IMHO, Gonzales doesn't just know where "the bodies are buried," he had a hand on the shovel. (Obviously by "the bodies are buried" I don't mean murder, but I do mean dirty tricks and shenanigans, like helping to make sure W's National Guard records are all missing.)
It starts locally. The lock the Democrats and Republicans have is because of our election process. There are some states (like Vermont) flirting with Instant Runoff voting. While IRV may not be a technically good as Condorcet and other methods, it's: a-intuitively understandable to most any voter; b-already becoming an issue in some states, with some momentum; c-even if you don't like it as well as some other method, it's more likely to get us there than from the current system.
The Constitution doesn't say how elections have to be run - that's up to the states. The Constitution merely has the states send Senators, Representatives, and Electors. Things like voting techniques CAN be tackled on a state-by-state basis.
>installed people who are not qualified to do the job
What's really fun/annoying about this is the win/win nature of it for the ones who did it.
They've got their cronies in all of these positions and are tilting the agencies agendas in "loyalist directions" besides. Clearly a WIN.
On the other hand, if those agencies are called upon to fulfill their primary missions, as understood by the rest of the nation...
Those filling the positions are not fully competent to do so, and the agency falls down on its job. How is this a WIN? Simple, the folks selecting the appointees also like to say that they're in favor of smaller government, and that anything that can be privatized, should be. If the agency fails in it's job, it's clear evidence that government is incapable, therefore it should be privatized. Of course you're supposed to ignore the fact that their appointees caused the failure in the first place. It becomes a WIN.
What's truly sad here is the decimation of institutional memory. Some of that may be bad, but not all, and at the very least if the institutional memory is gone, you can't learn from it to improve. The top tier has always been political, but what's happened this time is that the second and third tiers have resigned because they couldn't stomach what the top tier was doing. There's the real problem, the core agency competence has left.
On a side note, when Stewart does author interviews, I get the feeling he really has read the book. At least he has done enough homework to ask intelligent questions about it.
>How can any committee deciding on open standards seriously take a company which has been >proven time and time again to play by its own rules and whenever it offers something labeled >OPEN its about as open as the doors to Fort Knock are to the average person.
Plain and simple, arm twisting and blackmail, though both are no doubt couched in far more polite and legal-sounding terms. Microsoft-apology has become the dominant counter-culture on Slashdot of recent. But the fact remains that in spite of the fact that they may have good people, Microsoft's business conduct has been and remains abhorrent.
Elsewhere in this thread read about getting my daughter's Ubuntu amd64 system ready for her to take to college.
It took some fixing, some googling, and some CLI doing things other than apt-get or synaptic. I won't say it was hard, but it was clearly *not* "apt-get install X".
Keep in mind that I also felt that Ubuntu was the best thing for her to be taking away to school, and I still feel that way.
In another response on this same tree, you'll see some of the pain I've gone through getting my daughter's Ubuntu system doing what she wanted. Not that I'm trying to say it's worse than Gentoo, just that it's not "absolutely pushbutton painless."
She used Gentoo here at home, but Friday I install her in her freshman dorm room. Dad won't be around to maintain her system for her, and to be quite honest, Gentoo does require frequent low-level maintenance. I wanted her to have something she could *usually* handle entirely on her own, and in this case I figured the popularity of Ubuntu worked in her favor. She can push the update button, I've shown her how to get at synaptic, and a few other basics.
Now for the down side.
* Shortly after installation, she wanted Flash. Not in synaptic for amd64. I was able to find a Flash-on-Ubuntu-on-amd64 procedure with a bit of browsing, and got it done handily for her. But it wasn't a newbie type of thing.
* Sound only worked on one side. Furthermore, to her 18yo ears, the sound that was there had a high-pitched screech that annoyed her enough that she kept it turned off. Google was my friend, and now she's happy. But again, to a newbie it was smoke and magic - CLI even.
* Last night she wanted to play DVDs, and the installed default video player complained about missing plugins. Unfortunately it wouldn't tell me *what* was missing, just that *something* was. Google was my friend, but the first script failed, sending me back to google. Apparently I had to install a whole set of development tools, and there may have been one other hitch in there. At some point, it uninstalled some default media thing, too. The I *still* couldn't play the DVD. At this point, I just used synaptic to install xine-ui, and combined with the other stuff I'd done, she's watching movies. Using binaries was nice especially when it came to installing development tools, including gcc. But then again, Gentoo would have already had that stuff installed. But all in all, it was generally easier to get media working on Gentoo.
My 40-50 questions are all "on file" in/etc/make.conf and/etc/portage/*, so I DON'T have tell them to the waiter every time. I just order what I want.
For instance, I can install a few GNOME programs with the "-esd" USE flag, and not have to worry about the silly thing. The USE flags become particularly important when it comes to getting the features you want (and don't want) with multimedia.
But it's all on file, not 40-50 questions every time.
As a Gentoo user since 1.4, I have to say that the common image is incorrect, though I know it's the common Gentoo joke.
I generally don't "compile by hand," I generally "emerge -atv (packageName)" to install or "emerge -atuvDN world" to update. Nor am I a ricer with my CFLAGS settings. It just plain works smoother than the other distributions I've used. Harp all you want to about "waiting for compiles," but I'm out doing other things while that happens. It's not as if you have to sit and watch the compiler activity scroll past. It's the computer's time being used, not mine.
Back when I was on RedHat, I'd see "package X" that wasn't part of the official distribution. So I'd find an rpm and try to install it. Then I'd find that I needed another library, and go searching for that rpm. Sometimes then things would work. But sometimes I'd find that some package was looking for things in SuSE layout instead of RedHat, or I was grabbing an rpm from somewhere that didn't play well with RedHat for some other reason. There was a non-trivial set of packages that I never could get installed and running.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run. In fact, I've only had 1 intractable problem compiling from source, and that's been Doomsday, which isn't released for amd64. I've had a few transient problems with source-based packages that have soon gotten fixed. But by and large, my biggest problems have been related to binary-only packages.
Oh, and there's nothing about the usually-disruptive "upgrade to the next release." My system is just up-to-date. A few times a year they issue a new profile, but that's generally about as disruptive as upgrading any other package. The only really disruptive upgrades have been things like udev, gcc and xorg, but even with those it's better to take them one-at-a-time and cope, instead of the usual "practically everything has undergone significant changes" of a distribution upgrade.
Perhaps true, but at some point such behavior becomes malfeasance or misfeasance. Those appointees are there to perform a job, and if they're incapable of performing it then something is wrong. If less-competent appointees were deliberately selected, something greater is wrong with the selection process itself. Another aspect of this case is that these were Justice Department appointees being hired and fired, yet it appears that the selection process was being done by political personnel in the White House.
Yes, it's all Executive Branch, and theoretically the Executive Branch can manage itself as it sees fit, as you say.
So to the point... Imagine that federal prosecutors in the Justice Department begin "selectively enforcing" the law, say giving Republicans a blind eye and going after Democrats harder, especially before elections. Imagine then that federal prosecutors who enforce the law fairly and evenly are fired and replaced with others who will perform Republican leaning "selective enforcement."
So you say, "That's OK, it's the President's privilege, right, and authority."
Now imagine that Bill Clinton had done EXACTLY the same things, or if Hillary were elected and did the same things, of course swapping Republican and Democrat roles. Somehow I don't think you'd be so quiet about it.
Incidentally, some say that the Katrina debacle happened because top management levels were filled with political appointees without a sufficient eye to competence. Believe it or not, all of these government agencies are supposed to fulfill some function, and be competent at it. Or perhaps that's a new technique to trim the size of government. First say, "Almost anything that government does can be done better by the private sector," then insert sufficient incompetent appointees to be sure that that's true.
>but I don't know how politicians could fix the mentality of parents,
Parenting is serious business, and a serious responsibility. Not that it isn't also fun and rewarding, but the serious side can't be denied. In order to become parents, people should *want* to become parents. Parenthood is too important to be by accident.
This isn't really a fix, but #1 would be to adopt a more reasonable attitude toward reproductive rights. The current attitude is that the only acceptable method of "non-reproduction" is abstinence, and most people will admit that that's a non-starter. Without even touching the topic of abortion rights, there is another whole range of products, services, and techniques available for "family planning," and that whole range should be embraced, as opposed to just abstinence.
This IS a political issue.
Another post mentioned how the current norm is to have both parents working, sometimes more than 1 job each. This means that much of childrearing is contracted out, frequently to the "low (most affordable) bidder." If we want to have a cutthroat capitalistic winner-take-all society, fine. But we also need to recognize the consequences of setting up that type of society. To pretend that the winners can take all, and that there will be no societal consequences as the rest try to make do with what's leftover, is naive, perhaps indistinguishable from simple stupid greed.
But I'm not talking about the voting, I'm talking about the caucus groups, which at the moment is more important. The voting doesn't change committee chairmanships, the caucus associations does.
The language a corporation speaks or listens to with sincerity is MONEY. Tell them "Don't do that!" and they'll just hide their actions better next time. Fine them and they'll correct the problem. It's only the fine, the threat of a fine, or some other "reduction of revenue" (such as canceling or non-renewing a contract) that will incur any sort of action.
As it says in TFA, the company was not fined for the spill. Making sure fines are assessed is something Congress can do, or at least legislate.
Incidentally, the current administration guy in charge of mines is generally against fining mine operators for safety violations, or at least keeping the fines small enough to ignore.
In this case, the party membership makes a key difference. The majority party owns committee chairs and sets the agenda. By "razor-thin" he actually means "1". The Senate is currently 51-49 Democrat, but at least 2 of those (Sanders, Vt and Liebermann, Ct(?)) are independents. Sanders is generally more liberal then the Democrats, and unlikely to change affiliation, but Liebermann is generally more conservative. If Liebermann were to "caucus with the Republicans" instead of "caucusing with the Democrats" as he does today, the Senate would become 50-50, in which case VP Cheney would become the tie-breaking vote, making the Senate 51-50 Republican.
In particular, leadership of the Senate Judiciary would revert to Arlan Spectre (R, Pa) and very likely the current Gonzales investigations would cease. As for allegations of "witch hunt," the investigation began questioning whether or not the firings and reappointments were primarily politically motivated, and that's still essentially where they are today. Compare that to investigating a real estate deal. No, make that travel expense funding. No, make that sexual harassment of Gennifer Flowers. No, Paula Jones. No, a blow job from an intern. No, lying to the investigating committee about the blow job from an intern. The former investigation is focused on a particular action, the latter was focused only on a particular person. With such a shifting "event focus" the latter seems to me to meet the definition of "fishing expedition" far better.
Sometimes, not very often, but this is one of those times, Dem or Rep simply IS important. Unfortunately for Martha Rainville.
Other examples of attempted Congressional oversight would likely go back to their pre-2007 status, as well.
>Screw the CA oligarchy and improve security at the same time: support GNU TLS in your networking app.
Please explain.
I've always used OpenSSL, figured it can already do TLS, and adding GnuTLS would just be making for possible problems. I have an account at cacert.org, and have done my own root CA stuff on occasion.
How many YEARS now has the goal for software been to simply, "Make it work," and we STILL haven't been happy.
But Vista is something absolutely new under the sun. Vista is the first time that a major portion of the goal has been to, "Make it NOT work, some of the time." That's right, non-functionality is a key goal of Vista, because that's really what DRM is. Under the "wrong circumstances," don't work, or at least degrade operation. (Who knows, maybe "degrade operation" is an even tougher goal than "don't work.")
So here we have it, conflicting goals:
- Work! Do what the user wants you to do. - Don't work! The user is naughty even asking you to do that! and the hardest... - Figure out when to work, and when to not work.
A much more subtle set of requirements than normal software. An important facet is that it blurs the notion of "who's in charge?"
- With OSS, the user/programmer is in charge. - With Windows up to XP, the user is in charge, though Microsoft has a few deeply-buried probably-static exceptions. - With Vista...
Thanks for the link. I'd dug some stuff (links) up a while back, and lost them. This is much more direct.
I'll agree that the Uru inventory was limited, but there was something to it beyond putting eye candy in your relto. - You collected linking books which were inventory-like, in that an artifact collected here enabled you to go there, even though they were only visualized and used in the relto. - The wrist-band in the world with the spinning forts that allowed interfacing with later parts of the game. - The fireflies buzzing around your head that let you see in the dark elsewhere, likewise the energy capsules. Agreed not as complex as some games, but more so than other Myst games.
I found the interface to some of the objects annoying. Obviously I wanted to use the box as a bridge, but kicking it along the ground was most awkward, and the positioning was a bit critical. I wish I could have used my hands, somehow.
Looking a little deeper at your link, it's not really worth $10/mo for me, especially as Myst Uru is the only thing I'd want at Gametap.
There was a not-well-publicized version of Myst called RealMyst. Think of the basic Myst plot, combined with nearly full freedom of movement common to 1st/3rd person shooters. But RealMyst was really a technology demo/test platform for Myst Uru.
Myst Uru was a Myst-style game with 1st/3rd person selectable viewpoint and full motion. It was supposed to become a full MMPG world, but Cyan ran out of money. There are still people hacking the server code and running the MMPG on their own, but I never got around to trying it. I did enjoy the game, however.
I think my favorite concept of all of this is, "Explore strange places I've never been, perhaps places that don't really exist, perhaps even physically impossible places."
His point is that while Earth may have more space, comets have more time. Plus once you consider the entire ancient cometary halo, they may have had more space, too. As for delivering their cargo, it doesn't need to make it down intact. Presumably a few fragments of self-organizing molecules would bootstrap things on Earth. Getting that initial self-organizing molecule is the tough part. We're not talking anything recognizable as life here, just a steppingstone on the way there.
Still maybe life did originate on Earth with no assistance from comets. But his idea seems plausible.
Now that you mention it, Arthur was able to query the 'cavemen' about the Super-Deep-Thought question. So it just might be apparent that the Golgrafinchians died out. (Couldn't figure out how to reproduce, perhaps.)
The thing that stunned me about the whole "swiftboating" of John Kerry was that allegations were made, did their damage, and there was never any apparent followup. Well, the key word in that sentence was "apparent." Google was my friend on this matter, though it was some 6 months ago, so my memories may not be precise, at least I can't remember which news agency. Reporters went to to Viet Nam, to the vicinity of the battle cited for Kerry's Silver Star, to interview the locals. The locals did not remember Kerry, because "all of those American GIs look alike." But they remembered their people who participated in the battle, their side of the story. All relevant facts which could be verified with the locals resident at the time of the interview were consistent with the "official" version, under which Kerry was given the Silver Star. For instance, the fighters on the Viet Namese side were able soldiers, not children or infirmed seniors.
The swiftboating was a stunning success, considering that it smeared mud all over a candidate, and there was never followthrough to assess its validity.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, Gonzales doesn't just know where "the bodies are buried," he had a hand on the shovel. (Obviously by "the bodies are buried" I don't mean murder, but I do mean dirty tricks and shenanigans, like helping to make sure W's National Guard records are all missing.)
>make way for the Libertarians and the Greens
It starts locally. The lock the Democrats and Republicans have is because of our election process. There are some states (like Vermont) flirting with Instant Runoff voting. While IRV may not be a technically good as Condorcet and other methods, it's: a-intuitively understandable to most any voter; b-already becoming an issue in some states, with some momentum; c-even if you don't like it as well as some other method, it's more likely to get us there than from the current system.
The Constitution doesn't say how elections have to be run - that's up to the states. The Constitution merely has the states send Senators, Representatives, and Electors. Things like voting techniques CAN be tackled on a state-by-state basis.
It's really scary when a comedian is one of the best journalists we have to offer.
Back in my I Myth-ed the special they did for Walter Cronkite's 90th birthday. This weekend my wife and I finally got around to watching it.
-----------------------
Imagine Walter Cronkite as a guest on The Daily Show!
-----------------------
>installed people who are not qualified to do the job
What's really fun/annoying about this is the win/win nature of it for the ones who did it.
They've got their cronies in all of these positions and are tilting the agencies agendas in "loyalist directions" besides. Clearly a WIN.
On the other hand, if those agencies are called upon to fulfill their primary missions, as understood by the rest of the nation...
Those filling the positions are not fully competent to do so, and the agency falls down on its job. How is this a WIN? Simple, the folks selecting the appointees also like to say that they're in favor of smaller government, and that anything that can be privatized, should be. If the agency fails in it's job, it's clear evidence that government is incapable, therefore it should be privatized. Of course you're supposed to ignore the fact that their appointees caused the failure in the first place. It becomes a WIN.
What's truly sad here is the decimation of institutional memory. Some of that may be bad, but not all, and at the very least if the institutional memory is gone, you can't learn from it to improve. The top tier has always been political, but what's happened this time is that the second and third tiers have resigned because they couldn't stomach what the top tier was doing. There's the real problem, the core agency competence has left.
I like that Jon Stewart laments that fact, too.
On a side note, when Stewart does author interviews, I get the feeling he really has read the book. At least he has done enough homework to ask intelligent questions about it.
>How can any committee deciding on open standards seriously take a company which has been
>proven time and time again to play by its own rules and whenever it offers something labeled
>OPEN its about as open as the doors to Fort Knock are to the average person.
Plain and simple, arm twisting and blackmail, though both are no doubt couched in far more polite and legal-sounding terms. Microsoft-apology has become the dominant counter-culture on Slashdot of recent. But the fact remains that in spite of the fact that they may have good people, Microsoft's business conduct has been and remains abhorrent.
Elsewhere in this thread read about getting my daughter's Ubuntu amd64 system ready for her to take to college.
It took some fixing, some googling, and some CLI doing things other than apt-get or synaptic. I won't say it was hard, but it was clearly *not* "apt-get install X".
Keep in mind that I also felt that Ubuntu was the best thing for her to be taking away to school, and I still feel that way.
In another response on this same tree, you'll see some of the pain I've gone through getting my daughter's Ubuntu system doing what she wanted. Not that I'm trying to say it's worse than Gentoo, just that it's not "absolutely pushbutton painless."
Actually, I've put my daughter on Ubuntu.
She used Gentoo here at home, but Friday I install her in her freshman dorm room. Dad won't be around to maintain her system for her, and to be quite honest, Gentoo does require frequent low-level maintenance. I wanted her to have something she could *usually* handle entirely on her own, and in this case I figured the popularity of Ubuntu worked in her favor. She can push the update button, I've shown her how to get at synaptic, and a few other basics.
Now for the down side.
* Shortly after installation, she wanted Flash. Not in synaptic for amd64. I was able to find a Flash-on-Ubuntu-on-amd64 procedure with a bit of browsing, and got it done handily for her. But it wasn't a newbie type of thing.
* Sound only worked on one side. Furthermore, to her 18yo ears, the sound that was there had a high-pitched screech that annoyed her enough that she kept it turned off. Google was my friend, and now she's happy. But again, to a newbie it was smoke and magic - CLI even.
* Last night she wanted to play DVDs, and the installed default video player complained about missing plugins. Unfortunately it wouldn't tell me *what* was missing, just that *something* was. Google was my friend, but the first script failed, sending me back to google. Apparently I had to install a whole set of development tools, and there may have been one other hitch in there. At some point, it uninstalled some default media thing, too. The I *still* couldn't play the DVD. At this point, I just used synaptic to install xine-ui, and combined with the other stuff I'd done, she's watching movies. Using binaries was nice especially when it came to installing development tools, including gcc. But then again, Gentoo would have already had that stuff installed. But all in all, it was generally easier to get media working on Gentoo.
My 40-50 questions are all "on file" in /etc/make.conf and /etc/portage/*, so I DON'T have tell them to the waiter every time. I just order what I want.
For instance, I can install a few GNOME programs with the "-esd" USE flag, and not have to worry about the silly thing. The USE flags become particularly important when it comes to getting the features you want (and don't want) with multimedia.
But it's all on file, not 40-50 questions every time.
As a Gentoo user since 1.4, I have to say that the common image is incorrect, though I know it's the common Gentoo joke.
I generally don't "compile by hand," I generally "emerge -atv (packageName)" to install or "emerge -atuvDN world" to update. Nor am I a ricer with my CFLAGS settings. It just plain works smoother than the other distributions I've used. Harp all you want to about "waiting for compiles," but I'm out doing other things while that happens. It's not as if you have to sit and watch the compiler activity scroll past. It's the computer's time being used, not mine.
Back when I was on RedHat, I'd see "package X" that wasn't part of the official distribution. So I'd find an rpm and try to install it. Then I'd find that I needed another library, and go searching for that rpm. Sometimes then things would work. But sometimes I'd find that some package was looking for things in SuSE layout instead of RedHat, or I was grabbing an rpm from somewhere that didn't play well with RedHat for some other reason. There was a non-trivial set of packages that I never could get installed and running.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run. In fact, I've only had 1 intractable problem compiling from source, and that's been Doomsday, which isn't released for amd64. I've had a few transient problems with source-based packages that have soon gotten fixed. But by and large, my biggest problems have been related to binary-only packages.
Oh, and there's nothing about the usually-disruptive "upgrade to the next release." My system is just up-to-date. A few times a year they issue a new profile, but that's generally about as disruptive as upgrading any other package. The only really disruptive upgrades have been things like udev, gcc and xorg, but even with those it's better to take them one-at-a-time and cope, instead of the usual "practically everything has undergone significant changes" of a distribution upgrade.
Perhaps true, but at some point such behavior becomes malfeasance or misfeasance. Those appointees are there to perform a job, and if they're incapable of performing it then something is wrong. If less-competent appointees were deliberately selected, something greater is wrong with the selection process itself. Another aspect of this case is that these were Justice Department appointees being hired and fired, yet it appears that the selection process was being done by political personnel in the White House.
Yes, it's all Executive Branch, and theoretically the Executive Branch can manage itself as it sees fit, as you say.
So to the point... Imagine that federal prosecutors in the Justice Department begin "selectively enforcing" the law, say giving Republicans a blind eye and going after Democrats harder, especially before elections. Imagine then that federal prosecutors who enforce the law fairly and evenly are fired and replaced with others who will perform Republican leaning "selective enforcement."
So you say, "That's OK, it's the President's privilege, right, and authority."
Now imagine that Bill Clinton had done EXACTLY the same things, or if Hillary were elected and did the same things, of course swapping Republican and Democrat roles. Somehow I don't think you'd be so quiet about it.
Incidentally, some say that the Katrina debacle happened because top management levels were filled with political appointees without a sufficient eye to competence. Believe it or not, all of these government agencies are supposed to fulfill some function, and be competent at it. Or perhaps that's a new technique to trim the size of government. First say, "Almost anything that government does can be done better by the private sector," then insert sufficient incompetent appointees to be sure that that's true.
>but I don't know how politicians could fix the mentality of parents,
Parenting is serious business, and a serious responsibility. Not that it isn't also fun and rewarding, but the serious side can't be denied. In order to become parents, people should *want* to become parents. Parenthood is too important to be by accident.
This isn't really a fix, but #1 would be to adopt a more reasonable attitude toward reproductive rights. The current attitude is that the only acceptable method of "non-reproduction" is abstinence, and most people will admit that that's a non-starter. Without even touching the topic of abortion rights, there is another whole range of products, services, and techniques available for "family planning," and that whole range should be embraced, as opposed to just abstinence.
This IS a political issue.
Another post mentioned how the current norm is to have both parents working, sometimes more than 1 job each. This means that much of childrearing is contracted out, frequently to the "low (most affordable) bidder." If we want to have a cutthroat capitalistic winner-take-all society, fine. But we also need to recognize the consequences of setting up that type of society. To pretend that the winners can take all, and that there will be no societal consequences as the rest try to make do with what's leftover, is naive, perhaps indistinguishable from simple stupid greed.
But I'm not talking about the voting, I'm talking about the caucus groups, which at the moment is more important. The voting doesn't change committee chairmanships, the caucus associations does.
That's what a fine is for.
The language a corporation speaks or listens to with sincerity is MONEY. Tell them "Don't do that!" and they'll just hide their actions better next time. Fine them and they'll correct the problem. It's only the fine, the threat of a fine, or some other "reduction of revenue" (such as canceling or non-renewing a contract) that will incur any sort of action.
As it says in TFA, the company was not fined for the spill. Making sure fines are assessed is something Congress can do, or at least legislate.
Incidentally, the current administration guy in charge of mines is generally against fining mine operators for safety violations, or at least keeping the fines small enough to ignore.
In this case, the party membership makes a key difference. The majority party owns committee chairs and sets the agenda. By "razor-thin" he actually means "1". The Senate is currently 51-49 Democrat, but at least 2 of those (Sanders, Vt and Liebermann, Ct(?)) are independents. Sanders is generally more liberal then the Democrats, and unlikely to change affiliation, but Liebermann is generally more conservative. If Liebermann were to "caucus with the Republicans" instead of "caucusing with the Democrats" as he does today, the Senate would become 50-50, in which case VP Cheney would become the tie-breaking vote, making the Senate 51-50 Republican.
In particular, leadership of the Senate Judiciary would revert to Arlan Spectre (R, Pa) and very likely the current Gonzales investigations would cease. As for allegations of "witch hunt," the investigation began questioning whether or not the firings and reappointments were primarily politically motivated, and that's still essentially where they are today. Compare that to investigating a real estate deal. No, make that travel expense funding. No, make that sexual harassment of Gennifer Flowers. No, Paula Jones. No, a blow job from an intern. No, lying to the investigating committee about the blow job from an intern. The former investigation is focused on a particular action, the latter was focused only on a particular person. With such a shifting "event focus" the latter seems to me to meet the definition of "fishing expedition" far better.
Sometimes, not very often, but this is one of those times, Dem or Rep simply IS important. Unfortunately for Martha Rainville.
Other examples of attempted Congressional oversight would likely go back to their pre-2007 status, as well.
>Screw the CA oligarchy and improve security at the same time: support GNU TLS in your networking app.
Please explain.
I've always used OpenSSL, figured it can already do TLS, and adding GnuTLS would just be making for possible problems. I have an account at cacert.org, and have done my own root CA stuff on occasion.
What does GnuTLS do that is different?
How many YEARS now has the goal for software been to simply, "Make it work," and we STILL haven't been happy.
But Vista is something absolutely new under the sun. Vista is the first time that a major portion of the goal has been to, "Make it NOT work, some of the time." That's right, non-functionality is a key goal of Vista, because that's really what DRM is. Under the "wrong circumstances," don't work, or at least degrade operation. (Who knows, maybe "degrade operation" is an even tougher goal than "don't work.")
So here we have it, conflicting goals:
- Work! Do what the user wants you to do.
- Don't work! The user is naughty even asking you to do that!
and the hardest...
- Figure out when to work, and when to not work.
A much more subtle set of requirements than normal software. An important facet is that it blurs the notion of "who's in charge?"
- With OSS, the user/programmer is in charge.
- With Windows up to XP, the user is in charge, though Microsoft has a few deeply-buried probably-static exceptions.
- With Vista...
Thanks for the link. I'd dug some stuff (links) up a while back, and lost them. This is much more direct.
I'll agree that the Uru inventory was limited, but there was something to it beyond putting eye candy in your relto.
- You collected linking books which were inventory-like, in that an artifact collected here enabled you to go there, even though they were only visualized and used in the relto.
- The wrist-band in the world with the spinning forts that allowed interfacing with later parts of the game.
- The fireflies buzzing around your head that let you see in the dark elsewhere, likewise the energy capsules.
Agreed not as complex as some games, but more so than other Myst games.
I found the interface to some of the objects annoying. Obviously I wanted to use the box as a bridge, but kicking it along the ground was most awkward, and the positioning was a bit critical. I wish I could have used my hands, somehow.
Looking a little deeper at your link, it's not really worth $10/mo for me, especially as Myst Uru is the only thing I'd want at Gametap.
There was a not-well-publicized version of Myst called RealMyst. Think of the basic Myst plot, combined with nearly full freedom of movement common to 1st/3rd person shooters. But RealMyst was really a technology demo/test platform for Myst Uru.
Myst Uru was a Myst-style game with 1st/3rd person selectable viewpoint and full motion. It was supposed to become a full MMPG world, but Cyan ran out of money. There are still people hacking the server code and running the MMPG on their own, but I never got around to trying it. I did enjoy the game, however.
I think my favorite concept of all of this is, "Explore strange places I've never been, perhaps places that don't really exist, perhaps even physically impossible places."
Oh, plus Uru Myst had an inventory.
Do cable carriers even have common carrier status?
If they do, throttling all bittorent is a clear violation.
>In any case, I daresay that the Jesus of the Gospels is even more difficult to find nowadays.
You mean His core message wasn't about denying choice to women and rights to gays?
His point is that while Earth may have more space, comets have more time. Plus once you consider the entire ancient cometary halo, they may have had more space, too. As for delivering their cargo, it doesn't need to make it down intact. Presumably a few fragments of self-organizing molecules would bootstrap things on Earth. Getting that initial self-organizing molecule is the tough part. We're not talking anything recognizable as life here, just a steppingstone on the way there.
Still maybe life did originate on Earth with no assistance from comets. But his idea seems plausible.
Now that you mention it, Arthur was able to query the 'cavemen' about the Super-Deep-Thought question. So it just might be apparent that the Golgrafinchians died out. (Couldn't figure out how to reproduce, perhaps.)
The thing that stunned me about the whole "swiftboating" of John Kerry was that allegations were made, did their damage, and there was never any apparent followup. Well, the key word in that sentence was "apparent." Google was my friend on this matter, though it was some 6 months ago, so my memories may not be precise, at least I can't remember which news agency. Reporters went to to Viet Nam, to the vicinity of the battle cited for Kerry's Silver Star, to interview the locals. The locals did not remember Kerry, because "all of those American GIs look alike." But they remembered their people who participated in the battle, their side of the story. All relevant facts which could be verified with the locals resident at the time of the interview were consistent with the "official" version, under which Kerry was given the Silver Star. For instance, the fighters on the Viet Namese side were able soldiers, not children or infirmed seniors.
The swiftboating was a stunning success, considering that it smeared mud all over a candidate, and there was never followthrough to assess its validity.
Our press is really doing its job.