Flawed premise. We are opposed effectively because our wars are unjust and the local populations know it and will not surrender. We aren't up against "jihadists" or "terrorists" or "insurgents". We are up against people who want us out of their countries and will not submit to empire.
Afghanistan is a failure because, contrary to America's deeply held belief, it did not attack us on 9-11-01. The Taliban did not blow up the towers. Al Qaida did, and they booked from Afghanistan in the 30+ days it took for Bush to set up the annihilation of that country. We bombed brown people who kinda looked like Al Qaida and who were living in the same country that the outfit formerly camped in. We killed tens of thousands of people, occupied the place, and not coincidentally made our new puppet government sign the gas pipeline deal the Taliban government refused.
Iraq, well, well. A pack of lies to invade a helpless, non-hostile nation. We killed 100,000 outright and another 900,000 died from the effects of the occupation. Two million are homeless and at least a million of those have fled their own country. Girls are selling themselves in Syria to feed their families bak home. We are being opposed because we are bastards, not because we haven't "social networked" properly. We murdered their country. What would YOU do if someone wiped out three percent of all living Americans and then stole everything not nailed down, then dictated a constitution and installed a puppet government? Would social networking make you feel better after your wife and kids were incinerated?
Some unis require freshmen students to room in the dorms. I assume that's the captive audience. The university probably won't let Comcast drop a line in. And Comcast probably wouldn't want to install all those switches in the local area to handle the load -- cuts into profits.
As I've been saying for years, the E-911 system was just a con designed to put a GPS tracker into everyone's phone that could be accessed at will by the gubmint or whomever has the juice. I never needed to feel safe; I lack the hysteria gene that's been injected into Americans. But I do resent the tracker. And the possible tracker location log. EVERY damned police state trick they install is somehow designed to protect you from the you-know-whos nudge nudge wink wink. But the tech is always eventually turned against the population. We've survived for a half million years without being tracked in a giant prison state. We don't need it. We're feed stories of evil home invaders and dark muggers and we've turned our lives over to faceless organizations to "help" us. I'll never understand the cowardice that's gripped this country.
An emergency circuit containing the GPS location snitcher, powered by an actual physical on-off switch, fine, good, you can have a heart attack and help will come. But having the snitch hard-wired into the phone so it cannot be disabled without disabling the entire unit? That is defective by design, not designed to help you, but to track you against your will if someone wishes to do so. Powering off with a switch won't kill it -- there're tricks to get around that, and same for the software off option in the menus. We've been feed a massive con by the Total Information Awareness power freaks who drove that design through. Bet you MANY bucks that rich and powerful men can opt out of the tracking with special phones. Doubt Cheney's phone has a snitch. It's the schlubs that get to be tagged hyenas.
Voting machines such as those ESS and Diebold sell are useless for anything but cheating... as this illustrates, you can validate code and approve the circuitry design all you like, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN THE MACHINES AT GO-TIME. They can place cheat chips or upload cheat code, and by the time anyone even has an inkling beyond simple statistical obviousness -- which American media apparently can't understand -- the election is years over and we are told no one cares. Unless of course a Democrat wins; imagine the hell unleashed by FoxNews! if a single voting system may have scooted a Demo into office with some question of the system's honesty. But I digress.
Paper trails are useless in the usual conception as well. A voter votes, and a little piece of paper comes out telling him that he voted thusly. Oh, PLEASE. Unless the paper is a card and can be manually recounted and the totals compared to the computer tally, the paper trail is worthless. Anything can be recorded, and anything can be printed. Now, if instead for security purposes the paper card receipt is kept archivally, then why the HELL have a PC acting as an agent in the first place, and simply count the paper cards? Canada uses a number 2 pencil and paper ballet, and they count the votes manually, with a rep from both or more parties observing the count-- you know, the thing that the Supreme Court here said didn't work. And they finish national elections in hours after the polls close. Faster than we do. Their method scales, you see.
There is no reason to computerize the voting process other than cheating. None. All else is sophistry. We had working systems; they were abused by injecting doubt in Florida in 2000. The recounts work fine if the lawyers and the Supremes stay the hell out of things. None of you may recall, but in 2000, at the same time Florida was being sued and stayed to death and back, two more recounts were happening out in the western states -- manually -- and no one said a thing. Florida was made a carnival by Republicans because they wanted to instill the idea in a fantastically compliant media that recounts didn't work, that chads made things uncountable somehow, that NO RECOUNT WAS NECESSARY by any means possible. It took faked up riots in Dade by republican staffers pretending to be random thugs demanding a shutdown and a crooked Supreme Court majority -- all rightist Republicans, and I include Kennedy as he has shown his new colors since then -- to order the shutdown of the democracy hours before the recount was supposed to end. Never has the US seen a group of election officials and volunteers work so hard and so quickly to beat a crooked shutdown and what was frankly a putsch by the Republican party.
How different the world would be now if Gore had been allowed to win. The worst. Day. Ever. In American history.
Windows fails, and fails often, to do the simplest tasks. That is why the disgust, the loss of market share (excluding monopoly abuse forced installation on all boxen), and the mockery. Fix Windows, fix the mockery.
Think about it. The hippies alway got it right. That's why people hate them. They were right, and the straights were wrong. And still are. The "hippies" live their conscience. Straights compromise. The idealists, as you say, maintain the nonexistent middle... keep the sheep from stampeding over cliffs. The country has gone so far to the right in media coverage that the idea that people should control their own computers is somehow extremist. Wow, man.
America, the entire world, is entering a state of perpetual tyranny because people don't have the mental furniture necessary to understand the difference betwteen freedom and fascism. Freedom is not the ability to work for Wal-Mart, eat food, and go to theme parks. Freedom is the ability to not kow-tow your head on the sidewalk when a coporate/government thug demands your DNA and your unquestioning obedience. It's moving around the world without tracking devices; tyranny needs to know where the troublemakers are, so that they may be neutralized. Freedom requires the ability to write and speak anonymously. Freedom is NOT the ability to speak your mind only in the safety of your bedroom closet, for every byway and gathering place eventually becomes private property, where now-accepted custom is that no human right to speak or gather exists. Freedom to TROUBLE THE POWERFUL without the certainty that one will be noted and dealt with. Freedom is the ability to travel and meet with people without what are in all sanity PRISON GUARDS logging your movements and recording your words, building inescapable fortresses of data with which to destroy you come the need to do so. The wedding of power and business is in fact fascism, and fascism is always, ALWAYS sold by invoking an implacable enemy that we need to defend from at all costs.
Of course, as Bush and so many others have shown, that enemy always turns out to be the people that are being protected. Recursion of the "reason" given for all fascisms. The tools used to "protect" you from dark scary people are always - always! turned in full force against you. And done correctly, silence grips the mouths of all and no one dares utter the words to describe the reality in which they live, for the consequences are too deadly. The tools necessary to trigger the use of the KBR-built detention camps being built for the last few years are in place. One bomb, and Bush declares emergency powers and the troublemakers get their asses dragged to extrajudicial prisons at the sole mercy of the Unitary Executive. The Constitution teeters, the last few rights about to be declared void by his pocket judges. And the same is true in France, and the UK, and so many other places.
The Soviet Union died because it drained its resources with a gigantic military machine; that was happening long before one senile mean-spirited old actor pretended to be President. What put the nail in their coffin was...
Afghanistan. You know, the place we pretend we're not occupying? They spent themselves to death trying to block the rise of.... wait for it... Islamic fundamentalism. Seems they were right, but the solution of shooting all the rebels didn't work out.
Would the Soviet Union had died if we hadn't drained the world's coffers fighting it for over fifty years (Hitler invaded to Stop Communism, and we kept it up after the Russians kicked his ass)... and is the capitalist-mafia-fascism that replaced it in Russia any better? We've bought Nazi Germany, only a wealthy, stable one. Are we any safer? Are the nukes gone? Is that polonium in your Earl Grey, Gospodin?
And the spirit of Reagan, his fake tax cuts with insane spending increases, is now finally coming home as our economy teeters, ready to take everyone with us. You can't pretend to be President, can't pretend to understand economics. And bills eventually need paying.
Not being funded is not a failure. He has no development funds. He's not out of innovation, he's out of people with imagination. He spent thirty years building the car, while small plane manufacturers took a ten-twenty year break from innovation because they feared lawsuits. The Skycar is a triumph of engineering and perseverance. Given a hundred million to build a fleet of prototypes and develop the software he wants to control the car by wire, thus taking the guesswork out of piloting the craft, we'd have our flying car.
My POINT: we've had the flying car. We didn't want it. We sneered and ridiculed the people who tried to build one -- even the only one that actually made one for us. How the hell is it a failure? He didn't fail. WE failed. No money for innovation, only marketing the same tired old. We don't fund the future, so therefore it never happens. We could have mined the moon, electrically tossed the material to high earth orbit, refined silicon and aluminum using solar furnaces and made endless fleets of solar power satellites that would have powered the earth pollution-free for as long as we existed. Could have. Instead, we cut taxes and borrowed cash, we annihilated long range research, and let universities turn into privatized R&D arms of corporations instead of places to dream of new ways of doing things. We think burning ETHANOL in our IC engines is sooo 21st century. We are dead in the water, with a population that is focused on the near term profit and ignorant of the possibilities that existed even as recently as the seventies. The market fails us in this regard.
Moeller worked his ass off for thirty years and couldn't get the flying car off the ground because no one believed in, understood, or was willing to fund something that was unlike anything else. He wasn't waving around a piece of paper. He spent his life trying to prove it worked -- of course it would -- by showing us a working model. But it was a funny idea, so therefore he was a moonbat. So we have ten million dollar carbon composite jets, a dead space program still obsessing on beating the Russkies to Mars, and a population complaining about airport runway expansion while a VTOL flying car sits in a hanger. We have solutions, we just have stupid people. I spent the early part of my life cataloging solutions waiting for someone to fund or care, and watched an entire country pretend it didn't need to pay taxes while borrowing eight trillion dollars to pay for the stuff it claimed it didn't want. We spent the future's money on BMWs and outsourcing our industry while cutting education and now we have a nation that thinks Star Wars is science fiction. Other countries haven't done well either, but they've the excuse of coming up from behind, either from the undeveloped world, as it were, or from a series of devastating wars, or recovering from resource draining dicatorships. But we had it all, and pissed it away. Moeller and his descendants will have more flying cars for us, but there won't be a population with an educated sense of a future or the money to fund it.
Moeller has been building/developing a VSTOL skycar for over 30 years. He has it sitting on the ground. We don't even bother to notice. America is just so... conservative. They can't imagine tomorrow being different than today. We're single handedly shutting down the space station before it's finished. We've no shuttle in development -- we're rebuilding Apollo. Innovative aircraft rust while we still drive our great-grandpa's cars. Annnndd we LIKE it.
Just thought of something -- we "know" that he wasn't a member because he said he wasn't and they said he wasn't. Why do we "know" they told the truth? Why do white affiliates of terrorists get the benefit of the doubt while brown ones get tubes shoved into their mouths and are forced to inhale the water, over and over again?
I'm aware he wasn't, and that they aren't. But under current definitions, reality doesn't matter. If you're brown. Just suspicion is enough to get you taken away to be drowned, imprisoned or hosed down in a freezing room naked. The Militia doesn't get water piped into their lungs because they're white and popular - get it? If an armed Islamic group existed in America and a peripheral member bombed a Federal building, we'd have rounded them all up and they'd be lucky if they died early in the torture, else they'd be in solitary until they died.
The two SCOTUS decisions that destroyed the democratic United States government:
1. Decision that corporations were individuals, same as we meat puppets, endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty, and the freedom of speech. A decision, BTW, that never happened, as it was an interpretation by a SC clerk, not a Justice, that was seized on by the Guilded Age corporations as the institutionalization of their organizations as immortal citizens.
2. 1990s: decision by SCOTUS that political donations were protected speech, same as spoken words or writings.
These idiot ideas lead to the present day: corporations as legal individuals, spending as much as they like to influence government. After the 1990's, they simply bought the government, floor to ceiling.
To stop this horror, we have to kill those two SC decisions. Corporations go back to being government-licensed TEMPORARY legal shelters -- not people, not individuals, NO rights to buy government. And money is not speech. End of discussion. Remove money from the political campaigns. NO paid media time, none, end of insanity. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine on government licensed media for unpaid shilling for candidates in media as well. Separate Commerce and State, as some earlier poster beautifully called it.
5- People despise the content companies now, and are refusing to buy as long as they act like vicious life-destroying bastards. No one ever loved the labels, and that was BEFORE they decided to "educate" the population into believing that copying and listening to music was criminal. They've made enemies of their talent and their customers. Please, sue some more. I stopped buying music in 1999 and stopped listening to radio music about the same time. I've a lot of company. Next up: DVD's and TV programs. Want to sue us? Please, commit financial suicide. Go ahead. It'll work, really.
OR... they could look for people who had their families, along with a million other countrymen, blown up, torched, and shot for no damned reason. But that would require us to understand that we've actually made people mad at us. It's all about the EVIL, brown Muslims, not about what we do to piss them off...
I look forward to news of the the FBI energetically scanning watermelon purchases to identify future convenience store robbers. Hey, maybe Jewish delis to screen for possible accounting crimes! Salami on rye, born to fry.
Hey, anyone keeping tabs on pasty purchases in the UP? Timothy McVeigh was the only domestic terrorist to actually blow up a Federal building complete with a day care center. He was a member of the Michigan Militia, a armed terror group dedicated to violently taking out the Federal government, come the day. I assume we've rounded them all up and are currently half-drowning them daily in Cuba? [crickets]
The proverbial simple solution doesn't work when a "Unitary Executive" declares that laws and courts cannot constrain his actions. Bush will not obey courts or the law, period. He's declared such, his personal lawyer/AG declared it, and his actions match his words.
All that's left now is for him to suspend elections "temporarily", after someone blows up a bus or a highway. We are one bomb away from a Republican dictatorship. The military brass is overwhelmingly far-right, and will go along. Dey gotz da guns and the radio and the newspapers.
They only thing left to stop him is his party's unstoppable greed for tax cuts, oil profits, and military spending. We're going bankrupt; I don't know if it can stop a man with all the guns and control of the cops and transportation, not in the short run. But eventually the dollar will be toilet paper and we won't be able to trade overseas... and we've not the manufacturing capability to keep up our economy. Cognitive dissonance. Arithmetic doesn't care about our refusal to accept it; the bill will present itself.
Apparently no one's installed it that anyone can detect.
So Mac users, who let's face it, a self-selected group, are smarter than the default-installed Windows crowd. And the few who are dumb enough to install the virus don't know how to do it. Built-in protection.
What, seven years, no viruses? Come on, give up. Macs won. Windows lost. Game over. Nuke Windows from orbit. Even if ten thousand viruses arrived tomorrow, it'd be a miniscule fraction of the blasted battlefield that Windows live on. There is no comparison. Windows admins like Windows because -- well really, you know this is true -- fixing broken Windows and cleaning up the mess afterwards is their livelihood. Macs would cause a massive wave of unemployment in the admin community if businesses woke up and converted. And under the bravado and anti-Mac fulminating, they know that.
Diebold didn't fail. They did precisely what they wanted to do. Deliver a compromised system that could deliver the votes to the Republican party without too much fuss. They stonewalled every investigation, and got away clean. We can hold a politician to account, you see, but corporations are designed to be a fog impervious to criminal charges.
#2 pencil, boxes marked "check here", and manual counting overseen by reps from both parties when the boxes are opened. Simple. Unhackable by external third parties. Infinitely auditable. Cheap, 'cause the monitors work for free.
Scantrons can be hacked as well. The false assumption is that the manufacturer is pure of heart. They ain't.
Canada uses the #2 pencil and paper system, and they finish national elections in hours. With no room for cheating. And they can do recounts. Easily. There is no reason, NONE, for introducing useless automation into the system other than opening the door to hacking the totals. Convenience is not an reason, it's an excuse.
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Flawed premise. We are opposed effectively because our wars are unjust and the local populations know it and will not surrender. We aren't up against "jihadists" or "terrorists" or "insurgents". We are up against people who want us out of their countries and will not submit to empire.
Afghanistan is a failure because, contrary to America's deeply held belief, it did not attack us on 9-11-01. The Taliban did not blow up the towers. Al Qaida did, and they booked from Afghanistan in the 30+ days it took for Bush to set up the annihilation of that country. We bombed brown people who kinda looked like Al Qaida and who were living in the same country that the outfit formerly camped in. We killed tens of thousands of people, occupied the place, and not coincidentally made our new puppet government sign the gas pipeline deal the Taliban government refused.
Iraq, well, well. A pack of lies to invade a helpless, non-hostile nation. We killed 100,000 outright and another 900,000 died from the effects of the occupation. Two million are homeless and at least a million of those have fled their own country. Girls are selling themselves in Syria to feed their families bak home. We are being opposed because we are bastards, not because we haven't "social networked" properly. We murdered their country. What would YOU do if someone wiped out three percent of all living Americans and then stole everything not nailed down, then dictated a constitution and installed a puppet government? Would social networking make you feel better after your wife and kids were incinerated?
Some unis require freshmen students to room in the dorms. I assume that's the captive audience. The university probably won't let Comcast drop a line in. And Comcast probably wouldn't want to install all those switches in the local area to handle the load -- cuts into profits.
People, esp. teenagers, have sex because they are horny. No evil schools necessary.
And it's really no one else's business.
Doesn't make you safer. Makes you feel safer.
As I've been saying for years, the E-911 system was just a con designed to put a GPS tracker into everyone's phone that could be accessed at will by the gubmint or whomever has the juice. I never needed to feel safe; I lack the hysteria gene that's been injected into Americans. But I do resent the tracker. And the possible tracker location log. EVERY damned police state trick they install is somehow designed to protect you from the you-know-whos nudge nudge wink wink. But the tech is always eventually turned against the population. We've survived for a half million years without being tracked in a giant prison state. We don't need it. We're feed stories of evil home invaders and dark muggers and we've turned our lives over to faceless organizations to "help" us. I'll never understand the cowardice that's gripped this country.
An emergency circuit containing the GPS location snitcher, powered by an actual physical on-off switch, fine, good, you can have a heart attack and help will come. But having the snitch hard-wired into the phone so it cannot be disabled without disabling the entire unit? That is defective by design, not designed to help you, but to track you against your will if someone wishes to do so. Powering off with a switch won't kill it -- there're tricks to get around that, and same for the software off option in the menus. We've been feed a massive con by the Total Information Awareness power freaks who drove that design through. Bet you MANY bucks that rich and powerful men can opt out of the tracking with special phones. Doubt Cheney's phone has a snitch. It's the schlubs that get to be tagged hyenas.
Voting machines such as those ESS and Diebold sell are useless for anything but cheating... as this illustrates, you can validate code and approve the circuitry design all you like, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN THE MACHINES AT GO-TIME. They can place cheat chips or upload cheat code, and by the time anyone even has an inkling beyond simple statistical obviousness -- which American media apparently can't understand -- the election is years over and we are told no one cares. Unless of course a Democrat wins; imagine the hell unleashed by FoxNews! if a single voting system may have scooted a Demo into office with some question of the system's honesty. But I digress.
Paper trails are useless in the usual conception as well. A voter votes, and a little piece of paper comes out telling him that he voted thusly. Oh, PLEASE. Unless the paper is a card and can be manually recounted and the totals compared to the computer tally, the paper trail is worthless. Anything can be recorded, and anything can be printed. Now, if instead for security purposes the paper card receipt is kept archivally, then why the HELL have a PC acting as an agent in the first place, and simply count the paper cards? Canada uses a number 2 pencil and paper ballet, and they count the votes manually, with a rep from both or more parties observing the count-- you know, the thing that the Supreme Court here said didn't work. And they finish national elections in hours after the polls close. Faster than we do. Their method scales, you see.
There is no reason to computerize the voting process other than cheating. None. All else is sophistry. We had working systems; they were abused by injecting doubt in Florida in 2000. The recounts work fine if the lawyers and the Supremes stay the hell out of things. None of you may recall, but in 2000, at the same time Florida was being sued and stayed to death and back, two more recounts were happening out in the western states -- manually -- and no one said a thing. Florida was made a carnival by Republicans because they wanted to instill the idea in a fantastically compliant media that recounts didn't work, that chads made things uncountable somehow, that NO RECOUNT WAS NECESSARY by any means possible. It took faked up riots in Dade by republican staffers pretending to be random thugs demanding a shutdown and a crooked Supreme Court majority -- all rightist Republicans, and I include Kennedy as he has shown his new colors since then -- to order the shutdown of the democracy hours before the recount was supposed to end. Never has the US seen a group of election officials and volunteers work so hard and so quickly to beat a crooked shutdown and what was frankly a putsch by the Republican party.
How different the world would be now if Gore had been allowed to win. The worst. Day. Ever. In American history.
Um, what zapped the MBR again? Was it... Windoze? Yes, I do think that it was.
Windows fails, and fails often, to do the simplest tasks. That is why the disgust, the loss of market share (excluding monopoly abuse forced installation on all boxen), and the mockery. Fix Windows, fix the mockery.
Windows is, was, and will be, broken.
Think about it. The hippies alway got it right. That's why people hate them. They were right, and the straights were wrong. And still are. The "hippies" live their conscience. Straights compromise. The idealists, as you say, maintain the nonexistent middle... keep the sheep from stampeding over cliffs. The country has gone so far to the right in media coverage that the idea that people should control their own computers is somehow extremist. Wow, man.
America, the entire world, is entering a state of perpetual tyranny because people don't have the mental furniture necessary to understand the difference betwteen freedom and fascism. Freedom is not the ability to work for Wal-Mart, eat food, and go to theme parks. Freedom is the ability to not kow-tow your head on the sidewalk when a coporate/government thug demands your DNA and your unquestioning obedience. It's moving around the world without tracking devices; tyranny needs to know where the troublemakers are, so that they may be neutralized. Freedom requires the ability to write and speak anonymously. Freedom is NOT the ability to speak your mind only in the safety of your bedroom closet, for every byway and gathering place eventually becomes private property, where now-accepted custom is that no human right to speak or gather exists. Freedom to TROUBLE THE POWERFUL without the certainty that one will be noted and dealt with. Freedom is the ability to travel and meet with people without what are in all sanity PRISON GUARDS logging your movements and recording your words, building inescapable fortresses of data with which to destroy you come the need to do so. The wedding of power and business is in fact fascism, and fascism is always, ALWAYS sold by invoking an implacable enemy that we need to defend from at all costs.
Of course, as Bush and so many others have shown, that enemy always turns out to be the people that are being protected. Recursion of the "reason" given for all fascisms. The tools used to "protect" you from dark scary people are always - always! turned in full force against you. And done correctly, silence grips the mouths of all and no one dares utter the words to describe the reality in which they live, for the consequences are too deadly. The tools necessary to trigger the use of the KBR-built detention camps being built for the last few years are in place. One bomb, and Bush declares emergency powers and the troublemakers get their asses dragged to extrajudicial prisons at the sole mercy of the Unitary Executive. The Constitution teeters, the last few rights about to be declared void by his pocket judges. And the same is true in France, and the UK, and so many other places.
Americans don't read books, do they.
The Soviet Union died because it drained its resources with a gigantic military machine; that was happening long before one senile mean-spirited old actor pretended to be President. What put the nail in their coffin was...
Afghanistan. You know, the place we pretend we're not occupying? They spent themselves to death trying to block the rise of.... wait for it... Islamic fundamentalism. Seems they were right, but the solution of shooting all the rebels didn't work out.
Would the Soviet Union had died if we hadn't drained the world's coffers fighting it for over fifty years (Hitler invaded to Stop Communism, and we kept it up after the Russians kicked his ass)... and is the capitalist-mafia-fascism that replaced it in Russia any better? We've bought Nazi Germany, only a wealthy, stable one. Are we any safer? Are the nukes gone? Is that polonium in your Earl Grey, Gospodin?
And the spirit of Reagan, his fake tax cuts with insane spending increases, is now finally coming home as our economy teeters, ready to take everyone with us. You can't pretend to be President, can't pretend to understand economics. And bills eventually need paying.
Not being funded is not a failure. He has no development funds. He's not out of innovation, he's out of people with imagination. He spent thirty years building the car, while small plane manufacturers took a ten-twenty year break from innovation because they feared lawsuits. The Skycar is a triumph of engineering and perseverance. Given a hundred million to build a fleet of prototypes and develop the software he wants to control the car by wire, thus taking the guesswork out of piloting the craft, we'd have our flying car.
My POINT: we've had the flying car. We didn't want it. We sneered and ridiculed the people who tried to build one -- even the only one that actually made one for us. How the hell is it a failure? He didn't fail. WE failed. No money for innovation, only marketing the same tired old. We don't fund the future, so therefore it never happens. We could have mined the moon, electrically tossed the material to high earth orbit, refined silicon and aluminum using solar furnaces and made endless fleets of solar power satellites that would have powered the earth pollution-free for as long as we existed. Could have. Instead, we cut taxes and borrowed cash, we annihilated long range research, and let universities turn into privatized R&D arms of corporations instead of places to dream of new ways of doing things. We think burning ETHANOL in our IC engines is sooo 21st century. We are dead in the water, with a population that is focused on the near term profit and ignorant of the possibilities that existed even as recently as the seventies. The market fails us in this regard.
Moeller worked his ass off for thirty years and couldn't get the flying car off the ground because no one believed in, understood, or was willing to fund something that was unlike anything else. He wasn't waving around a piece of paper. He spent his life trying to prove it worked -- of course it would -- by showing us a working model. But it was a funny idea, so therefore he was a moonbat. So we have ten million dollar carbon composite jets, a dead space program still obsessing on beating the Russkies to Mars, and a population complaining about airport runway expansion while a VTOL flying car sits in a hanger. We have solutions, we just have stupid people.
I spent the early part of my life cataloging solutions waiting for someone to fund or care, and watched an entire country pretend it didn't need to pay taxes while borrowing eight trillion dollars to pay for the stuff it claimed it didn't want. We spent the future's money on BMWs and outsourcing our industry while cutting education and now we have a nation that thinks Star Wars is science fiction. Other countries haven't done well either, but they've the excuse of coming up from behind, either from the undeveloped world, as it were, or from a series of devastating wars, or recovering from resource draining dicatorships. But we had it all, and pissed it away. Moeller and his descendants will have more flying cars for us, but there won't be a population with an educated sense of a future or the money to fund it.
Moeller has been building/developing a VSTOL skycar for over 30 years. He has it sitting on the ground. We don't even bother to notice. America is just so... conservative. They can't imagine tomorrow being different than today. We're single handedly shutting down the space station before it's finished. We've no shuttle in development -- we're rebuilding Apollo. Innovative aircraft rust while we still drive our great-grandpa's cars. Annnndd we LIKE it.
Just thought of something -- we "know" that he wasn't a member because he said he wasn't and they said he wasn't. Why do we "know" they told the truth? Why do white affiliates of terrorists get the benefit of the doubt while brown ones get tubes shoved into their mouths and are forced to inhale the water, over and over again?
I'm aware he wasn't, and that they aren't. But under current definitions, reality doesn't matter. If you're brown. Just suspicion is enough to get you taken away to be drowned, imprisoned or hosed down in a freezing room naked. The Militia doesn't get water piped into their lungs because they're white and popular - get it? If an armed Islamic group existed in America and a peripheral member bombed a Federal building, we'd have rounded them all up and they'd be lucky if they died early in the torture, else they'd be in solitary until they died.
The two SCOTUS decisions that destroyed the democratic United States government:
1. Decision that corporations were individuals, same as we meat puppets, endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty, and the freedom of speech. A decision, BTW, that never happened, as it was an interpretation by a SC clerk, not a Justice, that was seized on by the Guilded Age corporations as the institutionalization of their organizations as immortal citizens.
2. 1990s: decision by SCOTUS that political donations were protected speech, same as spoken words or writings.
These idiot ideas lead to the present day: corporations as legal individuals, spending as much as they like to influence government. After the 1990's, they simply bought the government, floor to ceiling.
To stop this horror, we have to kill those two SC decisions. Corporations go back to being government-licensed TEMPORARY legal shelters -- not people, not individuals, NO rights to buy government. And money is not speech. End of discussion. Remove money from the political campaigns. NO paid media time, none, end of insanity. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine on government licensed media for unpaid shilling for candidates in media as well. Separate Commerce and State, as some earlier poster beautifully called it.
5- People despise the content companies now, and are refusing to buy as long as they act like vicious life-destroying bastards. No one ever loved the labels, and that was BEFORE they decided to "educate" the population into believing that copying and listening to music was criminal. They've made enemies of their talent and their customers. Please, sue some more. I stopped buying music in 1999 and stopped listening to radio music about the same time. I've a lot of company. Next up: DVD's and TV programs. Want to sue us? Please, commit financial suicide. Go ahead. It'll work, really.
Godwin's Law is dead. Bringing up Nazism is appropriate when your nation is undergoing a conversion to fascism.
OR... they could look for people who had their families, along with a million other countrymen, blown up, torched, and shot for no damned reason. But that would require us to understand that we've actually made people mad at us. It's all about the EVIL, brown Muslims, not about what we do to piss them off...
I look forward to news of the the FBI energetically scanning watermelon purchases to identify future convenience store robbers. Hey, maybe Jewish delis to screen for possible accounting crimes! Salami on rye, born to fry.
Hey, anyone keeping tabs on pasty purchases in the UP? Timothy McVeigh was the only domestic terrorist to actually blow up a Federal building complete with a day care center. He was a member of the Michigan Militia, a armed terror group dedicated to violently taking out the Federal government, come the day. I assume we've rounded them all up and are currently half-drowning them daily in Cuba? [crickets]
The proverbial simple solution doesn't work when a "Unitary Executive" declares that laws and courts cannot constrain his actions. Bush will not obey courts or the law, period. He's declared such, his personal lawyer/AG declared it, and his actions match his words.
All that's left now is for him to suspend elections "temporarily", after someone blows up a bus or a highway. We are one bomb away from a Republican dictatorship. The military brass is overwhelmingly far-right, and will go along. Dey gotz da guns and the radio and the newspapers.
They only thing left to stop him is his party's unstoppable greed for tax cuts, oil profits, and military spending. We're going bankrupt; I don't know if it can stop a man with all the guns and control of the cops and transportation, not in the short run. But eventually the dollar will be toilet paper and we won't be able to trade overseas... and we've not the manufacturing capability to keep up our economy. Cognitive dissonance. Arithmetic doesn't care about our refusal to accept it; the bill will present itself.
Apparently no one's installed it that anyone can detect.
So Mac users, who let's face it, a self-selected group, are smarter than the default-installed Windows crowd. And the few who are dumb enough to install the virus don't know how to do it. Built-in protection.
What, seven years, no viruses? Come on, give up. Macs won. Windows lost. Game over. Nuke Windows from orbit. Even if ten thousand viruses arrived tomorrow, it'd be a miniscule fraction of the blasted battlefield that Windows live on. There is no comparison. Windows admins like Windows because -- well really, you know this is true -- fixing broken Windows and cleaning up the mess afterwards is their livelihood. Macs would cause a massive wave of unemployment in the admin community if businesses woke up and converted. And under the bravado and anti-Mac fulminating, they know that.
Diebold didn't fail. They did precisely what they wanted to do. Deliver a compromised system that could deliver the votes to the Republican party without too much fuss. They stonewalled every investigation, and got away clean. We can hold a politician to account, you see, but corporations are designed to be a fog impervious to criminal charges.
Or just use the damned paper to count the vote. Computer printed receipt != what actually transpires.
#2 pencil, boxes marked "check here", and manual counting overseen by reps from both parties when the boxes are opened. Simple. Unhackable by external third parties. Infinitely auditable. Cheap, 'cause the monitors work for free.
Scantrons can be hacked as well. The false assumption is that the manufacturer is pure of heart. They ain't.
Canada uses the #2 pencil and paper system, and they finish national elections in hours. With no room for cheating. And they can do recounts. Easily. There is no reason, NONE, for introducing useless automation into the system other than opening the door to hacking the totals. Convenience is not an reason, it's an excuse.