The problem with the anticipation of bandwidth growth is that the content providers are the same people who own the bloody pipes! They have a vested interest in keeping upload speeds tinier than a shrew's unit in ice water.
Fiber optic pipes have more than enough capacity to deal with, say, 4K scanned movies sizes. They could move hundreds of gigabits per second around a network, no problem.
But we aren't ever going to get those pipes. It would wreck the cable and movie industries plans to control access to content. Hell, if some entrepeneur actually built the ultra-high speed network, the various media parties would buy laws to mandate content monitors. Or they'd tax it to death. Or declare it somehow aids terrorism. Americans will swallow anything, and the rest of the world has to dance to our tune for now.
If there is a market for it, and I think there is, the screens will improve and the bandwidth will be more effeciently utilized for full framerate video. Also, the memory capacity of the phone could be jacked higher, or a hard drive incorporated into the design, thus enabling video downloading on the go.
Gotta agree, 1 fps is pretty useless. GIF's with an attitude.
What's stopping us from routing our cable TV feed into our PC? We could use a high-bandwidth connection via a cell phone with a good video screen to log into our own personal TV server and watch anything we care to: streaming live TV, DVD's, MP4 video, video phones, webcams... why does everything worthwhile require us to pay through the nose? This tech is nearly free. If the cell companies weren't in the content selling business, they would't restrict what we can do with the phones so tightly. As I used to say back in the ZD PCmag.com forum days, pipe owners shouldn't be selling water. Choose one or the other. Otherwise, you get situations like this, in which the communications company has a heavy interest in monitoring what you do with your connection.
People: does anyone really, REALLY believe that a senator of the United States couldn't get Homeland Security to listen to him?
Kennedy is Enemy Number One with conservatives, and believe me, Homeland (Fatherland? GOD!) Security's political employees are damn near 100 poicent Bush supporters. Remember, HS has no civil service protection -- it's a patronage army.
Come on, you really think Kennedy's pleas were ignored in the normal course of business? "Conspiracy theory" my tired skinny ass, the honchos who now control our access to air travel are screwing with Bush's political enemies. Kennedy isn't the first one to find himself on the list. And the list is secret, you can't appeal, and no one cares anyway. It's the work of a second for a political shark to tap in a partial string into the database to mess up your life.
I am nothing if not real. The 50K man base will be armored, armed, and permanent. It is our control base in the Middle East. And it will be the symbol of the occupation once it is finished: I for one will never visit the place.
It is colonization. We are building a 50,000 man embassy/military command/oil control center, and we are not leaving. Our army is not leaving. We are in control of their media, ultimately. We are in control of their government. We have ownered their oil fields, and divvied them up amongst our energy corporations. When Bremmer left, he signed executive orders that effectively gave away the internal economy to foreigners (privatization), amongst many, many other seizures of power.
Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded, according to their own thinktank, the Project for A New American Century, because:
We needed to control that oil to control he emerging Asian economies, whicgh absolutely need the oil to grow.
We needed to defend Israel's interests in the region.
We needed to create a model democracy to instigate a classic domino theory collapse of theocratic regimes.
We need to show the world that We Are In Charge, and they could shove it, or as Cheney would say, Go Fuck Yourselves.
The civilian military theorists, led by Rumsfeld, wanted to demonstrate that the military brass didn't know how to run a war; that all we needed were small mobile forces and smart bombs, not the massive numbers of troops the military professionals said we would need.
Perle and Wolfowitz wanted to demonstrate that the CIA et al were underestimating the size of the Enemy, much like they insisted the CIA had done during the entire cold war. Those two had created a special intelligence division during Reagan's admin which processed what they thought were "real" intel, run by them: they did the same thing during the Iraq runup. They were dead effing wrong both times. The USSR was a wreck and Iraq was a basket case: the men are unapologetically wrong about everything they babble about in the ears of their presidents.
The Iraqis are not idiots, and they know a colonizing force when they see one shooting at them. They hear about Bush claiming to be the Will of God in speech after speech, and they know that they are in a religious war, by their standards AND Bush's. Americans don't read, so they don't know about the PNAC and Bush's claim to messianic knowledge.
I really,REALLY doubt that anyone anti-Republican with an operational brain cell left would pull such a useless, inflamatory stunt such as this.
It makes the 'pubs look like victims, and gives juice to the 'wingers and other "security" crazies in vogue, juice that will inevitably be used to set up a police state presence on the internet.
It reminds me vividly of the few "anarchists" at the WTO protests in Seattle a few years back. A few dozen really violent bastards ran out from nowhere and trashed the city, of the thousands of peaceful people assembled. The news networks ran the pictures incessantly, and the American public were convinced that protests were not worth the free assembly rights we used to have. Now you need to get a permit, and IF you get that, you are herded past a gauntlet of shoulder-to shoulder armored and overarmed black monsters, into a small enclosure surrounded by barbed wire, with cameras trained onto your face, in some remote hellhole. You may be arrested at will. As recent reports indicate, the FBI is now visiting people's homes on the premise that they MIGHT someday protest, leaving the message that They Are Being Watched.
Throwing out the obvious thought: the "anarchists" at the WTO protest were agents provocateurs, and the government security apparatchiks have used that "riot" to institute the present police state in the U.S. and Europe.
And I am thinking that these "protestors" against the Republican web sites are about as authentic as the "anarchist rioters" in Seattle.
Wait for it people: this DOS attack against the 'pubs will be used as publicity fodder to create a new internet police force. If it doesn't work this time, a few "anarchist" attacks in the future should convince the public that such a force is needed.
And the FBI/CIA/HS police will be asking for your papers when you criticize someone in power. Count on it.
The contents of the records were no one's business, being about his personal life. we need more of that. Being a public servant doesn't make your life a video game.
Bush never has 'fessed up about the dissertion during wartime, drug use, or his own arrest record. And no one talks about his high moral ground.
"The digital stuff is a whole different ball game."
That assertion is the heart of the matter. But, it is only an assertion. WHY is it a whole new ball game? If analog tape tech had progressed to the point that perfect copies were possible, I would give good odds that the assertion would not be made. The courts had decided that tapes were legal, and people were familiar with the right to make a copy.
The assertion is based soley on the premise that digital copies are perfectly reproducible, and therefore a greater threat than lossy tape. I call that premise specious: few people made so many generational copies of a tape that the loss of quality became onerous. The taped audio was adequate.
The assertion of a difference between digital and analog copying is an artificial one designed to reopen the debate about copying we had thought dead as canasta twenty years ago. And it has been a successful one, but not on the merits. Twenty years ago, politicians didn't require the vast amounts of cash they must use today to get elected and stay that way, and twenty years ago the lobbyists were nowhere near as professional and formidable as they are now.
I deny their assertion, so the only argument they have left is this: support us, or we come after you and rip you from office. It's an effective one. L. Ron would be proud.
Another "truth" that will not die, like Al Gore saying he invented the internet.
Dean was screaming to be heard above the noise of the crowd. Unfortunately, the microphone he was screaming into had a filter for ambient noise. It was impossible to hear anyone else but Dean.
When the sound of the crowd was mixed back into the recording, recreating what actually could be heard, Dean was barely audible.
It would have been the work of minutes for any network reporter to get the correctly mixed version of the audio. But they didn't. Only Diane Sawyer ever apologized for the lynching after she heard the corrected track.
It was too much fun for the networks, the rightwing cable pundits, the network executives threatened by Dean's pledge to break up their growing empires, the late night comedians- even John Stewart: come on, John you're smarter than this! - to slaughter Dean, whom the majority of the pundits disliked because he said things that caused massive cognitive dissonance in their unbelieveably uninformed minds.
Now we've Kerry, who won't even condemn Bush's straight-out lying about WMD's. Dean had the balls to tell the truth. Now he's been Gored, reduced to a joke because reporters simply would not be bothered to find out about filtering mics. Immense momentum killed by laziness and a willingness to kill the messenger.
The same amount of heat is transfered to your airspace, fan or no fan. The heat on a Hush box is moved via conduction and radiation, rather than via a fan. But the effect on the room temperature is the same.
Some things cannot be contracted away. The classic example is the right not to be owned, ie be a slave.
This has not been strictly enforced over the years. For instance, Scientology's "Sea Org" (the navy/management/lifers) requires their services for this life and I believe a billion years of subsequent lives. I don't know how this contract'd be enforced, tho.
I am getting a little more frightened about the rightward ho-ing of the judiciary. Being pro-business is one thing, but letting them own our thoughts?
What happens when, sometime in the next 100 years, it will be technologically possible to monitor human thoughts? Will we be scanned at work to see if we are thinking anything worth owning? This is not reducing the concept to its absurd conclusion. I'm serious here.
The right to be secure in our person and possessions should be extended to add security from intrusion of our own damned heads! Screw property rights. Our minds are the only thing they can't own - today - but brick by brick they are prepping a truly unbreakable prison.
This message brought to you courtesy of the Republican National Committee Meme Repetition Project. Waffle Waffle Waffle, remember Kerry Waffles! This message also brought to you because we can't think of anything to else nail this guy with. Waitaminit! He wore a blue clean suit at NASA! BluesuitBluesuitBluesuitBluesuitisn'theinsa ne?Blue Suit WAFFLE Bluesuit Waffle WAAAFFFFLLEEEEE westillgotnothingherewe'resoscrewed...
The western and southern states, the rural ones that hate welfare and federal handouts?
For decades, they've been taking in more federal money than they pay into the Federal kitty. Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, name a Red state, mostly. Contrariwise, the urban states, like California, the Northeast, Illinois, Ohio, the older states that eat up the handouts in the eyes of the Red states: they've been receiving far less back from the Federal pile than they've been paying in. In other words, the most conservative, we-pay-our-own-way-no-welfare-queens-please states have been on a massive welfare program since the fifties that dwarfs anything the poor or other people who got "handouts" received. They who complain most about the largesse the receipients of the Federal dole get are it's biggest consumers.
AND: the king of all handouts? Try the federal debt.
When Bush cut the taxes mostly for the wealthy, those trillions were borrowed, essentially from the wealthy of the world. About 12-18% of the federal budget simply pays the interest on the debt already accumulated; strangling the tax base siply increases the debt AND THE INTEREST paid on that debt.
We're talking tens of trillions over a period of decades going to national and international investors. It's the biggest wealth transfer in history. The biggest handout, dwarfing anything we spend on individual handouts for the poor. And how does that debt keep getting bigger? Try massive tax breaks for corporate entities. The biggest get money BACK from the Feds every year. And the money borrowed to pay them goes into the debt, which increases interest payments, which goes back in financial instruments to the very corporations who don't pay taxes in the first place...
The handouts are there all right, but they're all going UP the ladder, not down. This is Bush's real power base: those who are raking in the illimitable cash from his "policies" and using the moolah to buy even more property and power.
Printing a copy of vote for your own records is useless. The printer can print a "yes" while tallying a "no" vote. You've no idea how the tally is being aggregated at any level.
To make an electronic tally work:
1. You vote by touching the screen. 2. A ballot is printed out. You visually confirm that the ballot matches what you chose. 3. You put the ballot into a box. 4. EVERY BALLOT IS KEPT. The option is not up to the voter. 5. If a recount is called for, the sealed paper ballots are retreived from their storage and MANUALLY counted. The tallies from the manual -NOT ELECTRONIC- recount of the paper ballots should match the electronic vote total EXACTLY. If they do not, machine error or outright cheating occurred.
The preceding is the only way you can trust an electronic balloting system. Printed receipts for the voter, or aggregate totals made at the docking stations, don't mean squat. The vote on paper ballots should match the electronic tally. This way you get all the benefits of the electronic tally system with the auditability of the manual.
I once posted an analysis of the time required to recount all ballots nationally. It takes less than a day. Canada gets it done in hours. I see no reason to have an electronic system; it's expensive, designed for cheating, and gives you no real benefits RE recounts other than eliminating them.
It's interesting how hard the voting machine companies are fighting the paper ballot audit trail. Since they lose no money by adding the printer, being totally reimbursed + massive profit, they seem fixated on eliminating the audit capability. As blackboxvoting.com(.org?) shows, the systems are practically designed for cheating; the only explanation for their stonewalling or suggesting inferior paper receipt audits is that they simply know the jig will be up if someone opens up that black box.
Bigelow has not only buried the hatchet with the space agency, he finds himself in partnership with NASA. Bigelow Aerospace has signed three "Space Act Agreements" with NASA. These agreements provide for an ongoing exchange of personnel and technology, the joint testing of Bigelow projects at NASA facilities, and the transfer of NASA patents to Bigelow.
Wa-wa-wa-waaaiiiit a minute here! The entrepreneur is getting a bucket of state-developed patents for free? We paid for that set of patents! How does this guy get them assigned to him? How does he warrant this gift? Is this what "privatization" means? NASA gets whipped by privateers, knuckles under, and assigns ownership of public patents to a private agency? This is capitalism in action? If true, this is buggery!
If NASA wants to release the patents, fine. Assign them to the public domain, or however one phrases it. But you don't give them away under a "privatization" pretense to a lone individual, no matter how much he wants to open up space. We paid for that development. And Bigelow is a hypocrite.
As for all that government waste that NASA was being hounded for, by Bigelow as well as all the others: that contract bloat WAS CREATED BY PRIVATE COMPANIES, not the government. If one wants to blame someone for thievery, blame Boeing, Ratheon, and all the others over the years.
Um, they are both documentaries, and Moore has stated this.
So what if it is or isn't?
The only reason this "difference" is being flogged by the radicals is that it creates a patina, an aura, of "lying" by Moore. It's misdirection, in the same manner that Moore illustrated in the movie itself. Don't look at the elephant on the bed! Look at the dictionary! It's not an elephant by definition! It's a pachyderm!
Level-headedness shouldn't make you stupid. The facts in the movie are checked out. They are solid. What he documents happening, happened.
There is a difference between what O'Really and the radical right wing talkers do and what Moore does. Both are propagandists. The Right pretends to be fair, Moore does not. The Right has constant access to the airwaves, Moore does not. Bush and company lies, constantly, incontravertibly. Moore does not.
Moore is one man, and the radicals are legion. They are not equivalent.
I challenge you to find that statement in the movie. Mike implies BUSH/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rice are evil. And shows why. You imply that the King is the country, and hatred of the crown is hatred of the people.
Somehow I don't think you would believe criticism of Clinton would be hatred of America. QED.
2. Capitalism is evil
Once again, people are evil. Capitalism enables them to be all the evil they can be, in this war situation. And Mike shows us how evil.
3. Greed exists
????
4. Americans are stupid
You are just putting the chin out there to get whacked, aren't ya?
Okay: let it "phone home" to it's masters like the X-Box does. A naughty box that has been modded doesn't get to play DVDs. It also narcs on you to the video cops.
Hook up the MPAA with laws making it a mandatory ten year federal prison sentence if you mod the signed player.
Instead of selling the usual generic DVD from a stack of identical factory-made disks, change the method thusly: you buy a movie online or in a store. It is burned for you, with your credit card and Homeland Security database keys imbedded in the video. It only plays on your signed MPAA-approved player.
Then, make it illegal to import unsigned players.
Then, make it illegal to sell them.
Then, make it illegal to make them.
Finally, make it illegal to own an unsigned player.
Bush sat there for almost nine minutes after the second jet hit. Leaving aside the questions as to why he entered the classroom after the first jet hit, he is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services of the United States of America, and he had been informed that the U.S. was now under attack. Word for word, he was told that.
AND HE SAT THERE FOR NINE MINUTES.
His was the only authority that could order airliners shot down. He sat there. He could have gotten up off his ass to find out what was happening. He sat there.
Even if his reaction was natural for a not bright human, he was the CIC and he was derelict in his duty. As a result, the Pentagon was hit.
If he is not capable of being CIC, he should be removed. My God.
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The problem with the anticipation of bandwidth growth is that the content providers are the same people who own the bloody pipes! They have a vested interest in keeping upload speeds tinier than a shrew's unit in ice water.
Fiber optic pipes have more than enough capacity to deal with, say, 4K scanned movies sizes. They could move hundreds of gigabits per second around a network, no problem.
But we aren't ever going to get those pipes. It would wreck the cable and movie industries plans to control access to content. Hell, if some entrepeneur actually built the ultra-high speed network, the various media parties would buy laws to mandate content monitors. Or they'd tax it to death. Or declare it somehow aids terrorism. Americans will swallow anything, and the rest of the world has to dance to our tune for now.
In the name of The Great Bird, go thou and buy this month's Maxim magazine (US version). Thy wishes are fulfilled. Jolene wants us to take a peek.
"But, with all of the terrorist threats lately, bringing passport documents into the digital world is sure to increase security"
WHY? What does a passport have to do with terrorist threats? Is everyone bloody unhinged?
If there is a market for it, and I think there is, the screens will improve and the bandwidth will be more effeciently utilized for full framerate video. Also, the memory capacity of the phone could be jacked higher, or a hard drive incorporated into the design, thus enabling video downloading on the go.
Gotta agree, 1 fps is pretty useless. GIF's with an attitude.
What's stopping us from routing our cable TV feed into our PC? We could use a high-bandwidth connection via a cell phone with a good video screen to log into our own personal TV server and watch anything we care to: streaming live TV, DVD's, MP4 video, video phones, webcams... why does everything worthwhile require us to pay through the nose? This tech is nearly free. If the cell companies weren't in the content selling business, they would't restrict what we can do with the phones so tightly. As I used to say back in the ZD PCmag.com forum days, pipe owners shouldn't be selling water. Choose one or the other. Otherwise, you get situations like this, in which the communications company has a heavy interest in monitoring what you do with your connection.
People: does anyone really, REALLY believe that a senator of the United States couldn't get Homeland Security to listen to him?
Kennedy is Enemy Number One with conservatives, and believe me, Homeland (Fatherland? GOD!) Security's political employees are damn near 100 poicent Bush supporters. Remember, HS has no civil service protection -- it's a patronage army.
Come on, you really think Kennedy's pleas were ignored in the normal course of business? "Conspiracy theory" my tired skinny ass, the honchos who now control our access to air travel are screwing with Bush's political enemies. Kennedy isn't the first one to find himself on the list. And the list is secret, you can't appeal, and no one cares anyway. It's the work of a second for a political shark to tap in a partial string into the database to mess up your life.
I am nothing if not real. The 50K man base will be armored, armed, and permanent. It is our control base in the Middle East. And it will be the symbol of the occupation once it is finished: I for one will never visit the place.
It is colonization. We are building a 50,000 man embassy/military command/oil control center, and we are not leaving. Our army is not leaving. We are in control of their media, ultimately. We are in control of their government. We have ownered their oil fields, and divvied them up amongst our energy corporations. When Bremmer left, he signed executive orders that effectively gave away the internal economy to foreigners (privatization), amongst many, many other seizures of power.
Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded, according to their own thinktank, the Project for A New American Century, because:
We needed to control that oil to control he emerging Asian economies, whicgh absolutely need the oil to grow.
We needed to defend Israel's interests in the region.
We needed to create a model democracy to instigate a classic domino theory collapse of theocratic regimes.
We need to show the world that We Are In Charge, and they could shove it, or as Cheney would say, Go Fuck Yourselves.
The civilian military theorists, led by Rumsfeld, wanted to demonstrate that the military brass didn't know how to run a war; that all we needed were small mobile forces and smart bombs, not the massive numbers of troops the military professionals said we would need.
Perle and Wolfowitz wanted to demonstrate that the CIA et al were underestimating the size of the Enemy, much like they insisted the CIA had done during the entire cold war. Those two had created a special intelligence division during Reagan's admin which processed what they thought were "real" intel, run by them: they did the same thing during the Iraq runup. They were dead effing wrong both times. The USSR was a wreck and Iraq was a basket case: the men are unapologetically wrong about everything they babble about in the ears of their presidents.
The Iraqis are not idiots, and they know a colonizing force when they see one shooting at them. They hear about Bush claiming to be the Will of God in speech after speech, and they know that they are in a religious war, by their standards AND Bush's. Americans don't read, so they don't know about the PNAC and Bush's claim to messianic knowledge.
I really,REALLY doubt that anyone anti-Republican with an operational brain cell left would pull such a useless, inflamatory stunt such as this.
It makes the 'pubs look like victims, and gives juice to the 'wingers and other "security" crazies in vogue, juice that will inevitably be used to set up a police state presence on the internet.
It reminds me vividly of the few "anarchists" at the WTO protests in Seattle a few years back. A few dozen really violent bastards ran out from nowhere and trashed the city, of the thousands of peaceful people assembled. The news networks ran the pictures incessantly, and the American public were convinced that protests were not worth the free assembly rights we used to have. Now you need to get a permit, and IF you get that, you are herded past a gauntlet of shoulder-to shoulder armored and overarmed black monsters, into a small enclosure surrounded by barbed wire, with cameras trained onto your face, in some remote hellhole. You may be arrested at will. As recent reports indicate, the FBI is now visiting people's homes on the premise that they MIGHT someday protest, leaving the message that They Are Being Watched.
Throwing out the obvious thought: the "anarchists" at the WTO protest were agents provocateurs, and the government security apparatchiks have used that "riot" to institute the present police state in the U.S. and Europe.
And I am thinking that these "protestors" against the Republican web sites are about as authentic as the "anarchist rioters" in Seattle.
Wait for it people: this DOS attack against the 'pubs will be used as publicity fodder to create a new internet police force. If it doesn't work this time, a few "anarchist" attacks in the future should convince the public that such a force is needed.
And the FBI/CIA/HS police will be asking for your papers when you criticize someone in power. Count on it.
The contents of the records were no one's business, being about his personal life. we need more of that. Being a public servant doesn't make your life a video game.
Bush never has 'fessed up about the dissertion during wartime, drug use, or his own arrest record. And no one talks about his high moral ground.
Except Bush himself, of course.
"The digital stuff is a whole different ball game."
That assertion is the heart of the matter. But, it is only an assertion. WHY is it a whole new ball game? If analog tape tech had progressed to the point that perfect copies were possible, I would give good odds that the assertion would not be made. The courts had decided that tapes were legal, and people were familiar with the right to make a copy.
The assertion is based soley on the premise that digital copies are perfectly reproducible, and therefore a greater threat than lossy tape. I call that premise specious: few people made so many generational copies of a tape that the loss of quality became onerous. The taped audio was adequate.
The assertion of a difference between digital and analog copying is an artificial one designed to reopen the debate about copying we had thought dead as canasta twenty years ago. And it has been a successful one, but not on the merits. Twenty years ago, politicians didn't require the vast amounts of cash they must use today to get elected and stay that way, and twenty years ago the lobbyists were nowhere near as professional and formidable as they are now.
I deny their assertion, so the only argument they have left is this: support us, or we come after you and rip you from office. It's an effective one. L. Ron would be proud.
Another "truth" that will not die, like Al Gore saying he invented the internet.
Dean was screaming to be heard above the noise of the crowd. Unfortunately, the microphone he was screaming into had a filter for ambient noise. It was impossible to hear anyone else but Dean.
When the sound of the crowd was mixed back into the recording, recreating what actually could be heard, Dean was barely audible.
It would have been the work of minutes for any network reporter to get the correctly mixed version of the audio. But they didn't. Only Diane Sawyer ever apologized for the lynching after she heard the corrected track.
It was too much fun for the networks, the rightwing cable pundits, the network executives threatened by Dean's pledge to break up their growing empires, the late night comedians- even John Stewart: come on, John you're smarter than this! - to slaughter Dean, whom the majority of the pundits disliked because he said things that caused massive cognitive dissonance in their unbelieveably uninformed minds.
Now we've Kerry, who won't even condemn Bush's straight-out lying about WMD's. Dean had the balls to tell the truth. Now he's been Gored, reduced to a joke because reporters simply would not be bothered to find out about filtering mics. Immense momentum killed by laziness and a willingness to kill the messenger.
The same amount of heat is transfered to your airspace, fan or no fan. The heat on a Hush box is moved via conduction and radiation, rather than via a fan. But the effect on the room temperature is the same.
Some things cannot be contracted away. The classic example is the right not to be owned, ie be a slave.
This has not been strictly enforced over the years. For instance, Scientology's "Sea Org" (the navy/management/lifers) requires their services for this life and I believe a billion years of subsequent lives. I don't know how this contract'd be enforced, tho.
I am getting a little more frightened about the rightward ho-ing of the judiciary. Being pro-business is one thing, but letting them own our thoughts?
What happens when, sometime in the next 100 years, it will be technologically possible to monitor human thoughts? Will we be scanned at work to see if we are thinking anything worth owning? This is not reducing the concept to its absurd conclusion. I'm serious here.
The right to be secure in our person and possessions should be extended to add security from intrusion of our own damned heads! Screw property rights. Our minds are the only thing they can't own - today - but brick by brick they are prepping a truly unbreakable prison.
I'm going out to get a Hummer tomorrow.
Isn't that a little more than we need to know?
This message brought to you courtesy of the Republican National Committee Meme Repetition Project. Waffle Waffle Waffle, remember Kerry Waffles!a ne?Blue Suit WAFFLE Bluesuit Waffle WAAAFFFFLLEEEEE westillgotnothingherewe'resoscrewed...
This message also brought to you because we can't think of anything to else nail this guy with. Waitaminit! He wore a blue clean suit at NASA!
BluesuitBluesuitBluesuitBluesuitisn'theins
Oh, there's so much more!
The western and southern states, the rural ones that hate welfare and federal handouts?
For decades, they've been taking in more federal money than they pay into the Federal kitty. Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, name a Red state, mostly. Contrariwise, the urban states, like California, the Northeast, Illinois, Ohio, the older states that eat up the handouts in the eyes of the Red states: they've been receiving far less back from the Federal pile than they've been paying in. In other words, the most conservative, we-pay-our-own-way-no-welfare-queens-please states have been on a massive welfare program since the fifties that dwarfs anything the poor or other people who got "handouts" received. They who complain most about the largesse the receipients of the Federal dole get are it's biggest consumers.
AND: the king of all handouts?
Try the federal debt.
When Bush cut the taxes mostly for the wealthy, those trillions were borrowed, essentially from the wealthy of the world. About 12-18% of the federal budget simply pays the interest on the debt already accumulated; strangling the tax base siply increases the debt AND THE INTEREST paid on that debt.
We're talking tens of trillions over a period of decades going to national and international investors. It's the biggest wealth transfer in history. The biggest handout, dwarfing anything we spend on individual handouts for the poor.
And how does that debt keep getting bigger? Try massive tax breaks for corporate entities. The biggest get money BACK from the Feds every year. And the money borrowed to pay them goes into the debt, which increases interest payments, which goes back in financial instruments to the very corporations who don't pay taxes in the first place...
The handouts are there all right, but they're all going UP the ladder, not down. This is Bush's real power base: those who are raking in the illimitable cash from his "policies" and using the moolah to buy even more property and power.
Printing a copy of vote for your own records is useless. The printer can print a "yes" while tallying a "no" vote. You've no idea how the tally is being aggregated at any level.
To make an electronic tally work:
1. You vote by touching the screen.
2. A ballot is printed out. You visually confirm that the ballot matches what you chose.
3. You put the ballot into a box.
4. EVERY BALLOT IS KEPT. The option is not up to the voter.
5. If a recount is called for, the sealed paper ballots are retreived from their storage and MANUALLY counted. The tallies from the manual -NOT ELECTRONIC- recount of the paper ballots should match the electronic vote total EXACTLY. If they do not, machine error or outright cheating occurred.
The preceding is the only way you can trust an electronic balloting system. Printed receipts for the voter, or aggregate totals made at the docking stations, don't mean squat. The vote on paper ballots should match the electronic tally. This way you get all the benefits of the electronic tally system with the auditability of the manual.
I once posted an analysis of the time required to recount all ballots nationally. It takes less than a day. Canada gets it done in hours. I see no reason to have an electronic system; it's expensive, designed for cheating, and gives you no real benefits RE recounts other than eliminating them.
It's interesting how hard the voting machine companies are fighting the paper ballot audit trail. Since they lose no money by adding the printer, being totally reimbursed + massive profit, they seem fixated on eliminating the audit capability. As blackboxvoting.com(.org?) shows, the systems are practically designed for cheating; the only explanation for their stonewalling or suggesting inferior paper receipt audits is that they simply know the jig will be up if someone opens up that black box.
Hold on a minute, look at this:
Bigelow has not only buried the hatchet with the space agency, he finds himself in partnership with NASA. Bigelow Aerospace has signed three "Space Act Agreements" with NASA. These agreements provide for an ongoing exchange of personnel and technology, the joint testing of Bigelow projects at NASA facilities, and the transfer of NASA patents to Bigelow.
Wa-wa-wa-waaaiiiit a minute here! The entrepreneur is getting a bucket of state-developed patents for free? We paid for that set of patents! How does this guy get them assigned to him? How does he warrant this gift? Is this what "privatization" means? NASA gets whipped by privateers, knuckles under, and assigns ownership of public patents to a private agency? This is capitalism in action? If true, this is buggery!
If NASA wants to release the patents, fine. Assign them to the public domain, or however one phrases it. But you don't give them away under a "privatization" pretense to a lone individual, no matter how much he wants to open up space. We paid for that development. And Bigelow is a hypocrite.
As for all that government waste that NASA was being hounded for, by Bigelow as well as all the others: that contract bloat WAS CREATED BY PRIVATE COMPANIES, not the government. If one wants to blame someone for thievery, blame Boeing, Ratheon, and all the others over the years.
It was a JOKE. Ha ha, funny, that sort of thing.
Um, they are both documentaries, and Moore has stated this.
So what if it is or isn't?
The only reason this "difference" is being flogged by the radicals is that it creates a patina, an aura, of "lying" by Moore. It's misdirection, in the same manner that Moore illustrated in the movie itself. Don't look at the elephant on the bed! Look at the dictionary! It's not an elephant by definition! It's a pachyderm!
Level-headedness shouldn't make you stupid. The facts in the movie are checked out. They are solid. What he documents happening, happened.
There is a difference between what O'Really and the radical right wing talkers do and what Moore does. Both are propagandists. The Right pretends to be fair, Moore does not. The Right has constant access to the airwaves, Moore does not. Bush and company lies, constantly, incontravertibly. Moore does not.
Moore is one man, and the radicals are legion. They are not equivalent.
1. America is evil
I challenge you to find that statement in the movie. Mike implies BUSH/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rice are evil. And shows why. You imply that the King is the country, and hatred of the crown is hatred of the people.
Somehow I don't think you would believe criticism of Clinton would be hatred of America. QED.
2. Capitalism is evil
Once again, people are evil. Capitalism enables them to be all the evil they can be, in this war situation. And Mike shows us how evil.
3. Greed exists
????
4. Americans are stupid
You are just putting the chin out there to get whacked, aren't ya?
5. Islam is a benevolent and peaceful religion
It is. As much as Christianity is, anyway.
I reject all five.
They are all in your head, not Mike's movie.
Okay: let it "phone home" to it's masters like the X-Box does. A naughty box that has been modded doesn't get to play DVDs. It also narcs on you to the video cops.
Hook up the MPAA with laws making it a mandatory ten year federal prison sentence if you mod the signed player.
Instead of selling the usual generic DVD from a stack of identical factory-made disks, change the method thusly: you buy a movie online or in a store. It is burned for you, with your credit card and Homeland Security database keys imbedded in the video. It only plays on your signed MPAA-approved player.
Then, make it illegal to import unsigned players.
Then, make it illegal to sell them.
Then, make it illegal to make them.
Finally, make it illegal to own an unsigned player.
It's how you boil a frog: one degree at a time.
Bush sat there for almost nine minutes after the second jet hit. Leaving aside the questions as to why he entered the classroom after the first jet hit, he is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services of the United States of America, and he had been informed that the U.S. was now under attack. Word for word, he was told that.
AND HE SAT THERE FOR NINE MINUTES.
His was the only authority that could order airliners shot down. He sat there. He could have gotten up off his ass to find out what was happening. He sat there.
Even if his reaction was natural for a not bright human, he was the CIC and he was derelict in his duty. As a result, the Pentagon was hit.
If he is not capable of being CIC, he should be removed. My God.
No, the POINT is that he is a former liberal that halfwits keep identifying as a current example of liberalism.
He's as right wing as they come. But even he has turned against Bush's war, for the right reasons.
But he's not a damned liberal!