I'm sorry, but this is just argument by assertion. Both you and who you were responding to.
President Obama did not break any laws. Period. If he had, especially in this environment where the GOP will even damage the entire country just trying to hurt him, they'd have been all over it like flies on shit.
Screaming "Obama broke the law (of I wanted someone else elected)" doesn't even make it to the courts, much less through it.
George Washington spent approximately 13% of his federal budget on intelligence services, whereas today we spend less than 6% to the same ends.
So before you go all teabagger on us, imagining that your political position are the "true ideals on which the USA was founded", I suggest you do a little research.
You mistake "taking something seriously" with "agreeing with everything in some random petition by an incredible minority of the electorate, in direct opposition to the majority view of the US public".
Petitions raise issues, they don't decide things. They especially don't decide things when it's clear that the petitioners don't speak for the American people. This isn't just for those inane secession petitions, it's also for the TSA.
The majority of Americans think the TSA is doing a good job. You (and I) disagree, but that is the way it is. So the Administration is not lying when they say they take petitions seriously. In this case, they rather seriously said "no, ending the TSA ain't going to happen". And then mentioned some things they're trying to do to improve the experience - which actually is a reasonable request. (From the actual response - "Current efforts include: changing the way TSA screens passengers ages 12 and under, evaluating the expanded use of behavior detection techniques, and piloting expedited screening for known travelers.")
So grow up. Sometimes in elections, you just hold the minority view. And juvenile alienation is not only extremely annoying, it's counterproductive. Or did you sign that dumb-ass secession petition as well?
Killing U.S. citizens actively engaged in treason without a proper trial? You know, Abraham Lincoln and the civil war kind of settled that - about 140 years ago.
It's never been this bad ever before? No, actually. It's never been this good, as the book Winning the War on War explains. We are, today, in a golden age of peace, where the media gets upset at literally a handful of people in Yemen doing bad things.
If you want to know about real war, we still have a few here and there. The Second Congo War (a.k.a. the Great War of Africa), from 1998-2003 had over 5.1 MILLION casualties. To put that in perspective, there were more casualties in a single week of that war, than all the deaths (PLO/Hamas terrorist and Israeli overreaction) attributable to 40 years of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But you didn't know about this war, did you? Because, of course, it's just black Africans dying. So nothing that anyone in the U.S. cares about.
Seriously. Having the President personally decide the fate every single person to be killed? That's a vast improvement. I'm not even sure Stalin, or Lincoln for that matter, could even count all the people who were killed by their more generalized orders. It takes forever to count that high.
Republic Commando was a gritty look that for once nearly made Star Wars look like an actual war. It had casual senseless death and the tactics in it were pure military.
I'm pretty sure the reason why it wasn't all that well received was that it was so jarringly different from the cheesy "war-esque" melodrama that pervades Star Wars, and never got the idea playing it, that the clones were really finding their situation terribly fun.
It was, needless to say, the best Star Wars game I played, at least in terms of actual suspension of disbelief.
Now, whether you agree with a US soldier's rationale for killing a 12yo boy or an Al-Qaeda follower planting an IED that kills whoever detonates it is a different story, but they all have a definite rationale.
I think what drives more U.S. Soldiers to commit suicide than are actually killed in combat, is that it's often the case that the Al-Qaeda follower planting an IED is a 12 year old boy
In addition to the nice AC post, already showing how you're pulling "quotes" completely out of your ass, let me add a few things.
"Anti-war" means to minimize U.S. involvement in conflicts - not to prevent war around the globe, which is not only impossible, it would bankrupt us to try it. So how many ground troops did he commit to Libya? Zero. How many U.S. casualties? Zero. This was largely a revolution inside the country. And killing a handful of terrorists is what you do to avoid war. We wouldn't have been attacked on 9/11 had we focused on Bin Laden like President Clinton advised Bush to do.
>>>Is that why he signed the NDAA after saying he would veto it?
He threatened a veto. Congress changed the law to make it more acceptable. He still didn't like it, but it had a veto-proof majority of both chambers of Congress by then. Here's a clue: it's the National Defense Authorization. Voters will not vote for people who are against our military. So instead, Obama signed it, added a signing statement that he believed parts of it were unconstitutional, and then a few months later, issued an Executive Order saying that none of the unconstitutional parts would be enforced. Voila! Law defanged.
We elect Presidents in the country, not dictators, or all-seeing Gods who can immediately stop every incompetent bozo who is hired into the TSA. There really is only so much a President can do when the majority of the U.S. public strongly supports "security theater".
>>>The Democrats had full control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.
The Republicans filibuster everything in the Senate, not just tax increases, but that too obviously. And they never had a filibuster proof majority of Democrats. But instead had to deal with Lieberman of the "Connecticut for Lieberman" Party (who campaigned for McCain), and Ben Nelson who votes with the GOP far more than he votes with Democrats. That's not "full control".
He offered the GOP a mix of far too small tax increases and far too big spending cuts. But even giving them 90% of what they wanted, the GOP still went batshit insane.
And do you know why? Let me tell you. Because many conservatives, like yourself, don't care about facts. As with your fabricated "quote", they're not even self-aware enough to acknowledge that they're lying. They actually believe the complete bullshit they pull out of their asses, literally as they do so. U.S. politics these days is dealing with Birfers, Flat Earthers, Anti-science loons, and other nutcases, as the horde of racists who were adults in the 1950s start hitting the age of senility.
But at least they have racist upbringing as an excuse for putting their pride in front of any neutral reading of the facts. What's yours?
Obama is anti-war, he is getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan as gracefully as possible.
Obama is pro bill-of-rights. He's signed three laws allowing for better access to firearms (not passed when the GOP was fully in charge under Bush), and unlike Ron Paul, he doesn't think government should be regulating women's wombs.
Obama is anti deficit spending. He has come out publicly in favor of making multi-millionaires and billionaires pay at least the tax rates of their secretaries and taxing corporations that outsource jobs rather than those that keep jobs in the U.S.
Further, as you will see from this chart, the deficit is almost entirely due to things done during Bush's term. And the chart doesn't even point out that the "Economic downturn" was caused by the GOP and conservatives deregulating banks so they could gamble with depositor's money backed by the taxpayer. (Nothing forces a brokerage to take FDIC insurance, but if you do, you shouldn't be able to gamble with other people's money.)
So now will you be intellectually honest enough to support Obama now that all your concerns are addressed? I doubt it. Everything I just wrote was just a google search away, but you clearly didn't bother doing that. So I conclude that your reasons are little more than excuses, because you have a dream that some day you'll actually end up wealthy enough to pay the Buffet tax.
If I'm in a public setting, I can pull out my camera and take a picture, "spying" on anything in its viewfinder. This is 100% legal. I can also "spy" by taking a photo out of an airplane. Police can do this as well. Out west, we have airplanes which monitor traffic to see if you are vastly exceeding the speed limit, being a "spy" to see how fast you are driving. They even post signs that they do this.
It isn't strange that our military also has the authority to take footage. What is strange, and wonderful, is that our military removes this footage after 90 days. I have many pictures of all sorts of places, with images of fellow tourists accidentally being "spied" on in them. I am keeping these photos forever.
(Note: YMMV. Certain conservative State legislatures are trying to make it illegal to record police, so as to allow the police to cover up any of their criminal acts; however I am confidant that these laws are destined to eventually be fully overturned by the courts.)
I fail to see how this is in any way a terrible thing. The outside is a public setting. Always has been.
...to see so many ignorant posts following up yours, clearly having not even read the article, being modded up - while your reference is stuck at a "1".
Just to correct rainmouse's claim of mere "indirect" evidence, here is a quote from the link you provided:
The most direct observational evidence to date for dark matter is in a system known as the Bullet Cluster. In most regions of the universe, dark matter and visible material are found together,[33] as expected because of their mutual gravitational attraction. In the Bullet Cluster, a collision between two galaxy clusters appears to have caused a separation of dark matter and baryonic matter. X-ray observations show that much of the baryonic matter (in the form of 107–108 Kelvin[34] gas, or plasma) in the system is concentrated in the center of the system. Electromagnetic interactions between passing gas particles caused them to slow down and settle near the point of impact. However, weak gravitational lensing observations of the same system show that much of the mass resides outside of the central region of baryonic gas.
In other words, gravitational lensing of light waves - which is 100% direct evidence of matter - shows a region where there is matter that is clearly non-baryonic (i.e. does not interact with the electromagnetic field, a.k.a. "dark"). This is not subject to dispute.
The question of what, exactly, is dark matter - is indeed still a subject of scientific research. There are, however, a number of super-symmetric theories which posit super-partners for well known particles, the most stable of which turn out to have the exact characteristics we're noting observationally. It is important to note that these theories were not tailored to account for the dark matter, but seem to fit the observational evidence quite well so far.
As with all science however, theories are subject to falsification at any times as soon as new evidence comes on the scene.
Pollsters, of course, don't say what your fantasy pollster is saying. They don't make judgements on the phone. They follow the script exactly, because anything else would skew the results.
They also don't reference an unnamed study which costs absurd amounts of money for a marginal result, unless they are (as others have already mentioned) lying though a complete bullshit push-poll.
The fact that you can't even approach this issue with anything other than a completely fallacious straw-man (and the fact that you got others to mod you up for such bullshit), really helps underscore the fact that many modern-day conservatives reject facts, reason, logic, and science - preferring instead magical thinking and cheap emotional rejection.
The funny thing is, the OP is absolutely right: it didn't used to be this way. When I was a kid, conservatives prided themselves on being the cold-eyed realists. But with the theocratic takeover of the GOP, and the non-stop propaganda from FOX news that makes it culturally okay to just make crap up (instead of spinning the undisputed facts), even relatively sane conservatives like yourself can't actually form a coherent argument anymore. You argue against stawmen, and get karma from anonymous upvoters.
We elect Presidents in the U.S. Not dictators. The fact that you don't understand, or are unwilling to admit, how powerful Congress is, and how dysfunctional they've become, is the real source of your sickness.
For anyone who did a TL;DR on this, the "No Strings attached" link goes to a WSJ opinion piece complaining about doling out dollars only when States are willing to pony up part of it - a practice that's well over 100 years old (and well known to save money because while anyone will take a 100% free gift, less money is spent when people have to pay a part of it). There's some whaaagarble about not being able to continue to pay for benefits after the money has run out, which is an obvious (and stupid) point to make. You don't get something if you don't pay for it. Then, there's bashing over non-transference clauses (so if you say you're going to build a road with Fed dollars, you don't switch around your budget to lower what you were going to pay for the road anyway, and use the savings to put into some lawmaker's slush fund). Again - these types of clauses are literally over a century old, so it's hardly a "string", other than a standard "do what you say you're going to do with the money" type of string.
I'm not going to even go into the rest. It's pure partisan bullshit. It's Republican farmers who are against the Keystone pipeline, for example. They're terrified about what a leak will do to their water supply. And the President isn't getting a single vote from them.
But look, ArcherB is going to believe what Archer B wants to believe, no matter what. When someone decides to believe something, there's not a single fact that's going to keep them from doing so.
The problem in the real world with XKCD/diceware-style phrases, is that English words become keys. You don't have 44 bits of entropy. Rather, the vocabulary of the average American is the entropy.
In the XKCD example, for instance, the true number of permutations you have to check to brute force a password is: Size of Average Person's Vocabulary (about 25,000 words) - from which "correct" "horse" "battery" "stable" is selected - raised to the 4th power, or 3.906 * 10^17 combinations. That's not a huge amount for a password cracking algorithm.
Add in that many words are going to be used far more frequently than others, and it really isn't much different than the "misspell and stick in an odd character" method. And it's actually worse than sticking an odd character or two somewhere in the middle of your password.
Al Gore - Popularized and defended the scientific findings of climate science. He also championed DARPA-net in Congress. Vint Cerf, a key researcher in the creation of the TCP/IP protocol stack credited Gore with getting funding for his work.
President Obama (and dems) - Made college significantly more affordable by changing the student loan program (cutting out a percentage of the funds being taken by banks even though they were using US funds instead of their own).
Democrats (in general) - Highly supportive of education. Both college and K12 educators are largely convinced that the Democratic party is the only vehicle to preserve science in the schools.
Now it certainly is true that Democrats are more skeptical of nuclear power than the GOP is. But given what has happened in Japan, there is an actual legitimate debate over whether it is possible to make a powerplant safe from the corner-cutting of safety that inevitably arises in the name of maximizing quarterly profits. (The same can be said of deep water oil drilling: it's not that it can't be done safely, it's that doing it safely means a smaller bonus for the executives running the show if nothing goes wrong.) By and large, Democrats are the pro-education, pro-technology, pro-science party.
And anyone who talks about how the U.S. supposedly has an "intrusive government" has obviously never experienced a real one.
An average of 54% believe that aliens have contacted humans, over half believe that aliens have abducted humans, and 37% (+/-3%) think the US government is secretly hiding information on aliens.
Only 27% can name their two US Senators who Represent them.
About 25% believe in astrology.
"Do I really think people are so stupid as to believe that would be the reason he vetoed it?"
No, you can protest even if you are neither polite nor informative. But if you break the law, expect that the police will take you to jail. That's their job.
So please don't equate being arrested for Civil Disobedience with totalitarianism. In fact, being arrested for an unjust law - while in the public eye - is the whole point of Civil Disobedience.
And if you are going to be arrested, you'd better be polite and informative about it (at least if you want your protest to be politically effective). Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested many times. But he was never arrested for trying to shit on a police car.
...here is a Groklaw link backing up absolutely everything I just wrote.
(fair use snippet follows - emphasis mine)
The White House has launched a new citizen input process that allows citizens to propose and post petitions to the White House suggesting government action on issues of interest. One such petition calls for the Administration to direct the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cease issuing software patents. The White House has issued a response to the petition, and you will note that it barely responds to what the petitioners are requesting. Why? Because the White House has no direct power to do what the petition asks.
So what has the public reaction to that response been? Why, another petition screaming even louder for the White House to do something. Right idea; wrong forum.
We have software patents in the U.S. because Congress has essentially said that "anything under the sun made by man" is patentable. This well worn quote was provided during testimony in the consideration and adoption of the Patent Reform Act of 1952, and since then the U.S. court system has done its best to embrace that concept, giving us patents on software, business method, and the human genome. The administrative branch of our federal government had no hand in either legislating or interpreting legislation.Those activities are the purview of Congress and the Courts. The Administration can only enforce the law of the land (and on occasion, influence legislation or file an amicus brief in a court case), so our right-headed petitioners who want to rid the U.S. of software patents need to shift targets. They need to focus on Congress and the Courts.
So what are the odds that Congress will actually ever act to revoke software patents? Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, etc., would all probably peg those odds at less than one in a googol, since Congress appears to only answer to those who fund their campaigns with massive contributions beyond the reach of average voters. It is no secret that the largest players in the information technology sector all hold large patent portfolios, and it's a bit hard to imagine them walking away from the investment in patents willingly.
Yours is the most impolitely worded show of ignorance and stupidity that I've read since I last perused WorldNutDaily.
It's election season. If Obama offered a bill that declared the United States to be the bestest most wonderful nation on the planet which has ever been ever, Republicans in Congress would filibuster it on the grounds that he is a Socielst Muslen Kenyan who hates America and our Troops.
And you think that his recommendation on solving the Patent issue would actually help?
The Administration is right. The only way forward on this is for the "public" (i.e. massive multi-billion dollar companies like Google, Microsoft, etc) to petition Congress, telling them that overly broad patents are bad for business (i.e. bad for GOP campaign contributions).
Everything else implied in your one line screed is bullshit.
...at my current company, a software behemoth which got that way by buying out the VC stakeholders in innovative little companies and cannibalizing them.
We have a process in which you need to submit any change to the source base to "Code Collaborator", a barely functioning web-service tool which, besides needing babysitting by the administrators to work correctly, makes it an absolute requirement that some other engineer approves of your changes. Invariably, this means I'm trying to explain how a multithreaded algorithms work to a kid who just graduated from Bangalore University, and loves the power trip of being able to not actually do anything and get paid for it. I've had code on hold in our system waiting for a solid year to be reviewed (368 days) because of this kind of crap. (And invariably, when the code the junior engineers have all mutually approved for each other fails to work, they call up me to try to fix it.)
But buying out small companies and squeezing the life out of their software is profitable. Can't complain about the salary too much. Truly my company is still a place where software goes to die.
You had me going right up to the end of your sentence.
"Goose stepping" ?!? DailyKos may not be your cup of tea, but they are pretty solidly in the middle of what is considered the "left" in the U.S., and would be considered "centrist" or even "center right" in Europe. The fact that you are making an obvious allusion of them to the NAZI Brownshirts, over them excercising a tiny amount of editorial control of what remains on their site, shows far more about you than it does about them.
Also, for your eidification, "Free Speech" means "freedom from government repression for expressing your opinion", not "freedom to deface other people's property with messages that they consider offensive". I also know, courtesy of FOX, that there have been offensive leftist things posted on that website by various anonymous flamers, which they have promptly removed.
The only "moron" here is the person who posted a Godwin troll while complaining about some website's anti-troll policy.
No wait - scratch that. The morons who upvoted you as "Insightful" are more to blame. At least you can type.
I just have one question. Where in the Constitution is the government given the authority to regulate the internet.
Answer: Nowhere in the Constitution.
At first, I thought you were trolling. Nobody could be that dumb, could they?
Then considered FOX news and its fan base, and decided probably so.
Here are a couple of things you might consider:
1. The internet wasn't around when the Constitution was written.
2. Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Yes, that's written in the Constitution.
3. Internet commerce represents 99.999% of the Internet (and yes, porn is commerce)
Thanks to Washington State law, Oregon residents do not have to pay Washington State sales tax. I order from Amazon all the time, and never am taxed a penny in sales tax. So there is no incentive for them to move their operations south.
On the other hand, when I buy a gift for my uncle who lives up on Washington, and have it shipped directly, I pay Washington sales tax, even though I am the one doing the purchasing. Amazon's systems appear not to be sophisticated enough to handle that situation.
In terms of your comment "Aim at foot. Pull trigger.", it is very clear that Amazon is trying to cheat on their taxes, pretending that they don't do business in Texas when they clearly do. I'm not sure why some people think it's fair that corporations get to cheat on their taxes, when I don't.
Remember: a corporation's job is to legally make money by offering value that customers are willing to pay for.
Keeling that in mind, where would the revenue stream be? Unless you can figure out a way to change customers to prefer your systems over others, that means it's a pay-for service, that it is unlikely many people will pay for.
About the only way I can imagine the numbers working out is if you eliminated the hard disk in new units, making for a substantial cost savings in hardware. The downside, of course, would be that you couldn't save your game unless you were on line. And I don't think that's something many customers are willing to do quite yet, at least outside Japan and Korea.
I'm really coming to the conclusion that this is all hype. "Cloud computing" is the big marketing hype word these days, not quite as bad as "dot com" was in the 90s, but still, a warning sign of fluff. And this is clearly backed up by the requirements. A save game doesn't need the computational resources of a "cloud". It's just simple data storage. So whoever is using this word is either clueless, or being intentionally misleading to sell it to people he thinks are clueless. Either way, it's bad.
I wonder what the reaction would be if it weren't CapCom who had written a "knockoff" product, but rather an open source one.
My bet is that most of the people piously talking about how evil mimicking ideas was, would be defending the open source project.
Mark me down as on the side of allowing software engineers to be inspired by other products which, while having some interesting elements, just don't quite get all the way there. Otherwise we just hold back innovation.
The last thing the world needs are patents and lawsuits on "well it kind of looks the same". And I refuse to condemn CapCom for doing what many many open source project openly do - making a better fit for the actual need. Yes, even for games.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but this is just argument by assertion. Both you and who you were responding to.
President Obama did not break any laws. Period. If he had, especially in this environment where the GOP will even damage the entire country just trying to hurt him, they'd have been all over it like flies on shit.
Screaming "Obama broke the law (of I wanted someone else elected)" doesn't even make it to the courts, much less through it.
George Washington spent approximately 13% of his federal budget on intelligence services, whereas today we spend less than 6% to the same ends.
So before you go all teabagger on us, imagining that your political position are the "true ideals on which the USA was founded", I suggest you do a little research.
You mistake "taking something seriously" with "agreeing with everything in some random petition by an incredible minority of the electorate, in direct opposition to the majority view of the US public".
Petitions raise issues, they don't decide things. They especially don't decide things when it's clear that the petitioners don't speak for the American people. This isn't just for those inane secession petitions, it's also for the TSA.
The majority of Americans think the TSA is doing a good job. You (and I) disagree, but that is the way it is. So the Administration is not lying when they say they take petitions seriously. In this case, they rather seriously said "no, ending the TSA ain't going to happen". And then mentioned some things they're trying to do to improve the experience - which actually is a reasonable request. (From the actual response - "Current efforts include: changing the way TSA screens passengers ages 12 and under, evaluating the expanded use of behavior detection techniques, and piloting expedited screening for known travelers.")
So grow up. Sometimes in elections, you just hold the minority view. And juvenile alienation is not only extremely annoying, it's counterproductive. Or did you sign that dumb-ass secession petition as well?
...I'm pissed off at all this hand-wringing.
Killing U.S. citizens actively engaged in treason without a proper trial? You know, Abraham Lincoln and the civil war kind of settled that - about 140 years ago.
It's never been this bad ever before? No, actually. It's never been this good, as the book Winning the War on War explains. We are, today, in a golden age of peace, where the media gets upset at literally a handful of people in Yemen doing bad things.
If you want to know about real war, we still have a few here and there. The Second Congo War (a.k.a. the Great War of Africa), from 1998-2003 had over 5.1 MILLION casualties. To put that in perspective, there were more casualties in a single week of that war, than all the deaths (PLO/Hamas terrorist and Israeli overreaction) attributable to 40 years of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But you didn't know about this war, did you? Because, of course, it's just black Africans dying. So nothing that anyone in the U.S. cares about.
Seriously. Having the President personally decide the fate every single person to be killed? That's a vast improvement. I'm not even sure Stalin, or Lincoln for that matter, could even count all the people who were killed by their more generalized orders. It takes forever to count that high.
Republic Commando was a gritty look that for once nearly made Star Wars look like an actual war. It had casual senseless death and the tactics in it were pure military.
I'm pretty sure the reason why it wasn't all that well received was that it was so jarringly different from the cheesy "war-esque" melodrama that pervades Star Wars, and never got the idea playing it, that the clones were really finding their situation terribly fun.
It was, needless to say, the best Star Wars game I played, at least in terms of actual suspension of disbelief.
I think what drives more U.S. Soldiers to commit suicide than are actually killed in combat, is that it's often the case that the Al-Qaeda follower planting an IED is a 12 year old boy
In addition to the nice AC post, already showing how you're pulling "quotes" completely out of your ass, let me add a few things.
"Anti-war" means to minimize U.S. involvement in conflicts - not to prevent war around the globe, which is not only impossible, it would bankrupt us to try it. So how many ground troops did he commit to Libya? Zero. How many U.S. casualties? Zero. This was largely a revolution inside the country. And killing a handful of terrorists is what you do to avoid war. We wouldn't have been attacked on 9/11 had we focused on Bin Laden like President Clinton advised Bush to do.
>>>Is that why he signed the NDAA after saying he would veto it?
He threatened a veto. Congress changed the law to make it more acceptable. He still didn't like it, but it had a veto-proof majority of both chambers of Congress by then. Here's a clue: it's the National Defense Authorization. Voters will not vote for people who are against our military. So instead, Obama signed it, added a signing statement that he believed parts of it were unconstitutional, and then a few months later, issued an Executive Order saying that none of the unconstitutional parts would be enforced. Voila! Law defanged.
We elect Presidents in the country, not dictators, or all-seeing Gods who can immediately stop every incompetent bozo who is hired into the TSA. There really is only so much a President can do when the majority of the U.S. public strongly supports "security theater".
>>>The Democrats had full control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.
The Republicans filibuster everything in the Senate, not just tax increases, but that too obviously. And they never had a filibuster proof majority of Democrats. But instead had to deal with Lieberman of the "Connecticut for Lieberman" Party (who campaigned for McCain), and Ben Nelson who votes with the GOP far more than he votes with Democrats. That's not "full control".
He offered the GOP a mix of far too small tax increases and far too big spending cuts. But even giving them 90% of what they wanted, the GOP still went batshit insane.
And do you know why? Let me tell you. Because many conservatives, like yourself, don't care about facts. As with your fabricated "quote", they're not even self-aware enough to acknowledge that they're lying. They actually believe the complete bullshit they pull out of their asses, literally as they do so. U.S. politics these days is dealing with Birfers, Flat Earthers, Anti-science loons, and other nutcases, as the horde of racists who were adults in the 1950s start hitting the age of senility.
But at least they have racist upbringing as an excuse for putting their pride in front of any neutral reading of the facts. What's yours?
Obama is anti-war, he is getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan as gracefully as possible.
Obama is pro bill-of-rights. He's signed three laws allowing for better access to firearms (not passed when the GOP was fully in charge under Bush), and unlike Ron Paul, he doesn't think government should be regulating women's wombs.
Obama is anti deficit spending. He has come out publicly in favor of making multi-millionaires and billionaires pay at least the tax rates of their secretaries and taxing corporations that outsource jobs rather than those that keep jobs in the U.S.
Further, as you will see from this chart, the deficit is almost entirely due to things done during Bush's term. And the chart doesn't even point out that the "Economic downturn" was caused by the GOP and conservatives deregulating banks so they could gamble with depositor's money backed by the taxpayer. (Nothing forces a brokerage to take FDIC insurance, but if you do, you shouldn't be able to gamble with other people's money.)
So now will you be intellectually honest enough to support Obama now that all your concerns are addressed? I doubt it. Everything I just wrote was just a google search away, but you clearly didn't bother doing that. So I conclude that your reasons are little more than excuses, because you have a dream that some day you'll actually end up wealthy enough to pay the Buffet tax.
Ain't going to happen, pal.
If I'm in a public setting, I can pull out my camera and take a picture, "spying" on anything in its viewfinder. This is 100% legal. I can also "spy" by taking a photo out of an airplane. Police can do this as well. Out west, we have airplanes which monitor traffic to see if you are vastly exceeding the speed limit, being a "spy" to see how fast you are driving. They even post signs that they do this.
It isn't strange that our military also has the authority to take footage. What is strange, and wonderful, is that our military removes this footage after 90 days. I have many pictures of all sorts of places, with images of fellow tourists accidentally being "spied" on in them. I am keeping these photos forever.
(Note: YMMV. Certain conservative State legislatures are trying to make it illegal to record police, so as to allow the police to cover up any of their criminal acts; however I am confidant that these laws are destined to eventually be fully overturned by the courts.)
I fail to see how this is in any way a terrible thing. The outside is a public setting. Always has been.
In other words, gravitational lensing of light waves - which is 100% direct evidence of matter - shows a region where there is matter that is clearly non-baryonic (i.e. does not interact with the electromagnetic field, a.k.a. "dark"). This is not subject to dispute. The question of what, exactly, is dark matter - is indeed still a subject of scientific research. There are, however, a number of super-symmetric theories which posit super-partners for well known particles, the most stable of which turn out to have the exact characteristics we're noting observationally. It is important to note that these theories were not tailored to account for the dark matter, but seem to fit the observational evidence quite well so far. As with all science however, theories are subject to falsification at any times as soon as new evidence comes on the scene.
Pollsters, of course, don't say what your fantasy pollster is saying. They don't make judgements on the phone. They follow the script exactly, because anything else would skew the results.
They also don't reference an unnamed study which costs absurd amounts of money for a marginal result, unless they are (as others have already mentioned) lying though a complete bullshit push-poll.
The fact that you can't even approach this issue with anything other than a completely fallacious straw-man (and the fact that you got others to mod you up for such bullshit), really helps underscore the fact that many modern-day conservatives reject facts, reason, logic, and science - preferring instead magical thinking and cheap emotional rejection.
The funny thing is, the OP is absolutely right: it didn't used to be this way. When I was a kid, conservatives prided themselves on being the cold-eyed realists. But with the theocratic takeover of the GOP, and the non-stop propaganda from FOX news that makes it culturally okay to just make crap up (instead of spinning the undisputed facts), even relatively sane conservatives like yourself can't actually form a coherent argument anymore. You argue against stawmen, and get karma from anonymous upvoters.
We elect Presidents in the U.S. Not dictators. The fact that you don't understand, or are unwilling to admit, how powerful Congress is, and how dysfunctional they've become, is the real source of your sickness.
For anyone who did a TL;DR on this, the "No Strings attached" link goes to a WSJ opinion piece complaining about doling out dollars only when States are willing to pony up part of it - a practice that's well over 100 years old (and well known to save money because while anyone will take a 100% free gift, less money is spent when people have to pay a part of it). There's some whaaagarble about not being able to continue to pay for benefits after the money has run out, which is an obvious (and stupid) point to make. You don't get something if you don't pay for it. Then, there's bashing over non-transference clauses (so if you say you're going to build a road with Fed dollars, you don't switch around your budget to lower what you were going to pay for the road anyway, and use the savings to put into some lawmaker's slush fund). Again - these types of clauses are literally over a century old, so it's hardly a "string", other than a standard "do what you say you're going to do with the money" type of string.
I'm not going to even go into the rest. It's pure partisan bullshit. It's Republican farmers who are against the Keystone pipeline, for example. They're terrified about what a leak will do to their water supply. And the President isn't getting a single vote from them.
But look, ArcherB is going to believe what Archer B wants to believe, no matter what. When someone decides to believe something, there's not a single fact that's going to keep them from doing so.
The problem in the real world with XKCD/diceware-style phrases, is that English words become keys. You don't have 44 bits of entropy. Rather, the vocabulary of the average American is the entropy.
In the XKCD example, for instance, the true number of permutations you have to check to brute force a password is: Size of Average Person's Vocabulary (about 25,000 words) - from which "correct" "horse" "battery" "stable" is selected - raised to the 4th power, or 3.906 * 10^17 combinations. That's not a huge amount for a password cracking algorithm.
Add in that many words are going to be used far more frequently than others, and it really isn't much different than the "misspell and stick in an odd character" method. And it's actually worse than sticking an odd character or two somewhere in the middle of your password.
You forgot the other side of the equation:
Now it certainly is true that Democrats are more skeptical of nuclear power than the GOP is. But given what has happened in Japan, there is an actual legitimate debate over whether it is possible to make a powerplant safe from the corner-cutting of safety that inevitably arises in the name of maximizing quarterly profits. (The same can be said of deep water oil drilling: it's not that it can't be done safely, it's that doing it safely means a smaller bonus for the executives running the show if nothing goes wrong.) By and large, Democrats are the pro-education, pro-technology, pro-science party.
And anyone who talks about how the U.S. supposedly has an "intrusive government" has obviously never experienced a real one.
"Do I really think people are so stupid as to believe that would be the reason he vetoed it?"
Yes. Yes I do.
No, you can protest even if you are neither polite nor informative. But if you break the law, expect that the police will take you to jail. That's their job.
So please don't equate being arrested for Civil Disobedience with totalitarianism. In fact, being arrested for an unjust law - while in the public eye - is the whole point of Civil Disobedience.
And if you are going to be arrested, you'd better be polite and informative about it (at least if you want your protest to be politically effective). Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested many times. But he was never arrested for trying to shit on a police car.
Yours is the most impolitely worded show of ignorance and stupidity that I've read since I last perused WorldNutDaily.
It's election season. If Obama offered a bill that declared the United States to be the bestest most wonderful nation on the planet which has ever been ever, Republicans in Congress would filibuster it on the grounds that he is a Socielst Muslen Kenyan who hates America and our Troops.
And you think that his recommendation on solving the Patent issue would actually help?
The Administration is right. The only way forward on this is for the "public" (i.e. massive multi-billion dollar companies like Google, Microsoft, etc) to petition Congress, telling them that overly broad patents are bad for business (i.e. bad for GOP campaign contributions).
Everything else implied in your one line screed is bullshit.
...at my current company, a software behemoth which got that way by buying out the VC stakeholders in innovative little companies and cannibalizing them.
We have a process in which you need to submit any change to the source base to "Code Collaborator", a barely functioning web-service tool which, besides needing babysitting by the administrators to work correctly, makes it an absolute requirement that some other engineer approves of your changes. Invariably, this means I'm trying to explain how a multithreaded algorithms work to a kid who just graduated from Bangalore University, and loves the power trip of being able to not actually do anything and get paid for it. I've had code on hold in our system waiting for a solid year to be reviewed (368 days) because of this kind of crap. (And invariably, when the code the junior engineers have all mutually approved for each other fails to work, they call up me to try to fix it.)
But buying out small companies and squeezing the life out of their software is profitable. Can't complain about the salary too much. Truly my company is still a place where software goes to die.
You had me going right up to the end of your sentence.
"Goose stepping" ?!? DailyKos may not be your cup of tea, but they are pretty solidly in the middle of what is considered the "left" in the U.S., and would be considered "centrist" or even "center right" in Europe. The fact that you are making an obvious allusion of them to the NAZI Brownshirts, over them excercising a tiny amount of editorial control of what remains on their site, shows far more about you than it does about them.
Also, for your eidification, "Free Speech" means "freedom from government repression for expressing your opinion", not "freedom to deface other people's property with messages that they consider offensive". I also know, courtesy of FOX, that there have been offensive leftist things posted on that website by various anonymous flamers, which they have promptly removed.
The only "moron" here is the person who posted a Godwin troll while complaining about some website's anti-troll policy.
No wait - scratch that. The morons who upvoted you as "Insightful" are more to blame. At least you can type.
I just have one question. Where in the Constitution is the government given the authority to regulate the internet.
Answer: Nowhere in the Constitution.
At first, I thought you were trolling. Nobody could be that dumb, could they?
Then considered FOX news and its fan base, and decided probably so.
Here are a couple of things you might consider:
Next time, try to buy a clue, okay?
Thanks to Washington State law, Oregon residents do not have to pay Washington State sales tax. I order from Amazon all the time, and never am taxed a penny in sales tax. So there is no incentive for them to move their operations south.
On the other hand, when I buy a gift for my uncle who lives up on Washington, and have it shipped directly, I pay Washington sales tax, even though I am the one doing the purchasing. Amazon's systems appear not to be sophisticated enough to handle that situation.
In terms of your comment "Aim at foot. Pull trigger.", it is very clear that Amazon is trying to cheat on their taxes, pretending that they don't do business in Texas when they clearly do. I'm not sure why some people think it's fair that corporations get to cheat on their taxes, when I don't.
Remember: a corporation's job is to legally make money by offering value that customers are willing to pay for.
Keeling that in mind, where would the revenue stream be? Unless you can figure out a way to change customers
to prefer your systems over others, that means it's a pay-for service, that it is unlikely many people will pay for.
About the only way I can imagine the numbers working out is if you eliminated the hard disk in new units, making
for a substantial cost savings in hardware. The downside, of course, would be that you couldn't save your game
unless you were on line. And I don't think that's something many customers are willing to do quite yet, at least
outside Japan and Korea.
I'm really coming to the conclusion that this is all hype. "Cloud computing" is the big marketing hype word these
days, not quite as bad as "dot com" was in the 90s, but still, a warning sign of fluff. And this is clearly backed up
by the requirements. A save game doesn't need the computational resources of a "cloud". It's just simple data
storage. So whoever is using this word is either clueless, or being intentionally misleading to sell it to people he
thinks are clueless. Either way, it's bad.
I wonder what the reaction would be if it weren't CapCom who had written a "knockoff" product, but rather an open source one.
My bet is that most of the people piously talking about how evil mimicking ideas was, would be defending the open source project.
Mark me down as on the side of allowing software engineers to be inspired by other products which, while having some interesting elements, just don't quite get all the way there. Otherwise we just hold back innovation.
The last thing the world needs are patents and lawsuits on "well it kind of looks the same". And I refuse to condemn CapCom for doing what many many open source project openly do - making a better fit for the actual need. Yes, even for games.