I know this will not be a welcome thought, but not everyone needs to learn math. People really, really don't need calculus unless they become engineers. A lot of time is wasted in high school learning things that don't impact on anything you will do in your life. I'd suggest more civics and semantics; all the algebra in the world won't defend you against semantic assault. A great deal of the idiocy the U.S. is descending into is caused by manipulation of language by people who are much better at it than the people getting conned. We need to teach people the history of civilization. What frightens me is not the inability to do math, but the inability to remember something that happened ten years ago, even, and integrate it into current events. And the lack of understanding of the basics of civil rights and the constitution have made things like the Patriot Act and the surveillance of our communications a boring topic for most, because they don't have a clue why people are upset.
The original model let the keyboard fold into the back of the screen, turning it into a tablet computer. That was as perfect a ebook as you could want. Now the thing works like a normal laptop. Oh well.
Now, let's see a ten dollar cell phone powered by solar cells.
Real estate market is fueled by the tax cuts at the upper brackets. 40 percent of the home sales last year was for second homes. The wealthy are pouring their lovely new tax cuts into property, driving up the prices and making it seem like a bull market.
After the Bush party, there will come tax increases to at least pre-Bush levels to try to stop the debt hemmorage. The real estate market will be drained of all that lovely tax cut moola, and will crash like like its 1929. This is not the time to buy a house. And the prices are too high in any case. People can't afford this.
(Senor Commander Taco, why is the single quote key bringing up a search box? Id like to type one, please.)
Society wouldn't "implode". You're implying a lower birthrate means a society disappears, which is mathematically silly. A lower birthrate means the population shrinks for a few generations, then stablizes with lower numbers, which is a GOOD THING. We've too many people on the planet, eating up too many resources, killing too much life, producing killer pollution.
We don't have to "keep up" our population levels. And we certainly don't need to import the suicidally growing populations in other areas. They are in trouble because they have overgrown their resources, and moving them to new areas to repeat the process is madness.
The countries with reduced population will be winners, and the cancerously growing populations of doomed countries will self-destruct in the usual Malthusian manner: war, famine, disease and death. The causes of the horsemen are not political in the truest sense; population pressure is always the root cause.
Nothing, no organism, can grow ceaselessly. At some point, it poisons the environment with its own effluent and kills off both room to live and the food supply. Humans who maintain a steady state population, intelligently, will have resources to live and to educate, while those who do not will inevitably collapse into warfare, disease, ignorance and (usually religious) totalitarianism through sheer desperation. They will be the danger to to the planet, already warming and drying under the strain of a population doubling every two generations.
If you want to talk "Darwinian" natural selection, then remember that a population that survives by equllibrium will last, while populations that survive by overgrowing their territory and violently (metaphorically and literally) moving into more stable neighbors without learning from their mistakes will prosper for only a short time, then repeat the cycle until there are no more places to go. They win for a short time, and look successful, but ultimately kill off themselves and the people they overrun.
Nothing can grow forever. At the current rate of growth, in less than four thousand years the mass of humanity exceeds the mass of the planet. We exceed the mass of the entire universe in something less than eight thousand years. Considering humanity has been in its present form for the last one hundred thousand years, that's a reachable goal. Obviously we can't do that. Sometime in the next hundred years we reach crisis, even before we hit physical limits, with political breakdown.
In light of all this, worrying about keeping up with, say, the Indian subcontinent population-growth-wise is pretty silly.
Sorry. Claiming the law doesn't apply to you doesn't make breaking the law techically legal. It didn't work for Nixon. Cheney worked for Nixon, and he still believes that the law is what the President says it is. He was wrong then and he is wrong now. Thing is, they have Gonzales as AG, and he wrote the book on the Royal Presidency.
It's not that it's legal. It's just that they've installed their own sheriff. Who apparently asked Sweden to raid PirateBay. Isn't it great how everything's connected?
Yup. The anti-terrorist squads, which we are always assured are to defend us against attackers who don't respect civilization, have once again had their mission redefined by a man on horseback. We feel so SAFE when the cops are wearing masks to defend our freedoms.
"IANAL, but United States law has a provision that states you are "innocent until proven guilty".
There is an amendment: "Unless you look a bit dark, enjoy towels as a fashion accessory or take pictures in public or have been abroad in which case you can be locked up indefinitely just in case you met an evildoer and became tainted""
It's good to be a member of an Red State armed militia preparing for the overthrow of the United States with assault weapons. Even if one of your members blows up a federal building, never will a single white, patriotic would-be government overthrower who associated with McVeigh see the inside of a jail cell. Or the cages in Cuba, which are of course reserved for towelheads. Only those who hate Jesus can be terarists.
"Indeed. The *average* educational expendeture per student in the US is currently above $10,000 per year."
You realize that includes heating oil and maintenance of very old buildings? Paving parking lots? Electricity? Adjust for plant expenditures.
Also, public schools have expenses private schools do not, for private schools cherry pick their students for aptitude, parental accomplishment and high income. Public schools have to take in the immigrants who don't speak English at home, the violent, the stupid, the mentally handicapped, the poor who can't pay the fees and who are secretly starving, and kids who have parents that are pretty close to vegetables on the high end and criminals on the low. They have to do this with buildings that are not well insulated, have ancient plumbing, crappy lighting, and teachers that are the members of the most reviled profession in the U.S., and who are expected to make a truly heterogeneous student population act like the cherry-picked suburban white kids whose parents pay 17K a year per student.
And all the criticism is used to further underfund an already depressed and misunderstood school system. But the real problem is that white, affluent people simply don't understand from their gated community perspective that in poor areas, not everyone is perfect, relatively well-adjusted, wealthy, and prepped to death for success. So we continue the death spiral, for the people making the decisions and having the true say as to where money goes are blind to reality, and spout ideology about free markets and prisons instead of simply funding the fucking schools properly.
Don't try chemistry at home. Don't browse for or shop for chemical supplies online. Don't shop for chemicals in stores. Don't talk to people about chemicals. Don't buy books about chemicals, for they are watching libraries.
Don't write online about the government. Don't blog about the policies. Don't browse politics on the web. Don't say mean things about the President, or godforbid wish he was dead, for that violates the divine person of his majesty and the crown itself, and you will go away.
Don't browse for immoral pictures, for those logs will be used against you in divorce court and job interviews. Don't even bother running for office when the GOP has access to logs of you visiting "hot russians for you!"
If you work for the government, do not inform the press that your boss is breaking the law, or is involved in a massive secret conspiracy to break the law, for the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no first amendment if you work for someone, or the King has declared that the Constitution does not apply in his Forever War.
If you are a reporter, do not critize the government, or you will not be allowed to ask questions in person. You will have your phone logs carefully monitored. So do not listen to people telling you that they have information that the government is breaking the law, for you will go to prison as a traitor to the crown. Your source will be arrested, for they are watching him too. And he will go to prison.
There are no rules in Bush's self-declared World War III, so you have no rights to a trial, speedy or otherwise, and you burn in a cage in Cuba, if the Crown so decrees. No one will be told what happened to you. If they insist on petitioning to redress their grievances, they will be denied permits to protest. If they protest anyway, they will be restricted to First Amendment Zones complete with portable fences and multiple cameras with recording gear, after first surrendering their ID cards to the masked armored soldiers.
Don't research dirty bombs, which, even tho the CIA declared the devices worthless, you as an American citizen will be declared an enemy combatant. the AG will declare you guilty and hold you for years, then mysteriously drop all the charges after a judge laughs the evidence out of court. They'll charge you with something; after all, they have complete records on what you've said and browsed for years. There's always a crime if they watch you long enough.
If you are in a militia, they won't care even if a member blows up a federal building. Free pass for the patriots.
Don't talk. Don't criticize. Don't look. This is World War Three, as Bush said three weeks ago, and the war will never end by definition as long as Evil is in the world.
Each and every thing I've said is happening now. Each and every thing I've noted has never happened in US history before now.
19 idiots with boxcutters, and now we're the Soviet Union at its worst. Grow a set of balls, you cowards. They've made you so afraid of the unnamed and unknowable brown enemy that you've given up everything that made life worth living. And it won't save you from any attacks, so why the fuck are you all letting them get away with this?
The opposite of democracy is not communism. That's a meme pumped into our heads from 50 years of war with Russia. The opposite of democracy is totalitarianism, which is pretty much what Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales have built with the help of their wonderful new Supreme Court justices.
We'd like to take a moment to thank the Democratic Party for knuckling under and refusing to fillibuster the nominees which have now shut down a citizen's right to report a crime. As Justice Steven says, there is no difference between professional and non-professional speech. What we have here is the the ability of an employer, the federal government AKA Bush, to imprison people who report crimes.
We've now broken the fourth seal of totalitarianism. We cannot discuss governmental crimes with reporters. This will go along with not being able to assemble peaceably to redress grievances, to view the actions of the goverment and past governments, and the use of the free press to ferret out news from a government. Now we cannot speak, as well as not being able to hear.
This is serious. The curtain is coming down here and all across the world.
Only morons take blows to their body, or deal them out to others, when they don't have to. Boxers stand around and get hit; they don't last long and have a lot of problems later. REAL fighters use hard tools and leverage, and resort to hand work only when necessary. And a fighter does not take blows, he gives them out. If you're taking shots to the head, you've lost, even if you make it out of the fight.
Tears in the rotator cuffs. Brain damage from sudden acceleration of the skull. Wrist damage. Bone compression. Arthritis, in the wrists, the jaw, the knees, the back, the neck. Muscle tears that never really heal. Tendons pulling out of sheaths. Damage to the stomach and intestines from gut shots. Eyesight loss. Dental damage. Broken blood vessels. Nerve damage in the striking surfaces. Cartilage damage, big time. Clicking jaws, with pain. Ear damage.
Young jackasses who never believe they will get old think they will never have to pay for their stupidity. They will, oh yes, they will. The arthritis alone will be a warm feeling to nurse for the rest of their lives. I smacked my own wrists hard, once. I can't do pushups anymore without agony, and that's forever. Keep it up, kids.
This is worse than people trying to live out comic book hero fantasies in spandex. These are numbnuts trying to emulate a movie where the hero is 1) violently insane (people forget that little part!) 2) able to take blows that would literally cripple a man and walk away laughing. Believe me, you don't.
It's true. And the point should be highlighted for the "free market" ideologues:
A "free market" is made up of more than just businessmen trying to conquer markets. It's also the customers. The needs of the customers are not the needs of the men trying to lock down markets.
It is more than fair that users should organize to keep a few operators from telling everyone what to do and what to pay for it.
Businesses are fictional individuals licensed to exist by the people as corporations. They exist for our benefit. We do not exist to service them. They are not the bosses, we are. If we don't want to play by their paid-for little rules, THEY can shut up and sit down. Free software proponents aren't the zealots here. People who give things away rarely force people to use their wares.
My favorite old line from Wynne's "A Wrinkle in Time":
"'Equal' and 'alike' are not the same thing!"
Treating people equally doesn't mean alike. That would be impossible. They are treated as equally worthy of respect, and given equal opportunity, and are equally given responisiblity for their own behavior and choices. But they aren't treated alike.
This semantic distortion has been corrupting this debate since the dawn of the civil rights struggle. Before the beginnings of a cleanup were started in the fifties, people were most certainly treated unequally. A woman was a secretary or a nurse. She was given those opportunities. A black man was a laborer, and was dumped into a crap school in the city with others of his own kind. A black woman didn't need an education. And so forth.
The powerful backpush against retifying such obvious INEQUALITIES has been using the equal/alike disinformation tactic for over fifty years. It's wrong, and it's over.
1. Simple telephonic keyboard. 2. Simple on/off. 3. Simple one-button voicemail. 4. Tiny, sharp screen. 5. USB cable port for PC for backups or phone transfers. 6. Built-in charger that folds out to plug into a wall, or 12 volt cig lighter in a car. NO EXTRA CABLES. NO BRICKS. 7. GIANT BATTERY. I don't want a cosmetic clamshell, I want a battery that lasts more than a day in use. Hell, use standard batteries available at Radio Shack or online. Enough of the precious non-standard form factors. Standard lithiums or NiMH. Why not both, my choice. AA's or AAA's. 8. The GPS tracking chip to be on a separate power circuit than the phone. I want to enable the GPS to send for help, and to have it SHUT OFF when I do not. I do not want to be remotely tracked at the will of whomever. If necessary, I'd like the ability to spoof the GPS code or block the frequency of the satelites. 9. Use the GPS intelligently. If I lose the phone (and the GPS circuit is powered), let me call it up and get the coordinates and let me plug them into google maps. I can get the location within feet, no? 9. Black is The Only Color for Gadgets. 10. I want a built-in voice scrambler with unbreakable encryption. It can be done. No doubt it will become illegal. I still want it. 11. No text. No camera. No games. No Suggested Restaurants Nearby. I want A PHONE. 12. It should cost no more than fifty bucks US, retail, and a lot less to build. All the functions can be put onto one chip, for godssakes. 13. Hm. How about using the USB cable to POWER the phone in an emergency? 14. WATERPROOF THE DAMNED THING. I'm sick of losing phones when raindrops hit the openings in the case. 15. Toughen the phones up. I'll take stainless steel, please, even if it isn't black. Titanium? I'll pay extra. Just keep it safe from dying if someone bumps it. I'm a big boy, I can carry a little weight. 16. STOP TRACKING ME. STOP GIVING MY INFORMATION TO ANYONE WHO PAYS, especially those paranoid ineffectual proto-totalitarians in the Bush administration. (Caught bin Laden? No? Doesn't seem to be doing any good then!)
1. Be born to the right parents. 2. Go to right schools. 3. Use lifeling contacts of parents and school to get swell jobs. 4. Make friends at job contacts got you, move up to management. 5. Become an executive. 6. At every stage, blame others for being limited and uneducated.
AMD has beaten Intel's offerings for, what, three years now, and STILL they can't get a break. Apple won't use them. Dell just this month tentatively offers AMD chips for their server line.
The chips are cheaper and are faster than Intel's. You couldn't tell from the press!
No matter what AMD does, the next line in this type of story is "But Intel's next CPU, expected in the year 2121, is expected to outperform AMD's best. Is AMD doomed? "
This isn't a court case in any sane sense. The Administration is quashing evidence by citing national security in every instance. Since the evidence shows the Administration is lying and breaking the law, the Administration is simply shutting off any prosecution at will. That, by the way, is a felonious use of the national security laws. The laws were not intended to hide crimes.
Since they are firstly lawbreakers, and secondly feloniously using the security hole to protect themselves, the ONLY WAY TO STOP THEM is the use of the 1st Amendment to publish evidence against them, since no court can touch them. That is why we have a 1st amendment. Otherwise, we are subject to a shadow king operating under secret laws that are treasonous to speak of.
The 2600 decision was unconstitutional on the face of it. The first amendment lets a newspaper tell citizens where a red light district is without fear of being hauled up on pandering charges. The last 25 years have seen our federal courts loaded with pro-business, defacto right wing judges who have markedly ruled against the consumer and for more invasive corporate power.
Google shouldn't have to filter a damned thing.
Software to crack your own property is morally proper, no matter what laws the rich bastards have purchased. The "license to use, but you don't own this disk or the software" idea is manure. You buy it, you own it. That's how physical transactions work. An author of a book doesn't get to tell you how to read, store, or dispose of the book after you purchase it. Well, right now he can't. Wait a couple of years.
This is how people lose faith in the law. Make enough stupid, vicious laws to make powerful people happy, and soon no one respects the law, since they KNOW it's a scam to make powerful wealthy people happy.
I'm starting to see the end of the internet as we've known it. It's turning into corporate-controlled 21st century TV, complete with vice squads and corporate private cops busting people.
Time to start building encrypted darknet transmission systems, kids. The dark times are starting.
The gangsters at the RIAA are suing people to develop new revenue streams so that their organization, their industry, will survive the death of music CD's. They've the majority of the iTunes revenues; now they want satelite radio, digital local radio and any other mode that pops up to pay up until the end of time. I mean, this is great for them. All the new media players have built in meters. It's like selling electricity, but at whatever price you like, and you don't have any costs.
Artists are already being screwed by the labels for tech switchover costs, stamping costs, to the point where the successful artists are making 4 cents a song sold on iTunes (source: NPR, artist breaking down royalty). That's for old, already-paid for work. The new artists are probably going to get less, as they are still lent the money to pay for studio time, publicity, marketing, and stamping the MP3s, in advance of any sales. As usual, most artists will wind up owing money to the labels, even if the MP3 is successful.
I stopped buying CD's in 1999, when they nuked Napster. Like cockroaches, they will survive the boycott of their products by stealing something else.
There is a magic word to invoke when confronted with a tyrant.
The word is "no".
No to E911 involuntary tracking. No to private companies correlating databases and then passing the information to the government. No to electronic voting. No to private campaign financing. No to the "unitary executive" model of government. No to torture. No to grinding up our soldiers and foreign citizens in a needless invasion and occupation. No to tracking our communications. No to consolidation of our news media. No, no no no NO.
Repeat as often as necessary. You may become dead somewhere along the process, but die with the magic word on your lips.
You know, being based on ideas rather than holy inspiration, the Soviet government was subject to refutation and removal based on logic. Religiously based government, such as ours, are almost untouchable by logic. At least the atheistic Soviets could change.
How do you refute God's government on Earth? Bush has stated multiple times that he is doing God's work. He's ideologically bulletproof. His followers believe in his ascendancy to the stewardship of God's favorite nation, destined to lead us to the Rapture and the Final Days. This ain't no joke.
They can be removed for cause. No officeholder is untouchable. A senile judge may not choose to step down, for instance. How -- I would guess the Congress would have to impeach and remove the justice.
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I know this will not be a welcome thought, but not everyone needs to learn math. People really, really don't need calculus unless they become engineers. A lot of time is wasted in high school learning things that don't impact on anything you will do in your life. I'd suggest more civics and semantics; all the algebra in the world won't defend you against semantic assault. A great deal of the idiocy the U.S. is descending into is caused by manipulation of language by people who are much better at it than the people getting conned. We need to teach people the history of civilization. What frightens me is not the inability to do math, but the inability to remember something that happened ten years ago, even, and integrate it into current events. And the lack of understanding of the basics of civil rights and the constitution have made things like the Patriot Act and the surveillance of our communications a boring topic for most, because they don't have a clue why people are upset.
The original model let the keyboard fold into the back of the screen, turning it into a tablet computer. That was as perfect a ebook as you could want. Now the thing works like a normal laptop. Oh well.
Now, let's see a ten dollar cell phone powered by solar cells.
Real estate market is fueled by the tax cuts at the upper brackets. 40 percent of the home sales last year was for second homes. The wealthy are pouring their lovely new tax cuts into property, driving up the prices and making it seem like a bull market.
After the Bush party, there will come tax increases to at least pre-Bush levels to try to stop the debt hemmorage. The real estate market will be drained of all that lovely tax cut moola, and will crash like like its 1929. This is not the time to buy a house. And the prices are too high in any case. People can't afford this.
(Senor Commander Taco, why is the single quote key bringing up a search box? Id like to type one, please.)
Society wouldn't "implode". You're implying a lower birthrate means a society disappears, which is mathematically silly. A lower birthrate means the population shrinks for a few generations, then stablizes with lower numbers, which is a GOOD THING. We've too many people on the planet, eating up too many resources, killing too much life, producing killer pollution.
We don't have to "keep up" our population levels. And we certainly don't need to import the suicidally growing populations in other areas. They are in trouble because they have overgrown their resources, and moving them to new areas to repeat the process is madness.
The countries with reduced population will be winners, and the cancerously growing populations of doomed countries will self-destruct in the usual Malthusian manner: war, famine, disease and death. The causes of the horsemen are not political in the truest sense; population pressure is always the root cause.
Nothing, no organism, can grow ceaselessly. At some point, it poisons the environment with its own effluent and kills off both room to live and the food supply. Humans who maintain a steady state population, intelligently, will have resources to live and to educate, while those who do not will inevitably collapse into warfare, disease, ignorance and (usually religious) totalitarianism through sheer desperation. They will be the danger to to the planet, already warming and drying under the strain of a population doubling every two generations.
If you want to talk "Darwinian" natural selection, then remember that a population that survives by equllibrium will last, while populations that survive by overgrowing their territory and violently (metaphorically and literally) moving into more stable neighbors without learning from their mistakes will prosper for only a short time, then repeat the cycle until there are no more places to go. They win for a short time, and look successful, but ultimately kill off themselves and the people they overrun.
Nothing can grow forever. At the current rate of growth, in less than four thousand years the mass of humanity exceeds the mass of the planet. We exceed the mass of the entire universe in something less than eight thousand years. Considering humanity has been in its present form for the last one hundred thousand years, that's a reachable goal. Obviously we can't do that. Sometime in the next hundred years we reach crisis, even before we hit physical limits, with political breakdown.
In light of all this, worrying about keeping up with, say, the Indian subcontinent population-growth-wise is pretty silly.
Sorry. Claiming the law doesn't apply to you doesn't make breaking the law techically legal. It didn't work for Nixon. Cheney worked for Nixon, and he still believes that the law is what the President says it is. He was wrong then and he is wrong now. Thing is, they have Gonzales as AG, and he wrote the book on the Royal Presidency.
It's not that it's legal. It's just that they've installed their own sheriff. Who apparently asked Sweden to raid PirateBay. Isn't it great how everything's connected?
Yup. The anti-terrorist squads, which we are always assured are to defend us against attackers who don't respect civilization, have once again had their mission redefined by a man on horseback. We feel so SAFE when the cops are wearing masks to defend our freedoms.
Yes, police investigating themselves are addicted to the truth. And their comrades never lie.
"IANAL, but United States law has a provision that states you are "innocent until proven guilty".
There is an amendment: "Unless you look a bit dark, enjoy towels as a fashion accessory or take pictures in public or have been abroad in which case you can be locked up indefinitely just in case you met an evildoer and became tainted""
It's good to be a member of an Red State armed militia preparing for the overthrow of the United States with assault weapons. Even if one of your members blows up a federal building, never will a single white, patriotic would-be government overthrower who associated with McVeigh see the inside of a jail cell. Or the cages in Cuba, which are of course reserved for towelheads. Only those who hate Jesus can be terarists.
"Indeed. The *average* educational expendeture per student in the US is currently above $10,000 per year."
You realize that includes heating oil and maintenance of very old buildings? Paving parking lots? Electricity? Adjust for plant expenditures.
Also, public schools have expenses private schools do not, for private schools cherry pick their students for aptitude, parental accomplishment and high income. Public schools have to take in the immigrants who don't speak English at home, the violent, the stupid, the mentally handicapped, the poor who can't pay the fees and who are secretly starving, and kids who have parents that are pretty close to vegetables on the high end and criminals on the low. They have to do this with buildings that are not well insulated, have ancient plumbing, crappy lighting, and teachers that are the members of the most reviled profession in the U.S., and who are expected to make a truly heterogeneous student population act like the cherry-picked suburban white kids whose parents pay 17K a year per student.
And all the criticism is used to further underfund an already depressed and misunderstood school system. But the real problem is that white, affluent people simply don't understand from their gated community perspective that in poor areas, not everyone is perfect, relatively well-adjusted, wealthy, and prepped to death for success. So we continue the death spiral, for the people making the decisions and having the true say as to where money goes are blind to reality, and spout ideology about free markets and prisons instead of simply funding the fucking schools properly.
Don't try chemistry at home. Don't browse for or shop for chemical supplies online. Don't shop for chemicals in stores. Don't talk to people about chemicals. Don't buy books about chemicals, for they are watching libraries.
Don't write online about the government. Don't blog about the policies. Don't browse politics on the web. Don't say mean things about the President, or godforbid wish he was dead, for that violates the divine person of his majesty and the crown itself, and you will go away.
Don't browse for immoral pictures, for those logs will be used against you in divorce court and job interviews. Don't even bother running for office when the GOP has access to logs of you visiting "hot russians for you!"
If you work for the government, do not inform the press that your boss is breaking the law, or is involved in a massive secret conspiracy to break the law, for the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no first amendment if you work for someone, or the King has declared that the Constitution does not apply in his Forever War.
If you are a reporter, do not critize the government, or you will not be allowed to ask questions in person. You will have your phone logs carefully monitored. So do not listen to people telling you that they have information that the government is breaking the law, for you will go to prison as a traitor to the crown. Your source will be arrested, for they are watching him too. And he will go to prison.
There are no rules in Bush's self-declared World War III, so you have no rights to a trial, speedy or otherwise, and you burn in a cage in Cuba, if the Crown so decrees. No one will be told what happened to you. If they insist on petitioning to redress their grievances, they will be denied permits to protest. If they protest anyway, they will be restricted to First Amendment Zones complete with portable fences and multiple cameras with recording gear, after first surrendering their ID cards to the masked armored soldiers.
Don't research dirty bombs, which, even tho the CIA declared the devices worthless, you as an American citizen will be declared an enemy combatant. the AG will declare you guilty and hold you for years, then mysteriously drop all the charges after a judge laughs the evidence out of court. They'll charge you with something; after all, they have complete records on what you've said and browsed for years. There's always a crime if they watch you long enough.
If you are in a militia, they won't care even if a member blows up a federal building. Free pass for the patriots.
Don't talk. Don't criticize. Don't look. This is World War Three, as Bush said three weeks ago, and the war will never end by definition as long as Evil is in the world.
Each and every thing I've said is happening now. Each and every thing I've noted has never happened in US history before now.
19 idiots with boxcutters, and now we're the Soviet Union at its worst. Grow a set of balls, you cowards. They've made you so afraid of the unnamed and unknowable brown enemy that you've given up everything that made life worth living. And it won't save you from any attacks, so why the fuck are you all letting them get away with this?
Big torpedo.
"We were informed there were insurgents on that platform."
The opposite of democracy is not communism. That's a meme pumped into our heads from 50 years of war with Russia. The opposite of democracy is totalitarianism, which is pretty much what Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales have built with the help of their wonderful new Supreme Court justices.
We'd like to take a moment to thank the Democratic Party for knuckling under and refusing to fillibuster the nominees which have now shut down a citizen's right to report a crime. As Justice Steven says, there is no difference between professional and non-professional speech. What we have here is the the ability of an employer, the federal government AKA Bush, to imprison people who report crimes.
We've now broken the fourth seal of totalitarianism. We cannot discuss governmental crimes with reporters. This will go along with not being able to assemble peaceably to redress grievances, to view the actions of the goverment and past governments, and the use of the free press to ferret out news from a government. Now we cannot speak, as well as not being able to hear.
This is serious. The curtain is coming down here and all across the world.
Only morons take blows to their body, or deal them out to others, when they don't have to. Boxers stand around and get hit; they don't last long and have a lot of problems later. REAL fighters use hard tools and leverage, and resort to hand work only when necessary. And a fighter does not take blows, he gives them out. If you're taking shots to the head, you've lost, even if you make it out of the fight.
Tears in the rotator cuffs. Brain damage from sudden acceleration of the skull. Wrist damage. Bone compression. Arthritis, in the wrists, the jaw, the knees, the back, the neck. Muscle tears that never really heal. Tendons pulling out of sheaths. Damage to the stomach and intestines from gut shots. Eyesight loss. Dental damage. Broken blood vessels. Nerve damage in the striking surfaces. Cartilage damage, big time. Clicking jaws, with pain. Ear damage.
Young jackasses who never believe they will get old think they will never have to pay for their stupidity. They will, oh yes, they will. The arthritis alone will be a warm feeling to nurse for the rest of their lives. I smacked my own wrists hard, once. I can't do pushups anymore without agony, and that's forever. Keep it up, kids.
This is worse than people trying to live out comic book hero fantasies in spandex. These are numbnuts trying to emulate a movie where the hero is 1) violently insane (people forget that little part!) 2) able to take blows that would literally cripple a man and walk away laughing. Believe me, you don't.
It's true. And the point should be highlighted for the "free market" ideologues:
A "free market" is made up of more than just businessmen trying to conquer markets. It's also the customers. The needs of the customers are not the needs of the men trying to lock down markets.
It is more than fair that users should organize to keep a few operators from telling everyone what to do and what to pay for it.
Businesses are fictional individuals licensed to exist by the people as corporations. They exist for our benefit. We do not exist to service them. They are not the bosses, we are. If we don't want to play by their paid-for little rules, THEY can shut up and sit down. Free software proponents aren't the zealots here. People who give things away rarely force people to use their wares.
My favorite old line from Wynne's "A Wrinkle in Time":
"'Equal' and 'alike' are not the same thing!"
Treating people equally doesn't mean alike. That would be impossible. They are treated as equally worthy of respect, and given equal opportunity, and are equally given responisiblity for their own behavior and choices. But they aren't treated alike.
This semantic distortion has been corrupting this debate since the dawn of the civil rights struggle. Before the beginnings of a cleanup were started in the fifties, people were most certainly treated unequally. A woman was a secretary or a nurse. She was given those opportunities. A black man was a laborer, and was dumped into a crap school in the city with others of his own kind. A black woman didn't need an education. And so forth.
The powerful backpush against retifying such obvious INEQUALITIES has been using the equal/alike disinformation tactic for over fifty years. It's wrong, and it's over.
just jumping in with my wish list.
1. Simple telephonic keyboard.
2. Simple on/off.
3. Simple one-button voicemail.
4. Tiny, sharp screen.
5. USB cable port for PC for backups or phone transfers.
6. Built-in charger that folds out to plug into a wall, or 12 volt cig lighter in a car. NO EXTRA CABLES. NO BRICKS.
7. GIANT BATTERY. I don't want a cosmetic clamshell, I want a battery that lasts more than a day in use.
Hell, use standard batteries available at Radio Shack or online. Enough of the precious non-standard form factors. Standard lithiums or NiMH. Why not both, my choice. AA's or AAA's.
8. The GPS tracking chip to be on a separate power circuit than the phone. I want to enable the GPS to send for help, and to have it SHUT OFF when I do not. I do not want to be remotely tracked at the will of whomever. If necessary, I'd like the ability to spoof the GPS code or block the frequency of the satelites.
9. Use the GPS intelligently. If I lose the phone (and the GPS circuit is powered), let me call it up and get the coordinates and let me plug them into google maps. I can get the location within feet, no?
9. Black is The Only Color for Gadgets.
10. I want a built-in voice scrambler with unbreakable encryption. It can be done. No doubt it will become illegal. I still want it.
11. No text. No camera. No games. No Suggested Restaurants Nearby. I want A PHONE.
12. It should cost no more than fifty bucks US, retail, and a lot less to build. All the functions can be put onto one chip, for godssakes.
13. Hm. How about using the USB cable to POWER the phone in an emergency?
14. WATERPROOF THE DAMNED THING. I'm sick of losing phones when raindrops hit the openings in the case.
15. Toughen the phones up. I'll take stainless steel, please, even if it isn't black. Titanium? I'll pay extra. Just keep it safe from dying if someone bumps it. I'm a big boy, I can carry a little weight.
16. STOP TRACKING ME. STOP GIVING MY INFORMATION TO ANYONE WHO PAYS, especially those paranoid ineffectual proto-totalitarians in the Bush administration. (Caught bin Laden? No? Doesn't seem to be doing any good then!)
1. Be born to the right parents.
2. Go to right schools.
3. Use lifeling contacts of parents and school to get swell jobs.
4. Make friends at job contacts got you, move up to management.
5. Become an executive.
6. At every stage, blame others for being limited and uneducated.
AMD has beaten Intel's offerings for, what, three years now, and STILL they can't get a break. Apple won't use them. Dell just this month tentatively offers AMD chips for their server line.
The chips are cheaper and are faster than Intel's. You couldn't tell from the press!
No matter what AMD does, the next line in this type of story is "But Intel's next CPU, expected in the year 2121, is expected to outperform AMD's best. Is AMD doomed? "
This isn't a court case in any sane sense. The Administration is quashing evidence by citing national security in every instance. Since the evidence shows the Administration is lying and breaking the law, the Administration is simply shutting off any prosecution at will. That, by the way, is a felonious use of the national security laws. The laws were not intended to hide crimes.
Since they are firstly lawbreakers, and secondly feloniously using the security hole to protect themselves, the ONLY WAY TO STOP THEM is the use of the 1st Amendment to publish evidence against them, since no court can touch them. That is why we have a 1st amendment. Otherwise, we are subject to a shadow king operating under secret laws that are treasonous to speak of.
I don't recall electing a king.
The 2600 decision was unconstitutional on the face of it. The first amendment lets a newspaper tell citizens where a red light district is without fear of being hauled up on pandering charges. The last 25 years have seen our federal courts loaded with pro-business, defacto right wing judges who have markedly ruled against the consumer and for more invasive corporate power.
Google shouldn't have to filter a damned thing.
Software to crack your own property is morally proper, no matter what laws the rich bastards have purchased. The "license to use, but you don't own this disk or the software" idea is manure. You buy it, you own it. That's how physical transactions work. An author of a book doesn't get to tell you how to read, store, or dispose of the book after you purchase it. Well, right now he can't. Wait a couple of years.
This is how people lose faith in the law. Make enough stupid, vicious laws to make powerful people happy, and soon no one respects the law, since they KNOW it's a scam to make powerful wealthy people happy.
I'm starting to see the end of the internet as we've known it. It's turning into corporate-controlled 21st century TV, complete with vice squads and corporate private cops busting people.
Time to start building encrypted darknet transmission systems, kids. The dark times are starting.
The gangsters at the RIAA are suing people to develop new revenue streams so that their organization, their industry, will survive the death of music CD's. They've the majority of the iTunes revenues; now they want satelite radio, digital local radio and any other mode that pops up to pay up until the end of time. I mean, this is great for them. All the new media players have built in meters. It's like selling electricity, but at whatever price you like, and you don't have any costs.
Artists are already being screwed by the labels for tech switchover costs, stamping costs, to the point where the successful artists are making 4 cents a song sold on iTunes (source: NPR, artist breaking down royalty). That's for old, already-paid for work. The new artists are probably going to get less, as they are still lent the money to pay for studio time, publicity, marketing, and stamping the MP3s, in advance of any sales. As usual, most artists will wind up owing money to the labels, even if the MP3 is successful.
I stopped buying CD's in 1999, when they nuked Napster. Like cockroaches, they will survive the boycott of their products by stealing something else.
"Bush would change the color of the "Terror Threat Alert" whenever he was down in the polls, and other nasty stuff."
...crickets chirping...
For all of you on the fence about Bush's committment to defeating those terorists:
What happened to all those terror alerts once the 2004 election was over?
There is a magic word to invoke when confronted with a tyrant.
The word is "no".
No to E911 involuntary tracking. No to private companies correlating databases and then passing the information to the government. No to electronic voting. No to private campaign financing. No to the "unitary executive" model of government. No to torture. No to grinding up our soldiers and foreign citizens in a needless invasion and occupation. No to tracking our communications. No to consolidation of our news media. No, no no no NO.
Repeat as often as necessary. You may become dead somewhere along the process, but die with the magic word on your lips.
You know, being based on ideas rather than holy inspiration, the Soviet government was subject to refutation and removal based on logic. Religiously based government, such as ours, are almost untouchable by logic. At least the atheistic Soviets could change.
How do you refute God's government on Earth? Bush has stated multiple times that he is doing God's work. He's ideologically bulletproof. His followers believe in his ascendancy to the stewardship of God's favorite nation, destined to lead us to the Rapture and the Final Days. This ain't no joke.
They can be removed for cause. No officeholder is untouchable. A senile judge may not choose to step down, for instance. How -- I would guess the Congress would have to impeach and remove the justice.