Well, when the race card is played, it is like crying "child molester". You can deny it all you want, but the stench of "racist" or "child molester" never goes away.
That might be why operagost threw it at Reid.
When you can say the same thing about the shenanigans of the (D) you'll have proper outlook. There is no difference between the (D) and the (R) parties in regards to how despicable the things they do are. It is called Politics.
So much for "draining the swamp". It is clear that the only way to "drain the swamp" is for us, the voters, to do it.
That second part is what I'm talking about: democrats get no points from me when they said they were going to drain the swamp. They would have gotten points only had they done it.
As far as the first part, I see no evidence to back that up. Recently an effort to get 9/11 responders free healthcare coverage failed because it would have closed a tax loophole for large corporations, and some republicans said illegal immigrants could be covered. I blame democrats for being too dumb and cowardly to get it passed (and for stupidly invoking rules to require more than a majority to vote for it) but I think the republicans are worse for actually voting against it.
In my opinion, there are definite differences right now between the two parties: one is evil, the other has policies I agree with but is completely incompetent. That's why I don't think foolish statements from either party matter, and that's why I don't think operagost's reasoning was solid that Reid was worse than Angle.
I wonder how charitable you'd be if all those things were... say... GWB? or some "right wing" candidate?
I might find those gaffes funnier if it were coming from a republican, true, but it's not what Bush and the right wingers say that I have problems with, it's what they do.
I'd think you all would be past the "racist" thing by now, but you're losing so it is time to break out the old favorite card of the left.
Operagost brought up the race card about Reid. I only talked about it to point out that the pot is calling the kettle black.
Meanwhile I see that you aren't past pulling out the "pulling out the race card" card;)
Yeah, and he thinks that losing "only" 36,000 jobs in one day is good
I don't see how his outlook on that would have changed anything. Surely you're not suggesting the US economy had problems because Harry Reid wasn't optimistic enough.
He declared the Iraq war "lost" in 2007, and that the surge would be a failure.
Yep. He doesn't have a crystal ball and is clearly unfit for office. As far as losing the war, that was stupid to say for a politician. I'm not a politician, so I can say we lost the war when we confused Iraq with al qaeda.
He made prejudiced statements about President Obama.
So? Are we going to pretend most people in congress are not at least a little prejudiced? I'm taking it as a given that we're pretending that everyone isn't at least a little prejudiced (though we all are.) Or are we going to pretend that a politician who has gaffes is unfit in some way?
Did you get sued for it? Maybe you should think about running for office.
"The fart party: we promise to break the political gridlock in washington and also promise to break wind."
Maybe democrats should look into this as a method of getting past fillibustering everything: there's probably not a rule against farting in the face of the speaker to make him pass out (thus breaking the fillibuster). It's also not like that would be beneath the dignity of the senate.
I'm guessing Reagan rationalized these actions as reducing the federal budget. The only problem with that logic is that the guy ran up a bigger deficit in defense projects than Carter
If that problem in logic helped in large part to the breakup of the Soviet bloc
It wasn't part of the internal failure that was the soviet economy, so no, that wasn't what broke up the soviet bloc.
A two-party system seems pretty much non-functional, doesn't it?
It's worked for our entire political history. What's different at the moment is that one party has decided they'll be more successful if they stop anything from happening so the other guys don't get anything done.
That can definitely happen with more than two parties. If the current republican party were to split into the tea party and the republican party, you can't tell me that suddenly either would start working with democrats. The republicans may have started using that tactic first, but those who would be in the tea party are using them as well.
I'm personally wondering if Fox news and fast media in general is what's changing things for the worse. I suspect that previously, if some nutcase senator were putting political partisanship over progress, he'd be excluded, wheras today, on blogs and on fox news, he gets made into a hero.
So how do you suppose that 'little' healthcare thing managed to get passed at all?
Obama's political capital, which has dwindled with that and the Bush economy. That was a mammoth fight with plenty of compromises and quid pro quo going on, "I'm a popular president, you want to be on board." Now that's not true, that package could not be passed now, just a short while later.
Apparently it was actually novel and useful enough for its time to generate grassroot interest
Indeed. Real testament to the marketing geniuses at sony: I never once saw a commercial for the eye toy. There was only one eye toy shipped to the gamestop I was working at. Before guitar hero though, that was the only console accessory I heard anyone talk about.
It will be interesting to see if the Republicans have learned their lesson after they get back one or both houses of congress. You see them out proclaiming how they messed up during the Bush years, and now it will be different. We'll see how different it actually is.
That's the party that voted against free healthcare coverage for people exposed to dangerous materials during the rescue efforts after 9/11, because they didn't want to close a tax loophole for businesses and because there might be illegal immigrants covered by it.
I really don't want to see how differently they'll do things.
We may even finally see a third party, which would be the best political development in the last fifty years.
There will never be more than two parties in the big races without a structural change in how we elect our representatives and president. We've never had three parties except during brief transition periods when one is dying and being replaced by another for that reason. And of course there won't be a structural change because it's not in the interests of either of the dominant parties. Barring a change in the voting system, you're just going to get the Nader effect.
So you're talking about the tea party replacing the republican party, which I don't really see as being that interesting. They're going to be conservative whether you call them republicans or tea partiers, just as there's going to be a liberal side whether it's green or democrats.
The solar heating panels were installed on the roof of the West Wing, but removed during Ronald Reagans presidency in 1986, after the energy crisis and worries about dependence on foreign oil had subsided.
So, basically Regan thought the best way to encourage Americans to go nuts with gasoline again was to take the solar panels down? Huh? Why do it "quietly" then? I'm assuming he thought consumers were too dumb to realize that solar panels were not really an alternative to oil.
Shortsighted for multiple reasons. I mean, surely he didn't think dependence on foreign oil had been solved forever? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, this was Regan after all.
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
Not sure that would help anything. This study shows illegal immigrants cost the federal government at most 10 billion a year. Stopping that wouldn't save that much either, since as the article points out, a significant amount of that is actually going to their US born children. And how much do we spend on fighting illegal immigration? I couldn't find a figure after googling for 10 minutes, everything just kept coming up with estimates for how much illegal immigrants cost us, with the numbers varying wildly.
Plus I suspect if we told mexico to pay 10 billion or nearly anything, they'd tell us to fuck off, and also that we can deal with the drug smuggling barons directly since we're mostly funding the drug smuggling ourselves anyway.
I think it's a little more simple than that. The only things that can get done in Washington these days are the most trivial things. If Democrats back it before the elections, Republicans are going to toss it on the long list of things that they'll filibuster. After all, one trillion is a small price to pay for preventing the other guys from looking good.
Conversely, when republicans take back one or both houses, if they propose this, I suppose there's a thin chance they won't tack on something that democrats won't hate (or just one thing, like cutting the healthcare reform OR making Bush's tax cuts permanent), and then a thin chance democrats won't fillibuster it just out of spite...
I can say that with a straight face because it's not funny, it's just sad how unlikely either scenario is.
Your city and county taxes pay for fire departments. If your county is too poor to pay for a fire department, you may have a volunteer fire department, or the nearest municipality may charge a fee to cover service. If you don't pay that fee, you don't get fire protection.
The house was burning for hours. The owner offered to pay the fee, which was refused, while the house was still burning. The fire department came out when a neighbors house caught fire too, put out the neighbor's house, and the fire department left. You can't tell me that's how it's supposed to work. Paying the fee -afterwards- or maybe even the full cost of the fire department services, sure. Letting the house and pets burn, when they were there already, and refusing to accept payment from a desperate victim? What type of fucked up fire department does that? I'd almost expect better from the RIAA.
And what about you? Why are you so quick to call someone who just lost their house "stupid." That's callous even by slashdot standards.
Not only that, but is that XKCD reference implying that British police are beating the teen with a wrench to get his encryption password?!? Geez, I know we waterboard suspected terrorists and sympathizers, but hopefully it will be a few months before we start torture for computer access. At least reserve that shit for evil, job killing bittorrent files.
I'd expect that if it were a publicity stunt, they might mention a possible motive. As it is, I'd probably guess it's something like a bored teenager who was too lazy to scratch some vulgarity on a bathroom wall. Had they made even a tenuous conspiracy theory I might be more interested. Interested enough to click on over to cryptome anyway.
Not to say that obviously this isn't a publicity stunt because it could have been done more effectively.
We may never know? We DO know!
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I for one feel it's safe to assume Iran is right, that this is a nefarious plot by unnamed western nations to stop Iran's glorious peaceful nuclear power program, but that absolutely no computers controlling the nuclear program were infected. After all, Iran is completely trustworthy and it's nuclear scientists are smart enough not to use control computers to check their e-mail and click on random links from random people.
I'm also going to assume that fake first post was part of a nefarious plot by unnamed western nations to tarnish Iran's glorious image as first posters.
Dave Goldberg, coauthor of A User's Guide to the Universe, took a more optimistic approach. In a blog post, he assumed an average travel speed of 92 percent of the speed of light
That is one HELL of an assumption.
If you read the actual post you'd see it was a setup:
Suppose you wanted to fly to 981g in smooth comfort. In that case, you’d want to accelerate at earth-normal gravity for the first half of your trip and decelerate at the same rate for the second half.
He goes on to say that doing that would get you there in 6 years, which isn't too bad. He points out it would only take about 5% of the sun's energy put out in a second.
That was all setup to the punchline where he calculates that to get that much energy, you'd have to cover the entire earth in solar panels and absorb energy for 3 million years.
So this was not a "Hey, we could totally do this thing!" blog post.
Or the ability to refine it economically without giving a fuck about the environmental impact.
Japan doesn't have much land to just dump toxins in. So you're talking about exporting the problem to a 3rd world country. Which is I guess not much different from what's going on now.
Why is it that we as a society feel we need to put warning labels on things for the dumbest of society?
Mostly because of liability in court, which is not the worst thing in the world. Yes it's absurd for that woman to sue for spilling hot coffee, but there are going to be abuses no matter what. I'd rather companies have to warn people even about obvious dangers than companies getting away with hiding less obvious dangers.
Anyway, there are always legitimate situations where it's good to have a warning that you consider obvious. One that comes to mind here is people who can't feel properly. If you can't feel pain, or are paralyzed and have no sensation below your waist, you might not realize your laptop is burning your legs until either you smelled cooking flesh or your realized you had infected burns a few days later. Whether a warning is an effective way of preventing that, I don't know. Probably a better solution for everyone than laptop manufacturers getting sued, people in wheelchairs getting burns and/or infections, or hamfisted legislation limiting how much power laptops can have.
Right.... until they start adding commercials to books as electronic readers start becoming more mainstream. You won't be able to turn the page until you sit through this 15 second commercial that the publisher figures might interest you based on the content of the book.
I haven't heard of invasive commercials like that being added to videogames yet, which is obviously a much more acceptable medium for that. Ads have made it into games yes, and arguably some of the loading screen songs on certain games from EA that they're trying to get you to buy slows down the loading times, but so far nothing like you're describing for books. And when you consider that most books do not have ads inserted between them like magazines, I doubt we'll be seeing ads like that.
For one thing, a good way to prevent e readers from taking off is to start doing that shit. For another, publishers would have to be crazy, only the pulpiest author would be okay with his or her book being interrupted by ads.
Its good to be skeptical about advertisers limiting themselves, but I don't see your scenario happening.
Let me refer you to the second sentence of the summary:
Look old man, if it was important, it would be in the FIRST sentence because that's how we kids do it these days even if it means run on sentences and now I'll get off of your lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
WINE doesn't stand for "Wine is not a complete, Windows-compatible operating system sans the security vulnerabilities".
No, but WINACWCOSSTSV sure does.
Well, when the race card is played, it is like crying "child molester". You can deny it all you want, but the stench of "racist" or "child molester" never goes away.
That might be why operagost threw it at Reid.
When you can say the same thing about the shenanigans of the (D) you'll have proper outlook. There is no difference between the (D) and the (R) parties in regards to how despicable the things they do are. It is called Politics.
So much for "draining the swamp". It is clear that the only way to "drain the swamp" is for us, the voters, to do it.
That second part is what I'm talking about: democrats get no points from me when they said they were going to drain the swamp. They would have gotten points only had they done it.
As far as the first part, I see no evidence to back that up. Recently an effort to get 9/11 responders free healthcare coverage failed because it would have closed a tax loophole for large corporations, and some republicans said illegal immigrants could be covered. I blame democrats for being too dumb and cowardly to get it passed (and for stupidly invoking rules to require more than a majority to vote for it) but I think the republicans are worse for actually voting against it.
In my opinion, there are definite differences right now between the two parties: one is evil, the other has policies I agree with but is completely incompetent. That's why I don't think foolish statements from either party matter, and that's why I don't think operagost's reasoning was solid that Reid was worse than Angle.
I wonder how charitable you'd be if all those things were ... say ... GWB? or some "right wing" candidate?
I might find those gaffes funnier if it were coming from a republican, true, but it's not what Bush and the right wingers say that I have problems with, it's what they do.
I'd think you all would be past the "racist" thing by now, but you're losing so it is time to break out the old favorite card of the left.
Operagost brought up the race card about Reid. I only talked about it to point out that the pot is calling the kettle black.
Meanwhile I see that you aren't past pulling out the "pulling out the race card" card ;)
Yeah, and he thinks that losing "only" 36,000 jobs in one day is good
I don't see how his outlook on that would have changed anything. Surely you're not suggesting the US economy had problems because Harry Reid wasn't optimistic enough.
He declared the Iraq war "lost" in 2007, and that the surge would be a failure.
Yep. He doesn't have a crystal ball and is clearly unfit for office. As far as losing the war, that was stupid to say for a politician. I'm not a politician, so I can say we lost the war when we confused Iraq with al qaeda.
He made prejudiced statements about President Obama.
So? Are we going to pretend most people in congress are not at least a little prejudiced? I'm taking it as a given that we're pretending that everyone isn't at least a little prejudiced (though we all are.) Or are we going to pretend that a politician who has gaffes is unfit in some way?
And keep in mind we're talking about Reid vs Sharon Angle, who is campaigning against those evil, evil immigrants.
Did you get sued for it? Maybe you should think about running for office.
"The fart party: we promise to break the political gridlock in washington and also promise to break wind."
Maybe democrats should look into this as a method of getting past fillibustering everything: there's probably not a rule against farting in the face of the speaker to make him pass out (thus breaking the fillibuster). It's also not like that would be beneath the dignity of the senate.
I'm guessing Reagan rationalized these actions as reducing the federal budget. The only problem with that logic is that the guy ran up a bigger deficit in defense projects than Carter
If that problem in logic helped in large part to the breakup of the Soviet bloc
It wasn't part of the internal failure that was the soviet economy, so no, that wasn't what broke up the soviet bloc.
A two-party system seems pretty much non-functional, doesn't it?
It's worked for our entire political history. What's different at the moment is that one party has decided they'll be more successful if they stop anything from happening so the other guys don't get anything done.
That can definitely happen with more than two parties. If the current republican party were to split into the tea party and the republican party, you can't tell me that suddenly either would start working with democrats. The republicans may have started using that tactic first, but those who would be in the tea party are using them as well.
I'm personally wondering if Fox news and fast media in general is what's changing things for the worse. I suspect that previously, if some nutcase senator were putting political partisanship over progress, he'd be excluded, wheras today, on blogs and on fox news, he gets made into a hero.
So how do you suppose that 'little' healthcare thing managed to get passed at all?
Obama's political capital, which has dwindled with that and the Bush economy. That was a mammoth fight with plenty of compromises and quid pro quo going on, "I'm a popular president, you want to be on board." Now that's not true, that package could not be passed now, just a short while later.
Now, so close to the midterms, with blood in the water, republicans aren't going to let anything get through. Jim DeMint came right out and said he'd block anything he didn't personally approve first. That's how bad it is now.
Apparently it was actually novel and useful enough for its time to generate grassroot interest
Indeed. Real testament to the marketing geniuses at sony: I never once saw a commercial for the eye toy. There was only one eye toy shipped to the gamestop I was working at. Before guitar hero though, that was the only console accessory I heard anyone talk about.
It will be interesting to see if the Republicans have learned their lesson after they get back one or both houses of congress. You see them out proclaiming how they messed up during the Bush years, and now it will be different. We'll see how different it actually is.
That's the party that voted against free healthcare coverage for people exposed to dangerous materials during the rescue efforts after 9/11, because they didn't want to close a tax loophole for businesses and because there might be illegal immigrants covered by it.
I really don't want to see how differently they'll do things.
We may even finally see a third party, which would be the best political development in the last fifty years.
There will never be more than two parties in the big races without a structural change in how we elect our representatives and president. We've never had three parties except during brief transition periods when one is dying and being replaced by another for that reason. And of course there won't be a structural change because it's not in the interests of either of the dominant parties. Barring a change in the voting system, you're just going to get the Nader effect.
So you're talking about the tea party replacing the republican party, which I don't really see as being that interesting. They're going to be conservative whether you call them republicans or tea partiers, just as there's going to be a liberal side whether it's green or democrats.
The solar heating panels were installed on the roof of the West Wing, but removed during Ronald Reagans presidency in 1986, after the energy crisis and worries about dependence on foreign oil had subsided.
So, basically Regan thought the best way to encourage Americans to go nuts with gasoline again was to take the solar panels down? Huh? Why do it "quietly" then? I'm assuming he thought consumers were too dumb to realize that solar panels were not really an alternative to oil.
Shortsighted for multiple reasons. I mean, surely he didn't think dependence on foreign oil had been solved forever? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, this was Regan after all.
Which explains why Regan took them down: to work on his tan.
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
Not sure that would help anything. This study shows illegal immigrants cost the federal government at most 10 billion a year. Stopping that wouldn't save that much either, since as the article points out, a significant amount of that is actually going to their US born children. And how much do we spend on fighting illegal immigration? I couldn't find a figure after googling for 10 minutes, everything just kept coming up with estimates for how much illegal immigrants cost us, with the numbers varying wildly.
Plus I suspect if we told mexico to pay 10 billion or nearly anything, they'd tell us to fuck off, and also that we can deal with the drug smuggling barons directly since we're mostly funding the drug smuggling ourselves anyway.
I think it's a little more simple than that. The only things that can get done in Washington these days are the most trivial things. If Democrats back it before the elections, Republicans are going to toss it on the long list of things that they'll filibuster. After all, one trillion is a small price to pay for preventing the other guys from looking good.
Conversely, when republicans take back one or both houses, if they propose this, I suppose there's a thin chance they won't tack on something that democrats won't hate (or just one thing, like cutting the healthcare reform OR making Bush's tax cuts permanent), and then a thin chance democrats won't fillibuster it just out of spite...
I can say that with a straight face because it's not funny, it's just sad how unlikely either scenario is.
Your city and county taxes pay for fire departments. If your county is too poor to pay for a fire department, you may have a volunteer fire department, or the nearest municipality may charge a fee to cover service. If you don't pay that fee, you don't get fire protection.
The house was burning for hours. The owner offered to pay the fee, which was refused, while the house was still burning. The fire department came out when a neighbors house caught fire too, put out the neighbor's house, and the fire department left. You can't tell me that's how it's supposed to work. Paying the fee -afterwards- or maybe even the full cost of the fire department services, sure. Letting the house and pets burn, when they were there already, and refusing to accept payment from a desperate victim? What type of fucked up fire department does that? I'd almost expect better from the RIAA.
And what about you? Why are you so quick to call someone who just lost their house "stupid." That's callous even by slashdot standards.
I realized that, the s was for sarcasm.
Not only that, but is that XKCD reference implying that British police are beating the teen with a wrench to get his encryption password?!? Geez, I know we waterboard suspected terrorists and sympathizers, but hopefully it will be a few months before we start torture for computer access. At least reserve that shit for evil, job killing bittorrent files.
(/s)
I'd expect that if it were a publicity stunt, they might mention a possible motive. As it is, I'd probably guess it's something like a bored teenager who was too lazy to scratch some vulgarity on a bathroom wall. Had they made even a tenuous conspiracy theory I might be more interested. Interested enough to click on over to cryptome anyway.
Not to say that obviously this isn't a publicity stunt because it could have been done more effectively.
I for one feel it's safe to assume Iran is right, that this is a nefarious plot by unnamed western nations to stop Iran's glorious peaceful nuclear power program, but that absolutely no computers controlling the nuclear program were infected. After all, Iran is completely trustworthy and it's nuclear scientists are smart enough not to use control computers to check their e-mail and click on random links from random people.
I'm also going to assume that fake first post was part of a nefarious plot by unnamed western nations to tarnish Iran's glorious image as first posters.
I'd estimate that it would take around 20 years, maybe a bit more, in the reference frame of people back home.
So did he. The 6 years was what the people on the journey would experience.
Dave Goldberg, coauthor of A User's Guide to the Universe, took a more optimistic approach. In a blog post, he assumed an average travel speed of 92 percent of the speed of light
That is one HELL of an assumption.
If you read the actual post you'd see it was a setup:
Suppose you wanted to fly to 981g in smooth comfort. In that case, you’d want to accelerate at earth-normal gravity for the first half of your trip and decelerate at the same rate for the second half.
He goes on to say that doing that would get you there in 6 years, which isn't too bad. He points out it would only take about 5% of the sun's energy put out in a second.
That was all setup to the punchline where he calculates that to get that much energy, you'd have to cover the entire earth in solar panels and absorb energy for 3 million years.
So this was not a "Hey, we could totally do this thing!" blog post.
Or the ability to refine it economically without giving a fuck about the environmental impact.
Japan doesn't have much land to just dump toxins in. So you're talking about exporting the problem to a 3rd world country. Which is I guess not much different from what's going on now.
Why is it that we as a society feel we need to put warning labels on things for the dumbest of society?
Mostly because of liability in court, which is not the worst thing in the world. Yes it's absurd for that woman to sue for spilling hot coffee, but there are going to be abuses no matter what. I'd rather companies have to warn people even about obvious dangers than companies getting away with hiding less obvious dangers.
Anyway, there are always legitimate situations where it's good to have a warning that you consider obvious. One that comes to mind here is people who can't feel properly. If you can't feel pain, or are paralyzed and have no sensation below your waist, you might not realize your laptop is burning your legs until either you smelled cooking flesh or your realized you had infected burns a few days later. Whether a warning is an effective way of preventing that, I don't know. Probably a better solution for everyone than laptop manufacturers getting sued, people in wheelchairs getting burns and/or infections, or hamfisted legislation limiting how much power laptops can have.
Right.... until they start adding commercials to books as electronic readers start becoming more mainstream. You won't be able to turn the page until you sit through this 15 second commercial that the publisher figures might interest you based on the content of the book.
I haven't heard of invasive commercials like that being added to videogames yet, which is obviously a much more acceptable medium for that. Ads have made it into games yes, and arguably some of the loading screen songs on certain games from EA that they're trying to get you to buy slows down the loading times, but so far nothing like you're describing for books. And when you consider that most books do not have ads inserted between them like magazines, I doubt we'll be seeing ads like that.
For one thing, a good way to prevent e readers from taking off is to start doing that shit. For another, publishers would have to be crazy, only the pulpiest author would be okay with his or her book being interrupted by ads.
Its good to be skeptical about advertisers limiting themselves, but I don't see your scenario happening.
Let me refer you to the second sentence of the summary:
Look old man, if it was important, it would be in the FIRST sentence because that's how we kids do it these days even if it means run on sentences and now I'll get off of your lawn.