor Vehicles has issued approximately 905,000 driver’s licenses under Assembly Bill 60, the law requiring applicants to prove only their identity and California residency, rather than their legal presence in the state.
I love the phrase "undocumented drivers"...
"Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. . . . Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
And sure, Amazon is not the NSA, but if you think the NSA is not going to exploit this tech, well then I've got a bridge I can sell you...
“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back becausethe Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Remember when Mitt Romney sai Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat to the US? Remember how he was mocked mercilessly for his views?
President Barack Obama, among others, mocked the Republican candidate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the cold war’s been over for 20 years”.
Vice President Joe Biden opined that Romney belonged to “a small group of Cold War holdovers.”
John Kerry said “Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching ‘Rocky IV,’”
Rachel Maddow: “He read about Reagan’s private, outside-the-CIA cabal of team-B zealots who were telling him that Russia had all the stuff they didn’t have so he could justify a giant defense budget,”
Chris Matthews: “I don’t know what decade this guy’s living in. Is he trying to play Ronald Reagan here, or what?”
And then, of course, we have President Obama telling the Russian President that if he (Obama) was re-elected, he'd be able to cut more deals with Russia... 'I'll have more flexibility after election' President Barack Obama was caught on microphone telling Dmitry Medvedev.
The about-face by Democrats may have caused them whiplash...
The NY Times described it thusly: "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal"
"Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation's donors."
"Uranium investors' efforts to buy mining assets in Kazakhstan and the United States led to a takeover bid by a Russian state-owned energy company. The investors gave millions to the Clinton Foundation over the same period, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's office was involved with approving the Russian bid.
SEPTEMBER 2005 Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier, wins a major uranium deal in Kazakhstan for his company, UrAsia, days after visiting the country with former President Bill Clinton.
2006 Mr. Giustra donates $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.
JUNE 2008 Negotations begin for an investment in Uranium One by the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom.
2008-2010 Uranium One and former UrAsia investors make $8.65 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One investors stand to profit on a Rosatom deal.
2010-2011 Investors give millions more in donations to the Clinton Foundation.
JUNE 2010 Rosatom seeks majority ownership of Uranium One, pending approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, of which the State Department is a member.
JUNE 29, 2010 Bill Clinton is paid $500,000 for a speech in Moscow by a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin that assigned a buy rating to Uranium One stock.
OCTOBER 2010 Rosatom's majority ownership approved by Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
The truth is, I never left you
All through my wild days, my mad existence
I kept my promise
Don't keep your distance
And as for fortune, and as for fame
I never invited them in
Once again this proves that there is no technological solution to stupid human problems.
OTOH, a simple rule in the username/password database that prohibits admin/admin and other similar things like root/root could help. But then you'd just have people using their birthday or somesuch.
Bush didn't need any help. It was overwhelming passed by Congress, all he had to do was ask for it and sign it.
These are the 98 U.S. senators for voted in favor of the US Patriot Act of 2001 (Senator Landrieu (D-LA) did not vote) Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act on October 24, of 2001.
http://educate-yourself.org/cn...
Very few of the Democrats in the Senate learned their lesson, and so voted to reauthorize it by close to the same numbers in 2006, and Obama signed off on at least one more renewal (I've lost track).
The list of two-time Yeas includes Hillary Cllnton, Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Rockefeller, Sarbane, both Nelsons, Diane Feinstein, Max Baucus, Joe Lieberman, ...
The House was a tad better as far as Dems voting Nay, it passed the House 357-66 in 2001 and 280-138 in 2006.
Has there ever been a slashdot discussion with a high SNR?
From the link:
Taco Bell
Food that can be purchased with EBT card: Chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks
Not to keep picking on Taco Bell, but if the program was serious about being supplemental nutrition for homeless, elderly, and disabled, I can see no reason why the program limits Taco Bell's EBT patrons--and let's keep pretending that every one of them is truly homeless, elderly, or disabled--to "Chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks" It seems to me that those are exactly the foods we should *not* be allowing on EBT. Those items are simply not nutritious.
If you want to let people on EBT eat at Taco Bell, they should be buying food like shredded chicken Fresco Soft Taco or Black Bean Burrito or Fresco Fire Grilled Chicken Power Bowl. Not Cinnibon Bites and Mountain Dew Baja Blast Freeze.
Actually, it was part of a multi-year pilot program in a limited number of states. And sure, that's what they say they are limited to.
But if they only worked that way, then we would know that since vendors are not supposed to give cash for footstamps, then there's no arbitrage of foodstamp benefits either--no fraud ever because that's against the rules. But we know there's about $1B of such fraud every year.
Consider for example, how is Taco Bell supposed to ensure that the person purchasing "Chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks" with EBT is actually "homeless, elderly, or disabled"? "Excuse me sir, you can only use EBT at Taco Bell to purchase chips, desserts, specialty cold drinks, and soft drinks and only if you're homeless, elderly, or disabled." Surely the answer could be a simple lie: "Yeah, I'm homeless. I'll take large nachos and some cinnamon twists, and a Mountain Dew® Baja Blast Freeze."
And you think there's no reason at all why the Obama administration proposed cracking down on foodstamp use at restaurants?
And you think Yum! Brands — the owners of Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver’s — is lobbying to get in the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) so that more "impoverished" Americans can use their food stamps to buy fast food in all 50 states because they simply have the best interests of homeless, elderly, and disabled people in mind?
Bless your heart.