I support telephone company immunity because I understand it.
The key fact to remember regarding this issue is that it applies only to international traffic. That is, the communication must cross the border.
The United States government already conducts tens of thousands of unwarranted searches at its borders every day. Why should phone calls get a special exemption?
The arguments against the bill as passed are entirely fatuous and purely political.
For instance, the willing conflation of "U.S. persons" with "U.S. citizens." Telecom law is all about "U.S. persons" who may or may not be U.S. citizens. A "U.S. person" is anybody within the territory of the United States.
If Osama bin Laden were to visit Hawaii he would be a U.S. person under telecom law.
If bin Laden still has operatives in this country, they are U.S. persons. Why should their international phone calls be exempt from border searches?
That brings us to anther willful imbecility, ignoring the fact the provisions in question are about international phone calls. A frequent fatuousity ignoring this fact is "OMG they are accessing local switches." Well of course they are, what, you think international traffic makes some kind of subspace hop to a U.S. person's local handset?
I know the phone system "inside and out" if you get my meaning. I've had to write C that obeyed these laws. Millions of customers' rights were protected by my code, down to the tiniest legal requirements of each jurisdiction we served.
I think it's great that Obama is losing votes over this. Those voters are really voting for Osama and, at least on this issue, Obama has finally differentiated himself from Osama.
Yours is one of the rare posts that used the word "international" regarding this issue.
Everyone else is a complete fucking liar.
And while we probably don't agree on the issue, at least we can agree on the fact that only international calls were monitored.
At this point in the discussion, I remind people that governments reserve the right to search anything crossing their borders, and ask why they think phone calls deserve some special protections.
But that's asking people to think, and that is always a mistake.
Anyway, congratulations on using the word "international." Please use it to remind those around you that this is nothing but a baggage check at the border.
This vote-seller was going to receive the funds himself.
A lobbyist donates to a campaign, not the politician. The campaign then spends it on advertising which influences reporting keeping the electorate disinformed.
It would be much more honest if politicians just pocketed the damned cash!
I'm going to get "text on Mac OS X looks blurry, not soft" replies
Some people have grown up reading text set in fonts chosen and rendered by Microsoft.
For instance, that horrible font they used for the address field in Internet Explorer, the one in the 90s TV commercials "log on to our web page" shots. Good grief, having that font blown up on a large screen TV really shows how awful it is!
Jaggies everywhere.
And that is what some people have grown up with. Their brains have grown - literally - accustomed to interpreting the jaggies similarly to serifs.
When exposed to well-rendered text, these unfortunates are without the "serifian" hinting that their brains expect.
So if the "S" glyph does not have corners, it will look blurry to them.
Being an ex-Linotype user, I have always been a fan of how the Mac renders fonts in a very print-like fashion. But not such a fanboy as to excuse the use of Chicago font in advertising good grief.
And with Microsoft, it's not so much their font rendering technology as their horrible font choices!
It may be a good product, but their shitpage screams incompetence.
Problems:
1. Web page only works at the single text size they chose.
2. They waste ~1/3 of the page screen on whitespace.
3. 1 + 2 means you've got all this wasted screen space that you cannot fill with more legible text.
If they can't code a web page, why should I trust them to code an antivirus product?
If Bill Hemmer is so stupid why did CNN employ him for ten years?
I think Hemmer's show competes with Oprah and Ellen and the other mid-day idiot trash.
If you're going for Oprah's audience, you're going after a bunch of complete imbeciles.
Oh well, I like how prejudice works.
Hemmer working for CNN golly what a smart respectable journalist. Chetry working for Fox golly what a complete airhead. Hemmer working for Fox golly what a complete airhead. Chetry working for CNN golly what a smart respectable journalist.
Please, all the networks hire their idiots from the same idiot factories, cover the same stories the same way, and even Nova is shit when it comes to science.
Want science news? Don't watch TV for it. I haven't bothered picking one up in years, but the Dallas Morning News used to have the nation's best science section.
I mean, just look at Hansen.. Why does the government even pay this fool? So that he can call a press conference about how he is being censored.
It's similar to the reason CBS still holds any broadcast licenses whatsoever, and I think deeply related to the First Amendment.
That the cure for wrong stupid and harmful speech is to let the idiot spew.
In the short term (decades), Hansen's speech is extremely harmful: Piltdown Man Part Deux. Piltdown Man is still used as a club to prevent the teaching of Biology.
But, in the long term (century+), allowing the idiot to spew will create generations of properly skeptical scientists.
I've worked for two research scientists in the private sector, and their scientific ethics were far above those of most wacademics at the local football schools.
And though one was extremely political, its effect on his work was limited to repeating one or two media templates a day. Unlike the wacademics who pollute a third of their classroom time with political spewage - in the science classes.
I've had the TAs who didn't know the subject. I've had the TAs who sanction false data.
Perhaps there are some mid-range private schools that are not shot through with corruption like the public football schools and poison ivy league.
Just take a look at human evolution. Do you think that being "extremely focused" is a really good survival trait? Have you ever hunted?
Scatterbrains do not bring down game.
Distracted dummies cannot track wounded game for miles and hours, maybe days.
The best hunters in my family are the most serene.
Human beings are meant to multi-task. Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on. Yes, and the very act of gathering food requires sustained attention to the task.
We are talking about two nonexclusive modes of human operation, and the point of being human is that we can choose how to operate in this spectrum. Animals have less, if any, choice.
We can employ our volitional consciousness to develop our mindful awareness.
It is what makes the martial arts so beautiful.
And what makes the martial artist so dadgum hard to sneak up on!
Grampaw asked,
How about a 2 gigawatt plant dedicated to pumping and desalianting seawater for the Southwest's water supply? Then some moron suggested,
How about doing it with solar desalinators, which cost almost nothing to operate? Because he's talking about the American Southwest. Where mid-size cities like San Diego need thousands of acre feet a day.
At such scales, the preferred method is reverse osmosis, and that means power for the pumps.
Nothing beats nukes for power, except Grand Coulee and Three Gorges:-) Your choice, nuke or coal.
Also, land closer to the shore costs more. Solar desal takes acreage, and is optimally placed on the ocean. Salt disposal is a major problem for inland desal, especially in a greenie-infested place like California.
As a libertarian Dune-head wannabe water-merchant, nuke desal worries me. As a human being, nuke desal fills me with hope, as it can serve markets I cannot.
Things like using solar panels at your house and being more energy efficient will be our greatest step towards solving our energy problems. Energy density. Energy density. Energy density. You do not run Industry on diluted energy.
People themselves need to start taking their energy use into their own hands. Their are entire neighborhoods in the US who are self sufficient and actually give energy back. No they are not self-sufficient. It took industrial-scale energy to make the houses and whatever greenie artifices you're going on about. They may cover their electricity bills by selling power, but that's a long way from energy self-sufficiency.
Maybe one day there will be wind and solar farms large enough to provide enough power to build other wind and solar farms. That is self-sufficient.
it's hard when pointing out basic reality to sound like one is doing anything BUT bashing And then you say this by way of trying real hard:
Bush policies have resulted in $120 per barrel oil, a crashed dollar, a quagmired immoral war, the hideously mis-managed Katrina disaster, to name just a few items. Prove the causality of "Bush policies have resulted in $120 per barrel oil." Much more to blame are environmentalists and other terrorists. Your "basic reality" is an opinion.
The same with your second opinion. Prove causality using something more substantial than a Krugman opinion piece.
Operation Iraqi Freedom is moral, when the alternative is Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein post-sanctions, a horrible reality that President George W. Bush prevented.
Even the 9/11 Report points out the ever-increasing connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. But in the Land of Make-Believe, Saddam Hussein was perfectly in his box and would remain that way forever.
And "quagmire" is also an opinionated characterization. The foreign enemy cannot dislodge us. We have a commanding presence in the Middle East.
Judging by the scum who washed up in Texas, Katrina was a massive success at keeping the savage natives from eating each other. Under Democrat management, New Orleans had become a shithole, and Louisiana a true quagmire.
So again, your opinion is revealed as media-driven and free of thought.
I'm sure your little fantasyland up your asshole has lots more opinions, but by any other name they still smell as shit.
Next time my cords fail "invisibly" I will look closer.
I was beginning to wonder why simply unscrewing and rescrewing the plug-case from the plug proper would fix the short. There is no visible short - but "visible" is very different when you're trying to get notes to happen and not caring about the specifics of the failure mode.
I guess it's again time to make my own patch cords with gobs of politically incorrect lead-tin solder.
Slashdot Mirror
Should we then conclude that these proto-humans could jam?
A jam session is the bee dance of humanity.
I support telephone company immunity because I understand it.
The key fact to remember regarding this issue is that it applies only to international traffic. That is, the communication must cross the border.
The United States government already conducts tens of thousands of unwarranted searches at its borders every day. Why should phone calls get a special exemption?
The arguments against the bill as passed are entirely fatuous and purely political.
For instance, the willing conflation of "U.S. persons" with "U.S. citizens." Telecom law is all about "U.S. persons" who may or may not be U.S. citizens. A "U.S. person" is anybody within the territory of the United States.
If Osama bin Laden were to visit Hawaii he would be a U.S. person under telecom law.
If bin Laden still has operatives in this country, they are U.S. persons. Why should their international phone calls be exempt from border searches?
That brings us to anther willful imbecility, ignoring the fact the provisions in question are about international phone calls. A frequent fatuousity ignoring this fact is "OMG they are accessing local switches." Well of course they are, what, you think international traffic makes some kind of subspace hop to a U.S. person's local handset?
I know the phone system "inside and out" if you get my meaning. I've had to write C that obeyed these laws. Millions of customers' rights were protected by my code, down to the tiniest legal requirements of each jurisdiction we served.
I think it's great that Obama is losing votes over this. Those voters are really voting for Osama and, at least on this issue, Obama has finally differentiated himself from Osama.
Ron Paul is rational?
The idiot spews tired commie crap from the Vietnam War.
Ron Paul is a moron as are his supporters.
Yours is one of the rare posts that used the word "international" regarding this issue.
Everyone else is a complete fucking liar.
And while we probably don't agree on the issue, at least we can agree on the fact that only international calls were monitored.
At this point in the discussion, I remind people that governments reserve the right to search anything crossing their borders, and ask why they think phone calls deserve some special protections.
But that's asking people to think, and that is always a mistake.
Anyway, congratulations on using the word "international." Please use it to remind those around you that this is nothing but a baggage check at the border.
Mossadegh was a thief. Cloaking him in "democracy" works about as well as it did for Lenin: it fools the simple-minded.
Baf X of Hidden Agenda infamy taught me how to coach vibrato to female rock singers: punch them in the gut until they stop it.
Fortunately band politics removed the threat before I could test this method.
This is very different from the lobbying process.
This vote-seller was going to receive the funds himself.
A lobbyist donates to a campaign, not the politician. The campaign then spends it on advertising which influences reporting keeping the electorate disinformed.
It would be much more honest if politicians just pocketed the damned cash!
Is "Green Bank" code for "Burning Cross?"
This facility must be renamed.
I'm going to get "text on Mac OS X looks blurry, not soft" replies
Some people have grown up reading text set in fonts chosen and rendered by Microsoft.
For instance, that horrible font they used for the address field in Internet Explorer, the one in the 90s TV commercials "log on to our web page" shots. Good grief, having that font blown up on a large screen TV really shows how awful it is!
Jaggies everywhere.
And that is what some people have grown up with. Their brains have grown - literally - accustomed to interpreting the jaggies similarly to serifs.
When exposed to well-rendered text, these unfortunates are without the "serifian" hinting that their brains expect.
So if the "S" glyph does not have corners, it will look blurry to them.
Being an ex-Linotype user, I have always been a fan of how the Mac renders fonts in a very print-like fashion. But not such a fanboy as to excuse the use of Chicago font in advertising good grief.
And with Microsoft, it's not so much their font rendering technology as their horrible font choices!
A little slash-trivia here [...] causing the picture to "bounce" and shear
This far predates Slashdot and was covered in Dr. Dobb's in the mid-80s.
Holy shit Avast.com has a craptastic web site.
It may be a good product, but their shitpage screams incompetence.
Problems:
1. Web page only works at the single text size they chose.
2. They waste ~1/3 of the page screen on whitespace.
3. 1 + 2 means you've got all this wasted screen space that you cannot fill with more legible text.
If they can't code a web page, why should I trust them to code an antivirus product?
In fact, even if we just throw the stuff away, mining it from trash dumps will be cheaper than mining it from the ground.
One man's trash is another man's gold, and in the way of commodities one man's gold is another man's gold.
I am not very skilled with programming.
That has never stopped a CS grad from seeking a programming job.
You are able to tell the difference between al-Qaeda and the Washington Post?
Barring misfortune, Dumbo is likely to be the Democrat candidate.
And I think that most dems have decent enough vision to build the ARES V.
How's that Superconducting Supercollider coming along?
If Bill Hemmer is so stupid why did CNN employ him for ten years?
I think Hemmer's show competes with Oprah and Ellen and the other mid-day idiot trash.
If you're going for Oprah's audience, you're going after a bunch of complete imbeciles.
Oh well, I like how prejudice works.
Hemmer working for CNN golly what a smart respectable journalist.
Chetry working for Fox golly what a complete airhead.
Hemmer working for Fox golly what a complete airhead.
Chetry working for CNN golly what a smart respectable journalist.
Please, all the networks hire their idiots from the same idiot factories, cover the same stories the same way, and even Nova is shit when it comes to science.
Want science news? Don't watch TV for it. I haven't bothered picking one up in years, but the Dallas Morning News used to have the nation's best science section.
It's similar to the reason CBS still holds any broadcast licenses whatsoever, and I think deeply related to the First Amendment.
That the cure for wrong stupid and harmful speech is to let the idiot spew.
In the short term (decades), Hansen's speech is extremely harmful: Piltdown Man Part Deux. Piltdown Man is still used as a club to prevent the teaching of Biology.
But, in the long term (century+), allowing the idiot to spew will create generations of properly skeptical scientists.
I've worked for two research scientists in the private sector, and their scientific ethics were far above those of most wacademics at the local football schools.
And though one was extremely political, its effect on his work was limited to repeating one or two media templates a day. Unlike the wacademics who pollute a third of their classroom time with political spewage - in the science classes.
I've had the TAs who didn't know the subject. I've had the TAs who sanction false data.
Perhaps there are some mid-range private schools that are not shot through with corruption like the public football schools and poison ivy league.
Phil, meet Yngwie....
Scatterbrains do not bring down game.
Distracted dummies cannot track wounded game for miles and hours, maybe days.
The best hunters in my family are the most serene.
Human beings are meant to multi-task. Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on. Yes, and the very act of gathering food requires sustained attention to the task.We are talking about two nonexclusive modes of human operation, and the point of being human is that we can choose how to operate in this spectrum. Animals have less, if any, choice.
We can employ our volitional consciousness to develop our mindful awareness.
It is what makes the martial arts so beautiful.
And what makes the martial artist so dadgum hard to sneak up on!
At such scales, the preferred method is reverse osmosis, and that means power for the pumps.
Nothing beats nukes for power, except Grand Coulee and Three Gorges
Also, land closer to the shore costs more. Solar desal takes acreage, and is optimally placed on the ocean. Salt disposal is a major problem for inland desal, especially in a greenie-infested place like California.
As a libertarian Dune-head wannabe water-merchant, nuke desal worries me. As a human being, nuke desal fills me with hope, as it can serve markets I cannot.
Maybe one day there will be wind and solar farms large enough to provide enough power to build other wind and solar farms. That is self-sufficient.
The same with your second opinion. Prove causality using something more substantial than a Krugman opinion piece.
Operation Iraqi Freedom is moral, when the alternative is Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein post-sanctions, a horrible reality that President George W. Bush prevented.
Even the 9/11 Report points out the ever-increasing connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. But in the Land of Make-Believe, Saddam Hussein was perfectly in his box and would remain that way forever.
And "quagmire" is also an opinionated characterization. The foreign enemy cannot dislodge us. We have a commanding presence in the Middle East.
Judging by the scum who washed up in Texas, Katrina was a massive success at keeping the savage natives from eating each other. Under Democrat management, New Orleans had become a shithole, and Louisiana a true quagmire.
So again, your opinion is revealed as media-driven and free of thought.
I'm sure your little fantasyland up your asshole has lots more opinions, but by any other name they still smell as shit.
Next time my cords fail "invisibly" I will look closer.
I was beginning to wonder why simply unscrewing and rescrewing the plug-case from the plug proper would fix the short. There is no visible short - but "visible" is very different when you're trying to get notes to happen and not caring about the specifics of the failure mode.
I guess it's again time to make my own patch cords with gobs of politically incorrect lead-tin solder.