>regenerative workout machines which do not dissipate your work during fitness exercise but >instead stores it in usable form, (i.e. charge batteries or put power back to grid)
My pet concept has been for an exercise bike hooked to a generator - powering the TV you can watch while pedaling to nowhere.
Walk into Staples, Best Buy, Circuit City, or most any other "store for the masses."
Typically you're either "shopping for a PC" or "shopping for a Mac." Some people may plan to choose one or the other based on what they learn, but I'd suspect that most are already in one camp or the other. So you walk up to the PC and buy it. You've just bought Vista. I don't call that competition, I call it 2 nearly separate captive marketplaces.
A few years back, per-CPU licensing was rendered illegal. But Microsoft has substituted some other "loyalty plan" that is pretty much as effective at forcing 100% Vista preloads. In order to preload Linux, it has to be a separate model. Because of Linux' non-presence in the sales/preload chain, that separate model is necessarily a lower-volume part number. Therefore it gets killed in price competition.
I won't sit here and reflexively say Microsoft sucks!!! The New Slashdot Groupthink is that Microsoft is getting a raw deal, that their products really aren't that bad, and that anyone who reflexively pushes Linux is stooopid and unfair. I won't touch that one.
But I have never yet seen Microsoft compete fairly in a marketplace.
>If I work hard I should be allowed do what I want with my money. If I want to give it to my children >then that's my right. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned.
Sorry, I have to disagree. There are already limits on what you can do with your money. For instance, you can't hire a hitman to take out the noisy neighbor across the street. Part of the impetus of founding the US was a reaction against the Royalty in Great Brittain. Allowing unlimited inheritance in all essence estabilishes financial oligarchy, Royalty by another name.
As a matter of fact, I have a managed switch with VLANs. I picked it up for a song at a second-hand shop, no idea how it got there.
Right now it's just a dumb switch with a management port, but I'd like to play with VLANs and SNMP management, and perhaps more. So a few specific questions: 1 - I've done some reading, and it indicates that DHCP just doesn't play well with VLANs, and it causes extra CPU overhead. How bad is this, really? I use DHCP primarily to ease adminstration, so IPs are managed in my DHCP and DNS servers. 2 - How do you start getting your head around SNMP? I haven't had much luck finding "getting started" guides, and anything I have found seems to assume more knowledge than the basically none that I have. I get the impression that though my switch doesn't support it, if I had SNMP traps working, I could segregate PCs on VLANS based on their MACs, etc.
But remember that the fillibuster cuts both ways. It's a preventive tool, but perhaps it prevents something you don't like from getting voted on just as often as it prevents a vote on somthing you do like.
Then there's the 'Nuclear Option'. The 60-vote supermajority to end a fillibuster is an operating procedure, not a law, and it can be changed by a simple majority (51-49) vote. Despite very vocal objections to the fillibuster, the fact that it could be done away with so "easily" suggests that there has been wisdom in having retained it.
He mentions it in the interview - read "Anvil of Stars" for some very "Moving Mars"-like concepts. "Slant" is kind of nifty on the nanotech side, too. ("Anvil of Stars" is the sequel to "The Forge of God".)
Never heard of Robert Sawyer, have to look. Or for some fiction based on non-zero vacuum energy states, try "Schilde's Ladder" by Greg Egan.
Well, the mention of Poul Anderson in the interview, and then your mention of "City at the End of Time" leads me to another curiously pronounced "Poll", Frederik Pohl, and...
"The World at the End of Time" "The Other End of Time" "The Siege of Eternity" "The Far Shore of Time"
(just checked the bookshelf -'P' is closer to the bottom. Eon, Eternity, etc are with 'B' near the top.)
Blast, I just finished off my mod points a few minutes ago. This single line takes the cake, and says something critical about where gaming has been, is, and should be headed.
"You'll never even think about the graphics while you're playing it".
I thought the point wasn't the rampage, but the one-on-one swordfights with Katanas. Do the garbage-collection routines pop up out of the floor to carry away the dead?
I don't know where you come up with the description, "Small government republicans." It certainly doesn't apply to the past 6 years. They've been small when it comes to regulating business, big when it comes to giving out contracts, small when it comes to monitoring those contracts, and big when it comes to interfering in common peoples' lives. Oh, and "conservative" appears to have nothing to do with fiscal responsiblity or conservation of resources. IMHO, today "conservative" means conserving their wealth and power.
I've always held myself to be a moderate. My brother says we still live by the Republican values we were raised with, but today that makes us Liberals. In 4th grade, before really understanding politics, there were 2 of us favoring Barry Goldwater against LBJ. Having learned more about Goldwater since then, I guess I can call myself a conservative, a moderate, a liberal, and a Goldwater Republican - truthfully on all counts.
I used to like McCain. But if he's running on "personal integrity" he damaged that when he cozied up to the White House. I'm not talking about GWB, I'm talking about Karl Rove, the man who smeared McCain in Carolina and helped smear Kerry with the Swifties. (I checked up on it afterward - someone did a followup investigation, and the Swifties' allegations were proven false.) The Bob Jones appearance left me with a bad taste of pandering to the far right, too.
As for extremes, there is no extreme left in the US. Bernie Sanders is probably about as far left as we get. From what I hear from non-USers, the US has the far right, and our "far left" is slightly right-of-center, to the rest of the world.
By the way, Joe Biden appears to be running for 2008. He has always impressed me in interviews about being plainly, but intelligently spoken. Nor did he preach, but answered the questions and kept a sense of humor.
As for Hillary, I have some true (not neo-) conservative friends in New York, and they have been quite pleased with the actions of Senator Clinton. I have a suspicion that the 1994 Congressional election was a life-changing, view-changing event for her. She may feel partly to blame for the Republican Revolution and what it did to here husband's Presidency. (IMHO, Bill Clinton made the best of an adversarial relationship. Who else balanced the budget in the past century, with whatever Congress?)
Back to 1994, I really feel that we missed a chance, there. I don't know what the National Health Plan was going to be like, and I don't honestly care. What I don't like is that after 1994 all debate about health care was shut down cold. As a nation, we jammed our fingers in our ears and yelled, "Na-na-na-na! I'm not listening!" In the meantime, the whole system drifted onward. One of the key reasons for jobs being sent overseas has been health care. Employers have shifted plans, passing more cost over to employees, where they haven't dropped plans entirely. Uninsured find that their health care costs are even higher, because providers have been "negotiated down" by insurers, and they're transferring costs.
Our health care financing system is a complete mess. It's badly broken. We chose not to address it in 1994, before it became a real problem. We're still not. (IMHO, tort reform doesn't address the real issue, and is simply a bone to business.)
I still believe can still help, even though you're right. For any given person, the spam goes from the spamming (probably zombie) machine to that machine's ISP, then to the destination machine's ISP, then to the destination machine. Ordinary mail usually hops through an "administered mail relay" twice, and each of those hops is an opportunity to kill it with SPF. There has been much made of ISPs who know their users are spammers, but given that we're talking about zombies here, I don't think the ISPs of those zombie machines are spam-friendly. If SPF were pervasively used in this situation, it would cut spam traffic by 1/3 to 2/3, simply by dropping it on the floor sooner. Of course if SPF were pervasively used spammers would be seeking some other way to get their messages out.
I have a forwarding domain with DynDNS, so my mail takes 1 extra hop, and has 1 extra chance to get killed.
I believe on of my mother's friends has an infected machine, because a month or 2 back, I saw an upsurge in bounce notices being sent back to me. I'm getting Joe-jobbed big-time. I've looked at the headers, and not only is the 'originator' not a valid ID at my domain, the whole things is forged. In the past week I've gone to the trouble and expense to get Mailhop Outbound at DynDNS, have set up all of my domain's email to go through it, and next will set up an SPF record. Whoever respects SPF can easily detect and kill this stuff. I've done my part.
There have been articles recently about using an 'auto-bracket' mode to take multiple shots at bracketed exposures, and then reprocess them to combine them into a single wide-dynamic-range image. My little Sony point'n'shoot has such a mode, but when I wanted to try this trick recently, I found that it's really necessary to use a tripod.
In the meantime, my venerable Nikon FA still has slide film in it.
I bought a little over a year ago, and did at least enough work to know to avoid TurboCache, but I guess not enough to know about the 64/128 bus issue. At the time, the 6200 that I bought was one of the few I saw sub-$100 that looked decent - I just wish I'd known a teeny bit more, and maybe I could have found a full-bus version for only a little more.
It's also stunning just how populated the crap-space is. There must be more castrated cards than there are high-end cards. Now that I think of it, I wonder if it's a case of, "Oops, this design rev had that defect, let's 'feature' it on a new low-end card."
But now I find it annoying that the sub-$100 market has gone completely to castrated video cards. That didn't used to be the case. I have both Radeon 8500LE and FX5700LE cards that were sub-$100, and I'm quite happy with them. The features are all there, just the clock is slightly degraded. Obviously I'm not a hard-core gamer with cards like that, but for what I do, they're fine. On my newest system, I searched until I found an nVidia 6200 card that was not TurboCache, and got it for about the same price as the others. Unfortunately it has proven to be castrated with only half a memory bus, and is slower than the old FX5700.
It looks as if they may well have managed to kill the cheap-but-decent sub-$100 market, and moved the minimum decent price-point from $89 to near $150.
I remote-administer my 80+yo mother's machine 600+ miles away. Generally I only do security-related updates, until I get there in person, which has been happening more frequently in recent years. When there physically I bring the machine fully up-to-date. My main fear is doing something that will render it unable to get on the net, which has happened once. She's not sufficiently savvy to be of much help, and when that happened I had a cousing come over, and talked him through what needed doing.
My daughter would be much easier to work with. I am worried about the networking topology a university might deploy, notably hiding everything behind NAT, like my son's was. But I run an OpenVPN endpoint, and would likely have that set up so she could connect and I could get in.
I think another trick would be to have a separate repair partition - just enough to have a net connection, OpenVPN endpoint, and a small box of tools to repair the main install.
My son did pretty well with WinXP, though I added this thing called "abstrusion protection" as one layer, that appears to be more trouble than it's worth.
My daughter heads off to college next year, and unless they have some sort of laptop-with-tuition plan, she's taking a deskside machine with her. Right now that machine dual-boots Win98SE and Gentoo, but I won't send Win98SE off to a University. I'd been deferring any sort of upgrade, since Win98SE has been sufficient for games, and I don't like spending money before I need to. At some point this summer/fall I started thinking maybe I should just get Vista, since I'll be waiting long enough. Now I'm beginning to think it should be XP, because the machine is "only" an AthlonXP-2600, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, 256MB 5700LE. I get the impression that it will run Vista, but won't be that far above minimum requirements. Then again, I'm also wondering if she can just stick to Linux, though she'll need quite a bit more training before it can get too far from my maintenance.
When using it at home for schoolwork, she uses Linux, "because Windows just keep crashing." (her words)
Actually, the OEM Windows licensing situation it's WORSE than giving it away.
There's the negotiated price, and then there's the rebate. I have no idea what either the negotiated price or rebate is, but I have heard the essence from multiple sources. The profits are so thin on building PC boxes, that you simply can't make sufficient profit if you buy Windows at the negotiated price. The profit comes when you get the rebate, and though they're technically not allowed to make the rebates "Microsoft loyalty tests," and maybe technically the're not, essentially they are.
The same thing is done with Intel CPUs.
Take a look at that new PC or laptop. Other than the brand logo, there are nearly always 2 stickers - "Intel Inside" and "Designed for Windows". Those stickers and all of their hidden implications made the boxes profitable. Maybe the situation is now a little different with the Core line, but it's been that way for a long time. Personally I've removed the stickers, and tend to reattach them to wastebaskets and urinals.
My precinct votes with optically-scanned ballots on thick paper. It's kind of like standardized tests in schools, either fill in the circle or complete the line. The printing is right on the ballot, so there's no confusion of which circle of line to mark.
Not to be Luddite or anything, but as far as I can tell, it's pretty much perfect for voting. Understandable, machine-count for speed, and verifiable.
Won't argue with the official position statements, I can easily believe you, and would actually have a hard time believing otherwise.
But...
In this context, 2 things stick out every Sunday in the Prayer of the Faithful: 1 - Pro-life 2 - Safety of our troops and peace to come soon. I've only ever once heard a call for an end to the death penalty, or for government policies favorable to the non-wealthy, and those were both on the Sunday following the 2004 elections.
Prior to the 2004 elections, they were all but commanding us to vote for Bush, up to within an RCH of saying exactly that. So close in fact, that I find it odd that a California church is having its tax-exempt status threatened for merely being anti-war. I guess I'd have to hear what they actually said, but IMHO the difference between what the Catholic church did and just plain telling us from the pulpit to vote for Bush was negligible.
The religious, Catholics and Evangelicals alike, have sold their souls for sex. It's really just that simple. The 2 major stands are abortion and gay marriage, essentially sex. For that matter, we can throw in birth control, again sex.
In the interest of sex, which Jesus Christ didn't really say much about, (He said things like, "Avoid immoral conduct," and "Go, and sin no more," and I'm not even sure about the former.) they turn a blind eye to the rest of the "conservative agenda." That includes the death penalty, rush to war, and a general concentration of wealth in the upper classes, to the detriment of the poor. We can include children and widows in that class. Now there's something Jesus Christ DID talk about - at great length. He also talked at great length about wealthy upper class who put on airs of piousness.
IMHO the Church has betrayed their trust, over sex.
Slashdot Mirror
>regenerative workout machines which do not dissipate your work during fitness exercise but
>instead stores it in usable form, (i.e. charge batteries or put power back to grid)
My pet concept has been for an exercise bike hooked to a generator - powering the TV you can watch while pedaling to nowhere.
Horsehockey, close to 100% horsehockey!
Walk into Staples, Best Buy, Circuit City, or most any other "store for the masses."
Typically you're either "shopping for a PC" or "shopping for a Mac." Some people may plan to choose one or the other based on what they learn, but I'd suspect that most are already in one camp or the other. So you walk up to the PC and buy it. You've just bought Vista. I don't call that competition, I call it 2 nearly separate captive marketplaces.
A few years back, per-CPU licensing was rendered illegal. But Microsoft has substituted some other "loyalty plan" that is pretty much as effective at forcing 100% Vista preloads. In order to preload Linux, it has to be a separate model. Because of Linux' non-presence in the sales/preload chain, that separate model is necessarily a lower-volume part number. Therefore it gets killed in price competition.
I won't sit here and reflexively say Microsoft sucks!!! The New Slashdot Groupthink is that Microsoft is getting a raw deal, that their products really aren't that bad, and that anyone who reflexively pushes Linux is stooopid and unfair. I won't touch that one.
But I have never yet seen Microsoft compete fairly in a marketplace.
>If I work hard I should be allowed do what I want with my money. If I want to give it to my children
>then that's my right. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned.
Sorry, I have to disagree. There are already limits on what you can do with your money. For instance, you can't hire a hitman to take out the noisy neighbor across the street. Part of the impetus of founding the US was a reaction against the Royalty in Great Brittain. Allowing unlimited inheritance in all essence estabilishes financial oligarchy, Royalty by another name.
As a matter of fact, I have a managed switch with VLANs. I picked it up for a song at a second-hand shop, no idea how it got there.
Right now it's just a dumb switch with a management port, but I'd like to play with VLANs and SNMP management, and perhaps more. So a few specific questions:
1 - I've done some reading, and it indicates that DHCP just doesn't play well with VLANs, and it causes extra CPU overhead. How bad is this, really? I use DHCP primarily to ease adminstration, so IPs are managed in my DHCP and DNS servers.
2 - How do you start getting your head around SNMP? I haven't had much luck finding "getting started" guides, and anything I have found seems to assume more knowledge than the basically none that I have. I get the impression that though my switch doesn't support it, if I had SNMP traps working, I could segregate PCs on VLANS based on their MACs, etc.
But remember that the fillibuster cuts both ways. It's a preventive tool, but perhaps it prevents something you don't like from getting voted on just as often as it prevents a vote on somthing you do like.
Then there's the 'Nuclear Option'. The 60-vote supermajority to end a fillibuster is an operating procedure, not a law, and it can be changed by a simple majority (51-49) vote. Despite very vocal objections to the fillibuster, the fact that it could be done away with so "easily" suggests that there has been wisdom in having retained it.
He mentions it in the interview - read "Anvil of Stars" for some very "Moving Mars"-like concepts. "Slant" is kind of nifty on the nanotech side, too. ("Anvil of Stars" is the sequel to "The Forge of God".)
Never heard of Robert Sawyer, have to look. Or for some fiction based on non-zero vacuum energy states, try "Schilde's Ladder" by Greg Egan.
Well, the mention of Poul Anderson in the interview, and then your mention of "City at the End of Time" leads me to another curiously pronounced "Poll", Frederik Pohl, and...
"The World at the End of Time"
"The Other End of Time"
"The Siege of Eternity"
"The Far Shore of Time"
(just checked the bookshelf -'P' is closer to the bottom. Eon, Eternity, etc are with 'B' near the top.)
Blast, I just finished off my mod points a few minutes ago. This single line takes the cake, and says something critical about where gaming has been, is, and should be headed.
"You'll never even think about the graphics while you're playing it".
I thought the point wasn't the rampage, but the one-on-one swordfights with Katanas. Do the garbage-collection routines pop up out of the floor to carry away the dead?
Oh, and the motorcycle races, too.
I don't know where you come up with the description, "Small government republicans." It certainly doesn't apply to the past 6 years. They've been small when it comes to regulating business, big when it comes to giving out contracts, small when it comes to monitoring those contracts, and big when it comes to interfering in common peoples' lives. Oh, and "conservative" appears to have nothing to do with fiscal responsiblity or conservation of resources. IMHO, today "conservative" means conserving their wealth and power.
I've always held myself to be a moderate. My brother says we still live by the Republican values we were raised with, but today that makes us Liberals. In 4th grade, before really understanding politics, there were 2 of us favoring Barry Goldwater against LBJ. Having learned more about Goldwater since then, I guess I can call myself a conservative, a moderate, a liberal, and a Goldwater Republican - truthfully on all counts.
I used to like McCain. But if he's running on "personal integrity" he damaged that when he cozied up to the White House. I'm not talking about GWB, I'm talking about Karl Rove, the man who smeared McCain in Carolina and helped smear Kerry with the Swifties. (I checked up on it afterward - someone did a followup investigation, and the Swifties' allegations were proven false.) The Bob Jones appearance left me with a bad taste of pandering to the far right, too.
As for extremes, there is no extreme left in the US. Bernie Sanders is probably about as far left as we get. From what I hear from non-USers, the US has the far right, and our "far left" is slightly right-of-center, to the rest of the world.
By the way, Joe Biden appears to be running for 2008. He has always impressed me in interviews about being plainly, but intelligently spoken. Nor did he preach, but answered the questions and kept a sense of humor.
As for Hillary, I have some true (not neo-) conservative friends in New York, and they have been quite pleased with the actions of Senator Clinton. I have a suspicion that the 1994 Congressional election was a life-changing, view-changing event for her. She may feel partly to blame for the Republican Revolution and what it did to here husband's Presidency. (IMHO, Bill Clinton made the best of an adversarial relationship. Who else balanced the budget in the past century, with whatever Congress?)
Back to 1994, I really feel that we missed a chance, there. I don't know what the National Health Plan was going to be like, and I don't honestly care. What I don't like is that after 1994 all debate about health care was shut down cold. As a nation, we jammed our fingers in our ears and yelled, "Na-na-na-na! I'm not listening!" In the meantime, the whole system drifted onward. One of the key reasons for jobs being sent overseas has been health care. Employers have shifted plans, passing more cost over to employees, where they haven't dropped plans entirely. Uninsured find that their health care costs are even higher, because providers have been "negotiated down" by insurers, and they're transferring costs.
Our health care financing system is a complete mess. It's badly broken. We chose not to address it in 1994, before it became a real problem. We're still not. (IMHO, tort reform doesn't address the real issue, and is simply a bone to business.)
I'm a domain owner preparing to set up SPF.
I still believe can still help, even though you're right. For any given person, the spam goes from the spamming (probably zombie) machine to that machine's ISP, then to the destination machine's ISP, then to the destination machine. Ordinary mail usually hops through an "administered mail relay" twice, and each of those hops is an opportunity to kill it with SPF. There has been much made of ISPs who know their users are spammers, but given that we're talking about zombies here, I don't think the ISPs of those zombie machines are spam-friendly. If SPF were pervasively used in this situation, it would cut spam traffic by 1/3 to 2/3, simply by dropping it on the floor sooner. Of course if SPF were pervasively used spammers would be seeking some other way to get their messages out.
I have a forwarding domain with DynDNS, so my mail takes 1 extra hop, and has 1 extra chance to get killed.
I believe on of my mother's friends has an infected machine, because a month or 2 back, I saw an upsurge in bounce notices being sent back to me. I'm getting Joe-jobbed big-time. I've looked at the headers, and not only is the 'originator' not a valid ID at my domain, the whole things is forged. In the past week I've gone to the trouble and expense to get Mailhop Outbound at DynDNS, have set up all of my domain's email to go through it, and next will set up an SPF record. Whoever respects SPF can easily detect and kill this stuff. I've done my part.
And here I thought it was humor, and Atlantic Wall was saying that gorehog would be subpoenaed soon.
There have been articles recently about using an 'auto-bracket' mode to take multiple shots at bracketed exposures, and then reprocess them to combine them into a single wide-dynamic-range image. My little Sony point'n'shoot has such a mode, but when I wanted to try this trick recently, I found that it's really necessary to use a tripod.
In the meantime, my venerable Nikon FA still has slide film in it.
Sounds good. When I bought my 6200 over a year ago either the 7k series wasn't out, or only the high end of it was. (I believe.)
I bought a little over a year ago, and did at least enough work to know to avoid TurboCache, but I guess not enough to know about the 64/128 bus issue. At the time, the 6200 that I bought was one of the few I saw sub-$100 that looked decent - I just wish I'd known a teeny bit more, and maybe I could have found a full-bus version for only a little more.
It's also stunning just how populated the crap-space is. There must be more castrated cards than there are high-end cards. Now that I think of it, I wonder if it's a case of, "Oops, this design rev had that defect, let's 'feature' it on a new low-end card."
I have done what you suggest, in the past.
But now I find it annoying that the sub-$100 market has gone completely to castrated video cards. That didn't used to be the case. I have both Radeon 8500LE and FX5700LE cards that were sub-$100, and I'm quite happy with them. The features are all there, just the clock is slightly degraded. Obviously I'm not a hard-core gamer with cards like that, but for what I do, they're fine. On my newest system, I searched until I found an nVidia 6200 card that was not TurboCache, and got it for about the same price as the others. Unfortunately it has proven to be castrated with only half a memory bus, and is slower than the old FX5700.
It looks as if they may well have managed to kill the cheap-but-decent sub-$100 market, and moved the minimum decent price-point from $89 to near $150.
I remote-administer my 80+yo mother's machine 600+ miles away. Generally I only do security-related updates, until I get there in person, which has been happening more frequently in recent years. When there physically I bring the machine fully up-to-date. My main fear is doing something that will render it unable to get on the net, which has happened once. She's not sufficiently savvy to be of much help, and when that happened I had a cousing come over, and talked him through what needed doing.
My daughter would be much easier to work with. I am worried about the networking topology a university might deploy, notably hiding everything behind NAT, like my son's was. But I run an OpenVPN endpoint, and would likely have that set up so she could connect and I could get in.
I think another trick would be to have a separate repair partition - just enough to have a net connection, OpenVPN endpoint, and a small box of tools to repair the main install.
My son did pretty well with WinXP, though I added this thing called "abstrusion protection" as one layer, that appears to be more trouble than it's worth.
My daughter heads off to college next year, and unless they have some sort of laptop-with-tuition plan, she's taking a deskside machine with her. Right now that machine dual-boots Win98SE and Gentoo, but I won't send Win98SE off to a University. I'd been deferring any sort of upgrade, since Win98SE has been sufficient for games, and I don't like spending money before I need to. At some point this summer/fall I started thinking maybe I should just get Vista, since I'll be waiting long enough. Now I'm beginning to think it should be XP, because the machine is "only" an AthlonXP-2600, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, 256MB 5700LE. I get the impression that it will run Vista, but won't be that far above minimum requirements. Then again, I'm also wondering if she can just stick to Linux, though she'll need quite a bit more training before it can get too far from my maintenance.
When using it at home for schoolwork, she uses Linux, "because Windows just keep crashing." (her words)
Actually, the OEM Windows licensing situation it's WORSE than giving it away.
There's the negotiated price, and then there's the rebate. I have no idea what either the negotiated price or rebate is, but I have heard the essence from multiple sources. The profits are so thin on building PC boxes, that you simply can't make sufficient profit if you buy Windows at the negotiated price. The profit comes when you get the rebate, and though they're technically not allowed to make the rebates "Microsoft loyalty tests," and maybe technically the're not, essentially they are.
The same thing is done with Intel CPUs.
Take a look at that new PC or laptop. Other than the brand logo, there are nearly always 2 stickers - "Intel Inside" and "Designed for Windows". Those stickers and all of their hidden implications made the boxes profitable. Maybe the situation is now a little different with the Core line, but it's been that way for a long time. Personally I've removed the stickers, and tend to reattach them to wastebaskets and urinals.
My precinct votes with optically-scanned ballots on thick paper. It's kind of like standardized tests in schools, either fill in the circle or complete the line. The printing is right on the ballot, so there's no confusion of which circle of line to mark.
Not to be Luddite or anything, but as far as I can tell, it's pretty much perfect for voting. Understandable, machine-count for speed, and verifiable.
As much as that, I'd like to see a good Constitutional test of signing statements.
Won't argue with the official position statements, I can easily believe you, and would actually have a hard time believing otherwise.
But...
In this context, 2 things stick out every Sunday in the Prayer of the Faithful:
1 - Pro-life
2 - Safety of our troops and peace to come soon.
I've only ever once heard a call for an end to the death penalty, or for government policies favorable to the non-wealthy, and those were both on the Sunday following the 2004 elections.
Prior to the 2004 elections, they were all but commanding us to vote for Bush, up to within an RCH of saying exactly that. So close in fact, that I find it odd that a California church is having its tax-exempt status threatened for merely being anti-war. I guess I'd have to hear what they actually said, but IMHO the difference between what the Catholic church did and just plain telling us from the pulpit to vote for Bush was negligible.
Look at it another way...
The religious, Catholics and Evangelicals alike, have sold their souls for sex. It's really just that simple. The 2 major stands are abortion and gay marriage, essentially sex. For that matter, we can throw in birth control, again sex.
In the interest of sex, which Jesus Christ didn't really say much about, (He said things like, "Avoid immoral conduct," and "Go, and sin no more," and I'm not even sure about the former.) they turn a blind eye to the rest of the "conservative agenda." That includes the death penalty, rush to war, and a general concentration of wealth in the upper classes, to the detriment of the poor. We can include children and widows in that class. Now there's something Jesus Christ DID talk about - at great length. He also talked at great length about wealthy upper class who put on airs of piousness.
IMHO the Church has betrayed their trust, over sex.
Then you get redeployed or given the opportunity to participate in a resource action.
If only for your own management chain, it's probably good to generate some noise about the problems you've made sure nobody sees.