A while back, Penn Gillette wrote about his charter flight on a vomit comet. His was the second charter, right after the filming of "The Uranus Experiment," which he mentioned in the article.
Moonwatcher said to ask you to please quite disparaging semi-simian anthropoids. After all, HE's not frightened, and he's got a big black (or clear, if you prefer the book) slab to back him up.
Comment on your opinion: Obviously the staff hasn't been working hard enough for the past few years.
Reality distortion field, prick of a boss, and all, I have a level of respect for Steve Jobs because he's one of the few CEOs who knows how to do anything to improve the bottom line besides cut costs and shed employees.
> Prosperity is being taken as a birthright. I half wonder if the outcry against illegal > aliens is due to the fact that these people work hard.
I'm caught between agreeing with you on this, and thinking that you just sound like a spoiled brat CxO who doesn't want to share any of "his hard-earned money" with his employees who did most of the real work. Speaking of "Prosperity is being taken as a birthright," certainly our CxO crew has taken that one to new heights - 270X (on average) higher than the people that they insist complain too much and want too much for too little work. Not to mention that as they took home 270X the average worker's pay, they managed to completely screw the US industrial/development base, and the economy itself, to boot. I'd say we got much better service back when that number was only 40X.
The first prerequisite for preventing 9/11 would have been to pay attention to the intelligence. On Jan 21, 2001 the Bush administration dropped practically all affairs of the State Department and focused on getting out the the ABM Treaty so they could go ahead with Star Wars. They weren't merely ignoring the Middle East and Islamic extremists, they were putting back pressure against the intelligence even reaching the top. You can't "connect the dots" if you're not even looking at the page.
I don't know what McCain's position on Star Wars was back in 2000, and to be honest I don't know why it was pushed so hard, and wonder how much money was spent after 2000. But at the time we didn't need it, but its existence has pushed Russia to where they are today, the Cold War is restarting, and at this point without extensive diplomacy it would be unwise to dismantle it.
Assuming McCain wouldn't redirected the State Department so thoroughly and disastrously as Bush, I don't think 9/11 would have happend under his watch, and I'm sure it wouldn't have happened under Gore. What part of "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside US" is not clear enough?
What if bin Laden set up good relations with Myanmar, or North Korea, or any other number of corrupt regimes in the world.
Bad as he was, Saddam Hussein was actually better to his people, overall, than either of the 2 named regimes, an no doubt others. Once you start using the "He's a tyrant and needs to be taken out!" excuse, there's a looooooon line ahead of you.
In addition, the President had already been playing a very effective game of villainizing the Democrats from day 1 of his administration. You're right about the game of chicken - he likely would have let the funding run out, let calamaties start escalating, and blamed it all on the Democrats. Of course none of the blame would have fallen on his refusal to compromise.
Sad thing is, the press was behind him, and I suspect the nation would have bought the goods.
Sony is one of the few companies that does both media and electronics. There have been many questioning which branch of the company has more clout, and speculation that it would all revolve around DRM.
It appears that those questions have been answered.
I'll give one example - the Iraq War. There was little-to-no significant questioning of the Bush administrations "evidence" leading to the Iraq war, and after it came out that the evidence was defective, and very possibly cherry-picked, with some possibility of outright fabrication, there was still no investigation.
The nation has gone to war on false pretenses, done incredible damage to our prestige and trust overseas, and those who presided over it have received no significant account for their actions.
One way I heard it... Perhaps reporters may be left-wing, but somewhere up the management chain it turns solid right-wing.
The other way I've heard, from several sources, is that it's not a conspiracy, it's PROFIT. The media has become so revenue and profit oriented that investigative journalism has become a thing of the past. It's much cheaper and more profitable to accept press releases and report them as news.
In other words, in the USA the Press is broken, and has abdicated its duty, as conceived by the founders of our country.
I won't pretend to know about 2000/2004, and keep in mind we're still in the tinfoil hat zone.
I will throw some media blame at 2004, however. I had a generally low opinion of Kerry through most of the campaign, but then watched one of his speeches on CSPAN or some such, and realized that the guy can at least give a decent speech, and has decent speechwriters. But none of that came through general campaign coverage on mainstream networks. In retrospectives, the Democrats were criticized for fielding such weak candidates, but by what criteria is a guy who has trouble putting words together, and whos speaches sound like book reports come off as a strong candidate? I suspect the "strong" and "weak" is more a measure of the machines behind the candidates than the candidates, themselves.
As for conspiracy... No conspiracy, because conspiracies are generally hidden. If there's a vast right-wing conspiracy, it's because it's hidden in plain view, right out in the open, fully covered in weblogs, talk radio, Fox News, etc.
The real problem is that Usenet is the medium which has the greatest claim to rights under the First Ammendment.
All of the weblogs like Slashdot and such may be prettier, easier to use, and *might* have a higher signal-to-noise (Usenet is even worse than Slashdot, though it doesn't seem possible.) ratio, but they all have an owning party who accepts responsibility for their contents. Usenet is unowned, merely hosted, and therefore comes closest to free speech, in the political sense of the word.
I don't believe 9/11 would have happened under a Gore administration.
Beginning on their first day of office, the Bush administration shifted the focus of the State Department toward abdicating from the ABM treaty with Russia. (Originally made with the USSR, but inherited by Russia.) From the very start they began willfully ignoring the Middle East and Islamic issues, having derisively citing the Clinton administrations "preoccupation with the Middle East." Of course they never say 9/11 coming. Not only were they not looking, but when noise like reports titled, "Bin Laden Determined To Attack In US" surfaced, they stuffed their fingers in their ears.
At the very least, Gore would have inherited Clinton's engagement with the Middle East. Maybe 9/11 still would have happened, maybe the dots would have remained disconnected, but I would assert that there is a much higher chance of connecting them when you're listening to the intelligence reports.
It appears that the media have decided that it's time for Obama to lose the election. There is nothing in the news now directly about Obama, none of his own words, there is everything in the news about his campaign with words like "beleagured", "desperate", and this "vague rhetoric" stuff. Coming out of the Republican Convention there was the "rock star frenzy" about Sarah Palin, until facts started to reveal that she is really something of a Dan Quayle. There was a brief news cycle of fact discovery about Sarah Palin, and now things seem to be over to Dog Pile on Obama. By the way, notice how Iraq has pretty much disappeared from the news lately? The one thing I did hear is that the central government is beginning to arrest Sunnis, essentially dismantling the "Anhbar Awakening."
It's certainly good that we keep being told about our terrible Liberal Media, because I surely wouldn't have guessed it from what I've seen, lately.
I had thought the media were trying to keep this a tight horse-race, because that enhances their own status and ratings, by keeping us watching. That doesn't appear to be the case. Coming into the conventions, we had a Democratic rock-star candidate against a Republican whose own party had very little enthusiasm for him. Coming out we have an invisible Democratic candidate and an energized Republican party, and as far as I can tell, it's largely done with media coverage.
Oh, and we haven't even see this year's "October Surprise" yet.
Well no, that's part of the unwritten "privatize the profits and make the debt public." Good for profits.
I once had a coworker who was a neocon before the term was coined. He was always railing against taxes as "wealth redistribution, taking from those who have, and can - giving it to those who don't and can't." I semi-agreed with him, though nowhere near as vociferously, especially out of some compassion for those without.
Then came the savings and loan bailout, and Resolution Trust. At that point, and thinking a little more about the Military Industrial Complex, and I realized that it really is wealth redistribution, but I'll be more federal money goes to people making more than me than goes to people making less.
The electoral college is still useful, if it could have a little tuning.
With completely direct election, any recount would have to be nationwide, and any local dispute becomes a national dispute. Any close election would become a nightmare, and the definition of "close" would have to become quite large.
I also disagree with the "winner takes all" imlementation of the electoral college that is currently in general usage. There has been some push toward proportional electors by-state, and that is probably a good idea. Only problem is that Democrats want to push that through in narrowly Republican states, and Republicans want to push it through in narrowly Democratic states. The other side of the issue is that this is a states rights issue. The Constitution only says that each state will send electors, and defines how the number of electors is determined. The states decide how to choose the electors, and in fact don't even need to bind the electors to the election results. (I believe the states do have to have an election, they just don't need to respect the results.) So this makes the whole issue very muddy, and unable to uniformly change without a Constitutional ammendment.
Keep in mind that the message is clearly and loudly being sent:
"Profit is the most important thing in the United States of America."
Never in so few, or just those words, but sent nonetheless. "Government should not do anything that can be done by the private sector." "The Medicare Part 4 specifically prohibits the government from using its buying power to negotiate a better price on pharmaceuticals." "A company is *only* responsible to return value to its shareholders, while obeying the law." etc, etc, etc
There is still at least one human responsible for the policy and administration of the computer that ran the program that did the illegal search.
Otherwise someone could set up an automated targeting machine gun to transport itself to a crowded location, start targeting "large" objects and firing, then claim he was not responsible for mass murder, because a computer directed the actions.
> because the "movement" won't be in office. The politician will.
Not quite. The politician brings the "movement" into office with him.
Example: John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales, etc, etc. (I don't lump Dick Cheney in because he was on the ticket and was "elected", and I don't lump Colin Powell because I don't think he was really part of the "movement".)
No President does the job alone - (since Carter tried and failed) this is a team effort. Perhaps one of the most important things we don't do is look hard enough at the campaign organizations of the candidates, because that reflects how he selects and builds teams. As another for-instance, maybe bad mic selection at the mixing board helped the "Dean Scream" kill Howard Dean's candidacy, but there were also fundamental cash usage problems in his campaign that finished the job, and would have finished it later had the scream not happened.
Isn't one of the reasons for keeping government email on government machines security? I know another is public records, which is allegedly what's being evaded here, and I know even (especially?) government machines aren't necessarily secure. But at least there is the opportunity for security and the exercise of control. In this light, is it being reckless to use a non-government machine - especially a wide open service like yahoo, hotmail, or gmail, to conduct government business?
Slashdot Mirror
That looks like the article I read, though it's been over a year, so details are obviously fuzzy.
A while back, Penn Gillette wrote about his charter flight on a vomit comet. His was the second charter, right after the filming of "The Uranus Experiment," which he mentioned in the article.
Moonwatcher said to ask you to please quite disparaging semi-simian anthropoids. After all, HE's not frightened, and he's got a big black (or clear, if you prefer the book) slab to back him up.
Comment on your opinion: Obviously the staff hasn't been working hard enough for the past few years.
Reality distortion field, prick of a boss, and all, I have a level of respect for Steve Jobs because he's one of the few CEOs who knows how to do anything to improve the bottom line besides cut costs and shed employees.
> Prosperity is being taken as a birthright. I half wonder if the outcry against illegal
> aliens is due to the fact that these people work hard.
I'm caught between agreeing with you on this, and thinking that you just sound like a spoiled brat CxO who doesn't want to share any of "his hard-earned money" with his employees who did most of the real work. Speaking of "Prosperity is being taken as a birthright," certainly our CxO crew has taken that one to new heights - 270X (on average) higher than the people that they insist complain too much and want too much for too little work. Not to mention that as they took home 270X the average worker's pay, they managed to completely screw the US industrial/development base, and the economy itself, to boot. I'd say we got much better service back when that number was only 40X.
The first prerequisite for preventing 9/11 would have been to pay attention to the intelligence. On Jan 21, 2001 the Bush administration dropped practically all affairs of the State Department and focused on getting out the the ABM Treaty so they could go ahead with Star Wars. They weren't merely ignoring the Middle East and Islamic extremists, they were putting back pressure against the intelligence even reaching the top. You can't "connect the dots" if you're not even looking at the page.
I don't know what McCain's position on Star Wars was back in 2000, and to be honest I don't know why it was pushed so hard, and wonder how much money was spent after 2000. But at the time we didn't need it, but its existence has pushed Russia to where they are today, the Cold War is restarting, and at this point without extensive diplomacy it would be unwise to dismantle it.
Assuming McCain wouldn't redirected the State Department so thoroughly and disastrously as Bush, I don't think 9/11 would have happend under his watch, and I'm sure it wouldn't have happened under Gore. What part of "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside US" is not clear enough?
What if bin Laden set up good relations with Myanmar, or North Korea, or any other number of corrupt regimes in the world.
Bad as he was, Saddam Hussein was actually better to his people, overall, than either of the 2 named regimes, an no doubt others. Once you start using the "He's a tyrant and needs to be taken out!" excuse, there's a looooooon line ahead of you.
In addition, the President had already been playing a very effective game of villainizing the Democrats from day 1 of his administration. You're right about the game of chicken - he likely would have let the funding run out, let calamaties start escalating, and blamed it all on the Democrats. Of course none of the blame would have fallen on his refusal to compromise.
Sad thing is, the press was behind him, and I suspect the nation would have bought the goods.
I don't see anyone from the press digging in like the Woodward & Bernstein of old.
I'd really like to, believe me.
Sony is one of the few companies that does both media and electronics. There have been many questioning which branch of the company has more clout, and speculation that it would all revolve around DRM.
It appears that those questions have been answered.
I guess I'll take a little time to answer an AC.
I'll give one example - the Iraq War. There was little-to-no significant questioning of the Bush administrations "evidence" leading to the Iraq war, and after it came out that the evidence was defective, and very possibly cherry-picked, with some possibility of outright fabrication, there was still no investigation.
The nation has gone to war on false pretenses, done incredible damage to our prestige and trust overseas, and those who presided over it have received no significant account for their actions.
One way I heard it... Perhaps reporters may be left-wing, but somewhere up the management chain it turns solid right-wing.
The other way I've heard, from several sources, is that it's not a conspiracy, it's PROFIT. The media has become so revenue and profit oriented that investigative journalism has become a thing of the past. It's much cheaper and more profitable to accept press releases and report them as news.
In other words, in the USA the Press is broken, and has abdicated its duty, as conceived by the founders of our country.
OK, first we have Intel with ambient-air cooled datacenters.
Now Microsoft is putting them in tents.
What's next, raincoats in 19" rack size, or is it Server Umbrellas?
I won't pretend to know about 2000/2004, and keep in mind we're still in the tinfoil hat zone.
I will throw some media blame at 2004, however. I had a generally low opinion of Kerry through most of the campaign, but then watched one of his speeches on CSPAN or some such, and realized that the guy can at least give a decent speech, and has decent speechwriters. But none of that came through general campaign coverage on mainstream networks. In retrospectives, the Democrats were criticized for fielding such weak candidates, but by what criteria is a guy who has trouble putting words together, and whos speaches sound like book reports come off as a strong candidate? I suspect the "strong" and "weak" is more a measure of the machines behind the candidates than the candidates, themselves.
As for conspiracy... No conspiracy, because conspiracies are generally hidden. If there's a vast right-wing conspiracy, it's because it's hidden in plain view, right out in the open, fully covered in weblogs, talk radio, Fox News, etc.
The real problem is that Usenet is the medium which has the greatest claim to rights under the First Ammendment.
All of the weblogs like Slashdot and such may be prettier, easier to use, and *might* have a higher signal-to-noise (Usenet is even worse than Slashdot, though it doesn't seem possible.) ratio, but they all have an owning party who accepts responsibility for their contents. Usenet is unowned, merely hosted, and therefore comes closest to free speech, in the political sense of the word.
I'd rather have "tax and spend" than the financially irresponsible "tax-cut and spend" that we have now.
There may be similarities between the candidates, but there are real differences, too.
I'll take you one step further:
I don't believe 9/11 would have happened under a Gore administration.
Beginning on their first day of office, the Bush administration shifted the focus of the State Department toward abdicating from the ABM treaty with Russia. (Originally made with the USSR, but inherited by Russia.) From the very start they began willfully ignoring the Middle East and Islamic issues, having derisively citing the Clinton administrations "preoccupation with the Middle East." Of course they never say 9/11 coming. Not only were they not looking, but when noise like reports titled, "Bin Laden Determined To Attack In US" surfaced, they stuffed their fingers in their ears.
At the very least, Gore would have inherited Clinton's engagement with the Middle East. Maybe 9/11 still would have happened, maybe the dots would have remained disconnected, but I would assert that there is a much higher chance of connecting them when you're listening to the intelligence reports.
Don your tinfoil hats, please...
It appears that the media have decided that it's time for Obama to lose the election. There is nothing in the news now directly about Obama, none of his own words, there is everything in the news about his campaign with words like "beleagured", "desperate", and this "vague rhetoric" stuff. Coming out of the Republican Convention there was the "rock star frenzy" about Sarah Palin, until facts started to reveal that she is really something of a Dan Quayle. There was a brief news cycle of fact discovery about Sarah Palin, and now things seem to be over to Dog Pile on Obama. By the way, notice how Iraq has pretty much disappeared from the news lately? The one thing I did hear is that the central government is beginning to arrest Sunnis, essentially dismantling the "Anhbar Awakening."
It's certainly good that we keep being told about our terrible Liberal Media, because I surely wouldn't have guessed it from what I've seen, lately.
I had thought the media were trying to keep this a tight horse-race, because that enhances their own status and ratings, by keeping us watching. That doesn't appear to be the case. Coming into the conventions, we had a Democratic rock-star candidate against a Republican whose own party had very little enthusiasm for him. Coming out we have an invisible Democratic candidate and an energized Republican party, and as far as I can tell, it's largely done with media coverage.
Oh, and we haven't even see this year's "October Surprise" yet.
Well no, that's part of the unwritten "privatize the profits and make the debt public." Good for profits.
I once had a coworker who was a neocon before the term was coined. He was always railing against taxes as "wealth redistribution, taking from those who have, and can - giving it to those who don't and can't." I semi-agreed with him, though nowhere near as vociferously, especially out of some compassion for those without.
Then came the savings and loan bailout, and Resolution Trust. At that point, and thinking a little more about the Military Industrial Complex, and I realized that it really is wealth redistribution, but I'll be more federal money goes to people making more than me than goes to people making less.
The electoral college is still useful, if it could have a little tuning.
With completely direct election, any recount would have to be nationwide, and any local dispute becomes a national dispute. Any close election would become a nightmare, and the definition of "close" would have to become quite large.
I also disagree with the "winner takes all" imlementation of the electoral college that is currently in general usage. There has been some push toward proportional electors by-state, and that is probably a good idea. Only problem is that Democrats want to push that through in narrowly Republican states, and Republicans want to push it through in narrowly Democratic states. The other side of the issue is that this is a states rights issue. The Constitution only says that each state will send electors, and defines how the number of electors is determined. The states decide how to choose the electors, and in fact don't even need to bind the electors to the election results. (I believe the states do have to have an election, they just don't need to respect the results.) So this makes the whole issue very muddy, and unable to uniformly change without a Constitutional ammendment.
Shipping a product (not controlled by NDA) using the technology is legally equivalent to publishing.
Oh, IANAL, etc.
Keep in mind that the message is clearly and loudly being sent:
"Profit is the most important thing in the United States of America."
Never in so few, or just those words, but sent nonetheless.
"Government should not do anything that can be done by the private sector."
"The Medicare Part 4 specifically prohibits the government from using its buying power to negotiate a better price on pharmaceuticals."
"A company is *only* responsible to return value to its shareholders, while obeying the law."
etc, etc, etc
With mantras like these, what do you expect?
There is still at least one human responsible for the policy and administration of the computer that ran the program that did the illegal search.
Otherwise someone could set up an automated targeting machine gun to transport itself to a crowded location, start targeting "large" objects and firing, then claim he was not responsible for mass murder, because a computer directed the actions.
> because the "movement" won't be in office. The politician will.
Not quite. The politician brings the "movement" into office with him.
Example:
John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales, etc, etc. (I don't lump Dick Cheney in because he was on the ticket and was "elected", and I don't lump Colin Powell because I don't think he was really part of the "movement".)
No President does the job alone - (since Carter tried and failed) this is a team effort. Perhaps one of the most important things we don't do is look hard enough at the campaign organizations of the candidates, because that reflects how he selects and builds teams. As another for-instance, maybe bad mic selection at the mixing board helped the "Dean Scream" kill Howard Dean's candidacy, but there were also fundamental cash usage problems in his campaign that finished the job, and would have finished it later had the scream not happened.
Isn't one of the reasons for keeping government email on government machines security? I know another is public records, which is allegedly what's being evaded here, and I know even (especially?) government machines aren't necessarily secure. But at least there is the opportunity for security and the exercise of control. In this light, is it being reckless to use a non-government machine - especially a wide open service like yahoo, hotmail, or gmail, to conduct government business?
Don't you mean, "Pharisees and Sadducees?"
Bush's friends, too.