There was a 7-passenger variant of the Apollo capsule designed. I don't remember the circumstance, whether it was during Skylab or the ATSP.
Obviously form follows function, so things will look alike, but it's also faster to check your filing cabinet first - assuming as you say, you can find it.
Summary: The US private sector has already proven itself incapable of creating the internet. What makes ANYONE thing that in managing it they won't make the same type of mistakes that prevented them from creating it? What makes anyone thing that given a free hand, they won't simply destroy it, or at the very least cripple future growth.
There are certainly some grey-haired ones here on Slashdot. Think back a bit... a bit further. Go back to those prehistoric days before 1995, for a moment. Better yet, back a bit further still.
There was an internet. It existed in some universities, DOD installations, and DARPA contractors. It had email and ftp. To exchange information there was this thing called Usenet, which was actually useful before Green Card and AOL opened the floodgates. To publish information there was this nifty thing called gopher. Something called a web might have just barely been starting. Oh yeah, bang-paths, too. I almost forgot about those.
Then there was the private sector. Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, home-grown BBSes. People on Compuserve talked to people on Compuserve and accessed information Compuserve made available or partnered for. Ditto for AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, etc. NONE OF THEM WERE ANYTHING LIKE THE INTERNET!! ALL OF THEM WERE VYING FOR THE WHOLE PIE!! Now I'll quit shouting. In the private sector, many of those home-grown BBSes networked with each other. Modems dialed modems late at night when rates were low, and moved information from island to island.
My point is simply this in the US the corporate sector plays a winner-take-all game, cooperating only when necessary. They had several years in which they could have bridged their networks together, (peering?) and they didn't. They all wanted to be the Winner, they all wanted to take all.
It's even worse than this, because NONE of those prior networks were terribly versatile. They all fielded what the corporate business plans called for. They supported applications, they supported functions.
This is also really key. The corporate networks were essentially fixed-function - they didn't support simple transport.
The internet came along, and not only was it built on cooperation, so EVERYONE could play, it was built on transport, not function. Who thinks that when they sent the first email from node to node, they were thinking about p2p, streaming video, TOR, bittorrent, MMORPG, skype, SETI and Folding @Home, clouds, grids and the like? They were thinking ahead though, and realized that things could come beyond their current imagination.
From what I can see, business interests haven't learned SPIT in the intervening 15-20 years. They want to erect walls so they can extract more money from under any rock they can turn to find it. They want to give preference to their content over any other. They know what they like, and make sure it can happen, they know what they don't like and hinder it as they can get away with it, and they neglect what they don't or can't imagine, or perhaps hinder it out of caution.
In the US, the government has no monopoly on stupidity. In the US, the marketplace is so messed up as to be virtually incapable of addressing corporate stupidity. In the US, the campaign process is so messed up as to be virtually incapable of addressing government stupidity.
> Its every little community preventing the build-out of alternative infrastructure.
Last I looked, it was the corporations preventing the build-out of alternative infrastructure by little communities. There are quite a few states that have laws outright forbidding municipal internet service, and quite a few more states have erected some pretty nasty roadblocks, though they haven't forbidden it outright.
Or to put it another way, I certainly hope that when the time is right, my kids participate in nakedness and sex with someone - the stuff that is banned from US TV. I even more certainly hope that they NEVER experience the kind of violence that is absolutely routine on US TV.
Extra caveat... Of course being a parent, that little "when the time is right" clause may be humorous, if not contentious, and I realize that. The singular "someone" also may well fit into the same category.
But this also happens to look like Apollo-derived configurations of many years ago. The milk from the government's teat was already long-digested on this. All they needed to do to get to this point was grab old plans and concepts out of the filing cabinet and dust them off. Of course as in all things, that's the easy part.
The picture at your HL42 site looks kind of like the thing that Major Steve Austin crashed back in the 1970's. We still can't build his prosthetics even at our current best, and I'll bet the best we could do today would cost a heck of a lot more than $6e6.
I might have had both of your preferences too. Hindsight is great. We know that what both Lincoln and Roosevelt did was sufficient for "success," we don't know how much of what they did was necessary. Hindsight can indeed point out steps that didn't need to be taken, infringements that never need have happened. In the thick of events, it's not so clear.
The same arguments can be made of some of the powers Bush assumed. There was one key difference, to me. I was here during Bush's power expansions, and will hopefully live long enough to see some of the historical perspective, so I can get some of both sides. If as you say FISA authorization was easy to get, why the heck wasn't it good enough for him - why did he need to go past FISA? Oh, the signing statement goes back to George Washington. Another little stat... GHWB challenged 232 statues in 4 years with signing statments. Clinton challenged 130 statutes in 8 years. GWB challenged 1,100 statutes in 8 years with 130 signing statments. (Wikipedia)
The book you cited was written by Hitler in 1928, well before the Third Reich got really wheeling. "Plans seldom survive contact with the enemy." I'll add the corollary that "Wishes seldom survive contact with reality." His included.
It's degree, not necessarily kind. Yes, there has always been domestic wiretapping, but presumably it was always under warrant or other form of due process. After 9/11 we got into widespread warrantless wiretapping. Even that I won't say never existed before, but the degree increased dramatically. Same for signing statements - they existed and were used long before, but never as often or to change the intent of the law as significantly. I'll confess to not knowing what prior administrations did with respect to The Unitary Presidency.
FDR was an odd one. It doesn't come out now unless you read historical and/or biographical books, but he practically dragged the country kicking and screaming into WWII, at least prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He did things that were almost certainly illegal to support England and the Soviet Union prior to our entry into the war. He did many "unitary" things, I guess, and I'm not too fond of that.
But would you rather he hadn't?
That wrong made a right, and I'm not happy that it was wrong, but I'd be less happy had things turned out opposite.
Incidentally, prior to WWII heating up, the Republicans of the time felt, "Hitler is a man we can do business with." NPR ran an interview a few years back about a man back in the day. He was conversing with a German man immediately post-War, and was surprised to know that the German knew about his hometown - fairly knowledgable, in fact. Turns out that there were plans to appoint that German man to be in charge of the region of the US man's hometown - after Germany won the war. As part of due diligence the German man learned about the region he would be governing in the near future. (Do business with, indeed!)
> What the rich guys mean whey they say they're taking jobs that "no one wants" is > that they're taking jobs that THEY don't want.
Correction: they're taking jobs that "no one wants" at the wages the rich guys want to pay. After all, we can't ALL be rich, and if you're going to crank that difference between them an us in there, you've got to start somewhere.
> The maximization of profits is a requirement of law and a desire of the shareholders.
I'll believe the latter - I'll need a reference for the former.
I'll float a completely uninformed opinion... I think that the "legal requirement" for corporations to "to maximize profits and nothing else, within the limits of the law," is a bit of revisionist history designed to make sociopathic behavior expected and acceptable. I can accept that I may be wrong on this, but I do know that this type of language is something that seems to have come into normal usage only in the last 10-20 years, and I have a longer memory than that. Prior to that, "corporations were in business to make money," was commonly understood, but this concept that if they do anything else they're shirking their "responsibility" is new. Maybe it's really that stockholders have gotten more sociopathic. But I would have sworn that stockholder lawsuits were born in corporate mismanagement, not in failing to be sociopathic profiteers.
I'm having a problem with "human nature" these days. I don't think in its current implementation it's good enough to see our society through the end of the century, if even that far.
I'd like to hear how ACTA could survive some sort of Constitutional challenge. From what I hear, it's not a treaty, but an "executive agreement," and being able to skip ratification by the Senate was one reason mentioned when I heard that. (Don't know if there's a connection...) The Constitution talks about Treaties, ratified by the senate. The Constitution talks about Laws, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.
What the heck is an "Executive Agreement" and what sort of force does it have. Moreover, what would its resistance be to any sort of serious legal challenge, given its rather odd legal status in the first place. This sounds shakier than Bush's use of signing statements.
My wife's drug of choice is chocolate. She's a rabid anti-smoker (grew up in a smoking home, and won't stand for it in her own) and drinks water, fruit juice, and milk.
No matter how big an jerk you may think Zuckerberg is, and no matter how bad you may think Facebook is, it is practically always possible to get worse.
Not knowing anything that I didn't learn in the last 5 minutes, upon seeing this article, this Ceglia guy certainly has a running start on both. The enemy of your enemy may not be your friend - just a different enemy.
> People who dive in caves are engaging in the same kind of technological and personal over-confidence > that let BP drill a mile underwater without ever seriously and realistically considering what could > go wrong, or recognizing that they had no useful response available when it inevitably did.
One key difference... BP hasn't died, at least not yet. In such circumstance, death is usually "externalized."
Last week I posted about an article I heard about Chinese 1-child children on NPR. Part of the article was about the Saturday classes a girl was taking on her day off of normal school, and how she'd be eating supper at Saturday School, because classes ran that long. Basically, China is raising generations of children with no siblings, no extended family except grandparents and really, no playtime. In some contexts that culture might be admired for their dedication. Clearly this thread is a different context. Personally I think that China is in for Interesting Times, in the Confucian sense, and I rather fear that they're going to export far too much of that interest to the rest of the world as collateral damage.
Back to creativity...
As a kid, some of my favorite toys were cardboard boxes and old blankets. I made sure that my kids had access to both.
Remember when Legos were general purpose bricks, instead of "build this adventure set"?
I heard a report on NPR last week about China and their One Child policy, a generation later. They started it, "Imagine no sister or brother... not only that, but no cousins, no aunts, no uncles... just you, your parents, and maybe your grandparents." Then they went on to talk about life for the children, since each family has only one. Those kids are PUSHED. Their cited example was a girl, taking her Saturday off of regular school to go to tutoring school - she was going to wind up eating supper there, because the off-day classes lasted that long. Play, what play? I know play isn't everything, but it isn't just fun. Social interactions? What happens when the only social interactions a child gets with peers are in the highly structured environments of classrooms or school lunchrooms? (I would expect that Chinese school lunchrooms are highly structured, unlike their US counterparts.)
Then I thought about an entire generation of an entire population, pushed to achieve most of their lives, spending that time of their lives as the only focus of their parents hopes and affections. Next I put that together with a report on the US, about how "Children being raised with a higher focus on self-esteem wind up being bratty, sociopathic adults." I'm wondering what will happen when this generation is running the country, having had this kind of childhood. They'll clearly be equipped for dominance, have the ability to deliver, and feel that they deserve everything they get. I'm just wondering how this will impinge on the rest of the world.
The other respondents went after other parts of your post. I'll go after this:
> Not necessarily. Environmental contamination, particularly with heavy metals has an IQ lowering effect > on the populace. Additionally since IQ is set relatively early, and brain damage later on will take off > the total score.
I'm trying to figure out who you're trying to knock, here. Certainly the US has had its share of environmental issues, and continues to do so. But China is hardly clean on this, either. In fact, in a way China is worse, because they've seen the bad examples in the US, and in many cases are starting off on the wrong foot. They could have learned from our mistakes and avoided baking some of them into their society, only to have them resistant to removal later. They didn't.
Oh, holy cow!!! (Sorry, I tend to puns as well as sarcasm.) I can't believe that ANYONE would call for a "prayer for the economy", much less in front of a golden calf. But I guess some of Tina Fey's best Sarah Palin sketches were using verbatim words, not material written by official comedy writers. And I guess there are a bunch of people who got their religion from a second-rate science-fiction author, and that religion sounds like second-rate science fiction, assuming the John Smiths of South Park are approximately correct in their description.
Humor is the only defense mechanism. Environmental collapse isn't somewhere in the future - it's been happening for decades and we take it as a bunch of isolated incidents instead of a growing pattern. I'm growing some hope the the oil leak in the Gulf might actually be a big enough wake-up call.
My impression was that Spitzer didn't go after silly stuff like escort services, he went after corporate corruption - the kind that non-consensually bilks people out of real money. I'll contrast that with a few other current politicians, both of whom spoke out against the same "crime", and both of whom continue to hold their offices in spite of very real evidence that they used public money to finance their foibles.
I guess that leaves 2 real questions on Elliot Spitzer. 1 - Was he really prosecuting people for stuff like escort services? I was under the impression that he targeted much more real crimes. 2 - How did he finance his personal escort use? If it was his own money, as far as I'm concerned the "crime" was between him and his wife, and the rest of us can but out. If it was public money, I have a very real problem with it.
The rest of what you say, I agree with. (As someone else once said, "'I have been convicted of no crime,' is hardly a qualification for the post of Attorney General, the highest office of the Law in the land.")
Slashdot Mirror
There was a 7-passenger variant of the Apollo capsule designed. I don't remember the circumstance, whether it was during Skylab or the ATSP.
Obviously form follows function, so things will look alike, but it's also faster to check your filing cabinet first - assuming as you say, you can find it.
Summary: The US private sector has already proven itself incapable of creating the internet. What makes ANYONE thing that in managing it they won't make the same type of mistakes that prevented them from creating it? What makes anyone thing that given a free hand, they won't simply destroy it, or at the very least cripple future growth.
There are certainly some grey-haired ones here on Slashdot. Think back a bit... a bit further. Go back to those prehistoric days before 1995, for a moment. Better yet, back a bit further still.
There was an internet. It existed in some universities, DOD installations, and DARPA contractors. It had email and ftp. To exchange information there was this thing called Usenet, which was actually useful before Green Card and AOL opened the floodgates. To publish information there was this nifty thing called gopher. Something called a web might have just barely been starting. Oh yeah, bang-paths, too. I almost forgot about those.
Then there was the private sector. Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, home-grown BBSes. People on Compuserve talked to people on Compuserve and accessed information Compuserve made available or partnered for. Ditto for AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, etc. NONE OF THEM WERE ANYTHING LIKE THE INTERNET!! ALL OF THEM WERE VYING FOR THE WHOLE PIE!! Now I'll quit shouting. In the private sector, many of those home-grown BBSes networked with each other. Modems dialed modems late at night when rates were low, and moved information from island to island.
My point is simply this in the US the corporate sector plays a winner-take-all game, cooperating only when necessary. They had several years in which they could have bridged their networks together, (peering?) and they didn't. They all wanted to be the Winner, they all wanted to take all.
It's even worse than this, because NONE of those prior networks were terribly versatile. They all fielded what the corporate business plans called for. They supported applications, they supported functions.
This is also really key. The corporate networks were essentially fixed-function - they didn't support simple transport.
The internet came along, and not only was it built on cooperation, so EVERYONE could play, it was built on transport, not function. Who thinks that when they sent the first email from node to node, they were thinking about p2p, streaming video, TOR, bittorrent, MMORPG, skype, SETI and Folding @Home, clouds, grids and the like? They were thinking ahead though, and realized that things could come beyond their current imagination.
From what I can see, business interests haven't learned SPIT in the intervening 15-20 years. They want to erect walls so they can extract more money from under any rock they can turn to find it. They want to give preference to their content over any other. They know what they like, and make sure it can happen, they know what they don't like and hinder it as they can get away with it, and they neglect what they don't or can't imagine, or perhaps hinder it out of caution.
In the US, the government has no monopoly on stupidity.
In the US, the marketplace is so messed up as to be virtually incapable of addressing corporate stupidity.
In the US, the campaign process is so messed up as to be virtually incapable of addressing government stupidity.
> Its every little community preventing the build-out of alternative infrastructure.
Last I looked, it was the corporations preventing the build-out of alternative infrastructure by little communities. There are quite a few states that have laws outright forbidding municipal internet service, and quite a few more states have erected some pretty nasty roadblocks, though they haven't forbidden it outright.
Or to put it another way, I certainly hope that when the time is right, my kids participate in nakedness and sex with someone - the stuff that is banned from US TV. I even more certainly hope that they NEVER experience the kind of violence that is absolutely routine on US TV.
Extra caveat... Of course being a parent, that little "when the time is right" clause may be humorous, if not contentious, and I realize that. The singular "someone" also may well fit into the same category.
But this also happens to look like Apollo-derived configurations of many years ago. The milk from the government's teat was already long-digested on this. All they needed to do to get to this point was grab old plans and concepts out of the filing cabinet and dust them off. Of course as in all things, that's the easy part.
The picture at your HL42 site looks kind of like the thing that Major Steve Austin crashed back in the 1970's. We still can't build his prosthetics even at our current best, and I'll bet the best we could do today would cost a heck of a lot more than $6e6.
Naah, you can't include Godwin in that until you get to those who believe that Mary was impregnated by a travelling German mercenary.
I might have had both of your preferences too. Hindsight is great. We know that what both Lincoln and Roosevelt did was sufficient for "success," we don't know how much of what they did was necessary. Hindsight can indeed point out steps that didn't need to be taken, infringements that never need have happened. In the thick of events, it's not so clear.
The same arguments can be made of some of the powers Bush assumed. There was one key difference, to me. I was here during Bush's power expansions, and will hopefully live long enough to see some of the historical perspective, so I can get some of both sides. If as you say FISA authorization was easy to get, why the heck wasn't it good enough for him - why did he need to go past FISA? Oh, the signing statement goes back to George Washington. Another little stat... GHWB challenged 232 statues in 4 years with signing statments. Clinton challenged 130 statutes in 8 years. GWB challenged 1,100 statutes in 8 years with 130 signing statments. (Wikipedia)
The book you cited was written by Hitler in 1928, well before the Third Reich got really wheeling. "Plans seldom survive contact with the enemy." I'll add the corollary that "Wishes seldom survive contact with reality." His included.
It's degree, not necessarily kind. Yes, there has always been domestic wiretapping, but presumably it was always under warrant or other form of due process. After 9/11 we got into widespread warrantless wiretapping. Even that I won't say never existed before, but the degree increased dramatically. Same for signing statements - they existed and were used long before, but never as often or to change the intent of the law as significantly. I'll confess to not knowing what prior administrations did with respect to The Unitary Presidency.
FDR was an odd one. It doesn't come out now unless you read historical and/or biographical books, but he practically dragged the country kicking and screaming into WWII, at least prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He did things that were almost certainly illegal to support England and the Soviet Union prior to our entry into the war. He did many "unitary" things, I guess, and I'm not too fond of that.
But would you rather he hadn't?
That wrong made a right, and I'm not happy that it was wrong, but I'd be less happy had things turned out opposite.
Incidentally, prior to WWII heating up, the Republicans of the time felt, "Hitler is a man we can do business with." NPR ran an interview a few years back about a man back in the day. He was conversing with a German man immediately post-War, and was surprised to know that the German knew about his hometown - fairly knowledgable, in fact. Turns out that there were plans to appoint that German man to be in charge of the region of the US man's hometown - after Germany won the war. As part of due diligence the German man learned about the region he would be governing in the near future. (Do business with, indeed!)
> What the rich guys mean whey they say they're taking jobs that "no one wants" is
> that they're taking jobs that THEY don't want.
Correction: they're taking jobs that "no one wants" at the wages the rich guys want to pay. After all, we can't ALL be rich, and if you're going to crank that difference between them an us in there, you've got to start somewhere.
> The maximization of profits is a requirement of law and a desire of the shareholders.
I'll believe the latter - I'll need a reference for the former.
I'll float a completely uninformed opinion... I think that the "legal requirement" for corporations to "to maximize profits and nothing else, within the limits of the law," is a bit of revisionist history designed to make sociopathic behavior expected and acceptable. I can accept that I may be wrong on this, but I do know that this type of language is something that seems to have come into normal usage only in the last 10-20 years, and I have a longer memory than that. Prior to that, "corporations were in business to make money," was commonly understood, but this concept that if they do anything else they're shirking their "responsibility" is new. Maybe it's really that stockholders have gotten more sociopathic. But I would have sworn that stockholder lawsuits were born in corporate mismanagement, not in failing to be sociopathic profiteers.
I'm having a problem with "human nature" these days. I don't think in its current implementation it's good enough to see our society through the end of the century, if even that far.
I'd like to hear how ACTA could survive some sort of Constitutional challenge. From what I hear, it's not a treaty, but an "executive agreement," and being able to skip ratification by the Senate was one reason mentioned when I heard that. (Don't know if there's a connection...) The Constitution talks about Treaties, ratified by the senate. The Constitution talks about Laws, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.
What the heck is an "Executive Agreement" and what sort of force does it have. Moreover, what would its resistance be to any sort of serious legal challenge, given its rather odd legal status in the first place. This sounds shakier than Bush's use of signing statements.
My wife's drug of choice is chocolate. She's a rabid anti-smoker (grew up in a smoking home, and won't stand for it in her own) and drinks water, fruit juice, and milk.
But you did include "Almost" in that sentence.
To the person who is inclined to use drugs, ANYTHING is a gateway to drug usage. (Including, as others have mentioned, DHMO.)
No matter how big an jerk you may think Zuckerberg is, and no matter how bad you may think Facebook is, it is practically always possible to get worse.
Not knowing anything that I didn't learn in the last 5 minutes, upon seeing this article, this Ceglia guy certainly has a running start on both. The enemy of your enemy may not be your friend - just a different enemy.
> People who dive in caves are engaging in the same kind of technological and personal over-confidence
> that let BP drill a mile underwater without ever seriously and realistically considering what could
> go wrong, or recognizing that they had no useful response available when it inevitably did.
One key difference... BP hasn't died, at least not yet. In such circumstance, death is usually "externalized."
Double standards at play???
Last week I posted about an article I heard about Chinese 1-child children on NPR. Part of the article was about the Saturday classes a girl was taking on her day off of normal school, and how she'd be eating supper at Saturday School, because classes ran that long. Basically, China is raising generations of children with no siblings, no extended family except grandparents and really, no playtime. In some contexts that culture might be admired for their dedication. Clearly this thread is a different context. Personally I think that China is in for Interesting Times, in the Confucian sense, and I rather fear that they're going to export far too much of that interest to the rest of the world as collateral damage.
Back to creativity...
As a kid, some of my favorite toys were cardboard boxes and old blankets. I made sure that my kids had access to both.
Remember when Legos were general purpose bricks, instead of "build this adventure set"?
> Just because the stuff works when its fresh doesn't mean it'll work in 25 years.
Show me a road that lasts 25 years - at least in the US.
I heard a report on NPR last week about China and their One Child policy, a generation later. They started it, "Imagine no sister or brother... not only that, but no cousins, no aunts, no uncles... just you, your parents, and maybe your grandparents." Then they went on to talk about life for the children, since each family has only one. Those kids are PUSHED. Their cited example was a girl, taking her Saturday off of regular school to go to tutoring school - she was going to wind up eating supper there, because the off-day classes lasted that long. Play, what play? I know play isn't everything, but it isn't just fun. Social interactions? What happens when the only social interactions a child gets with peers are in the highly structured environments of classrooms or school lunchrooms? (I would expect that Chinese school lunchrooms are highly structured, unlike their US counterparts.)
Then I thought about an entire generation of an entire population, pushed to achieve most of their lives, spending that time of their lives as the only focus of their parents hopes and affections. Next I put that together with a report on the US, about how "Children being raised with a higher focus on self-esteem wind up being bratty, sociopathic adults." I'm wondering what will happen when this generation is running the country, having had this kind of childhood. They'll clearly be equipped for dominance, have the ability to deliver, and feel that they deserve everything they get. I'm just wondering how this will impinge on the rest of the world.
The other respondents went after other parts of your post. I'll go after this:
> Not necessarily. Environmental contamination, particularly with heavy metals has an IQ lowering effect
> on the populace. Additionally since IQ is set relatively early, and brain damage later on will take off
> the total score.
I'm trying to figure out who you're trying to knock, here. Certainly the US has had its share of environmental issues, and continues to do so. But China is hardly clean on this, either. In fact, in a way China is worse, because they've seen the bad examples in the US, and in many cases are starting off on the wrong foot. They could have learned from our mistakes and avoided baking some of them into their society, only to have them resistant to removal later. They didn't.
Oh, holy cow!!! (Sorry, I tend to puns as well as sarcasm.) I can't believe that ANYONE would call for a "prayer for the economy", much less in front of a golden calf. But I guess some of Tina Fey's best Sarah Palin sketches were using verbatim words, not material written by official comedy writers. And I guess there are a bunch of people who got their religion from a second-rate science-fiction author, and that religion sounds like second-rate science fiction, assuming the John Smiths of South Park are approximately correct in their description.
Humor is the only defense mechanism. Environmental collapse isn't somewhere in the future - it's been happening for decades and we take it as a bunch of isolated incidents instead of a growing pattern. I'm growing some hope the the oil leak in the Gulf might actually be a big enough wake-up call.
I must have problems using sarcasm.
My impression was that Spitzer didn't go after silly stuff like escort services, he went after corporate corruption - the kind that non-consensually bilks people out of real money. I'll contrast that with a few other current politicians, both of whom spoke out against the same "crime", and both of whom continue to hold their offices in spite of very real evidence that they used public money to finance their foibles.
I guess that leaves 2 real questions on Elliot Spitzer.
1 - Was he really prosecuting people for stuff like escort services? I was under the impression that he targeted much more real crimes.
2 - How did he finance his personal escort use? If it was his own money, as far as I'm concerned the "crime" was between him and his wife, and the rest of us can but out. If it was public money, I have a very real problem with it.
The rest of what you say, I agree with. (As someone else once said, "'I have been convicted of no crime,' is hardly a qualification for the post of Attorney General, the highest office of the Law in the land.")
> 2)In this country, it's political suicide to admit that you've ever been wrong about anything ever.
Elliot Spitzer deserves an incredible amount of respect. He did wrong. He admitted it. He apologized for it. He resigned.
I only wish we could somehow have back the services that he used to render, the reason he was elected.