> Obama only seems socialist if you ignore the 700 billion dollar bailout we handed to businesses
You won't find me supporting the bailout. So now that we are all agreed it was dumb where does that leave us since Obama voted for it right along with the McCainiac.
So our choice is between a third generation Marxist who hangs out with nutjobs and has zero accomplishments to justify two autobiographies vs a war hero who seems compelled to agree with Democrats at every opportunity out of some crazy notion that bipartisianship is always a good thing. We all know McCain has done a lot of things and will do big things as POTUS, and we Republicans will hate at least half of em. Why do ya think our side has been so demoralized.
> Actually, Adam Smith (the guy who basically invented Capitalism) was also in favor of the rich being taxed > at a higher rate than the poor, so that's not a good argument.
Progressive taxation is debatable but people of good intent can argue both sides and still be good Capitalists and traditional Americans. The government must have revenue, even if it were bound back to only doing the things it should be doing. The question of how to raise those funds with the least impact on the citizenry is valid.
What Obama is proposing is a different thing. He isn't talking about how best to fund the operations of the government, he is talking about redistribution of income by taxing people he decrees to be 'making too much' and handing out checks to people to don't pay any taxes at all. And that is Socialism/Communism. From Each according to their Abilities, to Each according to their Need. It doesn't get more clear cut.
> Are you kidding? They've been running Jeremiah Wright saying "Goddamn America" steadily on DirectTV the last couple days.
That wasn't McCain, it's a 527 group. But what part of the ad do you think is unfair?
Obama wasn't raised in that church and it wasn't just the closest one to him when he hit Chicago. He was organizing the black churches for political purposes and thus had the opportunity to sample the teachings of every church in the area and he picked Wright. Wright didn't go nuts after Obama joined, he was already teaching Cone's Black Liberation Theology.
> Did you get the Republican party robocall about Ayers, that basically said Obama was a bomb throwing terrorist who would bomb the Pentagon.
No they didn't say Obama is a bomb thrower, but it is 100% factual that Obama 'has no enemies on the left.' Riddle me this; name one close personal or professional associate of Sen. Obama that isn't a) a commununist radical, b) islamic extremist or c) part of the corrupt Chicago machine.
> and it completely turned Independents, like me
Bull. Anybody who is raving about 'swift boating' in light of McCain's campaign (Wright is a totally legit issue) ain't an Independent. Go troll some board where people don't have brains and they might believe that story.
Seriously, the welfare queen not only existed, she is still with us despite the joke of 'welfare reform.' When Katrine hit New Orleans it flushed out a crapload of fifth generation wards of the state. And if you look in any major city you will find just as many so it wasn't confined to New Orleans. Welfare Reform only changed the names of the programs around. So now people don't get "welfare" checks. But they do get to live in government owned housing where their rent is based on their ability to pay and if your income is low enough they even pick up the light bill for you. They don't give out 'food stamps' anymore, clients get a special credit card. They still pay people who can't support their current children to breed up more, so long as the 'baby daddy' doesn't live at the same address.
> I'd not mind the electoral college if the reality was that a state that was close (say 49/51 for this > particular gibberish) sent as close to the percentage of votes in to what that state's citizens wanted.
Bad idea. First off we should understand the original reason for the Electoral College. It is one of the last vestiges of the Old Republic left. It is a reminder that We aren't electing the POTUS and shouldn't, the States do it. The States were also supposed to elect the Senate and things took a notable downward trend when we foolishly changed that.
The Founding Fathers understood human nature and built a system to serve fallen man. They knew that power would corrupt, politicians would tend to be self serving people, etc. So they built a government of checks and balances, where the greed, self interest and stupidity of one set of politicians would be set against another and mostly cancel out. And one where the People itself were equally suspect and balanced against.
Today though, the Electoral College serves a very important function that anyone proposing to eliminate it must address. It is serving as a firewall against election fraud. For example, there will almost certainly be fraud in the local elections in IL, LA (my home state), NJ, etc. But little in the presidential election because there would be little point, none of those states are likely to be swingable. Watch where ACORN is putting the majority of it's troops.
Now imagine a world where the POTUS was directly elected. It would be a nightmare as Florida '00 was repeated in damned near every state every election cycle. Our Republic would fall into a civil war.
> That being said BluRay burners are expensive enough, and the blank media is expensive enough that I'll probably > still buy my BluRay movies on Amazon.com.
Which is perfectly good. I didn't buy my first DVD though until the protection was broken and I have no intention of buying anything BD until it is broken. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Who wants to buy a BD movie until they can pull a copy to a DVD for portable players off in the rest of the house, the in car players, etc. Until we can yank clips out of one. Until we can play then on our non-Windows machines.
Once stable build of mplayer support this stuff and the battle of key revocation settles down I'll think about investing in the stuff. Not before.
> Speaking as a Republican, I'd have no problem raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour.
Then you ain't much of a Republican if you don't even understand the basic philosoply of Free People participating in Free Markets.
Would you like to know what the Minimum Wage does in reality?
1. It sets a bar and says any job worth less than the Minimum Wage must either be done with illegals, outsourced to somewhere else, replaced with automation or some other solution because hiring an American to do it is now illegal. Basically it removes the least skilled workers from the labor pool and puts them on Welfare.
2. To the extent that employers DO suck it up and pay more for labor than it is worth on the Free Market it simply causes inflation to balance the equation, thus reducing the effective wages of everyone who earns more than the new Minimum Wage while quicky leaving those at Minimum about where they were before.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Learn it, love it, live it and we all will have a better world.
Ok, but lets also not use a corner case (health care) to obscure the more general point about the virtue of charity vs the evils of redistribution/welfare.
> "Poor Sick Bastard" has cancer and currently has no health insurance. Please find him an insurance > company that will cover him.
You ask the impossible because you ave made some fundamental mistakes. Can you find car insurance that will fix your car AFTER you wrap the damned thing around a light pole? See the problem here? Insurance is all about paying to INSURE against a potential FUTURE loss. So insurance can never be expected to take care of someone who, for whatever reason, didn't have coverage before an expensive medical condition develops.
I have given this subject some thought but don't have a final solution to offer. But here are some hard realities that have to be dealt with.
The first hard reality to face is that there ARE hard realities. In Obamaland there are solutions to all problems. It is a happy place full of fluffy kittens and unicorns. I'd like to live there too but that world doesn't exist, instead we have this crappy world where fluffy kittns have to be gassed because they quickly grow into cats hellbent on making as many fluffy kittens as they can and too many human didn't fix their asses and uncorns are mythological. Here life not only isn't carefree and easy, it is a bitch and isn't even close to 'fair.'
A Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is something that is possible because it doesn't cost anybody else anything to not kill or enslave you and to allow you to fly yer freak flag. But when you assert you have a right to BE happy it implies you have a claim on the labor of others. Now unless you are putting yourself into a special class entitled to be made happy by enslaving somebody else it just doesn't work.
Everyone must be equal before the Law. But the notion that everybody is actually equal is insane. Inequality is just not avoidable, squall about 'fairness' all you like, it changes nothing here in reality. Some people are born to parents with more resources at their disposal. Some are born smarter, stronger, more physically attractive. Some are born into racial groups currently enjoying advantages. And then some get the shitty end of the stick and get born as stupid, ugly kids to poor minority parents and then die at a young age of cancer, not even getting the consolation prize of being an 'inspiring poster child'. And there is absolutely nothing you, me or President Obama can do about any of that.
Modern medicine can let humans survive the horrible diseases that are still afflicting billions of people unfortunate enough to live in areas where it isn't available. The downside is that beyond some basic and inexpensive things like vaccines and such it costs a shitload of money and as we keep inventing all manner of new higher tech treatments the price is going from expensive to insane. If somebody can pay for it or bought insurance in advance of the need I don't think anybody here thinks they don't have the right to pay for whatever they want, hell ya can't take it with you anyway.
The hard question is whether a poor uninsured citizen has a RIGHT to demand treatment by confiscating wealth from his fellow citizens. Does a poor American, simply because of the happy accident of being born here, has a right to either enslave the doctor to tend him or enslave random citizens to pay the doctor for his services? Just because modern medicine now exists near him he suddenly has a right to it while some poor bastard in Africa dies alone and unnoticed? Note I'm not arguing that private charity shouldn't try to help the poor obtain medical care, I'm asking if they have the right to force others through the power of government to labor to pay for their care.
Now lets throw some really sacred livestock onto the barbie. Does everyone have some 'Right' to equal medical care? Lets assume we do decide everyo
> I like how helping poor, sick bastards is now considered "redistribution". Last I > checked that was just being a decent fucking person.
I'll stick to small words to give you a chance to get a clue.
If you help a poor sick bastard there is a good chance that you might actually help the guy. You gain Karma for the deed.
When the Government takes your money (under threat of jail or death by cop) and gives it to that same 'poor sick bastard' the poor bastard only becomes dependent on more welfare. Instead of gaining Karma you just lose a sack of cash you could almost certainly put to better use, one of which would have been helping the poor bastard. The Congresscritters gain no Karma for buying votes with other people's money.
> I hope you enjoy serving your remaining term in PMITA Federal Prsion. Have a nice day.
Not exactly. Assume he wins and that he refuses to resign. He gets to serve in the Senate instead of prison. NOTHING stops a congresscritter from freely traveling to Congress when it is about to go into session. If he decides that is how he wants to roll he can drive down the freeway shooting an Uzi and when a cop pulls him over all he has to do is flash his ID and say he is headin' to Congress and that is that. They can file charges, fine him, do anything else they want but that can't impede his travel. Only Congress itself can expel a member and it takes a supermajority to do it. Hopefully the Senate will throw his ass out on a 99-1 vote, but this IS congress we are talking about.
> So the election looks like the popular mayor of the states largest city vs. an unspecified > Republican to be named by Sarah Palin. Hard to think there won't be an enthusiasm gap there.
I dunno, if Stevens has the slightest hint of class left this could be a wonderful day for Republicans. Follow along with me for a minute. Bright and early tomorrow morning the Sen. holds a press conference and announces that if he wins reelection he will resign before the new Congress convenes and allow Gov. Palin to replace him. Remember that Palin has an 80%+ approval rating right now in her home state. So if she promises to to appoint a good solid reform minded Republican the odds are good the entire Republican ranks and a good percentage of the moderates who elected Palin herself on an anti-corruption reform platform would turn out.
> Its as if they will sneak in while you are not looking or something? Its all a bit silly.
Oh I dunno, could be that sneaking has been the preferred and most successful tactic of Communists the world over? With their endless layers of front groups, fifth columns, infiltration tactics, etc.
Witness the current election cycle where generations of tireless labor are about to come to fruition for the bastards. Endless efforts to infiltrate and undermine our instituitions such that they can finally run a pretty much out of the closet communist and because of their control over the mass media safely bet that 90% of the country will never know it until it is too late.
> Oh get off of it. The reason for the economic meltdown has little to do with Freddie and Fannie.
It had everything to do with Freddie and Fannie. Where do you think those mortage backed securities came from? Who do you think established the lending rules for what paper could go into a Freddie/Fannie/US Fedgov guaranteed securiy? Who was pushing Freddie, Fannie, banks in general to 'make home ownership easier for people in redlined communities'?
No, this was not a problem caused by deregulation. This was a problem caused by Congressional meddling in the marketplace. This was caused by 'community organizers' like ACORN sending mobs to bank president's houses. This was caused by ignoring the multiple warnings from Democrats, Republicans, Regulators, Independent accountants, everybody. Anybody with a functioning brain saw that giving out loans to people, who by definition, had almost no chance to repay them was going to end up in an epic fail. Some people knew the risk and didn't care. See Cloward-Piven Strategy
> If you're happy ted stevens was prosecuted, you are not a republican, you're a moderate.
Just looked at yer posting history and find a kostard. So I am under no illusions I'll change your mind so this is for anybody else reading. Tell me if I'm moderate or conservative.:)
No, Republicans believe in the Rule of Law, you guys are tey ones who go for the Rule of Men.... evil men like your third generation Marxist Messiah. Tell me, is there ANYONE close to Mr. Obama that isn't a) a marxist, b) Muslim, c) a terrorist (or symp), d) A Mobster or e) fits into more than one catagory?
Lets start at the beginning. Grandparents on mother side were both communists. Mom was at least an anti-american, probably socialist leaning if not a fellow traveller. Dad? Communist. What else do you call a man who gets tossed out of an overtly Socialist government for being to much of a redistributionist? Growing up Grampa figures Young Obama needs a proper father figure who can teach him how to be black enough to properly hate on whitey so he fixes him up with his old CPUSA buddy Frank Marshal Davis. Poor kid never really stood a chance, but then EVERYBODY at some point has to decide whether to keep the morals they grew up with or not.
So now lets examine the sort of people he associated with in his adult life. He married a bitter race baiter, after working with most of the black churches in Chicago he picked Rev. Wright's (an ex Nation of Islam marxist pretending to be a Protestant Christian) den of blasphemy and marxism, called Father Phlager[sp] (a Marxist pretending to be Catholic) a mentor, etc.
Then we get to his professional alliances. Ayers is just the most infamous menace to the Republic he allied himself with. His first job was 'community organizing' with Saul Alinsky's gang of misfit street agitators. Then he 'organized' with ACORN's front group Project Vote, where his job was to commit enough fraud to elect one of the more unstable people to ever hold a Senate seat, Carol Mosley Braun. He got his own start in elected office by being the hand picked successor for Alice Palmer, a hard core Communist, annointed by Bill Ayers in his home. Throughout his career he worked hand in glove with most of the nastiest bits of the infamous Daley Chicago Machine, was picked by Ayers to be in charge of doling out $160mil at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to a motley assortment of black power radicals, communists, and other malcontents. Now he is running for POTUS with one of Daley's favorite henchmen as his campaign manager.
> For a member of Congress to take such a bribe should be a death penalty offense.
Well Congress would be pretty frickin' empty..... But if they couldn't make a Quorum nothing could get done and I for one could live with that.:)
Seriously, I'm a Republican (and have the flamebait mods for questioning The Chosen One to prove it) and think today is a great day for Justice. Crooks need to go, regardless of party.
Now if we could just clean out the assholes who caused this current economic meltdown that started at Freddie and Fannie.... Sens Dodd (Banking Cmmt Chairman) and Obama (#2 lifetime money take in only four years), Rep Frank (Chief House cheerleader for subprime lending while fucking the guy in charge of subprime lending for close to decade while overseeing em), etc.
> In that case, since they keep extending the DST anyway (it's ~7 months now), why not extend it to year round.
Actually the US already tried year around DST. There is no good argument for DST but it won't die.
Because there is ONE thing it does, especially this last change. It makes Democrats feel better about themselves. So long as they can pass bills like DST and reafirm that they are smarter people, better people, more caring people than those ignorant pieces of crap they rule over then it is always worth it. This last extension was to save energy. Studies showed at the time it was unlikely to do anything of the sort but who cares about facts, those are for losers. The only fact that mattered was that Democrats could feel smug and superior, safe in the knowledge that a YES vote proved they were better people who care about saving the Earth.
Yes, the above is flamebait.:) DST really pisses me off, what kind of arrogant 'tard thinks they can order the sun around.
Yea... Asterisk has had premade bootable CDs that do this sort of thing for years. Wonder if Asterisk is now infringing on patents these guys almost certainly filed......
> the other thing to do is regulate cold-calling (whether commercial....
Doesn't matter. Automated dialers are already regulated, there is the no not call registry, etc. None of that matters. The telcos decided the money the spammers pay for their phone banks is too good to pass up so they sign the pink contracts and then just run interferrence. Go ahead, TRY to enforce the current laws that are supposed to let you get $500 for a junk fax. Good luck finding out who to sue because the phone company policy is not to release that information unless law enforcement supplies em with a court order. A lot of bother to collect $500 and at any rate no PD is going to help you on what is a civil matter so game over. The score? Phone Company 1, Spammer 1, customer 0.
Do not call registry? Yea, you can file a complaint with the FTC.... against a shadow. The phone number, if one even appears on your caller ID, is almost certainly fake so just how is the FTC supposed to do anything.
I often wonder what would happen if you documented calling the phone company right after a junk fax (that $500 being the juicy target to start on) and tell them you plan to take the previous caller to small claims court for the $500 and that if they refuse to disclose the customer's mailing address for the purpose of serving a court order then you plan to list THEM as the contact since they are now a co-conspirator. Tnen actually do it. If a few people did it odds are somebody will hit the judicial lotto. Once a few judges were identified somebody goes into business in those jurisdictions buying up junk faxes (and a limited power of attorney) from victims, suing on their behalf and forcing the telcos to reevaluate their profit/loss on spam.
I'm already hearing the apologists with their tired story that this is just registration fraud, no evidence of actual election fraud. Nothing to see here, move along.....
But they are wrong. Most are just repeating Kos talking points and aren't actually in on the scam, but they are useful idiots. So what IS the scam?
Go check out the CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY for details. Basically the idea is to totally swamp the system so that there is insufficient manpower to detect fraud. So that is a win for them since it brings chaos. Be allowing them to actually commit fraud under the cover of all this noise is yet another win. Finally as they undermine public confidence in our elections they win yet again.
> I own version 2, just got it a week ago off amazon.
Well I only see a Z2A now but the price of $37.99 is totally tempting. If they haven't Tivo'ed it yet. That A scares me. Please emme know if you can still get a shell prompt using zipit's instructions.
> Semi-glad I did, otherwise I'd be getting this one, as getting a USB port out of Z2 is probably beyond me:)
I'd bet good money it is somewhere on that unexplained expansion port along with a ttl level serial port. Might even have a spare SPI and/or i2c back there along with some GPIO pins. As a tinkerer those possibilities call out to me.
> Actually, the latest rev of the zipit does have a color screen.
I looked that up after posting.... But the version 2 is risky. They don't sell the $149 version anymore, now it is $49 + contract and none of the websites on running generic linux on em say of this new version is locked. And it is still a wee bit underpowered. 32M of RAM is a really tight fit for a modern flash enabled browser even if the screen were big enough. But if the $49 version sold over the counter can be repurposed without a service contract I'd just about have to grab one just for playing with. Yet if more than a few of us hacker types do that they will lock it down hard to pretect their tracfone style business model.
The one in this/. post is overall a better deal since it has more flash, ram, bluetooth and a more normal keyboard layout. And if were actually offered here in the US I suspect the price would be close to $149 instead of the $175 somebody came up with by doing a straight currency conversion.
Good, glad to see I'm not the only one who remembered the Zipit. That's this thing except with a color display, more ram/flash and this thing appears to run multiple apps unstead of just booting straight into an IM client.
But I don't want to just slag em, I think they might be close to opening a new form factor up, but this unit just isn't going to do the job. Give it a little more, say one more rev of the hardware cycle, and it will be there. It needs at least a 640x480 screen, enough oomph to run a web browser able to view a wide range of content, including flash video/youtube and run X to open up the app availibility a bit. More ram/flash will come automatically with time thanks to falling prices. And the MSRP needs to get down to where the Zipit was several years ago at $99 no contracts, no bs.
> I fail to see how you can draw any conclusions about the reliability of atmospheric physics papers from a study of biomedical research papers.
Biomedical research is a lot more amendable to verification and falsification, thus an argument can be made that errors are getting corrected. Global Warming is faith based, it's predictions aren't made in anything resembling a controlled scientific environment and the only way to test it's predictions is to do nothing for twenty years and see if the disasters predicted come to pass. Now consider that rerunning a medical test and the origional paper wrong will get a researcher rewarded while writing anything whatsoever questioning human caused global warming gets a researcher labeled a whore of the oil companies and the argument that the science on GW might be at least as flawed as these biomedical papers grows.
> Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind.
Of course there are important differences between a project such as Linux and a government.
Linus works as benevolent dictator because:
a) he is a good dictator. Everyone knows a good king is the best form of government, but nobody has ever solved the problem of evsuring a steady supply of good kings.
b) If enough people were to ever decide Linus were a bad dictator that can use the GPL to remove him with a minimum of fuss. In the real world removing a dictator involves a wee bit more effort.
c) Being a highly technical project focused on making the 'best kernel' it is easy to get agreement on most issues since everyone agrees on the meaning of 'best' after a few arguments and benchmark runs. Now consider the socialist/capitalist divide where there is zero agreement as to the definition of a 'good' government. Makes Windows vs Linux a petty squabble.
Not to mention the inescapable fact George Soros is a communist opposed to everything our form of government stands for so anybody who gives that asshole the time of day on the idea of reforming our government should be suspect.
> Because I'm pretty sure liberalism is, in general, at odds with the idea of a dictatorship? You know, like 'liberation'?
Liberal once meant people who stood for Truth, Justice and the American Way, but the word was corrupted by the socialists, like Progressive was before it. The primary difference between the two great philosophies battling for control of the US over the last century is that one side can proudly shout out what it stands for while the other changes the name of their movement every time the general public figures out that the current one is just another front for socialism. I'd really like to take liberal back from the bastards.
> Unlike many groups, the vast majority of EFF's funding comes from individual donations:
Yea, I used to contribute... back before BDS destroyed yer frickin brains and caused you to abandon your origional purpose and become daily kos with lawyers. Back when you were actually defending people like Steve Jackson, Demetri Skylarov[sp?], etc. against the cluelessness of the system regarding the "electronic frontier" and not trying to defend the right of terrorists to blow us the hell up. Just look at your headlines now:
"The EFF is suing to have the unconstitutional telecom immunity overturned."
Jeez, the NYT can't beat that for one sided. Isn't that kinda what the whole QUESTION you are asking the courts to examine is, whether it is unconstituitional or not? Congress, the President and a whole crapload of folks think it is constituitional, including just as an aside, both current candidates for POTUS but what the hell does any of us know. On your planet you ex hippies are the final arbiter of what is Constituitional.
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> Obama only seems socialist if you ignore the 700 billion dollar bailout we handed to businesses
You won't find me supporting the bailout. So now that we are all agreed it was dumb where does that leave us since Obama voted for it right along with the McCainiac.
So our choice is between a third generation Marxist who hangs out with nutjobs and has zero accomplishments to justify two autobiographies vs a war hero who seems compelled to agree with Democrats at every opportunity out of some crazy notion that bipartisianship is always a good thing. We all know McCain has done a lot of things and will do big things as POTUS, and we Republicans will hate at least half of em. Why do ya think our side has been so demoralized.
> Actually, Adam Smith (the guy who basically invented Capitalism) was also in favor of the rich being taxed
> at a higher rate than the poor, so that's not a good argument.
Progressive taxation is debatable but people of good intent can argue both sides and still be good Capitalists and traditional Americans. The government must have revenue, even if it were bound back to only doing the things it should be doing. The question of how to raise those funds with the least impact on the citizenry is valid.
What Obama is proposing is a different thing. He isn't talking about how best to fund the operations of the government, he is talking about redistribution of income by taxing people he decrees to be 'making too much' and handing out checks to people to don't pay any taxes at all. And that is Socialism/Communism. From Each according to their Abilities, to Each according to their Need. It doesn't get more clear cut.
> Are you kidding? They've been running Jeremiah Wright saying "Goddamn America" steadily on DirectTV the last couple days.
That wasn't McCain, it's a 527 group. But what part of the ad do you think is unfair?
Obama wasn't raised in that church and it wasn't just the closest one to him when he hit Chicago. He was organizing the black churches for political purposes and thus had the opportunity to sample the teachings of every church in the area and he picked Wright. Wright didn't go nuts after Obama joined, he was already teaching Cone's Black Liberation Theology.
> Did you get the Republican party robocall about Ayers, that basically said Obama was a bomb throwing terrorist who would bomb the Pentagon.
No they didn't say Obama is a bomb thrower, but it is 100% factual that Obama 'has no enemies on the left.' Riddle me this; name one close personal or professional associate of Sen. Obama that isn't a) a commununist radical, b) islamic extremist or c) part of the corrupt Chicago machine.
> and it completely turned Independents, like me
Bull. Anybody who is raving about 'swift boating' in light of McCain's campaign (Wright is a totally legit issue) ain't an Independent. Go troll some board where people don't have brains and they might believe that story.
> Seriously; the welfare queen never existed.
Can I have a hit off your bong?
Seriously, the welfare queen not only existed, she is still with us despite the joke of 'welfare reform.' When Katrine hit New Orleans it flushed out a crapload of fifth generation wards of the state. And if you look in any major city you will find just as many so it wasn't confined to New Orleans. Welfare Reform only changed the names of the programs around. So now people don't get "welfare" checks. But they do get to live in government owned housing where their rent is based on their ability to pay and if your income is low enough they even pick up the light bill for you. They don't give out 'food stamps' anymore, clients get a special credit card. They still pay people who can't support their current children to breed up more, so long as the 'baby daddy' doesn't live at the same address.
> I'd not mind the electoral college if the reality was that a state that was close (say 49/51 for this
> particular gibberish) sent as close to the percentage of votes in to what that state's citizens wanted.
Bad idea. First off we should understand the original reason for the Electoral College. It is one of the last vestiges of the Old Republic left. It is a reminder that We aren't electing the POTUS and shouldn't, the States do it. The States were also supposed to elect the Senate and things took a notable downward trend when we foolishly changed that.
The Founding Fathers understood human nature and built a system to serve fallen man. They knew that power would corrupt, politicians would tend to be self serving people, etc. So they built a government of checks and balances, where the greed, self interest and stupidity of one set of politicians would be set against another and mostly cancel out. And one where the People itself were equally suspect and balanced against.
Today though, the Electoral College serves a very important function that anyone proposing to eliminate it must address. It is serving as a firewall against election fraud. For example, there will almost certainly be fraud in the local elections in IL, LA (my home state), NJ, etc. But little in the presidential election because there would be little point, none of those states are likely to be swingable. Watch where ACORN is putting the majority of it's troops.
Now imagine a world where the POTUS was directly elected. It would be a nightmare as Florida '00 was repeated in damned near every state every election cycle. Our Republic would fall into a civil war.
> That being said BluRay burners are expensive enough, and the blank media is expensive enough that I'll probably
> still buy my BluRay movies on Amazon.com.
Which is perfectly good. I didn't buy my first DVD though until the protection was broken and I have no intention of buying anything BD until it is broken. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Who wants to buy a BD movie until they can pull a copy to a DVD for portable players off in the rest of the house, the in car players, etc. Until we can yank clips out of one. Until we can play then on our non-Windows machines.
Once stable build of mplayer support this stuff and the battle of key revocation settles down I'll think about investing in the stuff. Not before.
> Speaking as a Republican, I'd have no problem raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour.
Then you ain't much of a Republican if you don't even understand the basic philosoply of Free People participating in Free Markets.
Would you like to know what the Minimum Wage does in reality?
1. It sets a bar and says any job worth less than the Minimum Wage must either be done with illegals, outsourced to somewhere else, replaced with automation or some other solution because hiring an American to do it is now illegal. Basically it removes the least skilled workers from the labor pool and puts them on Welfare.
2. To the extent that employers DO suck it up and pay more for labor than it is worth on the Free Market it simply causes inflation to balance the equation, thus reducing the effective wages of everyone who earns more than the new Minimum Wage while quicky leaving those at Minimum about where they were before.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Learn it, love it, live it and we all will have a better world.
> Fair enough, but answer me this.
Ok, but lets also not use a corner case (health care) to obscure the more general point about the virtue of charity vs the evils of redistribution/welfare.
> "Poor Sick Bastard" has cancer and currently has no health insurance. Please find him an insurance
> company that will cover him.
You ask the impossible because you ave made some fundamental mistakes. Can you find car insurance that will fix your car AFTER you wrap the damned thing around a light pole? See the problem here? Insurance is all about paying to INSURE against a potential FUTURE loss. So insurance can never be expected to take care of someone who, for whatever reason, didn't have coverage before an expensive medical condition develops.
I have given this subject some thought but don't have a final solution to offer. But here are some hard realities that have to be dealt with.
The first hard reality to face is that there ARE hard realities. In Obamaland there are solutions to all problems. It is a happy place full of fluffy kittens and unicorns. I'd like to live there too but that world doesn't exist, instead we have this crappy world where fluffy kittns have to be gassed because they quickly grow into cats hellbent on making as many fluffy kittens as they can and too many human didn't fix their asses and uncorns are mythological. Here life not only isn't carefree and easy, it is a bitch and isn't even close to 'fair.'
A Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is something that is possible because it doesn't cost anybody else anything to not kill or enslave you and to allow you to fly yer freak flag. But when you assert you have a right to BE happy it implies you have a claim on the labor of others. Now unless you are putting yourself into a special class entitled to be made happy by enslaving somebody else it just doesn't work.
Everyone must be equal before the Law. But the notion that everybody is actually equal is insane. Inequality is just not avoidable, squall about 'fairness' all you like, it changes nothing here in reality. Some people are born to parents with more resources at their disposal. Some are born smarter, stronger, more physically attractive. Some are born into racial groups currently enjoying advantages. And then some get the shitty end of the stick and get born as stupid, ugly kids to poor minority parents and then die at a young age of cancer, not even getting the consolation prize of being an 'inspiring poster child'. And there is absolutely nothing you, me or President Obama can do about any of that.
Modern medicine can let humans survive the horrible diseases that are still afflicting billions of people unfortunate enough to live in areas where it isn't available. The downside is that beyond some basic and inexpensive things like vaccines and such it costs a shitload of money and as we keep inventing all manner of new higher tech treatments the price is going from expensive to insane. If somebody can pay for it or bought insurance in advance of the need I don't think anybody here thinks they don't have the right to pay for whatever they want, hell ya can't take it with you anyway.
The hard question is whether a poor uninsured citizen has a RIGHT to demand treatment by confiscating wealth from his fellow citizens. Does a poor American, simply because of the happy accident of being born here, has a right to either enslave the doctor to tend him or enslave random citizens to pay the doctor for his services? Just because modern medicine now exists near him he suddenly has a right to it while some poor bastard in Africa dies alone and unnoticed? Note I'm not arguing that private charity shouldn't try to help the poor obtain medical care, I'm asking if they have the right to force others through the power of government to labor to pay for their care.
Now lets throw some really sacred livestock onto the barbie. Does everyone have some 'Right' to equal medical care? Lets assume we do decide everyo
> I like how helping poor, sick bastards is now considered "redistribution". Last I
> checked that was just being a decent fucking person.
I'll stick to small words to give you a chance to get a clue.
If you help a poor sick bastard there is a good chance that you might actually help the guy. You gain Karma for the deed.
When the Government takes your money (under threat of jail or death by cop) and gives it to that same 'poor sick bastard' the poor bastard only becomes dependent on more welfare. Instead of gaining Karma you just lose a sack of cash you could almost certainly put to better use, one of which would have been helping the poor bastard. The Congresscritters gain no Karma for buying votes with other people's money.
> I hope you enjoy serving your remaining term in PMITA Federal Prsion. Have a nice day.
Not exactly. Assume he wins and that he refuses to resign. He gets to serve in the Senate instead of prison. NOTHING stops a congresscritter from freely traveling to Congress when it is about to go into session. If he decides that is how he wants to roll he can drive down the freeway shooting an Uzi and when a cop pulls him over all he has to do is flash his ID and say he is headin' to Congress and that is that. They can file charges, fine him, do anything else they want but that can't impede his travel. Only Congress itself can expel a member and it takes a supermajority to do it. Hopefully the Senate will throw his ass out on a 99-1 vote, but this IS congress we are talking about.
> So the election looks like the popular mayor of the states largest city vs. an unspecified
> Republican to be named by Sarah Palin. Hard to think there won't be an enthusiasm gap there.
I dunno, if Stevens has the slightest hint of class left this could be a wonderful day for Republicans. Follow along with me for a minute. Bright and early tomorrow morning the Sen. holds a press conference and announces that if he wins reelection he will resign before the new Congress convenes and allow Gov. Palin to replace him. Remember that Palin has an 80%+ approval rating right now in her home state. So if she promises to to appoint a good solid reform minded Republican the odds are good the entire Republican ranks and a good percentage of the moderates who elected Palin herself on an anti-corruption reform platform would turn out.
> Its as if they will sneak in while you are not looking or something? Its all a bit silly.
Oh I dunno, could be that sneaking has been the preferred and most successful tactic of Communists the world over? With their endless layers of front groups, fifth columns, infiltration tactics, etc.
Witness the current election cycle where generations of tireless labor are about to come to fruition for the bastards. Endless efforts to infiltrate and undermine our instituitions such that they can finally run a pretty much out of the closet communist and because of their control over the mass media safely bet that 90% of the country will never know it until it is too late.
> Oh get off of it. The reason for the economic meltdown has little to do with Freddie and Fannie.
It had everything to do with Freddie and Fannie. Where do you think those mortage backed securities came from? Who do you think established the lending rules for what paper could go into a Freddie/Fannie/US Fedgov guaranteed securiy? Who was pushing Freddie, Fannie, banks in general to 'make home ownership easier for people in redlined communities'?
No, this was not a problem caused by deregulation. This was a problem caused by Congressional meddling in the marketplace. This was caused by 'community organizers' like ACORN sending mobs to bank president's houses. This was caused by ignoring the multiple warnings from Democrats, Republicans, Regulators, Independent accountants, everybody. Anybody with a functioning brain saw that giving out loans to people, who by definition, had almost no chance to repay them was going to end up in an epic fail. Some people knew the risk and didn't care. See Cloward-Piven Strategy
> If you're happy ted stevens was prosecuted, you are not a republican, you're a moderate.
Just looked at yer posting history and find a kostard. So I am under no illusions I'll change your mind so this is for anybody else reading. Tell me if I'm moderate or conservative. :)
No, Republicans believe in the Rule of Law, you guys are tey ones who go for the Rule of Men.... evil men like your third generation Marxist Messiah. Tell me, is there ANYONE close to Mr. Obama that isn't a) a marxist, b) Muslim, c) a terrorist (or symp), d) A Mobster or e) fits into more than one catagory?
Lets start at the beginning. Grandparents on mother side were both communists. Mom was at least an anti-american, probably socialist leaning if not a fellow traveller. Dad? Communist. What else do you call a man who gets tossed out of an overtly Socialist government for being to much of a redistributionist? Growing up Grampa figures Young Obama needs a proper father figure who can teach him how to be black enough to properly hate on whitey so he fixes him up with his old CPUSA buddy Frank Marshal Davis. Poor kid never really stood a chance, but then EVERYBODY at some point has to decide whether to keep the morals they grew up with or not.
So now lets examine the sort of people he associated with in his adult life. He married a bitter race baiter, after working with most of the black churches in Chicago he picked Rev. Wright's (an ex Nation of Islam marxist pretending to be a Protestant Christian) den of blasphemy and marxism, called Father Phlager[sp] (a Marxist pretending to be Catholic) a mentor, etc.
Then we get to his professional alliances. Ayers is just the most infamous menace to the Republic he allied himself with. His first job was 'community organizing' with Saul Alinsky's gang of misfit street agitators. Then he 'organized' with ACORN's front group Project Vote, where his job was to commit enough fraud to elect one of the more unstable people to ever hold a Senate seat, Carol Mosley Braun. He got his own start in elected office by being the hand picked successor for Alice Palmer, a hard core Communist, annointed by Bill Ayers in his home. Throughout his career he worked hand in glove with most of the nastiest bits of the infamous Daley Chicago Machine, was picked by Ayers to be in charge of doling out $160mil at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to a motley assortment of black power radicals, communists, and other malcontents. Now he is running for POTUS with one of Daley's favorite henchmen as his campaign manager.
> For a member of Congress to take such a bribe should be a death penalty offense.
Well Congress would be pretty frickin' empty..... But if they couldn't make a Quorum nothing could get done and I for one could live with that. :)
Seriously, I'm a Republican (and have the flamebait mods for questioning The Chosen One to prove it) and think today is a great day for Justice. Crooks need to go, regardless of party.
Now if we could just clean out the assholes who caused this current economic meltdown that started at Freddie and Fannie.... Sens Dodd (Banking Cmmt Chairman) and Obama (#2 lifetime money take in only four years), Rep Frank (Chief House cheerleader for subprime lending while fucking the guy in charge of subprime lending for close to decade while overseeing em), etc.
Or just take Open Secrets:All Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008 and work yer way down the top twenty or so.
> In that case, since they keep extending the DST anyway (it's ~7 months now), why not extend it to year round.
Actually the US already tried year around DST. There is no good argument for DST but it won't die.
Because there is ONE thing it does, especially this last change. It makes Democrats feel better about themselves. So long as they can pass bills like DST and reafirm that they are smarter people, better people, more caring people than those ignorant pieces of crap they rule over then it is always worth it. This last extension was to save energy. Studies showed at the time it was unlikely to do anything of the sort but who cares about facts, those are for losers. The only fact that mattered was that Democrats could feel smug and superior, safe in the knowledge that a YES vote proved they were better people who care about saving the Earth.
Yes, the above is flamebait. :) DST really pisses me off, what kind of arrogant 'tard thinks they can order the sun around.
> VoIP is definitely the way to go.
Yea... Asterisk has had premade bootable CDs that do this sort of thing for years. Wonder if Asterisk is now infringing on patents these guys almost certainly filed......
> the other thing to do is regulate cold-calling (whether commercial....
Doesn't matter. Automated dialers are already regulated, there is the no not call registry, etc. None of that matters. The telcos decided the money the spammers pay for their phone banks is too good to pass up so they sign the pink contracts and then just run interferrence. Go ahead, TRY to enforce the current laws that are supposed to let you get $500 for a junk fax. Good luck finding out who to sue because the phone company policy is not to release that information unless law enforcement supplies em with a court order. A lot of bother to collect $500 and at any rate no PD is going to help you on what is a civil matter so game over. The score? Phone Company 1, Spammer 1, customer 0.
Do not call registry? Yea, you can file a complaint with the FTC.... against a shadow. The phone number, if one even appears on your caller ID, is almost certainly fake so just how is the FTC supposed to do anything.
I often wonder what would happen if you documented calling the phone company right after a junk fax (that $500 being the juicy target to start on) and tell them you plan to take the previous caller to small claims court for the $500 and that if they refuse to disclose the customer's mailing address for the purpose of serving a court order then you plan to list THEM as the contact since they are now a co-conspirator. Tnen actually do it. If a few people did it odds are somebody will hit the judicial lotto. Once a few judges were identified somebody goes into business in those jurisdictions buying up junk faxes (and a limited power of attorney) from victims, suing on their behalf and forcing the telcos to reevaluate their profit/loss on spam.
I'm already hearing the apologists with their tired story that this is just registration fraud, no evidence of actual election fraud. Nothing to see here, move along.....
But they are wrong. Most are just repeating Kos talking points and aren't actually in on the scam, but they are useful idiots. So what IS the scam?
Go check out the CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY for details. Basically the idea is to totally swamp the system so that there is insufficient manpower to detect fraud. So that is a win for them since it brings chaos. Be allowing them to actually commit fraud under the cover of all this noise is yet another win. Finally as they undermine public confidence in our elections they win yet again.
> I own version 2, just got it a week ago off amazon.
Well I only see a Z2A now but the price of $37.99 is totally tempting. If they haven't Tivo'ed it yet. That A scares me. Please emme know if you can still get a shell prompt using zipit's instructions.
> Semi-glad I did, otherwise I'd be getting this one, as getting a USB port out of Z2 is probably beyond me:)
I'd bet good money it is somewhere on that unexplained expansion port along with a ttl level serial port. Might even have a spare SPI and/or i2c back there along with some GPIO pins. As a tinkerer those possibilities call out to me.
> Actually, the latest rev of the zipit does have a color screen.
I looked that up after posting.... But the version 2 is risky. They don't sell the $149 version anymore, now it is $49 + contract and none of the websites on running generic linux on em say of this new version is locked. And it is still a wee bit underpowered. 32M of RAM is a really tight fit for a modern flash enabled browser even if the screen were big enough. But if the $49 version sold over the counter can be repurposed without a service contract I'd just about have to grab one just for playing with. Yet if more than a few of us hacker types do that they will lock it down hard to pretect their tracfone style business model.
The one in this /. post is overall a better deal since it has more flash, ram, bluetooth and a more normal keyboard layout. And if were actually offered here in the US I suspect the price would be close to $149 instead of the $175 somebody came up with by doing a straight currency conversion.
> It is a beefed up version of the Zipit.
Good, glad to see I'm not the only one who remembered the Zipit. That's this thing except with a color display, more ram/flash and this thing appears to run multiple apps unstead of just booting straight into an IM client.
But I don't want to just slag em, I think they might be close to opening a new form factor up, but this unit just isn't going to do the job. Give it a little more, say one more rev of the hardware cycle, and it will be there. It needs at least a 640x480 screen, enough oomph to run a web browser able to view a wide range of content, including flash video/youtube and run X to open up the app availibility a bit. More ram/flash will come automatically with time thanks to falling prices. And the MSRP needs to get down to where the Zipit was several years ago at $99 no contracts, no bs.
> I fail to see how you can draw any conclusions about the reliability of atmospheric physics papers from a study of biomedical research papers.
Biomedical research is a lot more amendable to verification and falsification, thus an argument can be made that errors are getting corrected. Global Warming is faith based, it's predictions aren't made in anything resembling a controlled scientific environment and the only way to test it's predictions is to do nothing for twenty years and see if the disasters predicted come to pass. Now consider that rerunning a medical test and the origional paper wrong will get a researcher rewarded while writing anything whatsoever questioning human caused global warming gets a researcher labeled a whore of the oil companies and the argument that the science on GW might be at least as flawed as these biomedical papers grows.
> Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind.
Of course there are important differences between a project such as Linux and a government.
Linus works as benevolent dictator because:
a) he is a good dictator. Everyone knows a good king is the best form of government, but nobody has ever solved the problem of evsuring a steady supply of good kings.
b) If enough people were to ever decide Linus were a bad dictator that can use the GPL to remove him with a minimum of fuss. In the real world removing a dictator involves a wee bit more effort.
c) Being a highly technical project focused on making the 'best kernel' it is easy to get agreement on most issues since everyone agrees on the meaning of 'best' after a few arguments and benchmark runs. Now consider the socialist/capitalist divide where there is zero agreement as to the definition of a 'good' government. Makes Windows vs Linux a petty squabble.
Not to mention the inescapable fact George Soros is a communist opposed to everything our form of government stands for so anybody who gives that asshole the time of day on the idea of reforming our government should be suspect.
> Because I'm pretty sure liberalism is, in general, at odds with the idea of a dictatorship? You know, like 'liberation'?
Liberal once meant people who stood for Truth, Justice and the American Way, but the word was corrupted by the socialists, like Progressive was before it. The primary difference between the two great philosophies battling for control of the US over the last century is that one side can proudly shout out what it stands for while the other changes the name of their movement every time the general public figures out that the current one is just another front for socialism. I'd really like to take liberal back from the bastards.
> Unlike many groups, the vast majority of EFF's funding comes from individual donations:
Yea, I used to contribute... back before BDS destroyed yer frickin brains and caused you to abandon your origional purpose and become daily kos with lawyers. Back when you were actually defending people like Steve Jackson, Demetri Skylarov[sp?], etc. against the cluelessness of the system regarding the "electronic frontier" and not trying to defend the right of terrorists to blow us the hell up. Just look at your headlines now:
"The EFF is suing to have the unconstitutional telecom immunity overturned."
Jeez, the NYT can't beat that for one sided. Isn't that kinda what the whole QUESTION you are asking the courts to examine is, whether it is unconstituitional or not? Congress, the President and a whole crapload of folks think it is constituitional, including just as an aside, both current candidates for POTUS but what the hell does any of us know. On your planet you ex hippies are the final arbiter of what is Constituitional.