Actually so far, TARP has profited 8.2 percent [bloomberg.com] netting taxpayers $25.2 billion.
That's an outright lie.
We taxpayers will never see a dime of that $25 billion (at least, not back in our pockets where it belongs), nor the $300+ billion that was taken from us to generate it.
It's not about whether or not the report is accurate, it's about what people believe. They are sure as hell not going to believe the economy is improving if they just got laid off.
It doesn't matter if the report is accurate from the national perspective, it has absolutely no bearing from the individual's perspective, and the individual perspective are where voters are seeing things.
Yes, but what they don't know is why they can't find a job.
Of course they do. It's because the economy is in the tank. It might be improving, but until that improvement actually changes their situation they will be of the opinion that the economy is in the tank. Period.
There are Republicans and then there are Conservatives. Yeah, most Republicans in office are not Conservatives, but most of the Republican sweep was Conservative, and it paints a picture for the rest of them.
That's what the Tea Party movement was all about - smaller, less intrusive government. The reference to the Boston Tea Party should have made that apparent, but it has been lost on many.
Whether or not it sticks for a while remains to be seen (recent history says no), but for now small government Republicans have the mandate.
You don't accidentally sell mortgages more than once.
But you do need to find a way to mitigate your risk caused by being coerced into taking on ridiculously bad loans in the first place (largely Clinton era, but some of it was both before and after).
Think back. How many programs were there to help low income people get into housing that they otherwise could not afford? There is a reason people couldn't afford housing: it was because it was beyond their means! There were the grants that the end consumer saw, but there was a lot more pressure on the other end to take on bad loans. All such loans are, by definition, high-risk. High-risk loans need risk mitigation - i.e. derivatives.
Once you take on a bad loan, you cannot hold on to it. You must trade it for something more reliable. Derivatives were ultimately a way to do that. Once this setup got moving in the 90's, bankers soon realized this new arrangement was a gold mine. They could take on these cancerous loans and then shove them off on to someone else, who would protect themselves with a derivative.
This was fine and dandy as long as there weren't too many bad loans out there (and therefore bad derivatives). Who knows when we crossed the point where it was (somewhat) OK, but we were well past that point by the time the housing market plateaued.
The collapse was a long time coming, and it was ignorantly encouraged by both the White House and Congress for the last 20 years.
And what's worse, even after the crash and all these problems have come to light, Obama is still promising to do whatever it takes to make sure more low-income individuals can buy homes they cannot afford! That's exactly what started the whole mess in the first place!
But the alternative is that the whole economy collapse in a pile of dust.
In business they call it "restructuring", and it's almost always healthy. Painful, but healthy.
The fact is we had a lot of dead weight and instability in our economy, and the crash was the market's way of punishing those who created the dead weight along with the rest of us who allowed them to do it (actually encouraged with various laws in the Clinton and Bush eras!).
What Bush and Obama chose to do instead was to prop up the businesses who perpetrated the shoddy business practices (in some cases essentially fraud), practically rewarding them for ruining the economy. Things are likely not significantly better than they would have been if we hadn't bailed them out, and even if they were significantly worse we would have emerged much, much stronger when recovery finally came. Instead the best we'll be able to do is get to the apparently strong but actually unstable position we were in 5 years ago (before we knew things could blow up at any moment).
On top of that we have now set the incredibly bad precedent that, so long as your company is "vital enough" to the economy, you can take higher risks that do not necessarily have a proportionately higher return, because if you screw up the Government is going to swoop in and save you. That is certainly not going to help us out in the long run, not by a long shot.
Last I checked, 10.2% was more than 10%, not "close to it, but not over".
And if you're going to talk about systemic risks, you're going to have to go a lot further back than a decade. The stage was being set for the crash over 30 years ago. It was predicted by economists in the '90s (that's Clinton's term, in case you didn't notice). It was primarily congress that let us down, and both parties are responsible.
The Democrats had like fifty four, and one of those was an Independent who was Democrat in name only (he even caucused with the Republicans, for goodness sakes).
Uh, that's complete bullshit. Up until Kennedy died there were 58 Democrats in the senate and two Independants who caucused with the Democrats. There were only 40 Republicans, which is not enough to avoid cloture (you need 41). Democrats basically had a supermajority for two years, and still the Republicans somehow managed to stymie their efforts. Could it possibly be because it was the Democratic position that was unreasonable, and not the Republican? I mean, the Independants should have been a breeze to win over if the Democrats were, in fact, being fair and bi-partisan.
The truth is the Democrat leadership couldn't even count on all the Democrats to vote to end these filibusters. The healthcare in particular was unpopular within the more conservative segments of the democratic party. They eventually resorted to shenanigans to get around the filibuster and pass it with a simple majority.
The opposition to the bill and others at the time was by no means pure Republican. It was in fact far more bipartisan opposition than the support for the bill was.
Again, they couldn't even get everyone in their own party to support the bill. Why is it the Republican's fault that it wouldn't pass without trickery?
So what happens? The Republicans refuse to allow anything to come to a vote - there's nearly fifty of them in the Senate, and I believe they can all filibuster for several hours each if they want to.
Again, there were 40 Republicans until Scott Brown was elected at the beginning of 2010, which is not enough to maintain a filibuster. The Democrats were struggling for support for the bill well before that; if it were only the Republicans being obstructionists it would have been a piece of cake to break the filibuster. The Democrats had more than enough support for cloture in such a case. The fact is, the bill sucks, and the Democrats couldn't even get full partisan support for it, let alone bi-partisan.
I have to admit though that I don't like the way a filibuster works these days. In the old days, when you filibustered it was basically a senator demanding their right to be heard. As such they would stand up and speak, and the rest of the Senate had to listen. It was an active process - if you quit talking, the filibuster was over. Now they've changed the Senate rules and all you have to say is "filibuster" and you can stall the Senate for as long as you want. You can thank the Democratic senate majority (majority sets procedural rules, like filibusters) in 1964 for changing the procedural rules for filibuster, which allowed the current state of affairs (prior to this the Senate averaged 1 filibuster a year, after it was closer to 20). No longer did you need to stand up and speak, instead you needed 34 supporters to enact filibuster, stalling the debate. The Dems did reduce the cloture vote to 60 from 67 in 1975, which was a slight correction to the "Tyranny of the Minority" caused by the rules change.
The nuclear option to get around this is especially dirty, though, and it was pretty bi-partisan (initially interpreted as a possibility by VP Nixon in '57, made official by Democrat majority in '75).
I want the health care system improved in this country as well, but being forced to buy over-priced insurance or have the IRS fine me $2000 is not what I or most people had in mind.
What's funny is, in order to make that fine worth a damn it needs to be more like $5k-$6k.
When that provision of the bill kicks in, it will be cheaper to drop your health insurance and take the fine. They have to treat you anyway, so there is no down side on the treatment end, and it costs a lot less than buying health insurance.
As health care costs rise (and pretty much anybody with a reasonable understanding of the bill and the healthcare system agrees costs will rise) more and more people will drop insurance altogether. This will, of course, further increase costs, causing more people to drop it until we have to make a new law that enacts a Canadian or British style system (which are shitty - there is a reason everyone comes to the US for care).
Obama was the face of the health care bill. He continued to ardently support it even after it clearly didn't meet the criteria he promised would absolutely would be met by the bill - I believe he actually said something like "I will not allow yadda yadda", but I may be misremembering the speeches.
As such, "Obamacare" is more than accurate. It's his bill. He wanted it, and he got it. He could have kept his promises by vetoing it when it went bad, instead he promoted it throughout the entire process, from start to finish. He even had bullshit meetings with republican congresscritters to try to bring them to his side, while the democratic congresscritters were actually writing the law.
Sorry, but I was paying attention, and I saw a perfectly reasonable and popular health care bill relentlessly torpedoed by the right, and that is the damaged bill we have now.
I was too, and I was horrified and flabbergasted with each new detail about what the bill would do came out (and I'm not talking about death panels and that hyped up bullshit). I imagine that's actually what happened for most Americans. It doesn't do what was promised, it costs a whole lot more than was promised (budget neutral was what we were promised, it isn't), and it's just another legal deathtrap that rich people with good lawyers will have no trouble navigating, while us regular folk will get shafted time and time again. For Christ's sake, it's 2,000 pages, and you need another 6,000+ pages worth of legal books to read the damn thing.
Democrats under Bush were far more reasonable than the Republicans have been in decades now, which is why Bush was able to "work across the aisle".
Bush was able to work across the aisle by bending over backwards and giving in to the democrats on nearly every domestic issue, and giving in on most foreign issues. It wasn't compromise, it was giving them what they wanted in the hopes that they'd be nicer to him. It didn't work though, people think GWB is a right-wing nut job, when in fact he is a very liberal and progressive republican. The only thing that made him different from the democrats was the war in Iraq (they were all for the war in Afghanistan).
What's crazy is John McCain is possibly more left leaning than Bush was. He was the darling of the media during Bush's presidency because he was constantly siding with the democrats in direct opposition to his republican caucus.
It may be worth calling attention to the fact, which seems to slip your mind, that under Clinton's leadership we saw one of the greatest decades of growth this country has ever experienced.
It may be worth calling attention to the fact that Clinton had absolutely nothing to do with that. The best you can say is that he didn't fuck it up. Most of that growth was from the dot-com bubble, which burst in 2000. Bush came in to office in November 2000. Less than a year and a later we saw the greatest terrorist attack on our country's history, devised by a man that Clinton decided not to take into US custody (the Saudi's were, at one time, begging us to take him off their hands).
So, who's fault is it for the market decline since 2000? It seems like a large share of the blame could be laid squarely on Clinton's shoulders, but the reality is we had to fight a war. Wars are expensive, and it could definitely be argued that we fought this one entirely the wrong way.
And under Obama we are slowly recovering. Doesn't any of those plain facts make you wonder about the Republican plan?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama was only responsible for half of the bailout, and it was in fact the half that was not used very much (they're constantly trying to adjust the Act so they can spend more of it on new things). The first half, the half that arguably actually did something (but which I still disagree with), was initiated by your favorite president in the whole wide world: GWB.
You're also ignoring the fact that hate crime has the intent of causing a chilling effect
No it doesn't, at least, not any of the hate crimes I have ever heard of. I'm sure it has happened in the past (almost certainly the KKK, and many other gangs), but all the actual hate crimes I have ever heard of were perpetrated by some fucktard who hated anybody of a different ethnicity. The guys actually committing the crimes rarely think that far ahead.
To refer to the ultimate example of a hate crime, Hitler wasn't trying to send a message to the Jewish community when he instigated the Holocaust, he was trying to kill all the Jews.
Hate crimes are motivated by hatred, and they should either include all crimes that are motivated by hatred, or none of them (honestly, I think the system is set up well enough to deal with hate crimes without the addition of any specific hate crime laws).
Really, a service like FaceBook I wouldn't expect to be very secure. You're already sharing your information with the rest of the world, someone else accessing your account is simply going to cause you some annoyance. Not that big a deal. Amazon I would expect to secure their communications though, so it's disturbing that they don't.
That's true for WEP encryption I believe, but definitely not for WPA.
It's the same key for authorization to the router, but once established it creates a separate shared key for each individual connection.
So no, once you are connected to the router you don't get free access to everyone else's traffic. You can communicate them via the router, but you'd have to break their encryption to grab their cookies.
And use it they have, since it's darn near impossible, for various reasons, to do certain things without it.
In other words, it was designed with a specific purpose in mind, and it is the only practical tool for said purpose?
Sounds like it's a good thing to me. Going to the dentist sucks, but that doesn't mean dentists suck at what they do, nor does it mean you should go see a bricklayer for your dental checkups.
You didn't look at your keyboard before typing that, did you?
On keyboards that have a key between ctrl and alt it's the Windows key. The vast majority of keyboards have them, since the vast majority of computers are Windows machines, and it's a really handy key for Windows shortcuts.
In case you're still too slow to get it (which wouldn't surprise me, since you seem to think the alt key is somewhere above the capslock key), it was a jab at Windows.
Apparently you weren't paying attention when IE6 became IE7, nor when IE7 became IE8, and you're certainly not paying attention now when IE8 is about to become IE9.
Microsoft is obviously continually improving their product. If they weren't, this article would not exist.
They are not, however, doing it on the schedule you would like them to do it on, and for some reason in your mind that qualifies as stagnation. Most reasonable people can recognize that this is, in fact, a major improvement in a long line of major improvements, which obviously discredits your claim completely.
Except antimatter is subject to the properties of space and time, it doesn't follow different rules for that. It is simply inverted matter - negative protons and positive electrons, but for every sub-atomic particle.
It's not like anti-matter somehow exists in a different space and time, it exists in our space and time. The Sun in fact spews out a small amount of anti-matter, and that definitely isn't moving backwards in time. We can create anti-matter on earth, and it doesn't go backward in time.
The idea, really, is silly.
The only thing really special about the matter-anti-matter relationship is that for some reason more matter gets created in these massive collisions of energy than anti-matter. If this were not so the universe as we know it would not exist.
It doesn't really matter, the fact is there is more of one than the other, and whatever that other is is not what the universe is made of. If the universe were made of antimatter, all the rules would just be mirrored. Physicists can only guess as to why there is more matter than antimatter (again, names are meaningless, the point is that they are opposites), but it seems to come up consistently in the big particle accelerators.
Logically, they ought to be created in the same proportions, then cancel each other out completely. They aren't though, and because of that we exist. Why aren't they balanced? That's one of the big questions that needs an answer.
But given the admission that they might fail to do so you have to pretty much assume its just a "hail Mary" pronouncement, that reflects more on the polling industry than anything else.
There was no admission of the kind. There was a study done by Pew that if you didn't adjust for it, it could skew the results by up to 4 points.
Customers aren't happy when the polls they ordered are inaccurate (unless they specifically ordered a skewed poll for media purposes, which is more likely with a PAC driven poll than the normal polls), so the big names in polling are very keen on keeping their polls as accurate as possible. An 8 point swing would be very damaging to their bottom line, so you can bet your ass they are going to try to nail it by taking every factor imaginable into account.
Thus, this is almost certainly a non-story. If they know the cell phone crowd favors dems, they are going to adjust for it. If they know robopolls favor repubs, they are going to adjust for it. They do this with hundreds of other factors to keep the polls as close to reality as possible. Therefore, I wouldn't expect a huge difference unless the pollsters have missed something major.
While the high-profile election seats may be that way, local elections actually generally have people that will effect your daily life.
More importantly high-profile candidates almost always come from these positions first. If you shut them down before they become "somebody" you've prevented that future bad candidate from being a possibility.
The reason we have such a huge problem with representatives is because politicians are practically ignored at the time when they are most easily influenced.
For example, Obama started out as a state senator (some funny business there, of course, but that's Chicago politics), became a US Senator for the state of Illinois 8 years later, and is now the president. He could have very easily been shut down at the state level by a competent opponent and a few thousand votes.
Don't tell me your vote doesn't matter. It doesn't have great influence when you think it should, but it certainly has a huge impact when you aren't really paying attention.
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Actually so far, TARP has profited 8.2 percent [bloomberg.com] netting taxpayers $25.2 billion.
That's an outright lie.
We taxpayers will never see a dime of that $25 billion (at least, not back in our pockets where it belongs), nor the $300+ billion that was taken from us to generate it.
You completely missed the point.
It's not about whether or not the report is accurate, it's about what people believe. They are sure as hell not going to believe the economy is improving if they just got laid off.
It doesn't matter if the report is accurate from the national perspective, it has absolutely no bearing from the individual's perspective, and the individual perspective are where voters are seeing things.
Yes, but what they don't know is why they can't find a job.
Of course they do. It's because the economy is in the tank. It might be improving, but until that improvement actually changes their situation they will be of the opinion that the economy is in the tank. Period.
There are Republicans and then there are Conservatives. Yeah, most Republicans in office are not Conservatives, but most of the Republican sweep was Conservative, and it paints a picture for the rest of them.
That's what the Tea Party movement was all about - smaller, less intrusive government. The reference to the Boston Tea Party should have made that apparent, but it has been lost on many.
Whether or not it sticks for a while remains to be seen (recent history says no), but for now small government Republicans have the mandate.
You don't accidentally sell mortgages more than once.
But you do need to find a way to mitigate your risk caused by being coerced into taking on ridiculously bad loans in the first place (largely Clinton era, but some of it was both before and after).
Think back. How many programs were there to help low income people get into housing that they otherwise could not afford? There is a reason people couldn't afford housing: it was because it was beyond their means! There were the grants that the end consumer saw, but there was a lot more pressure on the other end to take on bad loans. All such loans are, by definition, high-risk. High-risk loans need risk mitigation - i.e. derivatives.
Once you take on a bad loan, you cannot hold on to it. You must trade it for something more reliable. Derivatives were ultimately a way to do that. Once this setup got moving in the 90's, bankers soon realized this new arrangement was a gold mine. They could take on these cancerous loans and then shove them off on to someone else, who would protect themselves with a derivative.
This was fine and dandy as long as there weren't too many bad loans out there (and therefore bad derivatives). Who knows when we crossed the point where it was (somewhat) OK, but we were well past that point by the time the housing market plateaued.
The collapse was a long time coming, and it was ignorantly encouraged by both the White House and Congress for the last 20 years.
And what's worse, even after the crash and all these problems have come to light, Obama is still promising to do whatever it takes to make sure more low-income individuals can buy homes they cannot afford! That's exactly what started the whole mess in the first place!
But the alternative is that the whole economy collapse in a pile of dust.
In business they call it "restructuring", and it's almost always healthy. Painful, but healthy.
The fact is we had a lot of dead weight and instability in our economy, and the crash was the market's way of punishing those who created the dead weight along with the rest of us who allowed them to do it (actually encouraged with various laws in the Clinton and Bush eras!).
What Bush and Obama chose to do instead was to prop up the businesses who perpetrated the shoddy business practices (in some cases essentially fraud), practically rewarding them for ruining the economy. Things are likely not significantly better than they would have been if we hadn't bailed them out, and even if they were significantly worse we would have emerged much, much stronger when recovery finally came. Instead the best we'll be able to do is get to the apparently strong but actually unstable position we were in 5 years ago (before we knew things could blow up at any moment).
On top of that we have now set the incredibly bad precedent that, so long as your company is "vital enough" to the economy, you can take higher risks that do not necessarily have a proportionately higher return, because if you screw up the Government is going to swoop in and save you. That is certainly not going to help us out in the long run, not by a long shot.
for starters unemployment hasn't been over 10%. Close to it, but not over.
Unemployment peaked at 10.2% in October 2009.
Last I checked, 10.2% was more than 10%, not "close to it, but not over".
And if you're going to talk about systemic risks, you're going to have to go a lot further back than a decade. The stage was being set for the crash over 30 years ago. It was predicted by economists in the '90s (that's Clinton's term, in case you didn't notice). It was primarily congress that let us down, and both parties are responsible.
The Democrats had like fifty four, and one of those was an Independent who was Democrat in name only (he even caucused with the Republicans, for goodness sakes).
Uh, that's complete bullshit. Up until Kennedy died there were 58 Democrats in the senate and two Independants who caucused with the Democrats. There were only 40 Republicans, which is not enough to avoid cloture (you need 41). Democrats basically had a supermajority for two years, and still the Republicans somehow managed to stymie their efforts. Could it possibly be because it was the Democratic position that was unreasonable, and not the Republican? I mean, the Independants should have been a breeze to win over if the Democrats were, in fact, being fair and bi-partisan.
The truth is the Democrat leadership couldn't even count on all the Democrats to vote to end these filibusters. The healthcare in particular was unpopular within the more conservative segments of the democratic party. They eventually resorted to shenanigans to get around the filibuster and pass it with a simple majority.
The opposition to the bill and others at the time was by no means pure Republican. It was in fact far more bipartisan opposition than the support for the bill was.
Again, they couldn't even get everyone in their own party to support the bill. Why is it the Republican's fault that it wouldn't pass without trickery?
So what happens? The Republicans refuse to allow anything to come to a vote - there's nearly fifty of them in the Senate, and I believe they can all filibuster for several hours each if they want to.
Again, there were 40 Republicans until Scott Brown was elected at the beginning of 2010, which is not enough to maintain a filibuster. The Democrats were struggling for support for the bill well before that; if it were only the Republicans being obstructionists it would have been a piece of cake to break the filibuster. The Democrats had more than enough support for cloture in such a case. The fact is, the bill sucks, and the Democrats couldn't even get full partisan support for it, let alone bi-partisan.
I have to admit though that I don't like the way a filibuster works these days. In the old days, when you filibustered it was basically a senator demanding their right to be heard. As such they would stand up and speak, and the rest of the Senate had to listen. It was an active process - if you quit talking, the filibuster was over. Now they've changed the Senate rules and all you have to say is "filibuster" and you can stall the Senate for as long as you want. You can thank the Democratic senate majority (majority sets procedural rules, like filibusters) in 1964 for changing the procedural rules for filibuster, which allowed the current state of affairs (prior to this the Senate averaged 1 filibuster a year, after it was closer to 20). No longer did you need to stand up and speak, instead you needed 34 supporters to enact filibuster, stalling the debate. The Dems did reduce the cloture vote to 60 from 67 in 1975, which was a slight correction to the "Tyranny of the Minority" caused by the rules change.
The nuclear option to get around this is especially dirty, though, and it was pretty bi-partisan (initially interpreted as a possibility by VP Nixon in '57, made official by Democrat majority in '75).
I want the health care system improved in this country as well, but being forced to buy over-priced insurance or have the IRS fine me $2000 is not what I or most people had in mind.
What's funny is, in order to make that fine worth a damn it needs to be more like $5k-$6k.
When that provision of the bill kicks in, it will be cheaper to drop your health insurance and take the fine. They have to treat you anyway, so there is no down side on the treatment end, and it costs a lot less than buying health insurance.
As health care costs rise (and pretty much anybody with a reasonable understanding of the bill and the healthcare system agrees costs will rise) more and more people will drop insurance altogether. This will, of course, further increase costs, causing more people to drop it until we have to make a new law that enacts a Canadian or British style system (which are shitty - there is a reason everyone comes to the US for care).
Way to go Obamacare!
Obama was the face of the health care bill. He continued to ardently support it even after it clearly didn't meet the criteria he promised would absolutely would be met by the bill - I believe he actually said something like "I will not allow yadda yadda", but I may be misremembering the speeches.
As such, "Obamacare" is more than accurate. It's his bill. He wanted it, and he got it. He could have kept his promises by vetoing it when it went bad, instead he promoted it throughout the entire process, from start to finish. He even had bullshit meetings with republican congresscritters to try to bring them to his side, while the democratic congresscritters were actually writing the law.
Sorry, but I was paying attention, and I saw a perfectly reasonable and popular health care bill relentlessly torpedoed by the right, and that is the damaged bill we have now.
I was too, and I was horrified and flabbergasted with each new detail about what the bill would do came out (and I'm not talking about death panels and that hyped up bullshit). I imagine that's actually what happened for most Americans. It doesn't do what was promised, it costs a whole lot more than was promised (budget neutral was what we were promised, it isn't), and it's just another legal deathtrap that rich people with good lawyers will have no trouble navigating, while us regular folk will get shafted time and time again. For Christ's sake, it's 2,000 pages, and you need another 6,000+ pages worth of legal books to read the damn thing.
Democrats under Bush were far more reasonable than the Republicans have been in decades now, which is why Bush was able to "work across the aisle".
Bush was able to work across the aisle by bending over backwards and giving in to the democrats on nearly every domestic issue, and giving in on most foreign issues. It wasn't compromise, it was giving them what they wanted in the hopes that they'd be nicer to him. It didn't work though, people think GWB is a right-wing nut job, when in fact he is a very liberal and progressive republican. The only thing that made him different from the democrats was the war in Iraq (they were all for the war in Afghanistan).
What's crazy is John McCain is possibly more left leaning than Bush was. He was the darling of the media during Bush's presidency because he was constantly siding with the democrats in direct opposition to his republican caucus.
It may be worth calling attention to the fact, which seems to slip your mind, that under Clinton's leadership we saw one of the greatest decades of growth this country has ever experienced.
It may be worth calling attention to the fact that Clinton had absolutely nothing to do with that. The best you can say is that he didn't fuck it up. Most of that growth was from the dot-com bubble, which burst in 2000. Bush came in to office in November 2000. Less than a year and a later we saw the greatest terrorist attack on our country's history, devised by a man that Clinton decided not to take into US custody (the Saudi's were, at one time, begging us to take him off their hands).
So, who's fault is it for the market decline since 2000? It seems like a large share of the blame could be laid squarely on Clinton's shoulders, but the reality is we had to fight a war. Wars are expensive, and it could definitely be argued that we fought this one entirely the wrong way.
And under Obama we are slowly recovering. Doesn't any of those plain facts make you wonder about the Republican plan?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama was only responsible for half of the bailout, and it was in fact the half that was not used very much (they're constantly trying to adjust the Act so they can spend more of it on new things). The first half, the half that arguably actually did something (but which I still disagree with), was initiated by your favorite president in the whole wide world: GWB.
In other words, take your BS and stuff it.
Yeah, but she'd have had to be doing the exact same thing for it to work, so, yeah.
Gross.
You're also ignoring the fact that hate crime has the intent of causing a chilling effect
No it doesn't, at least, not any of the hate crimes I have ever heard of. I'm sure it has happened in the past (almost certainly the KKK, and many other gangs), but all the actual hate crimes I have ever heard of were perpetrated by some fucktard who hated anybody of a different ethnicity. The guys actually committing the crimes rarely think that far ahead.
To refer to the ultimate example of a hate crime, Hitler wasn't trying to send a message to the Jewish community when he instigated the Holocaust, he was trying to kill all the Jews.
Hate crimes are motivated by hatred, and they should either include all crimes that are motivated by hatred, or none of them (honestly, I think the system is set up well enough to deal with hate crimes without the addition of any specific hate crime laws).
ARP poisoning is pretty easy to protect against.
Really, a service like FaceBook I wouldn't expect to be very secure. You're already sharing your information with the rest of the world, someone else accessing your account is simply going to cause you some annoyance. Not that big a deal. Amazon I would expect to secure their communications though, so it's disturbing that they don't.
That's true for WEP encryption I believe, but definitely not for WPA.
It's the same key for authorization to the router, but once established it creates a separate shared key for each individual connection.
So no, once you are connected to the router you don't get free access to everyone else's traffic. You can communicate them via the router, but you'd have to break their encryption to grab their cookies.
And use it they have, since it's darn near impossible, for various reasons, to do certain things without it.
In other words, it was designed with a specific purpose in mind, and it is the only practical tool for said purpose?
Sounds like it's a good thing to me. Going to the dentist sucks, but that doesn't mean dentists suck at what they do, nor does it mean you should go see a bricklayer for your dental checkups.
And because of that J is now the most popular programming language in the world!
Or at least one of them, right? No?
Wait, you mean it didn't catch on like wildfire in the almost 20 years since its inception?
Huh, wonder why.
You didn't look at your keyboard before typing that, did you?
On keyboards that have a key between ctrl and alt it's the Windows key. The vast majority of keyboards have them, since the vast majority of computers are Windows machines, and it's a really handy key for Windows shortcuts.
In case you're still too slow to get it (which wouldn't surprise me, since you seem to think the alt key is somewhere above the capslock key), it was a jab at Windows.
Why can't you use paragraphs like normal people, so non-programmers can understand you? ;)
Apparently you weren't paying attention when IE6 became IE7, nor when IE7 became IE8, and you're certainly not paying attention now when IE8 is about to become IE9.
Microsoft is obviously continually improving their product. If they weren't, this article would not exist.
They are not, however, doing it on the schedule you would like them to do it on, and for some reason in your mind that qualifies as stagnation. Most reasonable people can recognize that this is, in fact, a major improvement in a long line of major improvements, which obviously discredits your claim completely.
Except antimatter is subject to the properties of space and time, it doesn't follow different rules for that. It is simply inverted matter - negative protons and positive electrons, but for every sub-atomic particle.
It's not like anti-matter somehow exists in a different space and time, it exists in our space and time. The Sun in fact spews out a small amount of anti-matter, and that definitely isn't moving backwards in time. We can create anti-matter on earth, and it doesn't go backward in time.
The idea, really, is silly.
The only thing really special about the matter-anti-matter relationship is that for some reason more matter gets created in these massive collisions of energy than anti-matter. If this were not so the universe as we know it would not exist.
It doesn't really matter, the fact is there is more of one than the other, and whatever that other is is not what the universe is made of. If the universe were made of antimatter, all the rules would just be mirrored. Physicists can only guess as to why there is more matter than antimatter (again, names are meaningless, the point is that they are opposites), but it seems to come up consistently in the big particle accelerators.
Logically, they ought to be created in the same proportions, then cancel each other out completely. They aren't though, and because of that we exist. Why aren't they balanced? That's one of the big questions that needs an answer.
Dude I totally just found it! Tennis balls are the size of tennis balls!
Boo-ya!
What's next? Ooh I know! I'll see if I can find something the size of a bowling ball! Now there's a challenge!
Now let's see... what could be the size of a bowling ball?
But given the admission that they might fail to do so you have to pretty much assume its just a "hail Mary" pronouncement, that reflects more on the polling industry than anything else.
There was no admission of the kind. There was a study done by Pew that if you didn't adjust for it, it could skew the results by up to 4 points.
Customers aren't happy when the polls they ordered are inaccurate (unless they specifically ordered a skewed poll for media purposes, which is more likely with a PAC driven poll than the normal polls), so the big names in polling are very keen on keeping their polls as accurate as possible. An 8 point swing would be very damaging to their bottom line, so you can bet your ass they are going to try to nail it by taking every factor imaginable into account.
Thus, this is almost certainly a non-story. If they know the cell phone crowd favors dems, they are going to adjust for it. If they know robopolls favor repubs, they are going to adjust for it. They do this with hundreds of other factors to keep the polls as close to reality as possible. Therefore, I wouldn't expect a huge difference unless the pollsters have missed something major.
While the high-profile election seats may be that way, local elections actually generally have people that will effect your daily life.
More importantly high-profile candidates almost always come from these positions first. If you shut them down before they become "somebody" you've prevented that future bad candidate from being a possibility.
The reason we have such a huge problem with representatives is because politicians are practically ignored at the time when they are most easily influenced.
For example, Obama started out as a state senator (some funny business there, of course, but that's Chicago politics), became a US Senator for the state of Illinois 8 years later, and is now the president. He could have very easily been shut down at the state level by a competent opponent and a few thousand votes.
Don't tell me your vote doesn't matter. It doesn't have great influence when you think it should, but it certainly has a huge impact when you aren't really paying attention.
If that's the case why the hell aren't you running for office yourself?
Dumbass.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!