Okay, people, we have a real life example from three years ago. Let me refresh.
Remember the last days of the 2000 election, just before the Renquist Supreme Court shut the count down? I believe a recount was mobilized at the very last. Allthe election volunteers manned the counting stations. Republican (screaming) watchers and Democratic watchers were stationed at every counter, watching the process and interjecting objections whenever they wanted to.
This solid, unremarkable process was on track to finish the recount in THREE DAYS. ALL the votes. Every one. Winnowed and cleaned up, with the truly unreadable ballots discarded.
The 'publcians shut the puppy down with hours to spare, and the case went to the Supremes. The Supremes ran down the clock until 30 minutes before the deadline they themselves imposed, making it impossible to finish the recount when the decision was announced.
There was no argument about the ballots that had been counted. All examinations were done, and the readable ballots were separate from the small minority of truly bad ones. BUT the process was terminated.
Your question was answered by history. the counties involved performed a cold recount in under three days, and had a projected 24 hours left until finished.. around December 13th, I think.
Manual recounts work fine. They WORKED fine. And they can be performed expeditiously.
What happened was a concerted effort to convince Anmerica that the recount was impossible, impossible, impossible. And people bought it. Even though the evidence was right in front of their face that it DID work. We had a media bored by the process, and an American people flummoxed by a month of utter bullshit lying by the Bushies.
Pieces of paper with holes in them are pretty easy to count.
Lets's see. let's say we have 300 counters. A million votes. Two watchers per counter, if someone is being a dick about it.
About 10 seconds is more than enough per ballot.
6 ballots per minute per counter. 300 counters. 1800 ballots per minute total. 1,000,000 / 1800 = 555 minutes = 9.25 hours.
A million votes can be counted by 300 people in 9 hours and fifteen minutes.
There are thousands of election volunteers. Any recount can be done in a week.
The recount was slow in Florida because Bush sued and harrassed until weeks dragged by, and people got sickof the subject. Gore suggested that the whole state be recounted, and was ignored. I listened, I heard him. Bush wanted it stopped.
Even so, at the end, Gore still won in all scenarios but one in the post-election recount.
The system was never broken, and we didn't need new machines.
Now we have machines that can be manipulated at will! Another win for the Bush camp.
Here's some more history: Bush signed a mandatory recount law in Texas while governor.
Another: He had two recounts going in other states besides Florida during the post-election process. He didn't have any problems with them.
He got what he wanted in Florida because of Harris stopping the election, his brother's manipulations, more money than God, and a determined Republican block in the Supreme Court.
Broadcasting on MC requires an expensive contract with a provider, whereas P2P simply requires one, single, node. Cheap, simple, and very scary to people who want control.
P2P can be largely untraceable, barring massive government involvement around the world, while multicasting is as controllable as TV. The company providing the MC is a single point of control; P2P is democratic, spontaneous, and as hard to control as the Internet itself.
"Oh my $DEITY..... they're trying to make fast-forwarding past advertisements illegal?!? "
It is already illegal in the U.S. The ads autoplay, and you cannot stop them. Unless, of course, you reverse engineer a DVD player that lets you control whatever you like -- which is illegal under the DMCA. It is illegal to attempt to bypass an encrypted system, however they care to define it. it Even ROT13 qualifies as encryption, so the vendors don't even have to try very hard.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/3251094.st m
Paedophile found dead in home
A convicted paedophile has been found battered to death in his home. The body of sex offender Arnold Hartley, 73, was found early on Saturday morning at his home in Redcar, Teesside.
He had suffered serious injuries to his head and face, and police have launched a murder hunt.
A 28-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman were arrested on Sunday, but were later released "unconditionally".
A Cleveland Police spokesman said it was not possible to say whether Hartley was the victim of a vigilante attack.
Hartley was jailed for 12 months in 2001 for making indecent images of a girl under the age of 14 and gross indecency.
'Medium risk'
Cleveland Police held a press conference on Sunday at which Detective Superintendent Brian Dunn said Hartley had lived at his home in Queen Street for many years and was well-known in the community as a sex offender.
He was released in April 2002 and returned to the area where he moved back into his former address.
Mr Dunn said Hartley was on the Sex Offenders' Register and was considered a "medium risk".
He said there had been "previous problems" at the address and Hartley had been subjected to harassment.
There was a disturbance shortly after midnight on Saturday in Queen Street and police have appealed for help in piecing together what happened.
Mr Dunn said: "This is a murder inquiry and obviously Mr Hartley's previous conviction will form part of the inquiry.
Forensic experts
"But whatever he has done in the past does not give people the right to attack and kill him."
A neighbour said Hartley's home had been the subject of many attacks but he had once claimed he did not have any enemies.
Cal Birkbeck, owner of the Castle Hotel said Hartley gave up replacing his broken windows because they had been smashed so many times.
On Sunday, three police cars were parked in front of the house with another in a back alley.
The front door was hidden by a tent and forensic experts were working around the property.
Police officers carried out house-to-house inquiries.
Three floral tributes had been left in front of the house.
And then people would start collecting statistics on dogs that hump kids' legs.
It's all about fear. Americans are convinced that they are under attack on all fronts. No matter how many registries or mean dogs they create, they simply don't feel safe.
It's about faulty risk analysis skills. Your kids have a hell of a lot more chance to be killed riding to the mall in the family car than to be attacked by a sex-mad dog.
But people are taught to be afraid, every day. Fear sells product, whereas a sane acceptance of that which you cannot control doesn't make anyone any buckage, or win votes for a fear-pimping demogogue.
And if she lies in court and the jury believes her, the affirmative defense is gone. Hm. Most times a guy'd get accused of having illegal sex with a girl, I'd bet it was because she decided it'd be fun to finger and ruin him. Girls are not always sugar and spice and everything nice. Sadistic men will beat you, but a sadistic woman can ruin you.
"It's all part of the feminist's (and their willing tool-boys) demonization of men as a class"
Or right wing religious attitudes towards non-procreative sex. I'd wager that there are a lot more gays or oral sex offenders put in jail over the last hundred years because God told us to do so, than masturbators targeted by penis hating "feminazis".
But I agree with your basic point: sex "crime" is in the eye of the beholder...
buut I'd take my chances with a womens study major rather than a Baptist holy warrior any day. At least I don't have to deal with "God", who by definition can't be challenged.
Why are you safer a mile away rather than a block away? The guy can't walk or drive a car? Your kid can't walk?
This is magical thinking. Danger doesn't have a locus anymore. We have roads and phones and the Internet.
Magical thinking in my neighborhood: a girl gets mugged down the street in front of a church. For six months, she posts a flyer on thhe wall of my building, a block away, warning of the "dangerous" spot in front of the church. What, the guy lives in the tree overhead?
And you are sure he really did all this? That there was no prosecutorial misconduct? That an ex-girlfriend didn't make it up to ruin him? That an obsessive "therapist" didn't embed the "memories" into a kid? Think of all the "satanist child molestors" who went to jail in the 80's and 90's in the south, all of whom were victims of hyperreligious hysteria, not to mention the many more with ruined lives. How about misidentification? How about database error? Data entry error? Misnumbering a house? People moving out? The molesters who had sex with a girl aged 17 years, 11 months, and 30 days?
I know parenting automatically throws on an insanity switch when it comes to safety, but JEEZ, calm down.
And you knew that the people on the line weren't screwing with you for fun... how?
You were set up on a line created for people to call in with "tips". Do you know that the "tips" called into law enforcement are largely worthless? People make shit up and call the line for the sheer enjoyment of listening to you squirm.
The junk on an open "sex offense" tip line is worthless. Hmm. And a great way for an anonymous bastard to ruin someone ELSE'S life, too!
Errors in most criminal cases naturally fix themselves after time, the criminals get out of jail and can live more or less normal lives.
Sorry, I have to say you can't possibly know that. There is no way to know how many innocent people are in prison. We just know that they are there.
Once you are accused, your money dries up, and then you are a plaything of the prosecutors. Appeals cost money, defense costs money. You're up against men with no spending limit, and you are broke.
Oral sex is still outlawed in some states. If caught, you would be a sex offender.
Funny story about "sex crimes": a month or so ago in Singapore, a security guard was sent to prison for two years. He had paid a sixteen year old girl money to give him a hummer.
No, he's not a sex criminal because of the underage prostitution he paid for. Prostiution is legal, so's a consenting 16 year old.
He's in prison because oral sex is a federal crime in Singapore.
People are absolutely insane on the subject of sex.
"Someone who wants to become filthy stinking rich. ("Trust me, two out of three doesn't cut it!" -- Zoidberg). 5% of the PC market is huge -- at least until competitors step in and fragment it."
And it would take one law to outlaw it. It's an incremental process to be sure, but the powers that want all this, Guvmint, Hollywood, record labels, Microsoft, are going to grind away until they get what they want. Then the simplest kinds of PR moves will get "untrusted" computing associated with "terrorism", and damn, there's a new law outlawing non-DRM hardward in Patriot Act 3.
This would be another one of those "conspiracy theories" that people who actually conspire love to mock, except that the FBI just equated protestors with terrorists the other day, because 1) terrorists raise money online, and so do terrorists, and 2) protestors organize protests online, and terrorists organize attacks online.
And NO ONE CARE THAT THEY SAID THAT OUT LOUD. Do you think that anyone will care about non-DRM-enabled BIOS's being outlawed?
"Or buy a motherboard with a BIOS that doesn't come from Phoenix. Last time I checked, Phoenix wasn't the only company on Earth that made motherboard BIOS setups."
And what if Phoenix-type BIOS's simply won't cooperate with non-DRMed BIOS's? After all, one of the goals is trusted *networking*. Get it? They are moving into the network space with DRM. The goal will eventually be to let "trusted" PC's network easily, while "untrusted" boxen get frozen out. Free markets can't survive collusion, as Adam Smith pointed out in giant glowing letters.
"As a vetern of our country's Army (oh no, he's biased! and stupid!)"
Wow. You provide your own insulting comeback post.
Interestingly, no one seems to have been ready to call you biased and stupid. You seem to think that the liberal knownothings are ready to spit on you and call you names.
Um, nope. So you make up a strawman to make it seem that you are under attack.
Defensive, much? I'd not mention it, but since you made such a point of your persecution, I have to make a point of the mythology massively accepted by members of the military, the belief that nasty liberals are out to defame you at any opportunity.
Started, as I recall, with the "civilian hippies spit on our brave boys" meme during Vietnam.
I recall an investigative reporter about 15 years ago (HARD to research the source now) who tried to track down these legions of spitters. Almost every story he tracked down turned out to be a I-heard-it-from-some-guy-who-heard-it-from-some-gu y thing. He found a couple of incidents that actually were true. The rest were mythology, a dearly held set of beliefs of most military men.
I impugne the motives of those who spread that meme originally. They have instilled it deeply into the ranks today; all my military friends think that civilians think them stupid, etc.
As for the spitting, etc. Exactly how long would your average spitter have lasted against a just-returned Marine who just got off a year's tour of duty in Vietnam? All such stories should end with, "and then I broke his spine".
Listen. Damn near everyone holds nothing but respect for you, who gives your time and maybe someday your life for your country. They always have. They have deep knowledge, however, that your civilian leaders, and some of your top military leaders, have absolutely led you into idiot wars, and are doing so today.
Don't confuse contempt for the Bushies for contempt for you. No one is calling you stupid, and no one is calling you biased.
But. YOUR attitude IS biased. Root out this belief that you are under attack. The press is not your enemy, civilians are not your enemy. You really don't have any enemies, not worth mentioning.
What you DO when you are ordered to do so is different than who you ARE. Intelligent people do understand the difference.
Hmmm. Sigh, I know it was a joke, but wouldn't you think they'd put in a fuel cell into the Segwaynator? It'd last a lot longer than a dozen miles. Or use a mobile generator to juice up the bots.
And how long exactly d'ya think a hummvee goes before it runs out of gas? A tank? Much of army logisitics involves moving giant gasoline tankers around behind all that mechanical infantry.
A fuel-celled powered or a simple diesel-powered mobile generator charging a few hundred Segwaynators would require refueling a lot less than our forces' current gas-em-ups. Electrical motors are more effectient users of fuel, matched mile for mile.
And if you up the amps on the rechargers, you can get a battery on full in less than 15 minutes. Higher amps, even faster. Research the solutions that GM engineers came up with for the Impact car. You don't even have to worry about being killed accidently -- they used induction charging.
Oh, and yes, I do know they will eventually put me in a file, if they haven't already. And I do know that if it really goes bad, I get to disappear forever.
It's called fighting back instead of giving in. Life, fortune, sacred honor sort of thing.
They came for the trade unionists, and all that.
You don't wait until there is no one left to speak for anyone.
It's called a wakeup call. The wakeup calls that Germans failed to heed eventually built the ovens.
Son, we are building execution machines in Guatanamo NOW. Courtesy of Haliburton. The ovens are firing up, and I am screaming NOW before they get the idea that I would make a nice souffle.
This all is a process. It takes time. But it is easily monitored, if you clean the crud from your eyes and actually watch what is happening.
The FBI now equates protestors with terrorists, as of two days ago. Police are slamming protestors into the ground with no excuses or consequences. "1st Amendment zones" are established to imprison dissenters when the President comes by. We have torture camps in Cuba, thousands of men locked in the dark, we're shipping secret prisoners to really GOOD torturers overseas, we've been looted blind, we've been led into a stupid, useless war... what the HELL ELSE DO YOU THINK GIVES US A CLUE WE'RE GOING DOWN GERMANY'S PATH?
Two thousand years of historical understanding. The sun is bright. The night is dark. A meter is a thousand millimeters.
Belief that it is prophesy is just that, belief. If you are trained that it is all true, then all historical and scholarly references I can tiredly dig up will all register as the lies of Satan to you.
But for anyone who wants to read up on the metaphor in Rev., then first try "Asimov's Guide to the Bible", part 2, the New Testament. Hint: it's in the last chapter. It's a starting point, and Asimov merely cited common scholarship.
Rev. is the most analyzed book of the Bible. Check Google, look for not-to-angry discussion or essays on the subject.
Nope. The earliest Christians were Jews, and were expected to be circumcised and follow kosher practices. Christ was a Jew.
And you're reading me too literally. Almost EVERYone hated Rome, and wanted them to die. Political tracts written in metaphor to escape being skinned alive were common in the area.
But the readers of Revelation in the 1st and 2nd centuries lived during the crushing of Masada and the final destruction of the Temple and the beginning of the Diaspora. Rome was all they concentrated on. All they hated.
The Jews also were ardent numeroloists. 1000 years, the precise measurement of the final city of the saved, numbers of heads of beasts, the precise nuumber of the saved, all of those numbers had special and specific metaphorical meaning for the people of the 1st century, much of which we don't understand now.
As for it being a literal prophecy of the end of days, it's pretty lame. Stars falling from the dome of the sky, like burning embers, moon of blood, all those things are silly.
If you argue that they are meant to be interpreted, then you make my case. It's metaphor. Not literal in any way. What it is metaphor for hs been analyzed to death. Try Asimov's guide to the Bible.
And people who believe the world is ending soon, they are the very people who don't give a damn about overpopulation, ecological damage, CO2 warming, species extinction, political knowledge of other cultures.. why should they? The world is ending! I can't stress this enough: the president doesn't care about bedrock environmental issues because he thinks the world is ending soon. Why make plans for hundreds or thousands of years? Why change your polluting industries? Why care about anything except your own salvation?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, people, we have a real life example from three years ago. Let me refresh.
Remember the last days of the 2000 election, just before the Renquist Supreme Court shut the count down? I believe a recount was mobilized at the very last. Allthe election volunteers manned the counting stations. Republican (screaming) watchers and Democratic watchers were stationed at every counter, watching the process and interjecting objections whenever they wanted to.
This solid, unremarkable process was on track to finish the recount in THREE DAYS. ALL the votes. Every one. Winnowed and cleaned up, with the truly unreadable ballots discarded.
The 'publcians shut the puppy down with hours to spare, and the case went to the Supremes. The Supremes ran down the clock until 30 minutes before the deadline they themselves imposed, making it impossible to finish the recount when the decision was announced.
There was no argument about the ballots that had been counted. All examinations were done, and the readable ballots were separate from the small minority of truly bad ones. BUT the process was terminated.
Your question was answered by history. the counties involved performed a cold recount in under three days, and had a projected 24 hours left until finished.. around December 13th, I think.
Manual recounts work fine. They WORKED fine. And they can be performed expeditiously.
What happened was a concerted effort to convince Anmerica that the recount was impossible, impossible, impossible. And people bought it. Even though the evidence was right in front of their face that it DID work. We had a media bored by the process, and an American people flummoxed by a month of utter bullshit lying by the Bushies.
Pieces of paper with holes in them are pretty easy to count.
Lets's see. let's say we have 300 counters. A million votes. Two watchers per counter, if someone is being a dick about it.
About 10 seconds is more than enough per ballot.
6 ballots per minute per counter. 300 counters. 1800 ballots per minute total. 1,000,000 / 1800 = 555 minutes = 9.25 hours.
A million votes can be counted by 300 people in 9 hours and fifteen minutes.
There are thousands of election volunteers. Any recount can be done in a week.
The recount was slow in Florida because Bush sued and harrassed until weeks dragged by, and people got sickof the subject. Gore suggested that the whole state be recounted, and was ignored. I listened, I heard him. Bush wanted it stopped.
Even so, at the end, Gore still won in all scenarios but one in the post-election recount.
The system was never broken, and we didn't need new machines.
Now we have machines that can be manipulated at will! Another win for the Bush camp.
Here's some more history: Bush signed a mandatory recount law in Texas while governor.
Another: He had two recounts going in other states besides Florida during the post-election process. He didn't have any problems with them.
He got what he wanted in Florida because of Harris stopping the election, his brother's manipulations, more money than God, and a determined Republican block in the Supreme Court.
God, what a mess.
"MULTICASTING!"
Broadcasting on MC requires an expensive contract with a provider, whereas P2P simply requires one, single, node. Cheap, simple, and very scary to people who want control.
P2P can be largely untraceable, barring massive government involvement around the world, while multicasting is as controllable as TV. The company providing the MC is a single point of control; P2P is democratic, spontaneous, and as hard to control as the Internet itself.
"Oh my $DEITY..... they're trying to make fast-forwarding past advertisements illegal?!? "
It is already illegal in the U.S. The ads autoplay, and you cannot stop them. Unless, of course, you reverse engineer a DVD player that lets you control whatever you like -- which is illegal under the DMCA. It is illegal to attempt to bypass an encrypted system, however they care to define it. it Even ROT13 qualifies as encryption, so the vendors don't even have to try very hard.
No, but do this instead: send in an absentee ballot. They have to manually count it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/3251094.st m
Paedophile found dead in home
A convicted paedophile has been found battered to death in his home.
The body of sex offender Arnold Hartley, 73, was found early on Saturday morning at his home in Redcar, Teesside.
He had suffered serious injuries to his head and face, and police have launched a murder hunt.
A 28-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman were arrested on Sunday, but were later released "unconditionally".
A Cleveland Police spokesman said it was not possible to say whether Hartley was the victim of a vigilante attack.
Hartley was jailed for 12 months in 2001 for making indecent images of a girl under the age of 14 and gross indecency.
'Medium risk'
Cleveland Police held a press conference on Sunday at which Detective Superintendent Brian Dunn said Hartley had lived at his home in Queen Street for many years and was well-known in the community as a sex offender.
He was released in April 2002 and returned to the area where he moved back into his former address.
Mr Dunn said Hartley was on the Sex Offenders' Register and was considered a "medium risk".
He said there had been "previous problems" at the address and Hartley had been subjected to harassment.
There was a disturbance shortly after midnight on Saturday in Queen Street and police have appealed for help in piecing together what happened.
Mr Dunn said: "This is a murder inquiry and obviously Mr Hartley's previous conviction will form part of the inquiry.
Forensic experts
"But whatever he has done in the past does not give people the right to attack and kill him."
A neighbour said Hartley's home had been the subject of many attacks but he had once claimed he did not have any enemies.
Cal Birkbeck, owner of the Castle Hotel said Hartley gave up replacing his broken windows because they had been smashed so many times.
On Sunday, three police cars were parked in front of the house with another in a back alley.
The front door was hidden by a tent and forensic experts were working around the property.
Police officers carried out house-to-house inquiries.
Three floral tributes had been left in front of the house.
I know. Do you think maybe they'll let us live out our lives on a reservation? Maybe in New Orleans?
"You would have great big fences and mean dogs."
And then people would start collecting statistics on dogs that hump kids' legs.
It's all about fear. Americans are convinced that they are under attack on all fronts. No matter how many registries or mean dogs they create, they simply don't feel safe.
It's about faulty risk analysis skills. Your kids have a hell of a lot more chance to be killed riding to the mall in the family car than to be attacked by a sex-mad dog.
But people are taught to be afraid, every day. Fear sells product, whereas a sane acceptance of that which you cannot control doesn't make anyone any buckage, or win votes for a fear-pimping demogogue.
And if she lies in court and the jury believes her, the affirmative defense is gone. Hm. Most times a guy'd get accused of having illegal sex with a girl, I'd bet it was because she decided it'd be fun to finger and ruin him. Girls are not always sugar and spice and everything nice. Sadistic men will beat you, but a sadistic woman can ruin you.
"It's all part of the feminist's (and their willing tool-boys) demonization of men as a class"
Or right wing religious attitudes towards non-procreative sex. I'd wager that there are a lot more gays or oral sex offenders put in jail over the last hundred years because God told us to do so, than masturbators targeted by penis hating "feminazis".
But I agree with your basic point: sex "crime" is in the eye of the beholder...
buut I'd take my chances with a womens study major rather than a Baptist holy warrior any day. At least I don't have to deal with "God", who by definition can't be challenged.
Why are you safer a mile away rather than a block away? The guy can't walk or drive a car? Your kid can't walk?
This is magical thinking. Danger doesn't have a locus anymore. We have roads and phones and the Internet.
Magical thinking in my neighborhood: a girl gets mugged down the street in front of a church. For six months, she posts a flyer on thhe wall of my building, a block away, warning of the "dangerous" spot in front of the church. What, the guy lives in the tree overhead?
And you are sure he really did all this? That there was no prosecutorial misconduct? That an ex-girlfriend didn't make it up to ruin him? That an obsessive "therapist" didn't embed the "memories" into a kid? Think of all the "satanist child molestors" who went to jail in the 80's and 90's in the south, all of whom were victims of hyperreligious hysteria, not to mention the many more with ruined lives. How about misidentification? How about database error? Data entry error? Misnumbering a house? People moving out? The molesters who had sex with a girl aged 17 years, 11 months, and 30 days?
I know parenting automatically throws on an insanity switch when it comes to safety, but JEEZ, calm down.
And you knew that the people on the line weren't screwing with you for fun... how?
You were set up on a line created for people to call in with "tips". Do you know that the "tips" called into law enforcement are largely worthless? People make shit up and call the line for the sheer enjoyment of listening to you squirm.
The junk on an open "sex offense" tip line is worthless. Hmm. And a great way for an anonymous bastard to ruin someone ELSE'S life, too!
Errors in most criminal cases naturally fix themselves after time, the criminals get out of jail and can live more or less normal lives.
Sorry, I have to say you can't possibly know that. There is no way to know how many innocent people are in prison. We just know that they are there.
Once you are accused, your money dries up, and then you are a plaything of the prosecutors. Appeals cost money, defense costs money. You're up against men with no spending limit, and you are broke.
You lose.
Oral sex is still outlawed in some states. If caught, you would be a sex offender.
Funny story about "sex crimes": a month or so ago in Singapore, a security guard was sent to prison for two years. He had paid a sixteen year old girl money to give him a hummer.
No, he's not a sex criminal because of the underage prostitution he paid for. Prostiution is legal, so's a consenting 16 year old.
He's in prison because oral sex is a federal crime in Singapore.
People are absolutely insane on the subject of sex.
"Someone who wants to become filthy stinking rich. ("Trust me, two out of three doesn't cut it!" -- Zoidberg). 5% of the PC market is huge -- at least until competitors step in and fragment it."
And it would take one law to outlaw it. It's an incremental process to be sure, but the powers that want all this, Guvmint, Hollywood, record labels, Microsoft, are going to grind away until they get what they want. Then the simplest kinds of PR moves will get "untrusted" computing associated with "terrorism", and damn, there's a new law outlawing non-DRM hardward in Patriot Act 3.
This would be another one of those "conspiracy theories" that people who actually conspire love to mock, except that the FBI just equated protestors with terrorists the other day, because 1) terrorists raise money online, and so do terrorists, and 2) protestors organize protests online, and terrorists organize attacks online.
And NO ONE CARE THAT THEY SAID THAT OUT LOUD. Do you think that anyone will care about non-DRM-enabled BIOS's being outlawed?
"Or buy a motherboard with a BIOS that doesn't come from Phoenix.
Last time I checked, Phoenix wasn't the only company on Earth that made motherboard BIOS setups."
And what if Phoenix-type BIOS's simply won't cooperate with non-DRMed BIOS's? After all, one of the goals is trusted *networking*. Get it? They are moving into the network space with DRM. The goal will eventually be to let "trusted" PC's network easily, while "untrusted" boxen get frozen out. Free markets can't survive collusion, as Adam Smith pointed out in giant glowing letters.
Let's put it this way: can I buy a major video card without MacroVision as a permanent "feature"?
Where your free market naaaooowwwww....
"As a vetern of our country's Army (oh no, he's biased! and stupid!)"
u y thing. He found a couple of incidents that actually were true. The rest were mythology, a dearly held set of beliefs of most military men.
Wow. You provide your own insulting comeback post.
Interestingly, no one seems to have been ready to call you biased and stupid. You seem to think that the liberal knownothings are ready to spit on you and call you names.
Um, nope. So you make up a strawman to make it seem that you are under attack.
Defensive, much? I'd not mention it, but since you made such a point of your persecution, I have to make a point of the mythology massively accepted by members of the military, the belief that nasty liberals are out to defame you at any opportunity.
Started, as I recall, with the "civilian hippies spit on our brave boys" meme during Vietnam.
I recall an investigative reporter about 15 years ago (HARD to research the source now) who tried to track down these legions of spitters. Almost every story he tracked down turned out to be a I-heard-it-from-some-guy-who-heard-it-from-some-g
I impugne the motives of those who spread that meme originally. They have instilled it deeply into the ranks today; all my military friends think that civilians think them stupid, etc.
As for the spitting, etc. Exactly how long would your average spitter have lasted against a just-returned Marine who just got off a year's tour of duty in Vietnam? All such stories should end with, "and then I broke his spine".
Listen. Damn near everyone holds nothing but respect for you, who gives your time and maybe someday your life for your country. They always have. They have deep knowledge, however, that your civilian leaders, and some of your top military leaders, have absolutely led you into idiot wars, and are doing so today.
Don't confuse contempt for the Bushies for contempt for you. No one is calling you stupid, and no one is calling you biased.
But. YOUR attitude IS biased. Root out this belief that you are under attack. The press is not your enemy, civilians are not your enemy. You really don't have any enemies, not worth mentioning.
What you DO when you are ordered to do so is different than who you ARE. Intelligent people do understand the difference.
Hmmm. Sigh, I know it was a joke, but wouldn't you think they'd put in a fuel cell into the Segwaynator? It'd last a lot longer than a dozen miles. Or use a mobile generator to juice up the bots.
And how long exactly d'ya think a hummvee goes before it runs out of gas? A tank? Much of army logisitics involves moving giant gasoline tankers around behind all that mechanical infantry.
A fuel-celled powered or a simple diesel-powered mobile generator charging a few hundred Segwaynators would require refueling a lot less than our forces' current gas-em-ups. Electrical motors are more effectient users of fuel, matched mile for mile.
And if you up the amps on the rechargers, you can get a battery on full in less than 15 minutes. Higher amps, even faster. Research the solutions that GM engineers came up with for the Impact car. You don't even have to worry about being killed accidently -- they used induction charging.
Oh, and yes, I do know they will eventually put me in a file, if they haven't already. And I do know that if it really goes bad, I get to disappear forever.
It's called fighting back instead of giving in. Life, fortune, sacred honor sort of thing.
They came for the trade unionists, and all that.
You don't wait until there is no one left to speak for anyone.
It's called a wakeup call. The wakeup calls that Germans failed to heed eventually built the ovens.
Son, we are building execution machines in Guatanamo NOW. Courtesy of Haliburton. The ovens are firing up, and I am screaming NOW before they get the idea that I would make a nice souffle.
This all is a process. It takes time. But it is easily monitored, if you clean the crud from your eyes and actually watch what is happening.
The FBI now equates protestors with terrorists, as of two days ago. Police are slamming protestors into the ground with no excuses or consequences. "1st Amendment zones" are established to imprison dissenters when the President comes by. We have torture camps in Cuba, thousands of men locked in the dark, we're shipping secret prisoners to really GOOD torturers overseas, we've been looted blind, we've been led into a stupid, useless war... what the HELL ELSE DO YOU THINK GIVES US A CLUE WE'RE GOING DOWN GERMANY'S PATH?
Two thousand years of historical understanding. The sun is bright. The night is dark. A meter is a thousand millimeters.
Belief that it is prophesy is just that, belief. If you are trained that it is all true, then all historical and scholarly references I can tiredly dig up will all register as the lies of Satan to you.
But for anyone who wants to read up on the metaphor in Rev., then first try "Asimov's Guide to the Bible", part 2, the New Testament. Hint: it's in the last chapter. It's a starting point, and Asimov merely cited common scholarship.
Rev. is the most analyzed book of the Bible. Check Google, look for not-to-angry discussion or essays on the subject.
Nope. The earliest Christians were Jews, and were expected to be circumcised and follow kosher practices. Christ was a Jew.
And you're reading me too literally. Almost EVERYone hated Rome, and wanted them to die. Political tracts written in metaphor to escape being skinned alive were common in the area.
But the readers of Revelation in the 1st and 2nd centuries lived during the crushing of Masada and the final destruction of the Temple and the beginning of the Diaspora. Rome was all they concentrated on. All they hated.
The Jews also were ardent numeroloists. 1000 years, the precise measurement of the final city of the saved, numbers of heads of beasts, the precise nuumber of the saved, all of those numbers had special and specific metaphorical meaning for the people of the 1st century, much of which we don't understand now.
As for it being a literal prophecy of the end of days, it's pretty lame. Stars falling from the dome of the sky, like burning embers, moon of blood, all those things are silly.
If you argue that they are meant to be interpreted, then you make my case. It's metaphor. Not literal in any way. What it is metaphor for hs been analyzed to death. Try Asimov's guide to the Bible.
And people who believe the world is ending soon, they are the very people who don't give a damn about overpopulation, ecological damage, CO2 warming, species extinction, political knowledge of other cultures.. why should they? The world is ending! I can't stress this enough: the president doesn't care about bedrock environmental issues because he thinks the world is ending soon. Why make plans for hundreds or thousands of years? Why change your polluting industries? Why care about anything except your own salvation?
It was more of a plaintive sigh. Not meant to slight you, or insinuate you were laughing. Sorry.