After all they provide a place for sex - people will do this, and it is probably better that they do this in a way subject to some sort of regulation.
To regulate: To make easier for one party to gain an advantage over the other they would not otherwise get. Usually, the party that gets control of the lawmakers is the recipient of any benefits of "regulation" -- Bill Anderson
It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry.... or prostitues learning that one trick with the tongue or any strategy of the escort industry.
3. The perfessers. Some people just want others to think they are smart, so they find one little point somewhere in what you've written and they pontificate about how this tangential fact ruins the whole article, and much they know and you don't, etc. etc. -- basically this is article envy. They're pissed that you have the attention and they do not.
Just rename it "Ugly Europeans".;) Seems to me though that the "Ugly Americans" description would apply equally well to a significant majority of European pontificators and pundits, not to mention government officials. I can provide many more details but it is a bit off-topic of a rant for this post.;)
Actually, the economics of H3 are fully dependent on having usable reactors and an ability to obtain H3.
The cost to get it "down here" is comparatively minor. A single shuttle load would power the US' electicity needs for about a year. Further, the tranportation of it is coming DOWN a gravity well, not up it. Maybe you are somehow thinking of sending it up there and then bringing it back?
Easy.
1. Send a shuttle up with a normal payload. 2. Deliver payload. 3. Rendezvous with cargo ship from Luna 4. Return to Earth.
Cheap. The rendezvous work would be done by the cargo ship from Luna. Said ship should would be rather lightweight and simple; being made specifically for the purpose.
The cost of establishing and mining the H3 is a major impediment; possibly more so than the reactor.
Lunar regolith is very pernicious stuff. It is extremely coarse and fine. It gets into everything, and as it has no wind to soften it's edges, is very damaging to the equipment. Further, mining on the Moon will require a significant amount of energy as well; in means of support and mining, as well as equipment repair and replacement. Mining equipment is not exactly small. And if you RTFA, you find that to get a single tone of H3 you need to process about 200 million tons of lunar regolith.
That's about 550.000 tons per day, or about 23,000 tons/hour. That's just a single ton of H3. Since it would take approximately 25 of those to run the US for a single year, you would need to multiply the above volume by 25. In other words, you need to be able to do the equivalent of processing over half a million tons of lunar regolith per hour 24x7. The quipment costs alone would be staggering, IMO.
This is one reason that lunar H3 processing will not usably take place until a Mars colony is thriving and able to manufacture what is needed. It is cheaper to land equipment on the moon if launched from Mars than from Earth Same thing for orbit.
This could in fact be one of the moneymakers for a Martian settlement. A single ton of He3 would supply a sizeable Martian settelement for a long time. Establishing He3 mining from a Martian settlement would aid it's independence and provide a powerfully effective export. At an estimated 4 billion dollars per ton, it'd pay for a lot. IMO a lot of that would be eaten by mining equipment costs.
Sun will throw all its muscle behind it's Java Desktop to deliver a polished, cohisive system. Linux will continue to be pulled in 100 directions at once.
Java Desktop is Linux . It's a GNOME based Linux w/looking glass. Big whoop. They call if Java Desktop because they are Sun. Sun could make toiletpaper and they'd still put the JAVA tag on it. "Java Wipe Papers" or "Java Buttock Purification System" or some such.
Around here, and in the classes I've been teaching, I've found people actually like picking their own way of doing things on their desktop. Oh the inhumanity of it all!
Some people keep chanting the mantra of "one UI to bind them". I say keep chanting as the world passes you by. Peopel say they don't want choice when they think they can't or won't get it. When they get it, they like it, and they like it a lot.
Then again, maybe people don't really find it difficult to use Alt-F4, the X button, File->Close or File->Quit to exit an application or close a window. There's 4, where's the other 99,996 you speak of? I'll give you some help: how about Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-W?
Each of those methods are available to Linux users and Windows users alike. Neither seem to find it complicated. Which part of that do you find complicated?
If I were building a desktop distribution, I would pick ONE window manager, bundle in enough hardware support to make things as plug-and-play as possible, put in ONE office suite, and a few other useful apps. Then I'd make the system easy enough to tweak later on, so anyone who wants to can grab components and install them as needed. ... and promptly go out of business, or be nothing more than a niche player at best. It's been tried; it doesn't work.
Not sorry to burst your bubble, but RH's *default* install contains only one window manager(Metacity), and only one office suite(OpenOffice.org). And their HW support on x86 far exceeds Solaris x86.
But in order to stay alive, they offer more than that via non-default but still canned installs. Why? Some of us like choice. Hell, some of us *need* choice in our given jobs.
I train sysadmins and users. I've not found it difficult at all.
Show me half a line of code that HP's contributed to the community.
A half a line of code would be pointless (unless you're SCO).
So how about some full projects?
http://opensource.hp.com/ is a start for HP and Compaq contribtions. Such as Vesta (GPL), DSpace (BSD), Open Source DB Benchmark, OpenSSI (clustering) (GPL). http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/ http://www.handh elds.org/
My group has submitted patches to Postfix, with some Mailman patches coming soon (contributed by yours truly). In a previous HP incarnation we submitted kernel patches in the SCSI subsystem.
We've got people working on things like distcc, Mondo (came -again- from HP), elilo, various math libraries, and more. Such as the SiS suite (go to sourceforge), perfmon on IA64 Linux, LDAPWeb and others.
The maintainer of the IA64 Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer is an HP guy, as is the 2.4 of the same. I dare say they've added at least half a line of code each. Jeremy Allison of SAMBA fame works at... yup HP, along with a few other of the top SAMBA guys. You think maybe they've contributed code?
How about IBM?
SponsoringOf/sourceOf/patchesFor STAF, Eclipse, OpenHPi, Kprobes, udev, JFS, EVMS, Many kernel patches, HotPlug, SAMBA, CIFS Channel bonding for ethernet, ATM, drivers, SiS, and many, many others.
The list goes on, and I could karma-whore for a really long comment showing you dozens more. But I won't hold my breath that you'd correct your statements.
Try going to http://www.hp.com/linux http://www.ibm.com/linux and http://www.sun.com/linux
Compare the intent of those pages.
Now, please, someone build a similar list for Sun. Of course starting with OpenOffice.org. http://www.sun.com/linux is not as useful as one would think when looking at the others. Let's see if we can compile what Sun has done for the opensource community. HAS, not SAYS it has.
Re:In the hope someone important at Sun reads this
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3) vim. I HATE vim!!! I DESPISE WITH A GREAT PASSION the defaults in vim! It sucks, it sucks, and it sucks. That's all there is to say about it.:-).vimrc solves that. Put your defaults in there and make it a part of your standard environment "package".
Re:Shoot your marketing department.
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new comic book villian - Spin Laden, the Marketing Terrarist!
to eventually get launch costs below a dollar per pound;
Now that's reaching for the stars. Coast to coast airline travel is not yet under a buck per pound unless you're really heavy. Portland to Seattle is about 175-250 per adult. Assume 175 or so pounds ona verage, and you're barely above a buck per pound.
Let's think about this for a minute. Nay, think longer. You're trying to say that we need to get the cost for an average human to fly into space down to about 175 bucks per person. Figure some luggage, etc. and maybe a few hundred at that.
One doesn't need launch costs that low for space exploration and travel to "take off" (pun intended". It's the myopic idea that space travel is so heinously dangerous or expensive that is the biggest hurdle. NASA goes a long way toward perpetuating this, btw.
However, if you think allowing more mercury in the water and more particulates in the air is a good thing, then you're welcome to your opinion, but you're just reinforcing the opinion of many here that Bush supporters have their own reality.
Ahh yes the you must be a Bush supporter/Republican dodge. FYI, I'm not a Bush supporter. I also note you take the standard smear attempt by creative addition to what I said thus proving my point. Do you not understand the concept of diminishing returns?
Do some research on the radiation issue. Since you are clearly the kind of person who would not be convinced by a lone poster on slashdot I'll point in you some directions, and still tell you about it just to be sure you have the resources needed to bust the myth for yourself.;)
* Do some digging on the space exploration research, there is probably ore info here than most any other industry other than the nuclear plant industry which you may or may to consider a good source.
* www.nrc.gov
Section 20.105(a) of 10 CFR Part 20 provides for Commission authorization of radiation levels in unrestricted areas based on a criterion of 500 millirems in one year to an individual in such areas. It also, in later sections, talks about areas of a reactor plant that are not allowed to have more than 100millirems/year dosage levels. Basically, you need special permission to have areas exceeding 100mr/year dosage levels. Some of this was increased in 2002 (there you go; on eof them "rollbacks" though I beleive some of them went higher then ever before)
The initial tolerance dose (as it was called) was 100 millirems. In 1946 the ideas were changed to a "no threshhold" concept, which dated to the meetings of the National Committee on Radiation Protection. This concept holds that there is no threshold at which dosages do not cause harm. Read that again so you're sure you read it.;)
Politicians over the intervening years have used this to say that the standards must be lower and lower. Indeed nuclear plants of a decade ago put out less than one tenth of one percent of the radiation in the area round them on an annual basis.
Annual estimates for someone living in the US are in the 360-405 millirem ranges, with people living in the 7 states of the Colorado plateau having, IIRC, about 4 times the cosmological radiation w/o measurable effect. Indeed many parts of the world have background radiation of ten times -or more- the avg. US dose w/o measurable ill effect). It also continues to rise as a result of increased air travel, and modern non-atomic power generation (for example, coal plants produce volumes more radiation than nuclear plants.
Other examples of unusually high radiation levels at the surface of the earth, exist very locally in parts of India and Brazil. In these locations the ground is covered with a black substance known as monazite sand, a relatively radioactive ore that is derived from thorium deposits. While described as local areas, some of these are large enough to contain small villages with substantial populations. The radiation level a foot or two above the surface of the sands may be as much as 20 times the average background level elsewhere, exposing people who live on this soil to annual doses of 5,000 to 10,000 millirems (50 to 100 millisievert). Studies of these populations, including people whose families have lived on the sands for several generations, have not disclosed any unusual trends in cancer or any other radiogenic disease. -- Lauriston S. Taylor, Idaho State University
Radiological exposure requirements for reactor worker areas at 100mr/year. Average dose for background (aka natural) radiation for people in N. America 350. (conservatively). 100 350. Even 500 5,000
Q.E.D. If I am not mistaken..
Even if you accept the above at face value (I don't recommend it), you should (IMNSHO) do some research on your own about the effects of radiation. You;ll find a lot that the
Being the computer wizard & all-around smart guy that Mr. Minix is, he's prepared for this by setting up backup site (just increment the number if it's down).
This is partly tongue in cheek so remember that as you read the rest. It is in part a serious question, too.
If he's so smart why not www#.electoral-vote.com as opposed to electoral-vote#.com and buying a new domain name for each one?
Well since this a political thread, I'll play spinmeister.
On the other hand, you can say that of the millions of adservs, the people the ads reach are not opposed to seeing them because they (generally) know how to stop them but choose not to. Thus they are more likely to be receptive to them. Therefore the value of that market is higher.
Not saying it is true, just playing spinmeister/devil's advocate
I am just a bit dispirited when I think about the (supposed) fact that my voting tomorrow will not help or hinder those things I'm hoping for.
You are almost to the promised land. Take the next step. Realize that if your vote doesn't sway the election then it is a waste. IMO, a vote not cast for whom you want to cast if for (even if you have to write that persons name in) is the waste.
Voting for Nader vs Kerry is countered by (in conventional "wisdom") those voting for Badnarik versus Bush. And Badnarik will get more votes than Nader anyway. Just like the pollsters don't poll Hawaii and Alaska. They cancel each other out.
So even in a swing state, casting a vote for someone you don't want to cast a vote for is still a waste. There is very likely someone else feeling the same way and casting the opposite ballot.
So vote for whomever you want to and feel good about it. Don't care who wins or loses, vote your conscience. Don't vote against Bush, or against Kerry. Vote FOR a person. Then you enter voting nirvana.
The problem is (and this is also brought up in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence) is that there is an infinite number of potentially valid hypothesis if one simply operates from this falsifiability standpoint, and therefore objective scientific progress is impossible.
Yet despite the assertion, scientific progress is churning along at an ever increasing pace. It isn't the number of potentially valid hypothesis that determines the number of actually valid ones. We potentially have an infinite number of people to confirm/refute them.
So the hypothesis that an potentially infinite number of hypotheses makes scientific progress impossible is proven to be actually false, thus reducing it by one. Well, that's infite -1 hypothesis left.;)
When your end point is an indefinite distance away, measure from the starting point.
science is by no means objective
"Science" is objective. Scientists, however, that's different.
You do realize that the quote you gave to "George Bush" was not the current president right? It was from his father George HW Bush in the mid-late 1980s'.
http://bennyhills.fortunecity.com/hardy/203/nonb el iever/page50.html and http://homepage.mac.com/dr billmartin/rssl/quotes/b ush.html
Will get you started if you didn't.
Otherwise, your sig quote makes me think of the Creationists misrepresenting reality to fit their agenda.;)
Easier than Afghanistan? If we'd stayed in Afghanistan, we'd have the same problem with insurgents moving in from other countries, but the native populace was actually sick of radical Islamic rule. Add in the fact that the infrastructure was already in a shambles (any improvement we could make would be dramatically better than the existing situation) and the reason it was in a shambles was because the Soviets had bombed the heck out of them... and the U.S. was the country that helped them. Not to mention the worldwide support for the invasion of Afghanistan.
I'm not saying the below causes/reasons are right or wrong, just illustrating them.
Yes, actually. Iraq is easier than Afghanistan for many reasons. First, it has a higher potential for economic industry rebuilding anytime soon. The key to rebuilding, or building, a nation is to develop or rebuild it's economic capacity. That was one of the lessons learned from the world wars that was forgotten for so many years. Iraq, by all accounts, has a higher potential than Afghanistan. It has more infrastructure. It is easier to rebuild in many cases, than to fully build. If for no other reason than it increases the potential targets for disruptors to attack early on.
The parent poster missed something else about why Iraq, and not just Afghanistan. Check the map. See where Iran is in regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan? Hopefully the light is now going on.
Remember the "Axis of Eeeeevil"? One of those so-called axis states is now bordered by American (and other) troops. Should we have a need (perceived or real) to go into Iraq, we have troops on two sides of it. That means we have staging bases. On the third side we have the Navy. So basically, we are boxing Iran in.
By boxing in Iran it makes it easier to play the "rogue in the box" game, or to outright invade. A naval blockade combined with at least some level of perceived military strength on it's other two largest borders will increase the ability to enact/maintain sanctions and/or blockades.
That is a strategic point not to be missed or taken lightly.
From a tactical standpoint, Iraq is easier. It's open desert for most of the terrain, and in that environment, the Army's M1 Abrams tanks are king.
Another one of the reasons for Iraq II was that it provides the US with a country in the area, reachable by sea, in which to put troops. Once troops have been moved from Saudi to iraq, the thinking is, the Fundamentalist Muslims lose their "they keep troops in the Holy Land!" plea. Afghanistan doesn't provide that. This also provides leverage in dealing with the Saudis. For all of the Europeans' complaints about "American Imperialism" they sure whine like mules when we talk about pulling our troops out of Europe, even today. (Exceptions noted)
Now back to Afghnistan... If we'd ponied up the kind of dough there that we are currently hemorrhaging in Iraq, the place would be well on its way to a stable democracy.
Actually, maybe you haven't noticed they are well on their way. However, there are underlying problems with their economic base. This will be a very long term commitment that he "international community" doesn't have the stomach for. The US knows it so they passed it off. Not to mention Iraq has a bigger border with Iran than Afghanistan. See above for why that matters.
The Bush administration vastly underestimated the amount and kind of resistance they'd face.
Actually, they overestimated it. They expected a lot more resistance in the opening weeks of the event. They thus, rightly so based on the previous conclusion, concluded that most of the combatants with appreciable skill would be captured/killed in the major operations phase.
Where the mistake was made was with the lack of appreciable resistance during the major operations was not anticipated which is the opposite of your claim.
some international support for the operation There is actual
However, even if you believe we should have attacked Iraq, it is hard to believe that Bush followed a well thought out plan. I think a good diplomat could have bargained with France, Germany, and Russia and gotten them on board.
You presuppose that those third parties could have been convinced. Maybe a good German dimplomat coudl have bargained with France and other nearby countries that they should have just ceded themselves to Germany as opposed to German just conquering them.
A "good diplomat" can not convince the elders of another country to do anything they wouldn't do already. If Russia, Germany, and France were predisposed to not doing it, then a "good diplomat" would not have convinced them to do it.
Further, another flaw in your assumption is that Bush was the diplomat. No, actually our Ambassadors, and Powell were the diplomatic arm. It's not like Bush called up foreign leaders and said "Wanna go play war in the sandbox?" for cryign out loud. The administration played the best dimplomatic game they thought they had, and lost a few. The reasons may be quite varied.
For exmaple, Tony Bliar is highly unlikely to convince George bush, or any US President in the near future at least, to stop supporting Israel, or to go defend China against Taiwan, or stop supporting Taiwan regardless of their diplomatic ability. Our "greatest ally" could not do this.
It isn't that it "seems impossible now" for many years, France has been making attemts to become the superpower of Europe. This makes them predisposed to counter the US. Germany is in a similar though less forceful position. This makes them predisposed to not side with US driven anything.
That we are now learning (publicly) that those three countries had heavy economic interest in the Oil For Food program and sanctions keeping competetion out of the area only lends reasoing as to why they were so admantly opposed to changing anything. Remember the US wanted to lighten/loosen sanctions a few years ago (even under Clinton) and they opposed it. Apparently due to their financial dealings.
So I posit that short of a picture of Saddam holding a sign saying "we've got gas and nukes, and we aimed them at Europe...see" and standing next to a stockpile of WMD they would not have agreed to it. Indeed, France and Germany are on record as saying they wouldn't send troops even if Kerry wins, nor would they have even if it hadn't been Bush pushing for it. They were just flat out opposed to it period.
But in any event, I'm not trying to change your mind on this. I am just pointing out the fallacies in your reasoning on that particular front, and that you can't use the charlatan theoretical "a good diplomat could have" line because of them.
And on the eviro policy thing. Many of the policies enacted under the previous presidents were bad for the environment anyway.
For example the ones that kept power companies from upgrading equipment. Yes, they existed (and some still do). It goes like this:
Any upgrades require the whole plant to be rebuilt to meet the newer standards. Never mind the cost of one versus the other. Even if the minor upgrade would improve the environmental performance of the plant, it's all or nothing.
Kind of like local building codes here. I can't make an add on to my 70's house without redoing the whole house's wiring. Never mind that I am improving the house or that the new area iis safer. If I want to do that, I am legally supposed to redo the entire house wiring to meet today's codes.
That is but one example of many of the regulations that do need to be repealed. Call it rollback if you want to, but remember that not all "rollbacks" are bad thing. Also, other areas I know of I'm sure you'd agree were stupid "levels".
Such as radiation requirements that set alimit that was below natural background radation. In other words, companies were required to scrib/protect an area to the point hat walking around the Sahara
The installation of (most) Operating sytems is disk based, not so much CPU based. So your encoding rate is likely not tied to well to how fast you can install Windows.
At the risk of sounding like a Linux Zealot (not that I am not one of course:) )...
If you are going to have a second OS just for burning the image to the disc, you could save yourself a great deal of headache by installing a small Linux partition on there instead.
You could even install X with a minimal window manager such as Blackbox or fluxbox, and only the minimal x-bsed cd/dvd burning tools. Or even smaller, just use the command line tools such as
(no that isn't a typo; cdrecord burns dvd as well)
That could (depending on OS chosen) be less hassle then setting up and trimming the fat from a Windows2k install, and take up a lot less space (say sigificantly less than 100MB if you went the text route -- a binary gentoo should do that easily enough) (and possibly time).
Just make a small partition for the Linux install, a small swap partition, and make a large Fat32 partition if you want Linux to modify images, or a large NTFS partition if all it'll do is read the images.
As you say:... lots of crap running in the background... detracts from the performance, so why run a graphical environment when one isn't needed? Heck I (or several others here) could whip you up a dialog based text/curses interface in short order to present you with your images and select which to burn. Then you'd just run that as your login shell and be done with it. You'd mount your root (and image) filesystem(s) as read-only and be quite secure and stable. In the event of a power outage or hardware failure the only thing lost would be the disc that was being burned.
Heck, this could even be done on a "live" cdrom. Then you could duplicate this on multiple machines just by booting from cdrom. Or if your motherboard supported it, stick it on a memory card or other persistent solid state memory device and boot from there.
This type of setup is in fact one of the areas Linux quite excels: as a small dedicated purpose machine.
Maybe someone should make bootable cdroms for this... hmmmm...
I just want the damned navigation system for my car. Then go buy one with it in it. I see commercials for it every day I watch much TV, which isn't much.
You can go down and buy DVD-NAV systems aftermarket. And despite your claims, GM does actuallyoffer it. So get a clue. or at least get updated.
And to top it off, it's available on systems that have OnStar available too.
And finally, OnStar and Nav are not comparable. Nav won't unlock your doors, notify the cops and ambulance where you are if your airbag goes off and you can't respond, read your email to you, and so on.
Indeed, I'll relay a story about OnStar and Nav from my wife. The place she wanted to go was a park. It wasn't on any maps. So what did OnStar do? They got on the phone and called the local parks department to find out how to get there from where my wife was at the time. One-time Nav purchases will not do that.
So take your apples and horshoes comparison and use your choice words about sticking things somehwere.;)
Kerry's Congressional career has been mostly during the Gingrichian Republican majority.
He's been a Senator for 20 years. At best the majority to which you refer only lasted six years, ten if you count 94 to this year. Last I knew 10 did not constitute a majority of 20. Yet the Gingrich majority effectively ended in 1996, as scant 2 years later. I'll be generous and let it extend to 2000, but that is still only 6 years.
For what it's worth I don't consider government funding of broadband or the telemarketer location requirement positive acheivements. The former is basically corporate welfare. The latter is basically feel good politics. IMO the CDA is a very minor "victory" in that IMO the CDA should never have passed and should be repealed. Lack of taxes is good, but it extends to everywhere, not just the Internet.
Even if I give you those two, Bush has things he's done that are quite good as well. After all, Bush also agrees taxing the Internet is a bad idea; so there is half the job right there. Tax cuts good, but again not enough. So there we have a mirror of those two.
My point was that salivating over a Kerry presidency defanging the DMCA is just foolish given his track record on tech issues.
I'd argue tech record/voting is as important as the others you cited. Kerry and Bush on Iraq? That is just "more of the same" versus "more more of the same". Healthcare, again; though bush has the edge, IMO. Patriot Act? Again, the end result from either of them will be "more of the same". Prior to the current political arean, Kerry pushed for the very things in the Patriot Act, and has gone on record as saying he doesn't have a problem with it -- his problem is in who gets to execute it. He says Ashcroft is the problem, not the PA. His solution is to put a cronie in. Thus, again the end result is the same whether it be Bush or Kerry. Kerry's guy will simply go after other people instead.
Kerry doesn't have an agenda other than "not Bush". His positions are determined by committee. In politics that means whomever gets the most access which is determined by political power and wealth. Kerry has to know his agenda before he can understand it.
Kerry's campaign is anti-worker, anti-wealth building, anti-economy, and anti-tech, anti-ownership, and thus anti-environment; as well as pro-big government, pro-lawyer, and pro-Kerry.
But then, those of us out here in Idaho have had direct results from him. He had a house built that had this land around it that he wanted to be "more green". So he had someone put in all these high-water plants.
The problem arose when he needed water for the plants. He didn't want to pay for the tremendous amount of water. So who did? We did. Somehow he managed to convince the State that we had to MOVE A STREAM for him. Kerry doesn't knwo how to undo any damage. Especially when he voted for the thigns he complains about, and his sole complaint was not the abdication of power, but the person it was given to; not the presence of the awful PA, but the AG running the prosecution of it. He refuses to admit the problem is the laws and the congressional votes to give the power in the first place; just as Bush refuses to admit his mistakes. Again, more of the same either side of the coin.
Has Bush done similar things? Probably. The choice isn't binary. I don't think either of them deserve to be there, and we certainly don't "deserve" either of them. So I am voting for someone else.
In many aspects, Bush may be more of the same (in Kerry's negative connotation), but Kerry is even more of the same.
It's pretty much a 50/50 shot at which one is elected/appointed/approved next month. So make a difference and vote 3rd party. Such as Badnarik. Let's face it, even you who live in a "battleground state" (the rest of us are chopped liver I guess) can vote for neither of the two and have an effect.
Especially those in the so-called battleground states can. Make the third party vote at least double the difference between dufus and dufus++, and we stand a chance at seeing something change toward better ideas and candidates. Personally, I'd sugest Badnarik, as he is on more ballots in the US than the other non-republicrats; and thus stands thebest chance at focusing the message.
It isn't a binary choice any more than choosing an OS is.
There is one binary choice though: will you vote like it is, or not?
Keep voting for "more of the same", and you will get it. With the presidential races getting closer and closer, the relative power of that organized minority gets stronger and stronger. If a single party can field candidates that pull double or more of the difference between the top two vote-getters, they become a minority to appeal/pander to.
In some ways this is the self-correcting (albeit SLOW!) mechanism at work. Two big parties grow more toward each other until the differences on election day are minor. Then that difference gets "eaten" by some third party gains enough share that they are sought out. They may or may not move into a bigger party status, but their ideas and their ideals become crucial pawns being fought over instead of sacrificed. Then a shift toward that set of principles/ideas happens.
Sometimes, a reaction to it happens. And two new parties are the focus; even if not the primary two.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry.
Just rename it "Ugly Europeans".
Actually, the economics of H3 are fully dependent on having usable reactors and an ability to obtain H3.
The cost to get it "down here" is comparatively minor. A single shuttle load would power the US' electicity needs for about a year. Further, the tranportation of it is coming DOWN a gravity well, not up it. Maybe you are somehow thinking of sending it up there and then bringing it back?
Easy.
1. Send a shuttle up with a normal payload.
2. Deliver payload.
3. Rendezvous with cargo ship from Luna
4. Return to Earth.
Cheap. The rendezvous work would be done by the cargo ship from Luna. Said ship should would be rather lightweight and simple; being made specifically for the purpose.
The cost of establishing and mining the H3 is a major impediment; possibly more so than the reactor.
Lunar regolith is very pernicious stuff. It is extremely coarse and fine. It gets into everything, and as it has no wind to soften it's edges, is very damaging to the equipment. Further, mining on the Moon will require a significant amount of energy as well; in means of support and mining, as well as equipment repair and replacement. Mining equipment is not exactly small. And if you RTFA, you find that to get a single tone of H3 you need to process about 200 million tons of lunar regolith.
That's about 550.000 tons per day, or about 23,000 tons/hour. That's just a single ton of H3. Since it would take approximately 25 of those to run the US for a single year, you would need to multiply the above volume by 25. In other words, you need to be able to do the equivalent of processing over half a million tons of lunar regolith per hour 24x7. The quipment costs alone would be staggering, IMO.
This is one reason that lunar H3 processing will not usably take place until a Mars colony is thriving and able to manufacture what is needed. It is cheaper to land equipment on the moon if launched from Mars than from Earth Same thing for orbit.
This could in fact be one of the moneymakers for a Martian settlement. A single ton of He3 would supply a sizeable Martian settelement for a long time. Establishing He3 mining from a Martian settlement would aid it's independence and provide a powerfully effective export. At an estimated 4 billion dollars per ton, it'd pay for a lot. IMO a lot of that would be eaten by mining equipment costs.
OOo also lacks compatibility with Exchange servers
Which since it isn't an email client doesn't seem to be too much an an issue in this MS laden environment.
Sun will throw all its muscle behind it's Java Desktop to deliver a polished, cohisive system. Linux will continue to be pulled in 100 directions at once.
Java Desktop is Linux . It's a GNOME based Linux w/looking glass. Big whoop. They call if Java Desktop because they are Sun. Sun could make toiletpaper and they'd still put the JAVA tag on it. "Java Wipe Papers" or "Java Buttock Purification System" or some such.
Around here, and in the classes I've been teaching, I've found people actually like picking their own way of doing things on their desktop. Oh the inhumanity of it all!
Some people keep chanting the mantra of "one UI to bind them". I say keep chanting as the world passes you by. Peopel say they don't want choice when they think they can't or won't get it. When they get it, they like it, and they like it a lot.
Then again, maybe people don't really find it difficult to use Alt-F4, the X button, File->Close or File->Quit to exit an application or close a window. There's 4, where's the other 99,996 you speak of? I'll give you some help: how about Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-W?
Each of those methods are available to Linux users and Windows users alike. Neither seem to find it complicated. Which part of that do you find complicated?
If I were building a desktop distribution, I would pick ONE window manager, bundle in enough hardware support to make things as plug-and-play as possible, put in ONE office suite, and a few other useful apps. Then I'd make the system easy enough to tweak later on, so anyone who wants to can grab components and install them as needed.
... and promptly go out of business, or be nothing more than a niche player at best. It's been tried; it doesn't work.
Not sorry to burst your bubble, but RH's *default* install contains only one window manager(Metacity), and only one office suite(OpenOffice.org). And their HW support on x86 far exceeds Solaris x86.
But in order to stay alive, they offer more than that via non-default but still canned installs. Why? Some of us like choice. Hell, some of us *need* choice in our given jobs.
I train sysadmins and users. I've not found it difficult at all.
Show me half a line of code that HP's contributed to the community.
h elds.org/
... yup HP, along with a few other of the top SAMBA guys. You think maybe they've contributed code?
A half a line of code would be pointless (unless you're SCO).
So how about some full projects?
http://opensource.hp.com/ is a start for HP and Compaq contribtions. Such as Vesta (GPL), DSpace (BSD), Open Source DB Benchmark, OpenSSI (clustering) (GPL). http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/
http://www.hand
My group has submitted patches to Postfix, with some Mailman patches coming soon (contributed by yours truly). In a previous HP incarnation we submitted kernel patches in the SCSI subsystem.
We've got people working on things like distcc, Mondo (came -again- from HP), elilo, various math libraries, and more. Such as the SiS suite (go to sourceforge), perfmon on IA64 Linux, LDAPWeb and others.
The maintainer of the IA64 Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer is an HP guy, as is the 2.4 of the same. I dare say they've added at least half a line of code each. Jeremy Allison of SAMBA fame works at
How about IBM?
SponsoringOf/sourceOf/patchesFor STAF, Eclipse, OpenHPi, Kprobes, udev, JFS, EVMS, Many kernel patches, HotPlug, SAMBA, CIFS Channel bonding for ethernet, ATM, drivers, SiS, and many, many others.
The list goes on, and I could karma-whore for a really long comment showing you dozens more. But I won't hold my breath that you'd correct your statements.
Try going to http://www.hp.com/linux http://www.ibm.com/linux and
http://www.sun.com/linux
Compare the intent of those pages.
Now, please, someone build a similar list for Sun. Of course starting with OpenOffice.org. http://www.sun.com/linux is not as useful as one would think when looking at the others. Let's see if we can compile what Sun has done for the opensource community. HAS, not SAYS it has.
3) vim. I HATE vim!!! I DESPISE WITH A GREAT PASSION the defaults in vim! It sucks, it sucks, and it sucks. That's all there is to say about it. :-) .vimrc solves that. Put your defaults in there and make it a part of your standard environment "package".
new comic book villian - Spin Laden, the Marketing Terrarist!
And his arch-enemy Usur Spellchecker
Whether this is patentable is another issue. But you can certainly patent a published idea -- it's the only way to protect it.
No, patents are supposed to monpoli^W protect implementations not ideas.
Second, according to the DMCA reverse engineering is NOT illegal. Breaking copy encryption is.
/me ducks
But compiling is a form of encryption, your honor.
to eventually get launch costs below a dollar per pound;
Now that's reaching for the stars. Coast to coast airline travel is not yet under a buck per pound unless you're really heavy. Portland to Seattle is about 175-250 per adult. Assume 175 or so pounds ona verage, and you're barely above a buck per pound.
Let's think about this for a minute. Nay, think longer. You're trying to say that we need to get the cost for an average human to fly into space down to about 175 bucks per person. Figure some luggage, etc. and maybe a few hundred at that.
One doesn't need launch costs that low for space exploration and travel to "take off" (pun intended". It's the myopic idea that space travel is so heinously dangerous or expensive that is the biggest hurdle. NASA goes a long way toward perpetuating this, btw.
However, if you think allowing more mercury in the water and more particulates in the air is a good thing, then you're welcome to your opinion, but you're just reinforcing the opinion of many here that Bush supporters have their own reality.
;)
;)
Ahh yes the you must be a Bush supporter/Republican dodge. FYI, I'm not a Bush supporter. I also note you take the standard smear attempt by creative addition to what I said thus proving my point. Do you not understand the concept of diminishing returns?
Do some research on the radiation issue. Since you are clearly the kind of person who would not be convinced by a lone poster on slashdot I'll point in you some directions, and still tell you about it just to be sure you have the resources needed to bust the myth for yourself.
* Do some digging on the space exploration research, there is probably ore info here than most any other industry other than the nuclear plant industry which you may or may to consider a good source.
* www.nrc.gov
Section 20.105(a) of 10 CFR Part 20 provides for Commission authorization of radiation levels in unrestricted areas based on a criterion of 500 millirems in one year to an individual in such areas. It also, in later sections, talks about areas of a reactor plant that are not allowed to have more than 100millirems/year dosage levels. Basically, you need special permission to have areas exceeding 100mr/year dosage levels. Some of this was increased in 2002 (there you go; on eof them "rollbacks" though I beleive some of them went higher then ever before)
The initial tolerance dose (as it was called) was 100 millirems. In 1946 the ideas were changed to a "no threshhold" concept, which dated to the meetings of the National Committee on Radiation Protection. This concept holds that there is no threshold at which dosages do not cause harm. Read that again so you're sure you read it.
Politicians over the intervening years have used this to say that the standards must be lower and lower. Indeed nuclear plants of a decade ago put out less than one tenth of one percent of the radiation in the area round them on an annual basis.
Annual estimates for someone living in the US are in the 360-405 millirem ranges, with people living in the 7 states of the Colorado plateau having, IIRC, about 4 times the cosmological radiation w/o measurable effect. Indeed many parts of the world have background radiation of ten times -or more- the avg. US dose w/o measurable ill effect). It also continues to rise as a result of increased air travel, and modern non-atomic power generation (for example, coal plants produce volumes more radiation than nuclear plants.
Other examples of unusually high radiation levels at the surface of the earth, exist very locally in parts of India and Brazil. In these locations the ground is covered with a black substance known as monazite sand, a relatively radioactive ore that is derived from thorium deposits. While described as local areas, some of these are large enough to contain small villages with substantial populations. The radiation level a foot or two above the surface of the sands may be as much as 20 times the average background level elsewhere, exposing people who live on this soil to annual doses of 5,000 to 10,000 millirems (50 to 100 millisievert). Studies of these populations, including people whose families have lived on the sands for several generations, have not disclosed any unusual trends in cancer or any other radiogenic disease. -- Lauriston S. Taylor, Idaho State University
Radiological exposure requirements for reactor worker areas at 100mr/year. Average dose for background (aka natural) radiation for people in N. America 350. (conservatively). 100 350. Even 500 5,000
Q.E.D. If I am not mistaken..
Even if you accept the above at face value (I don't recommend it), you should (IMNSHO) do some research on your own about the effects of radiation. You;ll find a lot that the
Being the computer wizard & all-around smart guy that Mr. Minix is, he's prepared for this by setting up backup site (just increment the number if it's down).
This is partly tongue in cheek so remember that as you read the rest. It is in part a serious question, too.
If he's so smart why not www#.electoral-vote.com as opposed to electoral-vote#.com and buying a new domain name for each one?
Well since this a political thread, I'll play spinmeister.
On the other hand, you can say that of the millions of adservs, the people the ads reach are not opposed to seeing them because they (generally) know how to stop them but choose not to. Thus they are more likely to be receptive to them. Therefore the value of that market is higher.
Not saying it is true, just playing spinmeister/devil's advocate
I am just a bit dispirited when I think about the (supposed) fact that my voting tomorrow will not help or hinder those things I'm hoping for.
You are almost to the promised land. Take the next step. Realize that if your vote doesn't sway the election then it is a waste. IMO, a vote not cast for whom you want to cast if for (even if you have to write that persons name in) is the waste.
Voting for Nader vs Kerry is countered by (in conventional "wisdom") those voting for Badnarik versus Bush. And Badnarik will get more votes than Nader anyway. Just like the pollsters don't poll Hawaii and Alaska. They cancel each other out.
So even in a swing state, casting a vote for someone you don't want to cast a vote for is still a waste. There is very likely someone else feeling the same way and casting the opposite ballot.
So vote for whomever you want to and feel good about it. Don't care who wins or loses, vote your conscience. Don't vote against Bush, or against Kerry. Vote FOR a person. Then you enter voting nirvana.
The problem is (and this is also brought up in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence) is that there is an infinite number of potentially valid hypothesis if one simply operates from this falsifiability standpoint, and therefore objective scientific progress is impossible.
;)
Yet despite the assertion, scientific progress is churning along at an ever increasing pace. It isn't the number of potentially valid hypothesis that determines the number of actually valid ones. We potentially have an infinite number of people to confirm/refute them.
So the hypothesis that an potentially infinite number of hypotheses makes scientific progress impossible is proven to be actually false, thus reducing it by one. Well, that's infite -1 hypothesis left.
When your end point is an indefinite distance away, measure from the starting point.
science is by no means objective
"Science" is objective. Scientists , however, that's different.
You do realize that the quote you gave to "George Bush" was not the current president right? It was from his father George HW Bush in the mid-late 1980s'.
b el iever/page50.htmlr billmartin/rssl/quotes/b ush.html
;)
http://bennyhills.fortunecity.com/hardy/203/non
and
http://homepage.mac.com/d
Will get you started if you didn't.
Otherwise, your sig quote makes me think of the Creationists misrepresenting reality to fit their agenda.
Easier than Afghanistan? If we'd stayed in Afghanistan, we'd have the same problem with insurgents moving in from other countries, but the native populace was actually sick of radical Islamic rule. Add in the fact that the infrastructure was already in a shambles (any improvement we could make would be dramatically better than the existing situation) and the reason it was in a shambles was because the Soviets had bombed the heck out of them... and the U.S. was the country that helped them. Not to mention the worldwide support for the invasion of Afghanistan.
...
I'm not saying the below causes/reasons are right or wrong, just illustrating them.
Yes, actually. Iraq is easier than Afghanistan for many reasons. First, it has a higher potential for economic industry rebuilding anytime soon. The key to rebuilding, or building, a nation is to develop or rebuild it's economic capacity. That was one of the lessons learned from the world wars that was forgotten for so many years. Iraq, by all accounts, has a higher potential than Afghanistan. It has more infrastructure. It is easier to rebuild in many cases, than to fully build. If for no other reason than it increases the potential targets for disruptors to attack early on.
The parent poster missed something else about why Iraq, and not just Afghanistan. Check the map. See where Iran is in regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan? Hopefully the light is now going on.
Remember the "Axis of Eeeeevil"? One of those so-called axis states is now bordered by American (and other) troops. Should we have a need (perceived or real) to go into Iraq, we have troops on two sides of it. That means we have staging bases. On the third side we have the Navy. So basically, we are boxing Iran in.
By boxing in Iran it makes it easier to play the "rogue in the box" game, or to outright invade. A naval blockade combined with at least some level of perceived military strength on it's other two largest borders will increase the ability to enact/maintain sanctions and/or blockades.
That is a strategic point not to be missed or taken lightly.
From a tactical standpoint, Iraq is easier. It's open desert for most of the terrain, and in that environment, the Army's M1 Abrams tanks are king.
Another one of the reasons for Iraq II was that it provides the US with a country in the area, reachable by sea, in which to put troops. Once troops have been moved from Saudi to iraq, the thinking is, the Fundamentalist Muslims lose their "they keep troops in the Holy Land!" plea. Afghanistan doesn't provide that. This also provides leverage in dealing with the Saudis. For all of the Europeans' complaints about "American Imperialism" they sure whine like mules when we talk about pulling our troops out of Europe, even today. (Exceptions noted)
Now back to Afghnistan
If we'd ponied up the kind of dough there that we are currently hemorrhaging in Iraq, the place would be well on its way to a stable democracy.
Actually, maybe you haven't noticed they are well on their way. However, there are underlying problems with their economic base. This will be a very long term commitment that he "international community" doesn't have the stomach for. The US knows it so they passed it off. Not to mention Iraq has a bigger border with Iran than Afghanistan. See above for why that matters.
The Bush administration vastly underestimated the amount and kind of resistance they'd face.
Actually, they overestimated it. They expected a lot more resistance in the opening weeks of the event. They thus, rightly so based on the previous conclusion, concluded that most of the combatants with appreciable skill would be captured/killed in the major operations phase.
Where the mistake was made was with the lack of appreciable resistance during the major operations was not anticipated which is the opposite of your claim.
some international support for the operation There is actual
However, even if you believe we should have attacked Iraq, it is hard to believe that Bush followed a well thought out plan. I think a good diplomat could have bargained with France, Germany, and Russia and gotten them on board.
...see" and standing next to a stockpile of WMD they would not have agreed to it. Indeed, France and Germany are on record as saying they wouldn't send troops even if Kerry wins, nor would they have even if it hadn't been Bush pushing for it. They were just flat out opposed to it period.
You presuppose that those third parties could have been convinced. Maybe a good German dimplomat coudl have bargained with France and other nearby countries that they should have just ceded themselves to Germany as opposed to German just conquering them.
A "good diplomat" can not convince the elders of another country to do anything they wouldn't do already. If Russia, Germany, and France were predisposed to not doing it, then a "good diplomat" would not have convinced them to do it.
Further, another flaw in your assumption is that Bush was the diplomat. No, actually our Ambassadors, and Powell were the diplomatic arm. It's not like Bush called up foreign leaders and said "Wanna go play war in the sandbox?" for cryign out loud. The administration played the best dimplomatic game they thought they had, and lost a few. The reasons may be quite varied.
For exmaple, Tony Bliar is highly unlikely to convince George bush, or any US President in the near future at least, to stop supporting Israel, or to go defend China against Taiwan, or stop supporting Taiwan regardless of their diplomatic ability. Our "greatest ally" could not do this.
It isn't that it "seems impossible now" for many years, France has been making attemts to become the superpower of Europe. This makes them predisposed to counter the US. Germany is in a similar though less forceful position. This makes them predisposed to not side with US driven anything.
That we are now learning (publicly) that those three countries had heavy economic interest in the Oil For Food program and sanctions keeping competetion out of the area only lends reasoing as to why they were so admantly opposed to changing anything. Remember the US wanted to lighten/loosen sanctions a few years ago (even under Clinton) and they opposed it. Apparently due to their financial dealings.
So I posit that short of a picture of Saddam holding a sign saying "we've got gas and nukes, and we aimed them at Europe
But in any event, I'm not trying to change your mind on this. I am just pointing out the fallacies in your reasoning on that particular front, and that you can't use the charlatan theoretical "a good diplomat could have" line because of them.
And on the eviro policy thing. Many of the policies enacted under the previous presidents were bad for the environment anyway.
For example the ones that kept power companies from upgrading equipment. Yes, they existed (and some still do). It goes like this:
Any upgrades require the whole plant to be rebuilt to meet the newer standards. Never mind the cost of one versus the other. Even if the minor upgrade would improve the environmental performance of the plant, it's all or nothing.
Kind of like local building codes here. I can't make an add on to my 70's house without redoing the whole house's wiring. Never mind that I am improving the house or that the new area iis safer. If I want to do that, I am legally supposed to redo the entire house wiring to meet today's codes.
That is but one example of many of the regulations that do need to be repealed. Call it rollback if you want to, but remember that not all "rollbacks" are bad thing. Also, other areas I know of I'm sure you'd agree were stupid "levels".
Such as radiation requirements that set alimit that was below natural background radation. In other words, companies were required to scrib/protect an area to the point hat walking around the Sahara
The installation of (most) Operating sytems is disk based, not so much CPU based. So your encoding rate is likely not tied to well to how fast you can install Windows.
:) ) ...
/path/to/image/image.name
... lots of crap running in the background... detracts from the performance, so why run a graphical environment when one isn't needed? Heck I (or several others here) could whip you up a dialog based text/curses interface in short order to present you with your images and select which to burn. Then you'd just run that as your login shell and be done with it. You'd mount your root (and image) filesystem(s) as read-only and be quite secure and stable. In the event of a power outage or hardware failure the only thing lost would be the disc that was being burned.
... hmmmm ...
At the risk of sounding like a Linux Zealot (not that I am not one of course
If you are going to have a second OS just for burning the image to the disc, you could save yourself a great deal of headache by installing a small Linux partition on there instead.
You could even install X with a minimal window manager such as Blackbox or fluxbox, and only the minimal x-bsed cd/dvd burning tools. Or even smaller, just use the command line tools such as
cdrecord dev=/dev/dvd speed=16
(no that isn't a typo; cdrecord burns dvd as well)
That could (depending on OS chosen) be less hassle then setting up and trimming the fat from a Windows2k install, and take up a lot less space (say sigificantly less than 100MB if you went the text route -- a binary gentoo should do that easily enough) (and possibly time).
Just make a small partition for the Linux install, a small swap partition, and make a large Fat32 partition if you want Linux to modify images, or a large NTFS partition if all it'll do is read the images.
As you say:
Heck, this could even be done on a "live" cdrom. Then you could duplicate this on multiple machines just by booting from cdrom. Or if your motherboard supported it, stick it on a memory card or other persistent solid state memory device and boot from there.
This type of setup is in fact one of the areas Linux quite excels: as a small dedicated purpose machine.
Maybe someone should make bootable cdroms for this
The only reason I would go to the USA would be to help in the next revolution.
And that wouldn't look good on a visa application...
Of course not. MasterCard, now that's everywhere you want to be!
I just want the damned navigation system for my car. Then go buy one with it in it. I see commercials for it every day I watch much TV, which isn't much.
;)
You can go down and buy DVD-NAV systems aftermarket. And despite your claims, GM does
actually offer it. So get a clue. or at least get updated.
And to top it off, it's available on systems that have OnStar available too.
And finally, OnStar and Nav are not comparable. Nav won't unlock your doors, notify the cops and ambulance where you are if your airbag goes off and you can't respond, read your email to you, and so on.
Indeed, I'll relay a story about OnStar and Nav from my wife. The place she wanted to go was a park. It wasn't on any maps. So what did OnStar do? They got on the phone and called the local parks department to find out how to get there from where my wife was at the time. One-time Nav purchases will not do that.
So take your apples and horshoes comparison and use your choice words about sticking things somehwere.
Kerry's Congressional career has been mostly during the Gingrichian Republican majority.
He's been a Senator for 20 years. At best the majority to which you refer only lasted six years, ten if you count 94 to this year. Last I knew 10 did not constitute a majority of 20. Yet the Gingrich majority effectively ended in 1996, as scant 2 years later. I'll be generous and let it extend to 2000, but that is still only 6 years.
For what it's worth I don't consider government funding of broadband or the telemarketer location requirement positive acheivements. The former is basically corporate welfare. The latter is basically feel good politics. IMO the CDA is a very minor "victory" in that IMO the CDA should never have passed and should be repealed. Lack of taxes is good, but it extends to everywhere, not just the Internet.
Even if I give you those two, Bush has things he's done that are quite good as well. After all, Bush also agrees taxing the Internet is a bad idea; so there is half the job right there. Tax cuts good, but again not enough. So there we have a mirror of those two.
My point was that salivating over a Kerry presidency defanging the DMCA is just foolish given his track record on tech issues.
I'd argue tech record/voting is as important as the others you cited. Kerry and Bush on Iraq? That is just "more of the same" versus "more more of the same". Healthcare, again; though bush has the edge, IMO. Patriot Act? Again, the end result from either of them will be "more of the same". Prior to the current political arean, Kerry pushed for the very things in the Patriot Act, and has gone on record as saying he doesn't have a problem with it -- his problem is in who gets to execute it. He says Ashcroft is the problem, not the PA. His solution is to put a cronie in. Thus, again the end result is the same whether it be Bush or Kerry. Kerry's guy will simply go after other people instead.
Kerry doesn't have an agenda other than "not Bush". His positions are determined by committee. In politics that means whomever gets the most access which is determined by political power and wealth. Kerry has to know his agenda before he can understand it.
Kerry's campaign is anti-worker, anti-wealth building, anti-economy, and anti-tech, anti-ownership, and thus anti-environment; as well as pro-big government, pro-lawyer, and pro-Kerry.
But then, those of us out here in Idaho have had direct results from him. He had a house built that had this land around it that he wanted to be "more green". So he had someone put in all these high-water plants.
The problem arose when he needed water for the plants. He didn't want to pay for the tremendous amount of water. So who did? We did. Somehow he managed to convince the State that we had to MOVE A STREAM for him. Kerry doesn't knwo how to undo any damage. Especially when he voted for the thigns he complains about, and his sole complaint was not the abdication of power, but the person it was given to; not the presence of the awful PA, but the AG running the prosecution of it. He refuses to admit the problem is the laws and the congressional votes to give the power in the first place; just as Bush refuses to admit his mistakes. Again, more of the same either side of the coin.
Has Bush done similar things? Probably. The choice isn't binary. I don't think either of them deserve to be there, and we certainly don't "deserve" either of them. So I am voting for someone else.
In many aspects, Bush may be more of the same (in Kerry's negative connotation), but Kerry is even more of the same.
It's pretty much a 50/50 shot at which one is elected/appointed/approved next month. So make a difference and vote 3rd party. Such as Badnarik. Let's face it, even you who live in a "battleground state" (the rest of us are chopped liver I guess) can vote for neither of the two and have an effect.
Especially those in the so-called battleground states can. Make the third party vote at least double the difference between dufus and dufus++, and we stand a chance at seeing something change toward better ideas and candidates. Personally, I'd sugest Badnarik, as he is on more ballots in the US than the other non-republicrats; and thus stands thebest chance at focusing the message.
It isn't a binary choice any more than choosing an OS is.
There is one binary choice though: will you vote like it is, or not?
Keep voting for "more of the same", and you will get it. With the presidential races getting closer and closer, the relative power of that organized minority gets stronger and stronger. If a single party can field candidates that pull double or more of the difference between the top two vote-getters, they become a minority to appeal/pander to.
In some ways this is the self-correcting (albeit SLOW!) mechanism at work. Two big parties grow more toward each other until the differences on election day are minor. Then that difference gets "eaten" by some third party gains enough share that they are sought out. They may or may not move into a bigger party status, but their ideas and their ideals become crucial pawns being fought over instead of sacrificed. Then a shift toward that set of principles/ideas happens.
Sometimes, a reaction to it happens. And two new parties are the focus; even if not the primary two.