If it looked like Bush was at real risk of being impeached, Repubs would take down Cheney first. Having Junior around their necks for the run-up to November 2008 will be a bad enough anchor. But "President Cheney" would be an anchor like they use for aircraft carriers. If he doesn't offer to resign -- "for health reasons" -- they'll coordinate a political hit on him like you wouldn't believe.
All the Dems would have to do is watch (and laugh).
First of all, this site is not typically representative of the general population so opinions expressed here are often skewed.
Even if that's true, so what?
There is no practical way to have both security and freedom; they are diametrically opposed concepts by definition.
It's not anywhere near that simple. In many cases, losing freedoms also results in less real security. As I suspect would happen in this case. Generously assuming that it'd actually be used for its publicly intended purpose, it might make us a little more secure from a specific subset of threats. But the potential for abuse is such that it would make us less secure against other threats.
In the long run, in general, freedom increases security. The exceptional situations in which increased security is necessary to protect freedom inevitably require careful and independent oversight to prevent security precautions from damaging freedom more than they secure it.
The "limited state of emergency" of which you speak, to whatever extent it exists, has no legal nor practical bearing on this matter.
Anything that depends on simply trusting the government is -- if I may be excused for using a heavily-abused term -- un-American. Our system of government is built on openness, oversight, and active citizen participation. That's especially true when someone tries to sells us on an intentionally vague and open-ended "state of emergency".
"If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning," Hawking said. "What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
Now, rediculous stuff comes from the other side as well; but when incredibly smart and esteemed scientists like Hawking make such statements that show an animosity toward and lack of understanding of religion, it might antagonize people.
The reason I laughed -- somewhat bitterly -- at Hawking's quip was that it sounded familiar, from my Sunday School days.
One of the reasons that I'm an ex-Bible Baptist was because reasonable questions like that generally got just that kind of dismissive and/or vaguely threatening response. Any skepticism I had was the work of Satan, trying to seduce me away from the God-given Truth.
Actually, it's been pretty common since the beginning of the prize, at least for things other than Literature. Heck, the 1904 Nobel Peace prize was give to the entire Institute of International Law. The entire International Committee of the Red Cross has won multiple times. The 1902 Nobel for Physics was given to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman for ""in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena". Etcetera.
Kind of like telling the world we need to ditch cars as our primary mode of transportation because of the evils of pollution...
Absolutely. I mean, sure, over 40,000 people die in the US every year in traffic accidents, and roughly another 10,000+ from air pollution from traffic, and jockeying for control of the hydrocarbons needed to power those vehicles contribute to low-level (and not-so-low-level) military conflicts, and so on and on, but it's not like there's any point trying to come up with something better. It'd just be a waste of time.
Well... "conservatives"... this wasn't the point of founding this country What about the next president, or the one after that... still trust them?
Oh, but this is the "Permanent Republican Majority", right? AKA, the Thousand Year Right? Therefore there will never again be a non-Republican president, and therefore we can trust them all.
And I'm sure the fine and honorable Senator from Diebold will be pleased to provide any necessary oversight.
Of course. And making the investment means you own the results. If the public wanted a say in the Internet, then they should have come up with the investment money to make it possible, instead of leaving it to the private sector.
Oh, wait.
Heh. Has anyone asked Al Gore -- who was one of the folks instrumental in getting funding for internet R&D -- what he thinks of this issue? I'm guessing that he'd back net neutrality.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith's invisible hand works almost everywhere...
... except where it's been stomped into a pulp by the corporatocracy's invisible jackboots. An honest free market, if we had one, would probably be better in many respects than what we have, even if it wouldn't be the utopia some folks seem to think. But despite all the lovely-sounding lip service they give the idea, neither corporatists nor their employees in DC (and elsewhere around the world) actually want a free market, for the fairly good reason that many of them would probably starve if they had to try to make a living in one. They don't want a free market, they want a market they can manipulate.
Oh, BTW, that cheap food? Government handouts to agri-business. Cheap clothes and electronics? Massive externalising of real-world costs and systematic control of worker populations. TANSTAAFMarket.
Take a look at how fat people are in "poverty" neighborhoods, and that will tell you something.
It tells me something different than it tells you.
"How fat people are" in the US is a piss-poor measure of their poverty level... except, perhaps, in the opposite direction that you're assuming. Due mostly to warping effect of agribusiness corporations and their reps in Congress have on the market, it's cheaper to be fat and malnourished in the US than it is to be slim and healthy.
And as a previous poster alluded to, having a FOP sticker on your car pretty much makes you immune to minor traffic violations. At least that's the myth in Indiana......
I've heard that story in various places. It might even be true in some of them. No doubt the folks who do the fund-raising for FOPs are very careful to unconvincingly deny the rumor, if they're asked. Deny it because it's essentially bribery, but deny it unconvincingly because I'm sure it gets people with more money than ethics to support the FOP.
Maybe the Red Cross should start a rumor that donating blood will get people priority treatment at hospitals.
Something about companies that have numerals in their names just makes them seem so reputable and trustworthy! I'm gonna sell my house and buy a butt-load of stock in them!!
It's safer to diversify. May I suggest that you invest half in them and half in our company -- 69ers Incorporated?
This would render any necessity for a distributed hydrogen infrastructure obsolete as the refuelling could be done either by depot stops, or potentially even through the postal service!
Now, lets just look at the problem. We currently jump into a car weighing 1500 kg, running a 20% efficient motor, to transport an 80 kg person. This is an efficiency of 1.01%, which is what the problem really is.
So if everybody eats enough to double their weight, the resulting efficiency would be dramatically increased. (Meanwhile, having cleverly intuited this for themselves, many people in the US have already begun the process...)
There'd be no point to Samsung hoarding memory to themselves if they can't sell it. As things are now, best case scenario, Samsung might be able to wrangle a somewhat bigger minority share of the mp3 player market. If they cut this deal with Apple, Samsung gets to benefit from Apple's huge share.
Remember when we used to hate all the damn previews? Now we look forward to them, thankful the commercials are over!
I liked previews and I think so did most of my friends, though we'd sometimes get irritated if they played too many of them.
But TV advertisements in a movie theatre suck ass, badly. That, in a nutshell, is why I (and at least a few other folks I know) haven't been in a mainstream movie theatre in months.
The kvetching about "no good movies anymore" is the same damn thing people have been saying for decades. [shrug] Sturgeon's Law.
Well, there goes the bird population in countries with paranoid leadership.
The National Audubon Society is going to be so pissed.
I'm guessing that the first thing the Bushies will do is deputize the folks in the Minuteman Project to shoot down migrating birds. "I mean, who knows what those birds are bringing over the border?"
Super-cheap nanotubes? About fucking time. We've been hearing about nanotubes for years, their possible use in computers, all their various other properties... It certainly took them long enough to discover a cheap way to make them.
Of course, if you had been part of the effort, it would've happened twice as fast. But you obviously had other priorities, and I'm sure I speak for all of us here when I express my deep appreciation for taking a little of your precious time to share your insight with Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
All the Dems would have to do is watch (and laugh).
Even if that's true, so what?
There is no practical way to have both security and freedom; they are diametrically opposed concepts by definition.
It's not anywhere near that simple. In many cases, losing freedoms also results in less real security. As I suspect would happen in this case. Generously assuming that it'd actually be used for its publicly intended purpose, it might make us a little more secure from a specific subset of threats. But the potential for abuse is such that it would make us less secure against other threats. In the long run, in general, freedom increases security. The exceptional situations in which increased security is necessary to protect freedom inevitably require careful and independent oversight to prevent security precautions from damaging freedom more than they secure it.
Diebold's real complaint is that when the committee voted on which company to go with, Diebold wasn't allowed to count the votes.
The "limited state of emergency" of which you speak, to whatever extent it exists, has no legal nor practical bearing on this matter.
Anything that depends on simply trusting the government is -- if I may be excused for using a heavily-abused term -- un-American. Our system of government is built on openness, oversight, and active citizen participation. That's especially true when someone tries to sells us on an intentionally vague and open-ended "state of emergency".
... that Hummer owners by comparison are always so modest and unpretentious.
One of the reasons that I'm an ex-Bible Baptist was because reasonable questions like that generally got just that kind of dismissive and/or vaguely threatening response. Any skepticism I had was the work of Satan, trying to seduce me away from the God-given Truth.
Actually, it's been pretty common since the beginning of the prize, at least for things other than Literature. Heck, the 1904 Nobel Peace prize was give to the entire Institute of International Law. The entire International Committee of the Red Cross has won multiple times. The 1902 Nobel for Physics was given to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman for ""in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena". Etcetera.
Lots more examples here.
Absolutely. I mean, sure, over 40,000 people die in the US every year in traffic accidents, and roughly another 10,000+ from air pollution from traffic, and jockeying for control of the hydrocarbons needed to power those vehicles contribute to low-level (and not-so-low-level) military conflicts, and so on and on, but it's not like there's any point trying to come up with something better. It'd just be a waste of time.
Oh, but this is the "Permanent Republican Majority", right? AKA, the Thousand Year Right? Therefore there will never again be a non-Republican president, and therefore we can trust them all.
And I'm sure the fine and honorable Senator from Diebold will be pleased to provide any necessary oversight.
Oh, wait.
Heh. Has anyone asked Al Gore -- who was one of the folks instrumental in getting funding for internet R&D -- what he thinks of this issue? I'm guessing that he'd back net neutrality.
Oh, BTW, that cheap food? Government handouts to agri-business. Cheap clothes and electronics? Massive externalising of real-world costs and systematic control of worker populations. TANSTAAFMarket.
It tells me something different than it tells you.
"How fat people are" in the US is a piss-poor measure of their poverty level ... except, perhaps, in the opposite direction that you're assuming. Due mostly to warping effect of agribusiness corporations and their reps in Congress have on the market, it's cheaper to be fat and malnourished in the US than it is to be slim and healthy.
I've heard that story in various places. It might even be true in some of them. No doubt the folks who do the fund-raising for FOPs are very careful to unconvincingly deny the rumor, if they're asked. Deny it because it's essentially bribery, but deny it unconvincingly because I'm sure it gets people with more money than ethics to support the FOP.
Maybe the Red Cross should start a rumor that donating blood will get people priority treatment at hospitals.
Can we get an alarm clock / periodic reminder option, as in Master of Orion 3? (Not that I really needed it for that game, unfortunately.)
The truth is actually what made the joke funny, though probably not in the way the jokester meant it to be funny.
Purely unintentionally, it's the first actually funny Gore/Internet joke made since the original Repub exaggeration.
It's safer to diversify. May I suggest that you invest half in them and half in our company -- 69ers Incorporated?
(It's a mining company, of course.)
Woot! A whole new way of going postal!
So if everybody eats enough to double their weight, the resulting efficiency would be dramatically increased. (Meanwhile, having cleverly intuited this for themselves, many people in the US have already begun the process ...)
There'd be no point to Samsung hoarding memory to themselves if they can't sell it. As things are now, best case scenario, Samsung might be able to wrangle a somewhat bigger minority share of the mp3 player market. If they cut this deal with Apple, Samsung gets to benefit from Apple's huge share.
I love the tag line for that movie. I think it would look particularly good on the Governator's campaign posters.
If the news media ever gets around to reporting some of the real news from 2000, it will be news.
I liked previews and I think so did most of my friends, though we'd sometimes get irritated if they played too many of them.
But TV advertisements in a movie theatre suck ass, badly. That, in a nutshell, is why I (and at least a few other folks I know) haven't been in a mainstream movie theatre in months.
The kvetching about "no good movies anymore" is the same damn thing people have been saying for decades. [shrug] Sturgeon's Law.
The National Audubon Society is going to be so pissed.
I'm guessing that the first thing the Bushies will do is deputize the folks in the Minuteman Project to shoot down migrating birds. "I mean, who knows what those birds are bringing over the border?"
Of course, if you had been part of the effort, it would've happened twice as fast. But you obviously had other priorities, and I'm sure I speak for all of us here when I express my deep appreciation for taking a little of your precious time to share your insight with Slashdot.
I strongly suspect that you're using the wrong tense.