As was said, it doesn't matter what virus product you are using. If any of them can be compromised in a critical moment or day in history to include critical system files in a virus database and have that virus definition update pushed out to your countries computers, then damage will be potentially be done if you are using their product to protect your systems. Perhaps you have policies to only check virus databases on test systems before pushing them to the live systems in your company thus introducing a delay between a random virus detection in the real world and protection in-house. That would contain the damage to a handful of systems if an actual virus definition based attack happens. But there are a lot of companies out there that either pull new definitions to a central server and push them out immediately or just pull them directly from the net. O/S protections for this may have been beefed up over the years, but I'll bet they still aren't foolproof.
The history of the company really doesn't matter. Kaspersky has a good reputation thus far. But in a war situation Russia vs. (insert your non-Russian country here) or US based anti-virus protection company vs. (insert your non-US country here) is the risk of such a vector of attack acceptable to you? Every company has to answer this. Maybe they don't actually brick the computer. Maybe they just screw up Office so it doesn't function. Maybe it isn't a permanent kill of your business - just a long time for IT to get everybody up and running. Just because IT should know better doesn't mean that every IT organization is correctly implementing what they know.
The US government is just trying to make the risks known. It's their job. When tensions either are increasing or have the potential to increase in the near future between two countries, to not do so would be nuts. Closed systems are great protection, but if you aren't closed with isolated networks and separate in-house/government and outside computers on everyone's desk, you have vectors of attack that have to be managed somehow. Most companies don't what to throw that kind of money at a low probability problem.
Merlin runs well on them - although it is pretty much a "fedora" version of the corporate software. It frequently has security patches before the mainline version.
And to set the record straight - although Carbon County may have been named for coal deposits, it really doesn't have active coal operations today. It was just a convenient stop on the Union Pacific Railroad back in the day.
There are mines in the southern part of the state in Sweetwater County, but most of the mines are up north between Gillette and Douglas (Campbell and Converse Counties - primarily Campbell at 88% of total state production).
TeX and pals. For when you really care about how your document looks - and you don't have too many embeded pictures - cause they are still a pain in TeX. I keep hoping, and have some basic ways to do particular things - I want a picture on the left, right, or full column - I do these things. But getting the text to actually freely flow around it without a lot of effort is still tough.
Well, one good reason is that most IT departments in the world can't afford to have exactly the same hardware on every production platform. It would be nice, and we'd like to have an exact duplicate of every hardware configuration / software configuration, but we just don't have unlimited cash to do that. So no matter how we test on the most prevalent hardware configuration, you can still get bitten by a particular hardware anomaly on a particular box. It's easy to blame the IT guys, but everybody has a budget they have to deal with and arguing for hardware to just test on is rarely going to be on higher management radar until there is a huge downtime that is public facing.
That's another reason that running Microsoft Windows only virtually on Linux is nice. You can have better control of the hardware it sees. But there are some PHBs out there that want it running on the bare metal for whatever good reasons, so you can never be completely free of the similar hardware issues.
Also, it is very rare for IT to use software in all the same ways that the actual end users do. It can appear to work fine, but fail when some engineer does "their" thing with the software that perhaps no other engineer does. Again, it's easy to blame the IT guys.
When you kill the installed on iron copy, you just have one copy. I haven't messed with Microsoft at home for a long time. I generally shrink or move the MS partition out of the way or nuke it completely and install Linux. But if you're having problems with device drivers and updates, running virtual with a simplified and generally older chipset emulated means fewer driver problems.
Are there issues? Of course. Getting sound to work may be problematic. You won't be able to game at the highest resolution or speed as on iron - just buy a console. But for most general work, running the few remaining "must have" applications that haven't gone over to Google or some other cloud provider or which have a Linux equivalent is generally good enough and not a performance hit that you notice.
If Microsoft can try to co-opt Linux into running on it, they really shouldn't bitch about people running their stuff virtualized on Linux especially when it is to try to prevent downtime and problems that they are causing themselves. It's really convenient to be able to just copy back a known working image of your system onto a broken image when some update breaks things. That is true whether the system is Linux or Microsoft.
Same thing happened in our schools. We feed our kids pretty well at home - definitely more healthy than the average American. The trouble is that cooking healthy meals is more expensive and school systems can't afford it. Here, to try to get the balance they needed, the schools were serving overripe bananas, apples that had gone soft, and other crap that they could buy cheap because it was well past its prime. It isn't that they couldn't do a good meal on the new plan - it's that nobody wants to pay for the cost of doing that. So yes - a lot of stuff ended up in the garbage.
One meal at school isn't going to make a difference in your kids lives either way. I grew up in the days we looked forward to the days we had cinnamon rolls smothered in frosting. Maybe the meals weren't perfect on the Obama scale. But we actually ate most of them. The cafeteria food in college was good too and most didn't go to waste - except for a food fight I remember just missing. Bake schools at elementary schools are mostly a thing of the past around here as well. Nothing wrong with homemade cookies - they have lots of healthy ingredients in them. The things they substituted to try to raise money were failures.
The problem is all the rest of the junk food kids eat - whether that is what they are living on at home (McD breakfast and dinner?), bags of chips, oversize sodas, and the like. In my day, nothing was supersized except on Thanksgiving. Restaurant portions were smaller and healthier. Lots has changed for the worse outside of the school day. And get off my lawn!
It's better to give the kids a meal they will eat than to give them garbage that gets thrown away. This is especially true for kids who may not get another decent meal at all.
I don't object to the pay, but it should be paid the same as everyone else - in cash and not stock. The "fate of the company" thing seems to be mostly an illusion reading the annual reports. The company management picks the stocks they compare themselves to in order to reap a particular bonus. If they don't seem to be doing well for a long enough period - they pick different companies to compare themselves to that are "more representative". They move yardsticks if that doesn't work. It's all a way of gaming the system to reduce taxes. Just pay what they worth so it's obvious to everybody and easy to understand.
It isn't a good idea for anybody to be investing in the company they work for via stock. If the company goes down the tubes, you not only lose your paycheck, but you lose your stock value as well. Don't get me wrong - stocks are great things - at least until the baby boomers peak out retirement withdrawals. But you need to stay diversified.
So roll Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, and all private insurance into a single payer system administered by the federal government (or a one time bid to corporate America). Handle the buyouts of the private portions via a stock purchase on a given day's price of the health insurance portion of every insurance company, their backing assets, liabilities - the whole works. Also reform the tort system.
Establish two or three tiers of benefit plans. Everybody chooses one regardless of age and pays its premium. Parents pay for minors. You can switch to a higher level of service with restrictions to prevent picking a higher level when you get sick. After you move up, you don't get to move back for another longer fixed period. The young aren't disadvantaged by having to pay for the same level of care seniors might need. But by the same token, there are just two or three levels - each with higher amounts covered and more procedures covered as you go up, so if you want to have platinum level care when young in case something goes terribly wrong, you can pay for it. Provide coverage for catastrophic illnesses at all levels so if you are a rare person who gets some horrible disease, you're covered.
Employers are completely eliminated from having to deal with health insurance, regardless of size for anyone (current or former or retired employees). They should be required to pass the savings along in the form of higher wages as part of the benefit of dropping the responsibility.
One payer. Medical providers win since there's just one entity to deal with and because based on a standard plan they know what is covered. Since everyone in the country is covered (legal or illegal) since everyone pays, there are no more uninsured people to deal with. All costs not covered by your plan are out of pocket so there's an incentive to join up. Since everyone is covered the premiums should be low enough to afford.
Provide an insurance card / day rate for emergencies for any person travelling to the US from a foreign country. This wouldn't cover treatments for pre-existing conditions, for example, but would cover you if you broke your leg while here if not covered by your home policy.
You can go to any provider anyplace in the country for any service if available. Everyone won't be able to get an appointment at Mayo, but if willing to wait everyone could be treated anywhere. On vacation? No problem. Just moved for a new job? No problem. Figure out a national price for all medical services and drugs and allow adjustments for cost of living in particular areas for what is reimbursed to the medical community. Actually publish it so people will know what to expect out of pocket for any procedure. With the ability for any person to go anywhere, there's an incentive for providers to keep their costs down as well.
Each year, the amount paid into the plan by everyone is compared to what is spent by the plan. If less was spent than came in, the premiums go down for that class for the next year. This gives people an incentive to make healthy choices - not a big incentive, but something. If more was spent than came in, the premiums go up for that class for the next year.
Defense is a required Constitutional expense. Privatize Social Security.
The voting in many recent elections would tend to indicate that the number of voters willing to vote for someone who supports the constitution is very small. If not the Constitution Party or even the Libertarian Party would be right up there with the R & D parties. These two parties make a lot of platform statements that I don't agree with - just as I don't agree with many platform statements of the R & D parties, but at least the Constitution Party wants to shrink the Federal government back to just its constitutional powers.
The website is an exercise in taking federal programs and trying to guess what preamble clause they would fit under.
The Constitution Party takes the premise that if it isn't obvious what category it fits under, it should go away - as a federal program. That would cause some reorganization of the structure of some parts of the federal government and elimination of others (moving them to any state that cared). It also might increase the total amount spent on a particular function as it would be duplicated by many but probably not all states.
It is a tough call as to where a line should be drawn for many things. For example, I think it is a great thing to expect all kids across the country to learn to particular standards at each grade so I'm in favor of common core (although I think the standards should require more of all students at all grade levels). A person who moves from Mississippi to Washington with children should be assured that their kids will do well at the same grade level and will have learned the same things. So you can make a case that that falls under the promoting the general welfare clause and has federal merit. But does the entire Department of Education when each state also has a Department of Education? Tough calls like this is why we have the huge spending that we do. No politician wants to make the call.
You don't have to use the divisions that are laid out in the preamble. You're free to try to track the spending back to actual text in the body of the document. Either approach is equally difficult. The reality is that many people haven't read the text of the Constitution past the preamble since they were in junior or maybe senior high school (f then). So Mr. B picked a division most could understand.
Kudos to you. I did a quick survey of most of the checked modules in our site outside core. Drupal 8.0.0 was released November 19, 2015 according to Google and close to 60% of the modules we have in use have no D8 equivalent. A few have something at some stage of development, but nothing at even a alpha or beta release level. Some that do have D8 equivalents are only at alpha or beta stages.
The core developers do Drupal. The plugin developers generally work on drupal modules as a sideline or fun project. I realize that relying on the second tier has this associated cost, but core Drupal without some of the addons really doesn't work in most environments. So making the upgrade easier would be a benefit to everyone (even if the automated solution wasn't optimal). The 5 to 6 and 6 to 7 paths also had very long delays for plugins, so this isn't new. Some were abandoned, sometimes with a different module suggested that may or may not handle the database the same.
Security in core is good. Security in the whole Drupal eco-system has the same risks that WP has when the learning curve takes a new bump every couple of years for people not involved in core development.
Drupal does have it's advantages and security is one of them. It's biggest disadvantage is that with every major release the core developers change large chunks of API so any add-on you are using has to be upgraded to a stable condition before you as a website maintainer or developer can move forward. After X major rewrites of their plugin because the Drupal developers decided method Y was now the best way to go, many plugin developers give up - understandably - leaving you with no upgrade path if you were using a particular plugin. There is a lot of debate as to the feature load in core - KISS and make everyone rely on plugin modules or actually make core useful. Drupal would be a really, really good choice if they'd just stop re-inventing the API with each release or make an automated conversion tool that would work with all changes and plugins to at least make a stable working version of the plugin on the day of release. It might be able to be done a better way in the new wonder method Y, but at least it would work.
Ironical - yes, but the wind farm north of town was shut down for an extended period for just this reason while they checked all the infrastructure involved to make sure it hadn't been damaged.
I'm pretty sure we do. Wind farms aren't pretty to look at. Reclaimed coal mines don't look any different than the prairie did before they dug the coal out. I don't know about all the power plants in WY, but the one near us has pretty good scrubbers to help with pollution controls. The wind farm, however, is right next to town and we get to enjoy all the tower's red aviation warning lights on the horizon all the time.
11% of electricity produced in WY does come from wind. Around 2/3 of generated electricity is already exported according to google searches. The biggest objection to wind farms is disruption of scenic views. The biggest problem with export is again building infrastructure to export the electricity and again scenic views.
People probably wouldn't object as much to the wind farms if the power was needed by the state's residents. When there is a large oversupply, it's a fair argument to not reduce our quality of life by building ugly wind farms. There has been particular resistance in the SW corner. FWIW we now have a wind farm north of town and it really isn't that nice to look at. Another consideration is that wildfires can put a wind farm out of commission for quite a while whereas power plants with a smaller footprint can be better protected. With increasing drought, that's a real concern.
Perhaps that is why God had Peter record in First Peter
4:17 For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?
4:18 And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?
not that there isn't a lot of other good stuff in the rest of the chapter.
You may be right about the improbability of an atheist being elected, and I, for one, am glad. It isn't like we've had a great many presidents who actually followed Christ's teaching. Some have certainly done a better job than others. If more Christians lived up to what He expected of us, perhaps you wouldn't be so bitter.
God doesn't care about political correctness. He cares about being correct according to His precepts and His commandments. God loves everyone. He just hates what everyone does for part or most of their lives. If you don't wish to avail yourself of His method of reconciliation to Him and try to live up to those standards with His grace covering those times you fail to measure up, that has and always will be your choice. He's laid out the consequences of the free choice you are making. Hearts are rarely converted with torches and pitchforks.
I have an older model, but I agree. Never having to set the watch and never having to worry about a new battery has been the nicest thing ever. Selecting time zones easily is a plus as well. As for the rest of the bells and whistles - well they're cute, but the other features are really the best for me. If you're out climbing you don't have to worry about getting a phone out to see the time and worrying that it will drop someplace inaccessible or just fall on something hard and break. I'll grant that phones "may" be more useful in a problem situation if you can get cell coverage where you are at (many places around here you can't), but I try not to be that wedded to a phone that one is always available to see the time on. Watches still serve a useful purpose if you are outdoors much.
I'd say the main argument for leaving the EC alone is that the lone Representative to the House in Wyoming (and other single Representative states or even the two Representative states) can't get much of anything done for their states compared the the huge number of Representatives from each of the bigger states. Having a bit of advantage - if it can even be called that with only 3 votes in the EC - gives a little balance to the difficult position smaller states like Wyoming have in all other aspects of the the House of Representatives in Congress.
If California wants something badly, they start off with 53 votes in favor. That's not a majority in itself, but it's a good start.
If you want to fix the EC, make all states allocate their EC votes based on the actual outcome of the vote in the state. Eliminate the winner takes all crap.
Going directly to the source is always useful when it is possible to do so. The thing with all solutions is that they take time. Sometimes going directly to the source can be the most time consuming - but you may get an unfiltered account assuming the source hasn't been itself manufactured or altered to change context. Technology is getting good enough to create really good illusions of fact. You tube is not necessarily better or worse at this. A couple of lines taken out of context there can be just as jaded as a news account if you don't see the entire speech or parts are selectively omitted.
Even trying to keep up with multiple sources as I mentioned on a continual basis can't really be done. But if something strikes you as off, you can always seek a second source from an alternative spectrum source. Pro Republican vs pro Democrat for example.
The older you get, the more cynical you get. You've simply seen too much and read too much and heard too much. If it is something that really matters, see what God says about it. He's a pretty solid arbitrator of what is truth and what is falsehood. Course, there's a lot of stuff I don't imagine He cares about that we get really worked up over...
So subscribe to both a very liberal and a very conservative newspaper that are well known that actually still do news - I know - that's getting tougher and tougher as more and more go to just running feeds. Pick up a local paper subscription as well if you don't live in a major city. Hard to pick good examples but maybe the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times/Washington Post. Read all three thoroughly. If the facts of a story are similar in each, then there is a greater chance (not in any way approaching 100%) that what you are reading is truth. If they are diametrically opposed, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Pick a few more diametrically opposed pairs for variety (Christian Science Monitor vs. Freethinker). Extend as needed.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than just relying on a single source for news.
Slashdot Mirror
As was said, it doesn't matter what virus product you are using. If any of them can be compromised in a critical moment or day in history to include critical system files in a virus database and have that virus definition update pushed out to your countries computers, then damage will be potentially be done if you are using their product to protect your systems. Perhaps you have policies to only check virus databases on test systems before pushing them to the live systems in your company thus introducing a delay between a random virus detection in the real world and protection in-house. That would contain the damage to a handful of systems if an actual virus definition based attack happens. But there are a lot of companies out there that either pull new definitions to a central server and push them out immediately or just pull them directly from the net. O/S protections for this may have been beefed up over the years, but I'll bet they still aren't foolproof.
The history of the company really doesn't matter. Kaspersky has a good reputation thus far. But in a war situation Russia vs. (insert your non-Russian country here) or US based anti-virus protection company vs. (insert your non-US country here) is the risk of such a vector of attack acceptable to you? Every company has to answer this. Maybe they don't actually brick the computer. Maybe they just screw up Office so it doesn't function. Maybe it isn't a permanent kill of your business - just a long time for IT to get everybody up and running. Just because IT should know better doesn't mean that every IT organization is correctly implementing what they know.
The US government is just trying to make the risks known. It's their job. When tensions either are increasing or have the potential to increase in the near future between two countries, to not do so would be nuts. Closed systems are great protection, but if you aren't closed with isolated networks and separate in-house/government and outside computers on everyone's desk, you have vectors of attack that have to be managed somehow. Most companies don't what to throw that kind of money at a low probability problem.
Merlin runs well on them - although it is pretty much a "fedora" version of the corporate software. It frequently has security patches before the mainline version.
Save the stockholder money. Fire the team and just revert back to the previous version. You do have backups - don't you google?
The Bush's wars ran up a significant debt as well. Don't forget about that.
And to set the record straight - although Carbon County may have been named for coal deposits, it really doesn't have active coal operations today. It was just a convenient stop on the Union Pacific Railroad back in the day.
There are mines in the southern part of the state in Sweetwater County, but most of the mines are up north between Gillette and Douglas (Campbell and Converse Counties - primarily Campbell at 88% of total state production).
There is environmental degradation to wind turbines as well - and they don't look particularly good on the scenic vistas either.
TeX and pals. For when you really care about how your document looks - and you don't have too many embeded pictures - cause they are still a pain in TeX. I keep hoping, and have some basic ways to do particular things - I want a picture on the left, right, or full column - I do these things. But getting the text to actually freely flow around it without a lot of effort is still tough.
Well, one good reason is that most IT departments in the world can't afford to have exactly the same hardware on every production platform. It would be nice, and we'd like to have an exact duplicate of every hardware configuration / software configuration, but we just don't have unlimited cash to do that. So no matter how we test on the most prevalent hardware configuration, you can still get bitten by a particular hardware anomaly on a particular box. It's easy to blame the IT guys, but everybody has a budget they have to deal with and arguing for hardware to just test on is rarely going to be on higher management radar until there is a huge downtime that is public facing.
That's another reason that running Microsoft Windows only virtually on Linux is nice. You can have better control of the hardware it sees. But there are some PHBs out there that want it running on the bare metal for whatever good reasons, so you can never be completely free of the similar hardware issues.
Also, it is very rare for IT to use software in all the same ways that the actual end users do. It can appear to work fine, but fail when some engineer does "their" thing with the software that perhaps no other engineer does. Again, it's easy to blame the IT guys.
When you kill the installed on iron copy, you just have one copy. I haven't messed with Microsoft at home for a long time. I generally shrink or move the MS partition out of the way or nuke it completely and install Linux. But if you're having problems with device drivers and updates, running virtual with a simplified and generally older chipset emulated means fewer driver problems.
Are there issues? Of course. Getting sound to work may be problematic. You won't be able to game at the highest resolution or speed as on iron - just buy a console. But for most general work, running the few remaining "must have" applications that haven't gone over to Google or some other cloud provider or which have a Linux equivalent is generally good enough and not a performance hit that you notice.
If Microsoft can try to co-opt Linux into running on it, they really shouldn't bitch about people running their stuff virtualized on Linux especially when it is to try to prevent downtime and problems that they are causing themselves. It's really convenient to be able to just copy back a known working image of your system onto a broken image when some update breaks things. That is true whether the system is Linux or Microsoft.
Load Linux. Run the Windows in a virtual environment.
Same thing happened in our schools. We feed our kids pretty well at home - definitely more healthy than the average American. The trouble is that cooking healthy meals is more expensive and school systems can't afford it. Here, to try to get the balance they needed, the schools were serving overripe bananas, apples that had gone soft, and other crap that they could buy cheap because it was well past its prime. It isn't that they couldn't do a good meal on the new plan - it's that nobody wants to pay for the cost of doing that. So yes - a lot of stuff ended up in the garbage.
One meal at school isn't going to make a difference in your kids lives either way. I grew up in the days we looked forward to the days we had cinnamon rolls smothered in frosting. Maybe the meals weren't perfect on the Obama scale. But we actually ate most of them. The cafeteria food in college was good too and most didn't go to waste - except for a food fight I remember just missing. Bake schools at elementary schools are mostly a thing of the past around here as well. Nothing wrong with homemade cookies - they have lots of healthy ingredients in them. The things they substituted to try to raise money were failures.
The problem is all the rest of the junk food kids eat - whether that is what they are living on at home (McD breakfast and dinner?), bags of chips, oversize sodas, and the like. In my day, nothing was supersized except on Thanksgiving. Restaurant portions were smaller and healthier. Lots has changed for the worse outside of the school day. And get off my lawn!
It's better to give the kids a meal they will eat than to give them garbage that gets thrown away. This is especially true for kids who may not get another decent meal at all.
I don't object to the pay, but it should be paid the same as everyone else - in cash and not stock. The "fate of the company" thing seems to be mostly an illusion reading the annual reports. The company management picks the stocks they compare themselves to in order to reap a particular bonus. If they don't seem to be doing well for a long enough period - they pick different companies to compare themselves to that are "more representative". They move yardsticks if that doesn't work. It's all a way of gaming the system to reduce taxes. Just pay what they worth so it's obvious to everybody and easy to understand.
It isn't a good idea for anybody to be investing in the company they work for via stock. If the company goes down the tubes, you not only lose your paycheck, but you lose your stock value as well. Don't get me wrong - stocks are great things - at least until the baby boomers peak out retirement withdrawals. But you need to stay diversified.
So roll Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, and all private insurance into a single payer system administered by the federal government (or a one time bid to corporate America). Handle the buyouts of the private portions via a stock purchase on a given day's price of the health insurance portion of every insurance company, their backing assets, liabilities - the whole works. Also reform the tort system.
Establish two or three tiers of benefit plans. Everybody chooses one regardless of age and pays its premium. Parents pay for minors. You can switch to a higher level of service with restrictions to prevent picking a higher level when you get sick. After you move up, you don't get to move back for another longer fixed period. The young aren't disadvantaged by having to pay for the same level of care seniors might need. But by the same token, there are just two or three levels - each with higher amounts covered and more procedures covered as you go up, so if you want to have platinum level care when young in case something goes terribly wrong, you can pay for it. Provide coverage for catastrophic illnesses at all levels so if you are a rare person who gets some horrible disease, you're covered.
Employers are completely eliminated from having to deal with health insurance, regardless of size for anyone (current or former or retired employees). They should be required to pass the savings along in the form of higher wages as part of the benefit of dropping the responsibility.
One payer. Medical providers win since there's just one entity to deal with and because based on a standard plan they know what is covered. Since everyone in the country is covered (legal or illegal) since everyone pays, there are no more uninsured people to deal with. All costs not covered by your plan are out of pocket so there's an incentive to join up. Since everyone is covered the premiums should be low enough to afford.
Provide an insurance card / day rate for emergencies for any person travelling to the US from a foreign country. This wouldn't cover treatments for pre-existing conditions, for example, but would cover you if you broke your leg while here if not covered by your home policy.
You can go to any provider anyplace in the country for any service if available. Everyone won't be able to get an appointment at Mayo, but if willing to wait everyone could be treated anywhere. On vacation? No problem. Just moved for a new job? No problem. Figure out a national price for all medical services and drugs and allow adjustments for cost of living in particular areas for what is reimbursed to the medical community. Actually publish it so people will know what to expect out of pocket for any procedure. With the ability for any person to go anywhere, there's an incentive for providers to keep their costs down as well.
Each year, the amount paid into the plan by everyone is compared to what is spent by the plan. If less was spent than came in, the premiums go down for that class for the next year. This gives people an incentive to make healthy choices - not a big incentive, but something. If more was spent than came in, the premiums go up for that class for the next year.
Defense is a required Constitutional expense. Privatize Social Security.
The voting in many recent elections would tend to indicate that the number of voters willing to vote for someone who supports the constitution is very small. If not the Constitution Party or even the Libertarian Party would be right up there with the R & D parties. These two parties make a lot of platform statements that I don't agree with - just as I don't agree with many platform statements of the R & D parties, but at least the Constitution Party wants to shrink the Federal government back to just its constitutional powers.
The website is an exercise in taking federal programs and trying to guess what preamble clause they would fit under.
The Constitution Party takes the premise that if it isn't obvious what category it fits under, it should go away - as a federal program. That would cause some reorganization of the structure of some parts of the federal government and elimination of others (moving them to any state that cared). It also might increase the total amount spent on a particular function as it would be duplicated by many but probably not all states.
It is a tough call as to where a line should be drawn for many things. For example, I think it is a great thing to expect all kids across the country to learn to particular standards at each grade so I'm in favor of common core (although I think the standards should require more of all students at all grade levels). A person who moves from Mississippi to Washington with children should be assured that their kids will do well at the same grade level and will have learned the same things. So you can make a case that that falls under the promoting the general welfare clause and has federal merit. But does the entire Department of Education when each state also has a Department of Education? Tough calls like this is why we have the huge spending that we do. No politician wants to make the call.
You don't have to use the divisions that are laid out in the preamble. You're free to try to track the spending back to actual text in the body of the document. Either approach is equally difficult. The reality is that many people haven't read the text of the Constitution past the preamble since they were in junior or maybe senior high school (f then). So Mr. B picked a division most could understand.
Kudos to you. I did a quick survey of most of the checked modules in our site outside core. Drupal 8.0.0 was released November 19, 2015 according to Google and close to 60% of the modules we have in use have no D8 equivalent. A few have something at some stage of development, but nothing at even a alpha or beta release level. Some that do have D8 equivalents are only at alpha or beta stages.
The core developers do Drupal. The plugin developers generally work on drupal modules as a sideline or fun project. I realize that relying on the second tier has this associated cost, but core Drupal without some of the addons really doesn't work in most environments. So making the upgrade easier would be a benefit to everyone (even if the automated solution wasn't optimal). The 5 to 6 and 6 to 7 paths also had very long delays for plugins, so this isn't new. Some were abandoned, sometimes with a different module suggested that may or may not handle the database the same.
Security in core is good. Security in the whole Drupal eco-system has the same risks that WP has when the learning curve takes a new bump every couple of years for people not involved in core development.
Drupal does have it's advantages and security is one of them. It's biggest disadvantage is that with every major release the core developers change large chunks of API so any add-on you are using has to be upgraded to a stable condition before you as a website maintainer or developer can move forward. After X major rewrites of their plugin because the Drupal developers decided method Y was now the best way to go, many plugin developers give up - understandably - leaving you with no upgrade path if you were using a particular plugin. There is a lot of debate as to the feature load in core - KISS and make everyone rely on plugin modules or actually make core useful. Drupal would be a really, really good choice if they'd just stop re-inventing the API with each release or make an automated conversion tool that would work with all changes and plugins to at least make a stable working version of the plugin on the day of release. It might be able to be done a better way in the new wonder method Y, but at least it would work.
Ironical - yes, but the wind farm north of town was shut down for an extended period for just this reason while they checked all the infrastructure involved to make sure it hadn't been damaged.
I'm pretty sure we do. Wind farms aren't pretty to look at. Reclaimed coal mines don't look any different than the prairie did before they dug the coal out. I don't know about all the power plants in WY, but the one near us has pretty good scrubbers to help with pollution controls. The wind farm, however, is right next to town and we get to enjoy all the tower's red aviation warning lights on the horizon all the time.
11% of electricity produced in WY does come from wind. Around 2/3 of generated electricity is already exported according to google searches. The biggest objection to wind farms is disruption of scenic views. The biggest problem with export is again building infrastructure to export the electricity and again scenic views.
People probably wouldn't object as much to the wind farms if the power was needed by the state's residents. When there is a large oversupply, it's a fair argument to not reduce our quality of life by building ugly wind farms. There has been particular resistance in the SW corner. FWIW we now have a wind farm north of town and it really isn't that nice to look at. Another consideration is that wildfires can put a wind farm out of commission for quite a while whereas power plants with a smaller footprint can be better protected. With increasing drought, that's a real concern.
Perhaps that is why God had Peter record in First Peter
not that there isn't a lot of other good stuff in the rest of the chapter.
You may be right about the improbability of an atheist being elected, and I, for one, am glad. It isn't like we've had a great many presidents who actually followed Christ's teaching. Some have certainly done a better job than others. If more Christians lived up to what He expected of us, perhaps you wouldn't be so bitter.
God doesn't care about political correctness. He cares about being correct according to His precepts and His commandments. God loves everyone. He just hates what everyone does for part or most of their lives. If you don't wish to avail yourself of His method of reconciliation to Him and try to live up to those standards with His grace covering those times you fail to measure up, that has and always will be your choice. He's laid out the consequences of the free choice you are making. Hearts are rarely converted with torches and pitchforks.
I have an older model, but I agree. Never having to set the watch and never having to worry about a new battery has been the nicest thing ever. Selecting time zones easily is a plus as well. As for the rest of the bells and whistles - well they're cute, but the other features are really the best for me. If you're out climbing you don't have to worry about getting a phone out to see the time and worrying that it will drop someplace inaccessible or just fall on something hard and break. I'll grant that phones "may" be more useful in a problem situation if you can get cell coverage where you are at (many places around here you can't), but I try not to be that wedded to a phone that one is always available to see the time on. Watches still serve a useful purpose if you are outdoors much.
I'd say the main argument for leaving the EC alone is that the lone Representative to the House in Wyoming (and other single Representative states or even the two Representative states) can't get much of anything done for their states compared the the huge number of Representatives from each of the bigger states. Having a bit of advantage - if it can even be called that with only 3 votes in the EC - gives a little balance to the difficult position smaller states like Wyoming have in all other aspects of the the House of Representatives in Congress.
If California wants something badly, they start off with 53 votes in favor. That's not a majority in itself, but it's a good start.
If you want to fix the EC, make all states allocate their EC votes based on the actual outcome of the vote in the state. Eliminate the winner takes all crap.
Going directly to the source is always useful when it is possible to do so. The thing with all solutions is that they take time. Sometimes going directly to the source can be the most time consuming - but you may get an unfiltered account assuming the source hasn't been itself manufactured or altered to change context. Technology is getting good enough to create really good illusions of fact. You tube is not necessarily better or worse at this. A couple of lines taken out of context there can be just as jaded as a news account if you don't see the entire speech or parts are selectively omitted.
Even trying to keep up with multiple sources as I mentioned on a continual basis can't really be done. But if something strikes you as off, you can always seek a second source from an alternative spectrum source. Pro Republican vs pro Democrat for example.
The older you get, the more cynical you get. You've simply seen too much and read too much and heard too much. If it is something that really matters, see what God says about it. He's a pretty solid arbitrator of what is truth and what is falsehood. Course, there's a lot of stuff I don't imagine He cares about that we get really worked up over...
So subscribe to both a very liberal and a very conservative newspaper that are well known that actually still do news - I know - that's getting tougher and tougher as more and more go to just running feeds. Pick up a local paper subscription as well if you don't live in a major city. Hard to pick good examples but maybe the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times/Washington Post. Read all three thoroughly. If the facts of a story are similar in each, then there is a greater chance (not in any way approaching 100%) that what you are reading is truth. If they are diametrically opposed, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Pick a few more diametrically opposed pairs for variety (Christian Science Monitor vs. Freethinker). Extend as needed.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than just relying on a single source for news.