And in fact, the documents were never proven to be forgeries.
When an unknown blowhard on the Internet makes this pathetically weak and logically worthless argument, it is lame, but understandable. Bilious partisan hatred does that to people posting on anonymous bulletin boards. I've done similar things myself.
For a reputable investigative journalist to make the same argument, it goes beyond lame. It is at the very least an example of reckless, willful, unprofessional, career-ending negligence. It is positively surreal how Rather thought he could produce such documents and then place the burden of disproof on his critics. Journalism simply does not work that way. It's preposterous. Bush is probably President today thanks to the bizarre antics of Rather and his cohorts.
By the way, the proportionally-spaced, perfectly-centered typography is far from the only reason to think these documents are crude modern forgeries. Content analysis shows dozens of reasons they could not conceivably have been written by a Texas Air National Guard officer at the purported time and place, but in all likelihood were forged by an Army National Guard officer unfamiliar with the differing terminology of another branch of service. Bill Burkett, take a bow.
LOL! How do you think those outer-shell electrons interact;)
I don't follow you. Just because a valence electron can be described by a wave equation doesn't make it a photon. Ionic chemical bonds are an electromagnetic phenomenon.
The only photon-electron interactions I know about are the photoelectric effect, Compton scattering, and pair production. (and brehmsstrahlung, but that is really an electron-photon interaction, not the other way around.) Unless I am in an X-ray suite, no significant amount of any of those should be taking place in my brain.
-ccm
Re:The Monad shell won't be in Vista
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
OK, I see, a GUI sudo. OS X has this too, of course.
One of the things I hate most about Windows is having to run a piece of ordinary software from an administrator account to make it work properly. Although to be fair, this is msotly the fault of lazy or stupid software makers.
-ccm
The Monad shell won't be in Vista
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
Word has it that Vista will change that and there will be sudo like capabilities but I suspect it is too soon to tell if it will materialize and if so, in what form.
Not in Vista, it won't.
Back when Vista was still Longhorn, they were planning to include a new Microsoft Shell, aka MSH, aka Monad. But they are saying now that it won't be released with Vista.
Even *thinking* about my patent requires photon-electron interactions in your brain, so you owe me royalties both for thought *and* use!
I don't think so! Neuronal signals in the brain are mediated by neurotransmitters, and involve chemical interactions between shell electrons only. The only direct photon-electron interaction in the body is in the retina. So with the right patent, maybe you can collect from me for reading your post, but you can't keep me from thinking about it.
It's the old question of "is it right to steal bread to feed your starving children ?" And of course the best solution is publically funded socialized medical system where such situations simply won't happen, since the government pays for medicine and bread.
Actually, socialism steals bread from everyone. Exhibit A, Zimbabwe.
There are, however, the ninth and tenth ammendments, which say any right not enumerated is reserved to the states or the people. There could indeed be a natural and unalienable right to privacy, it's just not explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights. The right to privacy, if such exists, is in the purview of the states.
Ironically, the 9th and 10th Amendments were looked upon as mere toilet paper by the Supreme Court from the time of Roosevelt right up until United States v. Lopez in 1995. With the notable exception of Roe v. Wade, several generations of mostly Democratic Supreme Court appointees took the view that the Commerce Clause meant that the States could be treated as so many French departments, charged with little more than implementing the dictates of the central government.
If the 9th and 10th Amendments ever prove to be indispensable to establishing a general right to privacy (apart from a "penumbra" sheltering abortion on demand), you can thank Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist for restoring them.
The mix of 192.168 and 10. nets is rather unusual. I'm not sure what to make of it. I could see one of them being a 192.168 if the user is running a NAT, but the 10 net surely isn't going anywhere.
Not all private nets are 192.168.0.0/16. I have a private 10.1.1.0/24 subnet behind my NAT, because my company uses 192.168.0.0/16 for its own internal subnets. I VPN into work, and I want to keep everything nice and separate and easily routable. There's no reason that the reverse couldn't be true too.
These are the IP addresses in the RFC-defined "private" address ranges (RFC 1918):
10.0.0.0 through 10.255.255.255 (10.0.0.0/8)
172.16.0.0 through 172.31.255.255 (172.16.0.0/12)
192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255 (192.168.0.0/16)
"Ballistic" implies unguided artillery, the only kind that existed until 50 years ago or so. It means missiles (in the broadest sense, including rocks, bullets, cannonballs, howitzer shells, rockets, etc.) that follow a trajectory determined only by basic Newtonian mechanics: momentum, gravity, air friction, etc. Calculating such trajectories, for given inputs of pounds of gunpowder, wind speed and direction, and angles of elevation, was a major impetus to the development of electronic computers.
Guided missiles are non-ballistic, as they are subject to control inputs from airfoil surfaces or maneuvering rockets that change the path of the missile. An ICBM, or "intercontinental ballistic missile" is a rocket that is under such guidance from launch until a certain point in space, at which time the guidance ceases, the warhead(s) separate, and the subsequent trajectory is determined only by Newtonian mechanics.
The military uses the term "going ballistic" to describe this transition, and hence the common use of the term to indicate someone going out of control. It's not a very good metaphor, as an ICBM is guided quite precisely right up to the point at which it goes ballistic, and thereafter is guaranteed to hit extremely close to the point of aim.
So keep driving to work alone in a vehicle that's meant to hold eight people just because you think it makes you look "cool". In reality, it makes you look like a sad pathetic retard who's compensating for a lack of self esteem.
Who are you talking to? Got a mouse in your pocket? My car is a small BMW.
There have been signifigant advances in solar, wind and water power generation.
All well and good, but do you really think the angry do-gooders will let any of it be built?
First off, let's forget water. There will never again be a major hydropower project in this country. The good sites are already taken, and anybody proposing a major new dam nowadays would be laughed out of town, right before the ELF burned his house down.
OK, wind power then. Well, the Cape Cod wind farm fiasco has shown what happens when you try to put renewable energy generation machinery where rich liberals have to actually see it at work. NIMBY! NIMBY! NIMBY! Put it out in some red state with the hicks. Too bad if it makes no economic sense, we're liberals, we don't do economics, we just do the fingers-in-ears/LALALALA thing.
You MIGHT get the green mafia to agree to cover Arizona or some other flyover red state with solar cells, but I wouldn't count on it, as there is liable to be some endangered bug or rodent that mobilizes armies of Sierra Club lawyers and brings everything to a screeching halt. And I've seen studies suggesting that no solar cell can produce enough power over its entire usable life to balance out the fossil fuels used in its production, never mind the toxic wastes produced during manufacturing.
Pooh! As if that made a meaningful difference. . .
Here's the deal with the SUV bashing: It's nothing more than guilt-ridden scapegoating.
Even the most ecologically correct American liberal lives a life of unparalleled luxury and ease, fueled by cheap energy, and uses up the Earth's resources by orders of magnitude more than an African villager.
Can you imagine how comical it would seem to a man who has never ridden in a motor vehicle, to see Volvo and Prius owners looking down their noses at Hummer owners? The guy in Birkenstocks, whose footprint on nature is fifty times bigger than the villager's, sneers at the guy in cowboy boots whose footprint is sixty times greater.
Same goes for Europe vs. America. If the American way of life is unsustainable, so is the European, differing only by a relatively minor degree. It may help the bien-pensant European Left feel better about its own hypocrisy by saying "Look! The Amis are worse!" But it hardly solves the problem.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
The judge just says "We can't tell you what the evidence is, you know, for reasons of national security, but trust me...it's pretty convincing. Guilty! [BANG]"
You are exaggerating. Yes, aliens can be deported on the basis of secret evidence, but so what? They are not citizens, and I don't give a shit what happens between them and the immigration authorities. Coming to this country is a privilege, not a right. We can deport aliens for any reason or no reason at all, any time we like, the same as any other sovereign nation.
It is indisputably true that the government doesn't have the resources or the desire to hassle immigrants who are working hard and minding their own business, and equally true that there are some bad apples among the pool of recent immigrants that have only been discovered by secret surveillance techniques like Echelon. I don't have any problem with them being kicked out, and I don't want to see our intelligence abilities compromised by public exposure in court. So tough shit for the poor innocent fund-raisers for the cuddly widdle Palestinian suicide bombers. The sooner the fucking murderous filth are expelled, the better.
Now, if American citizens could be convicted of crimes on the basis of secret evidence with no jury trial, then you'd have a legitimate complaint, and I'd be right behind you. But this is not the case at present, and I doubt very much it ever will be.
After I had taken computer programming classes in my high school and local community college, and learned Basic, Cobol, and Fortran, my folks bought a Fortune 32:16 for their business. This would have been about 1982 or so.
It had a 6 MHz 68000 processor,512K of RAM, a 20meg hard drive ($4000 extra!) and a couple of dumb terminals in addition to the console. It ran a variant of System 7 Unix with a very primitive menu-driven interface. Software was quite limited and shockingly expensive. I seem to remember the C compiler being something like $700, and not near as good as the gcc you can get for free today. But it was good enough for me to learn C quite thoroughly. I also taught myself relational DBMS programming with Informix on it.
Total cost was about $15,000,or perhaps $30,000 in today's money, so it was a lot of computer for a teenage boy to be in charge of. Nevertheless, I made it pay for itself, with some custom Basic, C and Informix applications that were quite useful to my folks. It gave good service for a decade. We still have it in some forgotten closet.
So basically this tax frees the BBC from providing what the market wants.
Exactly. Just like NPR and PBS in the US.
Rich, snooty, big-city liberals force us working stiffs to give them money, so they can watch opera and documentaries on yacht seamanship without having to pay for it, or God forbid having to watch any icky commercials. Then they pat each other on the back for their pious civic-mindedness.
If so-called "public" media were not living an elitist lie, it would be mostly NASCAR races and soaps.
it could well help avoid fatalities in road chases
I don't care about fatalities in police chases, when it's only the perpetrator. They should be machine-gunned from helicopters as soon as it's safe to do so.
For a wealthy public figure who's trying to argue that certain wealthy people should be paying more, he'd better make sure he's paying at least as much as he's asking them to.
So, if you were eligible for welfare, but believed that welfare is too lenient... perhaps the restrictions should be such that they place you just outside their reach. Would you collect the check anyway?
Not a good analogy. Meehan is a public figure whose election to Congress was expedited by a public vow to stick to term limits. Not only that, he excoriated on the floor of the House those members who did not stick by their vows, before he himself decided to renege too.
Private hypocrisy of the type you are describing is a different matter. It's nobody's business but my own, as long as I am breaking no laws. Politicians and other public figures have to play by a different set of rules, though. If I were a politician who loudly demanded a tightening of welfare eligibility, and it should be found that I was collecting welfare despite being ineligible under the rules I had been promoting, I'd probably lose my next election.
The much more common flip side of this is the limousine liberal who loudly demands higher taxes on "the rich", but pays only the minimum required by law-- e.g. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. It's their business and theirs alone -- again, except while running for office.
I think that it cost John Kerry a lot of votes when it was discovered that he and his idle billionaire wife were paying taxes at a rate of 15%, thanks to clever lawyering, while calling for higher taxes on hard-working dentists and doctors and small businessmen who were already paying 30% or more marginal tax rates. It certainly confirmed my own poor opinion of him when I found that I paid more taxes than he did.
Well, you can rationalize all you want, but the question of whether or not Meehan made a vow to serve only four terms in Congress is a "binary depiction", and quite easily verified. In fact, he was a vociferous leader of the term limits movement. Yet here he is on his eighth term, and his flunkies are flushing that fact down the memory hole. Appalling.
Slashdot Mirror
You saw Quest for Fire, didn't you? Rae Dawn Chong can give me some non-intercourse sex any time she wants. After all, she invented it!
-ccm
I think every previous response to this statement assumed that the anonymous poster seriously meant what he said.
C'mon, people. Use your noodles. This is obvious sarcasm. There have been no small-government Republicans on the national stage since Barry Goldwater.
-ccm
When an unknown blowhard on the Internet makes this pathetically weak and logically worthless argument, it is lame, but understandable. Bilious partisan hatred does that to people posting on anonymous bulletin boards. I've done similar things myself.
For a reputable investigative journalist to make the same argument, it goes beyond lame. It is at the very least an example of reckless, willful, unprofessional, career-ending negligence. It is positively surreal how Rather thought he could produce such documents and then place the burden of disproof on his critics. Journalism simply does not work that way. It's preposterous. Bush is probably President today thanks to the bizarre antics of Rather and his cohorts.
By the way, the proportionally-spaced, perfectly-centered typography is far from the only reason to think these documents are crude modern forgeries. Content analysis shows dozens of reasons they could not conceivably have been written by a Texas Air National Guard officer at the purported time and place, but in all likelihood were forged by an Army National Guard officer unfamiliar with the differing terminology of another branch of service. Bill Burkett, take a bow.
-ccm
I don't follow you. Just because a valence electron can be described by a wave equation doesn't make it a photon. Ionic chemical bonds are an electromagnetic phenomenon.
The only photon-electron interactions I know about are the photoelectric effect, Compton scattering, and pair production. (and brehmsstrahlung, but that is really an electron-photon interaction, not the other way around.) Unless I am in an X-ray suite, no significant amount of any of those should be taking place in my brain.
-ccm
One of the things I hate most about Windows is having to run a piece of ordinary software from an administrator account to make it work properly. Although to be fair, this is msotly the fault of lazy or stupid software makers.
-ccm
Not in Vista, it won't.
Back when Vista was still Longhorn, they were planning to include a new Microsoft Shell, aka MSH, aka Monad. But they are saying now that it won't be released with Vista.
-ccm
I don't think so! Neuronal signals in the brain are mediated by neurotransmitters, and involve chemical interactions between shell electrons only. The only direct photon-electron interaction in the body is in the retina. So with the right patent, maybe you can collect from me for reading your post, but you can't keep me from thinking about it.
-ccm
Actually, socialism steals bread from everyone. Exhibit A, Zimbabwe.
-ccm
Ironically, the 9th and 10th Amendments were looked upon as mere toilet paper by the Supreme Court from the time of Roosevelt right up until United States v. Lopez in 1995. With the notable exception of Roe v. Wade, several generations of mostly Democratic Supreme Court appointees took the view that the Commerce Clause meant that the States could be treated as so many French departments, charged with little more than implementing the dictates of the central government.
If the 9th and 10th Amendments ever prove to be indispensable to establishing a general right to privacy (apart from a "penumbra" sheltering abortion on demand), you can thank Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist for restoring them.
-ccm
Not all private nets are 192.168.0.0/16. I have a private 10.1.1.0/24 subnet behind my NAT, because my company uses 192.168.0.0/16 for its own internal subnets. I VPN into work, and I want to keep everything nice and separate and easily routable. There's no reason that the reverse couldn't be true too.
These are the IP addresses in the RFC-defined "private" address ranges (RFC 1918):
-ccm
Oh. Well, never have I been so resoundingly refuted. I bow down to your mastery of logic and rhetoric.
-ccm
Guided missiles are non-ballistic, as they are subject to control inputs from airfoil surfaces or maneuvering rockets that change the path of the missile. An ICBM, or "intercontinental ballistic missile" is a rocket that is under such guidance from launch until a certain point in space, at which time the guidance ceases, the warhead(s) separate, and the subsequent trajectory is determined only by Newtonian mechanics.
The military uses the term "going ballistic" to describe this transition, and hence the common use of the term to indicate someone going out of control. It's not a very good metaphor, as an ICBM is guided quite precisely right up to the point at which it goes ballistic, and thereafter is guaranteed to hit extremely close to the point of aim.
-ccm
Who are you talking to? Got a mouse in your pocket? My car is a small BMW.
-ccm
All well and good, but do you really think the angry do-gooders will let any of it be built?
First off, let's forget water. There will never again be a major hydropower project in this country. The good sites are already taken, and anybody proposing a major new dam nowadays would be laughed out of town, right before the ELF burned his house down.
OK, wind power then. Well, the Cape Cod wind farm fiasco has shown what happens when you try to put renewable energy generation machinery where rich liberals have to actually see it at work. NIMBY! NIMBY! NIMBY! Put it out in some red state with the hicks. Too bad if it makes no economic sense, we're liberals, we don't do economics, we just do the fingers-in-ears/LALALALA thing.
You MIGHT get the green mafia to agree to cover Arizona or some other flyover red state with solar cells, but I wouldn't count on it, as there is liable to be some endangered bug or rodent that mobilizes armies of Sierra Club lawyers and brings everything to a screeching halt. And I've seen studies suggesting that no solar cell can produce enough power over its entire usable life to balance out the fossil fuels used in its production, never mind the toxic wastes produced during manufacturing.
-ccm
Pooh! As if that made a meaningful difference. . .
Here's the deal with the SUV bashing: It's nothing more than guilt-ridden scapegoating.
Even the most ecologically correct American liberal lives a life of unparalleled luxury and ease, fueled by cheap energy, and uses up the Earth's resources by orders of magnitude more than an African villager.
Can you imagine how comical it would seem to a man who has never ridden in a motor vehicle, to see Volvo and Prius owners looking down their noses at Hummer owners? The guy in Birkenstocks, whose footprint on nature is fifty times bigger than the villager's, sneers at the guy in cowboy boots whose footprint is sixty times greater.
Same goes for Europe vs. America. If the American way of life is unsustainable, so is the European, differing only by a relatively minor degree. It may help the bien-pensant European Left feel better about its own hypocrisy by saying "Look! The Amis are worse!" But it hardly solves the problem.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
--ccm
I get even with that kind of person when I meta-moderate, which is every day.
-ccm
You are exaggerating. Yes, aliens can be deported on the basis of secret evidence, but so what? They are not citizens, and I don't give a shit what happens between them and the immigration authorities. Coming to this country is a privilege, not a right. We can deport aliens for any reason or no reason at all, any time we like, the same as any other sovereign nation.
It is indisputably true that the government doesn't have the resources or the desire to hassle immigrants who are working hard and minding their own business, and equally true that there are some bad apples among the pool of recent immigrants that have only been discovered by secret surveillance techniques like Echelon. I don't have any problem with them being kicked out, and I don't want to see our intelligence abilities compromised by public exposure in court. So tough shit for the poor innocent fund-raisers for the cuddly widdle Palestinian suicide bombers. The sooner the fucking murderous filth are expelled, the better.
Now, if American citizens could be convicted of crimes on the basis of secret evidence with no jury trial, then you'd have a legitimate complaint, and I'd be right behind you. But this is not the case at present, and I doubt very much it ever will be.
-ccm
It had a 6 MHz 68000 processor,512K of RAM, a 20meg hard drive ($4000 extra!) and a couple of dumb terminals in addition to the console. It ran a variant of System 7 Unix with a very primitive menu-driven interface. Software was quite limited and shockingly expensive. I seem to remember the C compiler being something like $700, and not near as good as the gcc you can get for free today. But it was good enough for me to learn C quite thoroughly. I also taught myself relational DBMS programming with Informix on it.
Total cost was about $15,000,or perhaps $30,000 in today's money, so it was a lot of computer for a teenage boy to be in charge of. Nevertheless, I made it pay for itself, with some custom Basic, C and Informix applications that were quite useful to my folks. It gave good service for a decade. We still have it in some forgotten closet.
-ccm
Exactly. Just like NPR and PBS in the US.
Rich, snooty, big-city liberals force us working stiffs to give them money, so they can watch opera and documentaries on yacht seamanship without having to pay for it, or God forbid having to watch any icky commercials. Then they pat each other on the back for their pious civic-mindedness.
If so-called "public" media were not living an elitist lie, it would be mostly NASCAR races and soaps.
-ccm
The thought of the BBC going bankrupt warms my heart. Get stuffed, you rent-seeking termites.
I don't care about fatalities in police chases, when it's only the perpetrator. They should be machine-gunned from helicopters as soon as it's safe to do so.
-ccm
Thank you. My point exactly.
-ccm
I think it was a joke, and actually a rather good one.
Not a good analogy. Meehan is a public figure whose election to Congress was expedited by a public vow to stick to term limits. Not only that, he excoriated on the floor of the House those members who did not stick by their vows, before he himself decided to renege too.
Private hypocrisy of the type you are describing is a different matter. It's nobody's business but my own, as long as I am breaking no laws. Politicians and other public figures have to play by a different set of rules, though. If I were a politician who loudly demanded a tightening of welfare eligibility, and it should be found that I was collecting welfare despite being ineligible under the rules I had been promoting, I'd probably lose my next election.
The much more common flip side of this is the limousine liberal who loudly demands higher taxes on "the rich", but pays only the minimum required by law-- e.g. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. It's their business and theirs alone -- again, except while running for office.
I think that it cost John Kerry a lot of votes when it was discovered that he and his idle billionaire wife were paying taxes at a rate of 15%, thanks to clever lawyering, while calling for higher taxes on hard-working dentists and doctors and small businessmen who were already paying 30% or more marginal tax rates. It certainly confirmed my own poor opinion of him when I found that I paid more taxes than he did.
-ccm
Well, you can rationalize all you want, but the question of whether or not Meehan made a vow to serve only four terms in Congress is a "binary depiction", and quite easily verified. In fact, he was a vociferous leader of the term limits movement. Yet here he is on his eighth term, and his flunkies are flushing that fact down the memory hole. Appalling.