"Would you be saying that if she had been selling crystal meth and crack to her friends and been caught with it?"
Even though that's not really analogous to what happened, I would still be calling for the guilty officials to be hung from lamp posts in front of the school district headquarters and left to rot as a warning to others. The entire drug war is insane, precisely because it's used to justify crap like this.
A better analogy would be if she had been accused of what you said by a student who actually was caught dealing.
Therein, I mention the Deacons of Defense, armed civil rights activists.
Also note that many post-Civil War gun control laws in the South were intended with the specific intent of disarming blacks; it was widely accepted that these laws would never be applied to white folks.
The antebellum Dredd Scott decision said you can't make blacks citizens because then we'd have to let them have guns -- an implicit acknowledgment that arms are useful for resisting tyranny.
And, seriously now, would you burn a cross on the front yard of a house with man holding his shotgun on you?
Outside the U.S., let me point to the Warsaw Uprising, where a poorly-armed neighborhood of Jews stood off the German Army for months.
History abounds with examples of enslaved people achieving freedom through force of arms; those like you who scorn the idea somehow never manage to show the example of a free people being subjugated despite being armed. Put up or shut up.
"...The practical reason for the Second Amendment is that private ownership of guns was necessary to perpetuate slavery."
I cannot let this go unchallenged.
The practical reason was that the Founders had just won a war against the most powerful nation on Earth starting with a privately-armed militia. They knew from strong, recent experience that a people well practiced with arms they owned were the first defense against tyranny.
Concorde -- "the shot heard round the world" -- was fought over a gun-control action: the British trying to confiscate privately owned arms and put them into an armory they controlled.
I agree with your comment to this extent: citizens should be able to possess the current military issue-weapon. In our times, that would be M-16s, or at least its semi-auto equivalent, the AR-15 and clones thereof.
(Hey, Mr. Obama! Want your new mandatory-volunteer corps to be actually-volunteer? Set it up as an Article 1, Section 8 militia, and let volunteers keep their issue weapon after their training hitch in high school.)
In any event, times have changed. The very first gun control measures were laws keeping guns out of the hands of slaves, indentured servants, and Indians. Many modern gun control laws were originally enacted after the Civil War to keep guns out of the hands of freed black men.
One of the reasons given in the infamous Dredd Scott decision for not accepting black people as real human beings was specifically that then they'd be allowed to possess arms under the Second Amendment.
In my own lifetime...look up Deacons For Defense and Justice, armed black churchmen who rode with other, more pacifistic civil rights activists as body guards.
In the current case, scroll down through this thread and read the comments from those who would use their arms on the school thugs who perpetrated this vile sex crime. That's what the right to keep and bear is about -- not revolution, not overthrowing the government, but checking it, returning it to its limits. Reminding officials who might otherwise think themselves above the law that there are consequences beyond the law. Yes, the citizens imposing those consequences would be in prison or dead themselves -- but that's exactly what Jefferson was talking about when he said the Tree of Liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
(And, yes, I agree one hundred percent that sex-offender registries are also abominations, but if we're going to have them, the two women who actually performed the search and any school official who approved it should damn well be on one, if they survive prison.)
Before another feature is added, before another UI pixel is tweaked, before so much as a single clock cycle of normal performance is optimized, I want FireFox to stop leaking memory and most especially to stop running up the CPU from 10% to 95% (as reported by top) several times a day even in safe-mode.
Yeah, I've tried about a dozen different fixes. I'm not here begging for help; that's what the tech support forums are for.
I'm just declaring: today I'm going to waste my afternoon uninstalling FF, wiping my profile, and re-installing FF from scratch, and I am not happy about that.
If that doesn't fix it, FF goes poof and doesn't come back until I read that this problem has been clearly identified and stomped flat. This is the kind of crap I left IE (and indeed, Windows itself -- I'm on Ubuntu) to get away from -- and no, I don't mean the CPU hogging.
I mean the attitude that feature creep and marginal tweaking is more important than fixing severe usability problems.
I'm wondering -- and this is pure blue sky speculation, because I do not have personal experience with anything more than a 1911 pistol -- I'm wondering if the French incident was possible because apparently that design didn't rely on a gas tube to work the action, thus had no pathway to pressurize the breech. The Pendleton incident, however, strongly suggests that in fast-moving, high-energy events like this, chaos rules and sometimes tail-of-the-bell-curve crazy shit just happens.
I'm eager to read the final report, if one is ever released.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have implied that the BFA debris alone caused all that damage.
Via JGreely's reply, see this article concerning a similar event at Camp Pendleton, where the BFA shattered without damaging the barrel so badly that the gun couldn't fire. He also refers to reports in Hatcher indicating that in tests, "partial obstructions were often blown clear, damaging the muzzle rather than the breech".
You're right, the circumstances are very suspicious, and I suspect the French army is as prone to cover-up as any other, but it seems at least plausible that this was a huge blunder, not a deliberate massacre.
In any event, though, the point is that at least two of the fundamental rules of gun safety were violated in this incident:
* All guns are always loaded (taking blanks as "not really loaded"), and
* Don't point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy.
The gun described in the opening article is designed to encourage violations of the same rules. No good and very bad.
Steven Den Beste has some interesting discussion on this point in comments here and here.
Summary: there was a BFA attached, but it failed in such a way as to spray the crowd with debris.
The soldier involved has been charged with criminal gross negligence.
The CINC (who, unlike the American CINC, is not also the President) resigned in a snit because Pres. Sarkozy scolded him for being an amateur.
==
BTW, strelitsa, no, that portion of American citizens who are neither the military nor the police aren't necessarily "mobs", until we join an unruly crowd, or "vigilantes", until we hunt down, without due process, alleged criminals who are not immediately threatening us. We're just citizens who are neither military nor police, About half of us aren't even armed (but even those of us who are armed are not thereby mobs or vigilantes). Those of us who are able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 are members of the "unorganized militia", but by military standards I'm too old and disabled, so I'm not in that set, either.
I'm going to assume that the military is looking into this simply because they look into everything, not because they actually plan to deploy it. It's a terrible idea.
1. See the incident a few weeks ago where a soldier was firing machine gun blanks into a crowd during a demonstration. He swapped mags--but unfortunately, the fresh mag was not filled with blanks.
2. A tactical shooting instructor I once had, a cop, told us about the bean-bag shotgun he kept in his patrol car. The barrel was wrapped with blue tape, and there was a strict policy, as "leave without pay and a reprimand in your file", against ever loading it with anything other than beanbag rounds. In a crisis, if you grabbed the blue barrel, you had to be certain you would be firing beanbags, not lead.
3. When you point your gun at a person and pull the trigger, you must be very certain about what the gun will do. This adds a whole 'nother level of complexity to what should be a simple, reliable design. Not only will soldiers and cops inadvertently fire this thing on "kill" not "stun", but there's also a question of whether or not it will fire at all--just as bad if the cop needs to make a bad guy stop.
4. When a bad guy sees a gun pointed at him, he needs to be certain that if he doesn't do as he is told, he will die. I don't want bad guys to see this gun, and decide to take a gamble that it's only set to stun.
5. Americans have, and should have, a deep suspicion towards inappropriate force being exercised under color of law. The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution. If you can't trust your military or police, the answer isn't to give them weak weapons--the answer is to disband them, by force if necessary, and organize trustworthy forces.
[1] NB: Technically, the police are civilians (see for example Robert Peel #7), but I hope this gets my point across. I wish I knew a word for "out of uniform, unbadged civilians", but nothing comes to mind.
When you cast your vote, you are given a printed, human-readable copy of your ballot with a unique random index number printed on it, assigned at the moment your vote is cast, which is not linked to the voter rolls.
All the votes are available on a website as a spreadsheet, sorted by index number. Anyone can download the sheet for a given district, or for all precincts.
So, you download the sheet for your precinct, find your index number, and verify the recorded votes against your paper copy of the ballot.
You can also count the votes for each candidate, and see that your totals match the officially reported ones.
If they're not already, make the voter registration rolls open public records. That means that anyone can make spot checks, verifying that there are no dead people on the rolls. This list can be sorted by address, so you can check that there are not bogus addresses, or 100 people living in a two-room apartment.
The total number of voting records must be less than the total number of registered voters.
So, any individual voter can verify that: 1. His vote was recorded correctly. 2. The totals are being reported correctly. 3. Bogus votes haven't been inserted into the system.
Although that last check is weak, if enough people do spot checks, widespread, systematic fraud will likely be spotted, increasing the risk.
Thanks everyone who replied. This is enough to get me going.
rantingkitten, your instructions were exactly what I was looking for, and I wish that they, or something like them, were included in the readme file, or somewhere fairly obvious on the FF site. I'm too sleepy right now to start major surgery, but I'll give it a try tomorrow.
I see that if I wait for a few days, Ubuntu and Synaptic will put a push-button package together. That's encouraging.
I'm also waiting for a couple of my add-ons, like Sage, to be updated, so there's no rush as long as I know it's coming.
I've scattered several questions throughout; they're bold for your convenience.
I downloaded the archive into its own folder, then extracted it into the same folder. I found that I could, in fact, run Firefox by double-clicking a file named "firefox", which turns out to be a shell script. Every time I run it, I have to confirm that I want to run it as opposed to displaying it.
How do I keep Linux from making me confirm that I want to run the script?
ABOUT says: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051202 Firefox/3.0
The Firefox launcher in the panel above my desktop starts 3.0 b5.
ABOUT says: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509 Firefox/3.0b5
In both cases, System Monitor reports a process named Firefox, with no version number.
If beta 5 is running, the firefox script in my download folder launches another instance of b5, rather than rc1.
While I appreciate the value, for now, of having separate installs of the beta and the RC, at some point, I'm going to want to go with the release. How will I replace the beta with the release version?
I've downloaded some packages, and they have in fact gone through a specific install sequence, once or twice even asking me to click on a EULA. The binaries do not remain in the download directory, but instead get put somewhere else, I'm guessing somewhere in $PATH. Can I put the RC somewhere in the path so that it will be the launcher default rather than the beta, but without deleting the beta?
Again, thanks for your help. You've given me some important clues to figure out what is going on.
Let me know if I'm missing some obvious tutorial somewhere, or if we should move this discussion to email or another forum.
I double checked, and unless the process is running under a name other than "Firefox" or "Mozilla", that's not the problem. In the past, when it has been a problem, I at least got a dialog telling me to quit the running process. I'm getting nothing at all.
Your response suggests that I should be seeing some kind of installation sequence. What do you do to start the install?
OK, I feel like a right idiot asking this, but I'm new to Linux and am still finding my way.
How do I install this update?
I downloaded firefox-3.0rc1.tar.bz2, but it only opens with the archive manager. I've extracted everything into a new folder, but nothing there seems to install the package.
There's a file called "updater", but nothing happens when I click on it. Clicking on the file named "Firefox" starts Firefox, after going through a EULA dialog at least the first time, but the b05 package is still what usually runs. Is installation not actually necessary?
"Check for Updates" under Help/About is grayed out.
I Googled for "firefox rc1 install" and several variations thereof, and remain unenlightened. It almost seems as if this update should happen automatically and transparently, but it's not happening for me.
Yes, I am using an account with admin powers.
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, and ran the update manager before obtaining the FF release candidate.
Current FF version is 3 b05, which came with Ubuntu.
What am I missing?
I have to say, mysterious installation has been one of the major thorns in converting me whole heartedly to Linux. Sometimes it happens automagically, sometimes I can't figure out how to do it at all, and often I can find no information about how to install/update a package. Over and over, install instructions go no further than "download and install", which doesn't help much if the install doesn't start itself.
Jim Samples shows he's got more integrity than any Boston public safety official or federal official of any kind.
No reasonable person would conclude that these devices were bombs.
Those who claim, "But...anything could look like a bomb! We can't take any chances!" are half right. Anything can look like a bomb. If that's the course you take, resign yourself to living under airport concourse rules: possess only the expected or explicitly permitted, keep it by you at all times, prepare to be searched at any moment by any official on any pretext.
The message here is that citizens must try to predict what pompous, cowardly officials will deem threatening or suspicious.
Of course, a real bomb would either not look like a bomb or would be completely hidden. (Wait till campaign season then hide your C4 boombox behind a Kennedy campaign poster.)
This is the public equivalent of arresting school kids for running around on the playground with pointed fingers and cocked thumbs, yelling "Bang! Bang! You're dead!"
Action was taken against Cartoon Network because that's a way of pretending to be tough on terror while carefully avoiding do anything that might offend actual terrorists.
Go ahead, folks. Try to imagine Boston officials trying to arrest, oh, say, a local imam or CAIR director for placing signs with the Crescent and Star picked out in green lights.
In the version I read (from Danny Kaye's Around the World Storybook), when the dinner guests arrived, they found the man stirring a stew pot--hung close to the ceiling over a single candle....
As a Bush supporter, I must express my gratitude to Kerry for allowing we voters to speak without dragging us all through the courts.
As badly as he wanted it, that concession call must have cost him. I know he was prepared to fight to the last ditch, but decided not to. I respect his integrity.
Now, Mr. Bush, Finish the job we've hired you to do.
If you really mean the grounds (green or bare copper wires) then this is a problem. But if you are talking about the neutrals (white) then the code forbids them to be bonded to the grounds at subpanels. They can only be grounded at the main panel.
If the neutrals and grounds are intermixed, then the grounds, and everything connected to them, will carry return current. The grounds are only supposed to carry fault current.
This is one of the most common wiring errors. An excellent example of the traps waiting for the unwary, and why you should hire a pro to oversee and direct any work you do, and to do the critical stuff, like 220, three-phase, and main panel work.
There's a lot read into "Cogito, ergo sum" that I don't think is there.
Descarte was simply looking for a starting place in an argument to show that God existed. How could he know that anything existed? After all, we experience dreams and hallucinations, so our sensory experience is not reliable. Even mathematical logic may have some subtle, undetected flaw.
His insight was that if thinking was taking place, something, someone, was doing the thinking. Whatever was true, his self-awareness was near-tautological proof that his self-awareness, at least, existed. The world might be a dream, his body a mere seeming, other people figments of his imagination -- but the fact was that something was experiencing all that, and that something, himself, had to exist to have the experience, false or not.
Any creature capable of framing this concept knows that it exists. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it's a dead end; it doesn't allow you to infer the existence of anything else.
I do not think that any fair government should fear such speech.
"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
On that basis, the government damn well should fear such speech, they just shouldn't be able to do jack shit about it. All officials who take an oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution should have cold sweat trickling down their backs, as they remember that the Second Amendment is part of that Constitution, and that them getting uppity is why.
James Lovelock, one of the true ninja hacker lords, has suggested that of all planets in the solar system, only Earth looks like it harbors life, because only it has an atmosphere that is out of chemical equilibrium.
Lovelock, a atmospheric chemist and inventor who made his fortune on the ion-capture gas chromatography detector, is the author of the so-called Gaia Hypothesis. Romantic name aside, it's the idea that the presence of life alters a planet's environment to be more favorable to life. (The idea and name have been appropriated by eco-mystics who take it to mean that there actually is some sort of earth deity, but that's emphatically not what Lovelock is saying.)
On our planet, many atmospheric gases are grossly out of equilibrium. For instance, although the atmosphere is about one-fifth oxygen, there are detectable traces of methane, mostly from termites and "the farts of ruminants". If life were not continually renewing the methane, it would combine with the oxygen, and disappear in a few hours.
Of course, the presence of oxygen itself is an anomaly. It is so reactive that if it were not renewed by photosynthesis, it would bind with the copious free carbon lying about.
Lovelock gives many other examples in his excellent book, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth. (He also mentions that the presence of fluorocarbons, like Freon, in the atmosphere is a clear sign, not just of life, but of intelligent life. Since you can determine atmospheric composition by spectrometry through a telescope, this gives a way to detect civilization if only you can image a planet hosting it.)
There's a clue in the simple appearance of the planets from space: compare the complex and constantly-changing appearance of the Earth's patchy clouds, liquid-water ocean, and of course its wildly varying landmasses (including snowcaps, yellow deserts, chlorphyll-green jungles, and seasonal temperate forests and grasslands), with the dead, relatively static appearance of any other planet in the system. Our nervous systems have life-detection circuits built in; honestly now, do you see any when you look at Mars?
The key is that Earth is alone in all the solar system in having a disequilibrium chemistry. This doesn't mean that there wasn't life elsewhere at one time; it may not even mean that there aren't small, isolated outposts that support some life, but not enough to control the entire planet. Certainly, life on Earth had to start that way.
Nevertheless, although there may indeed have been a time, early in its history, when life florished on Mars, it seems dead now.
Slashdot Mirror
"Would you be saying that if she had been selling crystal meth and crack to her friends and been caught with it?"
Even though that's not really analogous to what happened, I would still be calling for the guilty officials to be hung from lamp posts in front of the school district headquarters and left to rot as a warning to others. The entire drug war is insane, precisely because it's used to justify crap like this.
A better analogy would be if she had been accused of what you said by a student who actually was caught dealing.
See my comment up-thread
Therein, I mention the Deacons of Defense, armed civil rights activists.
Also note that many post-Civil War gun control laws in the South were intended with the specific intent of disarming blacks; it was widely accepted that these laws would never be applied to white folks.
The antebellum Dredd Scott decision said you can't make blacks citizens because then we'd have to let them have guns -- an implicit acknowledgment that arms are useful for resisting tyranny.
And, seriously now, would you burn a cross on the front yard of a house with man holding his shotgun on you?
Outside the U.S., let me point to the Warsaw Uprising, where a poorly-armed neighborhood of Jews stood off the German Army for months.
History abounds with examples of enslaved people achieving freedom through force of arms; those like you who scorn the idea somehow never manage to show the example of a free people being subjugated despite being armed. Put up or shut up.
Dab Nang It!
This, of course, was in response to Qrlx's post, and that's the one that showed in preview.
So, why is my reply now showing as a reply to a reply to a reply that wasn't even there when I started typing?
"...The practical reason for the Second Amendment is that private ownership of guns was necessary to perpetuate slavery."
I cannot let this go unchallenged.
The practical reason was that the Founders had just won a war against the most powerful nation on Earth starting with a privately-armed militia. They knew from strong, recent experience that a people well practiced with arms they owned were the first defense against tyranny.
Concorde -- "the shot heard round the world" -- was fought over a gun-control action: the British trying to confiscate privately owned arms and put them into an armory they controlled.
I agree with your comment to this extent: citizens should be able to possess the current military issue-weapon. In our times, that would be M-16s, or at least its semi-auto equivalent, the AR-15 and clones thereof.
(Hey, Mr. Obama! Want your new mandatory-volunteer corps to be actually-volunteer? Set it up as an Article 1, Section 8 militia, and let volunteers keep their issue weapon after their training hitch in high school.)
In any event, times have changed. The very first gun control measures were laws keeping guns out of the hands of slaves, indentured servants, and Indians. Many modern gun control laws were originally enacted after the Civil War to keep guns out of the hands of freed black men.
One of the reasons given in the infamous Dredd Scott decision for not accepting black people as real human beings was specifically that then they'd be allowed to possess arms under the Second Amendment.
In my own lifetime...look up Deacons For Defense and Justice, armed black churchmen who rode with other, more pacifistic civil rights activists as body guards.
In the current case, scroll down through this thread and read the comments from those who would use their arms on the school thugs who perpetrated this vile sex crime. That's what the right to keep and bear is about -- not revolution, not overthrowing the government, but checking it, returning it to its limits. Reminding officials who might otherwise think themselves above the law that there are consequences beyond the law. Yes, the citizens imposing those consequences would be in prison or dead themselves -- but that's exactly what Jefferson was talking about when he said the Tree of Liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
(And, yes, I agree one hundred percent that sex-offender registries are also abominations, but if we're going to have them, the two women who actually performed the search and any school official who approved it should damn well be on one, if they survive prison.)
Before another feature is added, before another UI pixel is tweaked, before so much as a single clock cycle of normal performance is optimized, I want FireFox to stop leaking memory and most especially to stop running up the CPU from 10% to 95% (as reported by top) several times a day even in safe-mode.
Yeah, I've tried about a dozen different fixes. I'm not here begging for help; that's what the tech support forums are for.
I'm just declaring: today I'm going to waste my afternoon uninstalling FF, wiping my profile, and re-installing FF from scratch, and I am not happy about that.
If that doesn't fix it, FF goes poof and doesn't come back until I read that this problem has been clearly identified and stomped flat. This is the kind of crap I left IE (and indeed, Windows itself -- I'm on Ubuntu) to get away from -- and no, I don't mean the CPU hogging.
I mean the attitude that feature creep and marginal tweaking is more important than fixing severe usability problems.
"Hopefully this will become a UK wide policy...."
You want to pay your government to come up with detailed rules on exactly how to throw out your rubbish?
You want to pay your government to hire people to paw through your rubbish and rob you if you didn't throw it in the right bin?
That's really the best use of your taxes you can come up with?
It's true: there'll always be an...island off the coast of France.
I'm wondering -- and this is pure blue sky speculation, because I do not have personal experience with anything more than a 1911 pistol -- I'm wondering if the French incident was possible because apparently that design didn't rely on a gas tube to work the action, thus had no pathway to pressurize the breech. The Pendleton incident, however, strongly suggests that in fast-moving, high-energy events like this, chaos rules and sometimes tail-of-the-bell-curve crazy shit just happens.
I'm eager to read the final report, if one is ever released.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have implied that the BFA debris alone caused all that damage.
Via JGreely's reply, see this article concerning a similar event at Camp Pendleton, where the BFA shattered without damaging the barrel so badly that the gun couldn't fire. He also refers to reports in Hatcher indicating that in tests, "partial obstructions were often blown clear, damaging the muzzle rather than the breech".
You're right, the circumstances are very suspicious, and I suspect the French army is as prone to cover-up as any other, but it seems at least plausible that this was a huge blunder, not a deliberate massacre.
In any event, though, the point is that at least two of the fundamental rules of gun safety were violated in this incident:
* All guns are always loaded (taking blanks as "not really loaded"), and
* Don't point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy.
The gun described in the opening article is designed to encourage violations of the same rules. No good and very bad.
Steven Den Beste has some interesting discussion on this point in comments here and here.
Summary: there was a BFA attached, but it failed in such a way as to spray the crowd with debris.
The soldier involved has been charged with criminal gross negligence.
The CINC (who, unlike the American CINC, is not also the President) resigned in a snit because Pres. Sarkozy scolded him for being an amateur.
==
BTW, strelitsa, no, that portion of American citizens who are neither the military nor the police aren't necessarily "mobs", until we join an unruly crowd, or "vigilantes", until we hunt down, without due process, alleged criminals who are not immediately threatening us. We're just citizens who are neither military nor police, About half of us aren't even armed (but even those of us who are armed are not thereby mobs or vigilantes). Those of us who are able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 are members of the "unorganized militia", but by military standards I'm too old and disabled, so I'm not in that set, either.
I'm going to assume that the military is looking into this simply because they look into everything, not because they actually plan to deploy it. It's a terrible idea.
1. See the incident a few weeks ago where a soldier was firing machine gun blanks into a crowd during a demonstration. He swapped mags--but unfortunately, the fresh mag was not filled with blanks.
2. A tactical shooting instructor I once had, a cop, told us about the bean-bag shotgun he kept in his patrol car. The barrel was wrapped with blue tape, and there was a strict policy, as "leave without pay and a reprimand in your file", against ever loading it with anything other than beanbag rounds. In a crisis, if you grabbed the blue barrel, you had to be certain you would be firing beanbags, not lead.
3. When you point your gun at a person and pull the trigger, you must be very certain about what the gun will do. This adds a whole 'nother level of complexity to what should be a simple, reliable design. Not only will soldiers and cops inadvertently fire this thing on "kill" not "stun", but there's also a question of whether or not it will fire at all--just as bad if the cop needs to make a bad guy stop.
4. When a bad guy sees a gun pointed at him, he needs to be certain that if he doesn't do as he is told, he will die. I don't want bad guys to see this gun, and decide to take a gamble that it's only set to stun.
5. Americans have, and should have, a deep suspicion towards inappropriate force being exercised under color of law. The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution. If you can't trust your military or police, the answer isn't to give them weak weapons--the answer is to disband them, by force if necessary, and organize trustworthy forces.
[1] NB: Technically, the police are civilians (see for example Robert Peel #7), but I hope this gets my point across. I wish I knew a word for "out of uniform, unbadged civilians", but nothing comes to mind.
I'm not an expert, but here's my take:
When you cast your vote, you are given a printed, human-readable copy of your ballot with a unique random index number printed on it, assigned at the moment your vote is cast, which is not linked to the voter rolls.
All the votes are available on a website as a spreadsheet, sorted by index number. Anyone can download the sheet for a given district, or for all precincts.
So, you download the sheet for your precinct, find your index number, and verify the recorded votes against your paper copy of the ballot.
You can also count the votes for each candidate, and see that your totals match the officially reported ones.
If they're not already, make the voter registration rolls open public records. That means that anyone can make spot checks, verifying that there are no dead people on the rolls. This list can be sorted by address, so you can check that there are not bogus addresses, or 100 people living in a two-room apartment.
The total number of voting records must be less than the total number of registered voters.
So, any individual voter can verify that:
1. His vote was recorded correctly.
2. The totals are being reported correctly.
3. Bogus votes haven't been inserted into the system.
Although that last check is weak, if enough people do spot checks, widespread, systematic fraud will likely be spotted, increasing the risk.
Thanks everyone who replied. This is enough to get me going.
rantingkitten, your instructions were exactly what I was looking for, and I wish that they, or something like them, were included in the readme file, or somewhere fairly obvious on the FF site. I'm too sleepy right now to start major surgery, but I'll give it a try tomorrow.
I see that if I wait for a few days, Ubuntu and Synaptic will put a push-button package together. That's encouraging.
I'm also waiting for a couple of my add-ons, like Sage, to be updated, so there's no rush as long as I know it's coming.
"Onward through the fog!"
Again, thank you for staying with me on this.
I've scattered several questions throughout; they're bold for your convenience.
I downloaded the archive into its own folder, then extracted it into the same folder. I found that I could, in fact, run Firefox by double-clicking a file named "firefox", which turns out to be a shell script. Every time I run it, I have to confirm that I want to run it as opposed to displaying it.
How do I keep Linux from making me confirm that I want to run the script?
ABOUT says:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051202 Firefox/3.0
The Firefox launcher in the panel above my desktop starts 3.0 b5.
ABOUT says:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509 Firefox/3.0b5
In both cases, System Monitor reports a process named Firefox, with no version number.
If beta 5 is running, the firefox script in my download folder launches another instance of b5, rather than rc1.
While I appreciate the value, for now, of having separate installs of the beta and the RC, at some point, I'm going to want to go with the release. How will I replace the beta with the release version?
I've downloaded some packages, and they have in fact gone through a specific install sequence, once or twice even asking me to click on a EULA. The binaries do not remain in the download directory, but instead get put somewhere else, I'm guessing somewhere in $PATH. Can I put the RC somewhere in the path so that it will be the launcher default rather than the beta, but without deleting the beta?
Again, thanks for your help. You've given me some important clues to figure out what is going on.
Let me know if I'm missing some obvious tutorial somewhere, or if we should move this discussion to email or another forum.
Jesser, thanks for the reply.
I double checked, and unless the process is running under a name other than "Firefox" or "Mozilla", that's not the problem. In the past, when it has been a problem, I at least got a dialog telling me to quit the running process. I'm getting nothing at all.
Your response suggests that I should be seeing some kind of installation sequence. What do you do to start the install?
OK, I feel like a right idiot asking this, but I'm new to Linux and am still finding my way.
How do I install this update?
I downloaded firefox-3.0rc1.tar.bz2, but it only opens with the archive manager. I've extracted everything into a new folder, but nothing there seems to install the package.
There's a file called "updater", but nothing happens when I click on it. Clicking on the file named "Firefox" starts Firefox, after going through a EULA dialog at least the first time, but the b05 package is still what usually runs. Is installation not actually necessary?
"Check for Updates" under Help/About is grayed out.
I Googled for "firefox rc1 install" and several variations thereof, and remain unenlightened. It almost seems as if this update should happen automatically and transparently, but it's not happening for me.
Yes, I am using an account with admin powers.
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, and ran the update manager before obtaining the FF release candidate.
Current FF version is 3 b05, which came with Ubuntu.
What am I missing?
I have to say, mysterious installation has been one of the major thorns in converting me whole heartedly to Linux. Sometimes it happens automagically, sometimes I can't figure out how to do it at all, and often I can find no information about how to install/update a package. Over and over, install instructions go no further than "download and install", which doesn't help much if the install doesn't start itself.
It's revealing that "czar" is even remotely an attractive label in some circles.
I make a habit of reading "czar" as "fuehrer" whenever I see it. That brings things into a less romantic light.
"Drug Fuehrer".
"Energy Fuehrer".
"Copyright Fuehrer".
"Healthcare Fuehrer".
"Education Fuehrer".
"Diversity Fuehrer".
"Climate Fuehrer."
No, most of these don't exist--yet. But I think there's a lot of folks who want to see all of these, and more.
May all fuehrers and their minions hang and die in the public square.
Oh my gosh, I hope the Black Sun hasn't failed!
Jim Samples shows he's got more integrity than any Boston public safety official or federal official of any kind.
No reasonable person would conclude that these devices were bombs.
Those who claim, "But...anything could look like a bomb! We can't take any chances!" are half right. Anything can look like a bomb. If that's the course you take, resign yourself to living under airport concourse rules: possess only the expected or explicitly permitted, keep it by you at all times, prepare to be searched at any moment by any official on any pretext.
The message here is that citizens must try to predict what pompous, cowardly officials will deem threatening or suspicious.
Of course, a real bomb would either not look like a bomb or would be completely hidden. (Wait till campaign season then hide your C4 boombox behind a Kennedy campaign poster.)
This is the public equivalent of arresting school kids for running around on the playground with pointed fingers and cocked thumbs, yelling "Bang! Bang! You're dead!"
Action was taken against Cartoon Network because that's a way of pretending to be tough on terror while carefully avoiding do anything that might offend actual terrorists.
Go ahead, folks. Try to imagine Boston officials trying to arrest, oh, say, a local imam or CAIR director for placing signs with the Crescent and Star picked out in green lights.
In the version I read (from Danny Kaye's Around the World Storybook), when the dinner guests arrived, they found the man stirring a stew pot--hung close to the ceiling over a single candle....
As a Bush supporter, I must express my gratitude to Kerry for allowing we voters to speak without dragging us all through the courts.
As badly as he wanted it, that concession call must have cost him. I know he was prepared to fight to the last ditch, but decided not to. I respect his integrity.
Now, Mr. Bush, Finish the job we've hired you to do.
If you really mean the grounds (green or bare copper wires) then this is a problem. But if you are talking about the neutrals (white) then the code forbids them to be bonded to the grounds at subpanels. They can only be grounded at the main panel.
If the neutrals and grounds are intermixed, then the grounds, and everything connected to them, will carry return current. The grounds are only supposed to carry fault current.
This is one of the most common wiring errors. An excellent example of the traps waiting for the unwary, and why you should hire a pro to oversee and direct any work you do, and to do the critical stuff, like 220, three-phase, and main panel work.
Would an intelligent consumer buy white flour from a cocaine dealer? I think not.
Doesn't matter who you buy it from; white flour is a completely legal substance. Period.
I bet a lot of those "pirate" shops also sold screwdrivers, scopes, meters, connectors, wires....
Doesn't matter who you buy it from. If you don't use it to commit an illegal act, you ought not be culpable. Period.
There's a lot read into "Cogito, ergo sum" that I don't think is there.
Descarte was simply looking for a starting place in an argument to show that God existed. How could he know that anything existed? After all, we experience dreams and hallucinations, so our sensory experience is not reliable. Even mathematical logic may have some subtle, undetected flaw.
His insight was that if thinking was taking place, something, someone, was doing the thinking. Whatever was true, his self-awareness was near-tautological proof that his self-awareness, at least, existed. The world might be a dream, his body a mere seeming, other people figments of his imagination -- but the fact was that something was experiencing all that, and that something, himself, had to exist to have the experience, false or not.
Any creature capable of framing this concept knows that it exists. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it's a dead end; it doesn't allow you to infer the existence of anything else.
See the Wikipedia entry.
I do not think that any fair government should fear such speech.
"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
On that basis, the government damn well should fear such speech, they just shouldn't be able to do jack shit about it. All officials who take an oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution should have cold sweat trickling down their backs, as they remember that the Second Amendment is part of that Constitution, and that them getting uppity is why.
James Lovelock, one of the true ninja hacker lords, has suggested that of all planets in the solar system, only Earth looks like it harbors life, because only it has an atmosphere that is out of chemical equilibrium.
Lovelock, a atmospheric chemist and inventor who made his fortune on the ion-capture gas chromatography detector, is the author of the so-called Gaia Hypothesis. Romantic name aside, it's the idea that the presence of life alters a planet's environment to be more favorable to life. (The idea and name have been appropriated by eco-mystics who take it to mean that there actually is some sort of earth deity, but that's emphatically not what Lovelock is saying.)
On our planet, many atmospheric gases are grossly out of equilibrium. For instance, although the atmosphere is about one-fifth oxygen, there are detectable traces of methane, mostly from termites and "the farts of ruminants". If life were not continually renewing the methane, it would combine with the oxygen, and disappear in a few hours.
Of course, the presence of oxygen itself is an anomaly. It is so reactive that if it were not renewed by photosynthesis, it would bind with the copious free carbon lying about.
Lovelock gives many other examples in his excellent book, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth. (He also mentions that the presence of fluorocarbons, like Freon, in the atmosphere is a clear sign, not just of life, but of intelligent life. Since you can determine atmospheric composition by spectrometry through a telescope, this gives a way to detect civilization if only you can image a planet hosting it.)
There's a clue in the simple appearance of the planets from space: compare the complex and constantly-changing appearance of the Earth's patchy clouds, liquid-water ocean, and of course its wildly varying landmasses (including snowcaps, yellow deserts, chlorphyll-green jungles, and seasonal temperate forests and grasslands), with the dead, relatively static appearance of any other planet in the system. Our nervous systems have life-detection circuits built in; honestly now, do you see any when you look at Mars?
The key is that Earth is alone in all the solar system in having a disequilibrium chemistry. This doesn't mean that there wasn't life elsewhere at one time; it may not even mean that there aren't small, isolated outposts that support some life, but not enough to control the entire planet. Certainly, life on Earth had to start that way.
Nevertheless, although there may indeed have been a time, early in its history, when life florished on Mars, it seems dead now.