achines that long after the vendor has last touched them are set up for a given polling place's configuration by the election board officials who actually deploy them.
You are aware that one of the complaints about Diebold systems in 2004 was that they pushed out software updates to some areas right before the election, right?
But not because of some 'Marie Antoinette made French Fries internationally popular' fairy tale. I don't want to know where you pulled that piece of wisdom from...
Um...pretty much any book that covers culinary history including the introduction of potatoes to Europe? The potato was feared poisonous, considered suitable only for the poor and desperate. Marie Antoinette made it fashionable.
I think you'll find that what we USians call "French Fries" are in fact Belgian in origin. Just another example of how we insist on sticking to false concepts simply because on average, we're dumber than a pile of doorknobs.
I think you'll find that what USians call French Fries came from France, via Benjamin Franklin. Whether the Belgians "invented" them first is a matter of considerable historical disagreement, though there certainly is no question that the court of Marie Antoinette was responsible for their international popularization.
Actually it was the Belgians that invented French Fries. It's you dumb bastards who can't tell the difference between two European countries that should get a clue;-)
Considering it was the court of Marie Antoinette who made the fry (and potato in general) internationally popular and socially acceptable, it's hardly ignorant or irrational to call it a French Fry. As to whether the French or Belgians invented the preparation -- I'm sure there was a Native American or Spanish cook who fried them before the potato ever spread to Belgium or France. There certainly is no reason to state with certainty that the Belgians are responsible, and plenty of reason to credit the French with making it trendy.
It just goes to show how bloody expensive the US phone market is.
The American cell market grew slowly because our landline service is insanely cheap compared to anything on the continent or UK. And it's not as if we're getting ripped off on our cell phones -- a $30/month cell phone contract will come with unlimited minutes during evening and weekends, when most lengthy personal calls are made. It's not hard to find ones with unlimited minutes to anyone on the same network, unlimited calls to numbers you select, free incoming calls, unlimited text messages, etc.
Yes, we do have a different billing and marketing system. No, it doesn't mean we're paying any more than customers in any other developed country. We both pay in different ways. Your market thinks it's illogical the person receiving a call should be charged at all. Our market thinks it's illogical that someone should have to figure out ahead of time what device and network the person on the other end of a call will be using. Quite the contrary, we specifically don't want our numbers to be tied to a particular device or network. We want our phone numbers to connect to a person, regardless of what company they're a customer of this month.
Did you get out of bed today? Did you brush your teeth today? Did you post on Slashdot today?
What if he sleeps on a futon? Literally he didn't get out of bed, but in the spirit of your question he did. So neither "yes" nor "no" answers the question completely accurately.
What if he brushed his top teeth and not his bottom? If he brushes some of his teeth, or got cut short in the middle of brushing, is that yes or no? Obviously if he just ran a toothbrush over his teeth for 1 second without even wetting it or applying paste, his breath will be bad and his plaque will still be there. Someone smelling his breath and asking "eew, did you brush your teeth today?", will rightly consider it untruthful for him to reply yes.
Did he post on slashdot today? What if he lives in another time zone and posted at 11:59 his time, yet to you that was the middle of the afternoon? Is that today or yesterday? Either answer he gives you could be right or wrong depending on your point of view, and if you only allow yes or no, there will never be a chance to clarify which POV the answer comes from.
Show me even "two sides" of genocide, or homophobically motivated violence, racial prejudice, or slavery, much less this circle plot you refer to.
Genocide: Frees up resources, eliminates political opposition. Can bring great personal fame to a leader. Can lead to outside investments and attention to an otherwise ignored region.
Homophobic Violence: Discourages homosexuals to publicly state orientation, thus marginalizing their influence on society. Can bring great personal fame to perpetrator. Creates incentive for homosexuals to continue living in dishonest marriages/families, which may be beneficial to the family.
Racial Prejudice: Promotes self-esteem and stronger community in each racial group. Can be used to justify unfair treatment of others, which brings financial and social advantages to yourself and your group.
Slavery: Provides low-cost labor force. Creates trade and political connections between regions that otherwise would be separate.
If there weren't another side to these problems, they wouldn't still exist as problems. And if you refuse to understand the other side and simply write them off as evil, you'll never eliminate the problem, another person will come along and create it all over again because the benefits are still there.
Yes, it's possible. And even in your scenario, the admin ultimately has the ability to get at the data (albeit with a supervisor). You simply cannot remove that requirement the way you can with passwords, because you cannot destroy the data.
Ultimately you do have to trust the IT department not to go to the vault together and decrypt everything over the weekend. They have to be able to decrypt things without the user, that's just a fundamental requirement for data preservation. You can put all the auditing and supervision on the process you like, but you can never escape the requirement unless you're willing to lose all data when an employee is killed in a car accident.
That's because democrats and the media constantly...
Yes, when all else fails, just blame everyone else for your failure. There are no options, except the ones offered for years by Iraqi expatriates, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians, but those aren't real options because they don't fit our ideology. Until after the midterm elections when James Baker suggests it again, then we might look at it.
"Publius" argued in the federalist papers that a permanent unified government is a better forum for resolving inevitable regional differences, and that a unified government can better provide for the common defense than a loose confederation of smaller states, even though the latter appears easier in the short term. The same arguments apply here.
Yes, and the uprising of the working class will result in equitable distribution of wealth. A benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient and effective form of government. An hereditary monarchy inspires great loyalty. Those arguments all apply here, too.
I can see we can only resolve this difference of opinion by waiting two years and continuing this discussion then, when I will gladly eat my words if I am wrong.
You sure? Because back in 2004 I heard the same promises from many people. I read these exact same kinds of statistics and glowing reports of what was "just starting to happen". Everything is always right around the corner. The opposition is just a bunch of dead-enders. They're in the last throes. We just passed a turning point. We had the first independent Iraqi division. And then two months later the military said they were not really capable of being independent. We have Iraqi police taking the lead. And then sectarian violence goes through the roof until we redeploy Marines and soldiers to that area. Violence goes down, we hand it back to the Iraqi police and violence goes right back up.
14 of 18 provinces being in good shape sounds great to anyone who doesn't bother to find out that 90% of the (non-Kurdish) population lives in the provinces where violence and security are dramatically worse than they were when there was no Iraqi government or police whatsoever. It's kind of like being told you have a fatal brain tumor, but hey your body is in great shape from all that yoga!
When Bush or Rice go to Baghdad on an announced visit and don't have to wear bulletproof vests in one of the most heavily fortified areas on Earth, people will believe we're getting somewhere. It's a bit cynical to say how great and safe the country is and then fly in at 2am firing flares and chaff and running a disco ball the whole time just to jump out for a 30-minute photo opportunity with guests who had no idea you were coming because it's too dangerous to tell the President of the country you're visiting.
Its like passwords, your argument has been used before by people who defend systems in which the password is retrievable. The only way for me to know a user's password in my systems is if I set it myself or they tell me. There is not a method to recover them. The same can be done for the text and such of the mail.
Except that assigning a new password and "destroying" the old one is a perfectly acceptable solution. So there is no need for anyone to be able to recover the old one. Destroying a document is not an acceptable solution -- if my boss needs me to recover a document, I need to be able to do it, whether it is by interacting with the application, searching through cache data, or scouring the individual hard disk sectors.
Ultimately it does come down to trust (or greater monitoring), but you can't remove the fundamental ability of IT to be able to access all corporate data in some manner if you expect them to provide comprehensive support to the organization.
Part of your argument (3 state solution, etc.) is about things that are up to the Iraqi government and Iraqi people to decide. President Bush has said he will support any such solutions their democratic process agrees to, even if the solutions might seem radical to us, as long as the rights of individuals are upheld. Iraq is not part of some United States "empire," to be ordered about as we please. They are a sovereign ally who needs our help in establishing security and economic growth.
That sounds great on a a bumper sticker, unfortunately it bears no relation to the administration's actual policy. The administration has repeatedly let it be known that the three-state solution is an unacceptable alternative. Even Fox News agrees on this matter, the three-state solution is seen by the administration as opening up too much influence to Iraq's neighbors. Bush frequently gives speeches extolling general principles that sound great, while letting Cheney and others go out and deliver the real policy which tends to be extremely not so great.
The rest of your argument seems to be directed at the executive branch, who are not up for election at the moment. May I ask what you specifically hope will be accomplished by changing members of the legislative?
I know it is shocking news, but one purpose of the Legistative branch is to perform oversight on the Executive (and vice-versa). Some of the excesses of the Executive in the past few years have been direct results of the unwise concentration of power in the hands of one ideological group. Any situation that reduces that concentration of power is beneficial to America. No specific action is necessary, indeed at the federal level in particular it was commonly taken as a conservative axiom that government inaction is preferable to unwise action. It is a shame the GOP fell in love with spending and power once they got a taste of it.
I was also responding more generally to your sentiment that Iraq is going to magically turn around in the next 2 years and that the Legislature will take "credit" for it. The policy is mostly in the hands of, and hindered by, the Executive, and nothing coming out of that branch indicates we should see a change in outcome because we're not changing our input.
They don't listen to their own arguments about the mistakes made. They say Bush didn't send enough troops and that he doesn't pay enough attention to social concerns in Iraq.... The logical response to that argument is to send more troops and commit more resources to reconstruction so we can get out of there faster, but democrats only take that kind of bold gamble on West Wing episodes. In real life, they're not optimistic enough to believe it might work.
Just because more troops would have helped in 2003 does not mean more troops would help now. Indeed, more troops would hurt now. Of course, less troops would hurt now, too. We've been painted into a corner and are simply flushing money and lives down a toilet due to the fact that we are asking the military to solve a non-military problem, and we are asking ideologues to solve pragmatic problems. What would have been good solutions in 2003 before particular problems got out of control are no longer viable. It's a shame we bet so many men and women's lives on the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which has been a complete failure, when we already had the proper Powell Doctrine available to us from the beginning. It's a shame that we formed a civil authority comprised entirely by unqualified neoconservative sycophants rather than professional diplomats and administrators. It's a shame we ignored all advice that didn't fit into a predetermined ideological mold. But that's what happened.
So the trillion-dollar question is, knowing that these guys are bad at planning and implementing things in a professional manner, why should we allow them to continue being in charge? If we know that these guys have their egos and reputations wrapped up in their past decisions in such a way that makes it impossible to take a new course, why should we continue letting them chart the course? Every solution that is offered up is considered "unacceptable" by the current White House team, which begs the question of why they believe the current situation is acceptable when the American public, the Iraqi public, and the rest of the world all consider it unacceptable?
Go ahead and ask Bush about splitting Iraq into three states, about engaging Iraq's neighbors to try and use their influence for something other than chaos, ask about rapprochement with our European and Asian allies who we've alienated so that we can get assistance. All of these options are "unacceptable", because there's a big dick contest going on and nobody in the current White House can afford to admit to having made a mistake in policy. Nobody is allowed to admit that we aren't omnipotent and that sometimes we don't just want help from allies, we genuinely need it. I'm sorry if your masculinity is threatened by the idea that a new president will get more international cooperation, but the fact is Bush has made too much of his foreign policy into a big dick contest. The only way to change that equation is to remove his personality, and his administration, from the equation. Then both our allies and our opponents can have the flexibility to change course and claim victory while actually doing exactly what we want. The plan doesn't even have to change to become more successful, but you do need to change the players when their influence is actively harming the plan.
God knows you'll need to harness the awesome power of those extra 32 bits to browse web pages at an acceptable speed.
We need 64-bit Firefox ASAP, how else can we open web sites with more than 4GB of content?
Re:For Slashdotters who haven't been paying attent
on
2006 Election Maps Mashups
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's funny, I was thrilled when Bush won in 2004. Because it was clear to anyone paying attention that Iraq was so ineptly planned that nobody would be able to turn around by that point. Bush had to stay in power so they couldn't blame someone else for fumbling their ball. And no matter who is in control of Congress, Bush is still the Commander in Chief right through the 2008 election.
The albatross of Iraq is going to be dangling around the Republican Party's neck for as long as amputees and bodybags are coming home, and no matter how hard they try they'll never be able to rewrite history to make the failure anyone's fault but their own. The only way the Republican party will keep control of the Executive branch in 2008 (barring divine intervention in Iraq, which Bush should have gotten by now considering his close relationship with Jesus!) is by candidates running in the exact opposite direction of every policy from the past 5 years (I suspect we'll be hearing the phrase "flip-flop" quite a bit as Republican Presidential candidates try to explain their foreign policy positions).
Neoconservatism, as stupid as it was, at least had the virtue of being such a colossally bad theory on the use of power that it failed spectacularly in only the first few years of implementation. Not very good for the tens of thousands who had to die just to prove what a bad idea it was, but it took Communism decades longer and millions more to be so equally, thoroughly, discredited.
I look forward to the day when real conservatives come back into power in the GOP and these chickenhawk neoconservative cowards are put back at the children's table where they belong.
and that "USA extra-territorial" (read: Guantanamo & Irak) is on par with Nigeria.
I'm sure that's referring to US territories -- Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc. Possibly they did include Iraq, it wouldn't be an inappropriate place to categorize the country at the moment.
Actually, it was the credit cards with scratch-off one-time numbers I was thinking of, not smart cards (I had one of those cool second-by-second smart cards for my DoD work though!). I wish we'd get wider distribution of that low-tech security, unfortunately I suspect we have to wait for some massive publicized widespread keylogging trojan before most American banks will spend the capital. Penny wise and pound foolish.
OT: question about Finder. I don't use it, but am curious if you can "pause" searches. In Windows, anyway, the searches can take hours and dog down the system to terrible slowness. If you want to do something else at decent speed, you have to kill the search (often with task manager) and start it over. No pause.
There are command-line controls for Spotlight indexing, if that's what you're talking about. But once the initial index is done (and that usually doesn't slow down a system noticeably), you'll never need to pause a search, they're basically instant (really several seconds) for all results. The index is updated on file operations, so there's no noticeable performance decrease other than the extra milliseconds it takes to write the spotlight index when it updates a file. It's a completely different (and better) beast than Windows indexing service or search, which can take many minutes for results to be complete.
I would hope that your bank has a Web site immune from threat by key-loggers. If not, change banks.
I'm not even sure what that means. Most banks (here in the US) just use a user/password combination that it easily logged if your system is compromised. I know elsewhere many banks have smart cards with one-time use PINs and such, which we'd love to have, but it just isn't an option for most Americans.
My point was that he can't complain about viruses on Windows computers now that he's helped spreading it.
It was spread from a Windows machine to another Windows machine via an Apple-branded Windows removable storage device. No Macs were involved anywhere in this process (and indeed if a Mac had been, that would have stopped the virus!).
Most people would never put someone's elses earbud into their own ear, I know I would never do so.
Well, certainly with that attitude you'll never meet a girl this way. If you can't be attractive and interesting enough that she feels safe putting your headphones on, then you have no chance of getting her number, much less sharing bodily fluids with her.
World of difference between walking into a bar to get a drink and walking into a bar to meet random single people.
This would be news on most college campuses I've been to.
You make it sound like some crazy reckless idea to go to a public gathering place for adults with the intention of meeting new adults. It seems like a pretty logical thing to most other people. If you're looking for something, you go where that thing is likely to be gathered in large quantities.
Honestly, it's like walking into a bar you've never been in before.
Huh? How are you supposed to ever get a drink if you aren't allowed to enter a bar you've never been in before? Were you born in a bar and restricted to that bar for the rest of your life?
How in the world would a perfect girlfriend require you to delete porn and give up your hobbies?
It may shock most "nice guys" but the truth is many, many women like porn, like watching it with their boyfriend, and are confident enough with themselves that they aren't threatened by their boyfriend looking at it or having it, so long as it he is doing so in a healthy manner.
And feel free to be a geek who loves computers and star trek, just don't make that the center of your life. Having genuine passion about something "geeky" is sexier than being a generic football-watching beer guzzling suburban drone.
The problem with most geeks is they put women on pedestals, since they interact so rarely in a romantic context. Women don't need to be protected or pandered to, they want you to be yourself and be confident about yourself. If you're willing to change who you are just to attract her, you're too weak to keep her happy. As soon as you're willing to walk away becuse she doesn't like your porn/hobbies, then you're strong enough for her to want you.
But yes, you do need to take a shower and keep your hair (all over) groomed.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that one of the complaints about Diebold systems in 2004 was that they pushed out software updates to some areas right before the election, right?
But not because of some 'Marie Antoinette made French Fries internationally popular' fairy tale. I don't want to know where you pulled that piece of wisdom from...
Um...pretty much any book that covers culinary history including the introduction of potatoes to Europe? The potato was feared poisonous, considered suitable only for the poor and desperate. Marie Antoinette made it fashionable.
I think you'll find that what USians call French Fries came from France, via Benjamin Franklin. Whether the Belgians "invented" them first is a matter of considerable historical disagreement, though there certainly is no question that the court of Marie Antoinette was responsible for their international popularization.
Actually it was the Belgians that invented French Fries. It's you dumb bastards who can't tell the difference between two European countries that should get a clue ;-)
Considering it was the court of Marie Antoinette who made the fry (and potato in general) internationally popular and socially acceptable, it's hardly ignorant or irrational to call it a French Fry. As to whether the French or Belgians invented the preparation -- I'm sure there was a Native American or Spanish cook who fried them before the potato ever spread to Belgium or France. There certainly is no reason to state with certainty that the Belgians are responsible, and plenty of reason to credit the French with making it trendy.
It just goes to show how bloody expensive the US phone market is.
The American cell market grew slowly because our landline service is insanely cheap compared to anything on the continent or UK. And it's not as if we're getting ripped off on our cell phones -- a $30/month cell phone contract will come with unlimited minutes during evening and weekends, when most lengthy personal calls are made. It's not hard to find ones with unlimited minutes to anyone on the same network, unlimited calls to numbers you select, free incoming calls, unlimited text messages, etc.
Yes, we do have a different billing and marketing system. No, it doesn't mean we're paying any more than customers in any other developed country. We both pay in different ways. Your market thinks it's illogical the person receiving a call should be charged at all. Our market thinks it's illogical that someone should have to figure out ahead of time what device and network the person on the other end of a call will be using. Quite the contrary, we specifically don't want our numbers to be tied to a particular device or network. We want our phone numbers to connect to a person, regardless of what company they're a customer of this month.
Did you get out of bed today?
Did you brush your teeth today?
Did you post on Slashdot today?
What if he sleeps on a futon? Literally he didn't get out of bed, but in the spirit of your question he did. So neither "yes" nor "no" answers the question completely accurately.
What if he brushed his top teeth and not his bottom? If he brushes some of his teeth, or got cut short in the middle of brushing, is that yes or no? Obviously if he just ran a toothbrush over his teeth for 1 second without even wetting it or applying paste, his breath will be bad and his plaque will still be there. Someone smelling his breath and asking "eew, did you brush your teeth today?", will rightly consider it untruthful for him to reply yes.
Did he post on slashdot today? What if he lives in another time zone and posted at 11:59 his time, yet to you that was the middle of the afternoon? Is that today or yesterday? Either answer he gives you could be right or wrong depending on your point of view, and if you only allow yes or no, there will never be a chance to clarify which POV the answer comes from.
Show me even "two sides" of genocide, or homophobically motivated violence, racial prejudice, or slavery, much less this circle plot you refer to.
Genocide: Frees up resources, eliminates political opposition. Can bring great personal fame to a leader. Can lead to outside investments and attention to an otherwise ignored region.
Homophobic Violence: Discourages homosexuals to publicly state orientation, thus marginalizing their influence on society. Can bring great personal fame to perpetrator. Creates incentive for homosexuals to continue living in dishonest marriages/families, which may be beneficial to the family.
Racial Prejudice: Promotes self-esteem and stronger community in each racial group. Can be used to justify unfair treatment of others, which brings financial and social advantages to yourself and your group.
Slavery: Provides low-cost labor force. Creates trade and political connections between regions that otherwise would be separate.
If there weren't another side to these problems, they wouldn't still exist as problems. And if you refuse to understand the other side and simply write them off as evil, you'll never eliminate the problem, another person will come along and create it all over again because the benefits are still there.
Yes, it's possible. And even in your scenario, the admin ultimately has the ability to get at the data (albeit with a supervisor). You simply cannot remove that requirement the way you can with passwords, because you cannot destroy the data.
Ultimately you do have to trust the IT department not to go to the vault together and decrypt everything over the weekend. They have to be able to decrypt things without the user, that's just a fundamental requirement for data preservation. You can put all the auditing and supervision on the process you like, but you can never escape the requirement unless you're willing to lose all data when an employee is killed in a car accident.
Yes, when all else fails, just blame everyone else for your failure. There are no options, except the ones offered for years by Iraqi expatriates, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians, but those aren't real options because they don't fit our ideology. Until after the midterm elections when James Baker suggests it again, then we might look at it.
Yes, and the uprising of the working class will result in equitable distribution of wealth. A benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient and effective form of government. An hereditary monarchy inspires great loyalty. Those arguments all apply here, too.
You sure? Because back in 2004 I heard the same promises from many people. I read these exact same kinds of statistics and glowing reports of what was "just starting to happen". Everything is always right around the corner. The opposition is just a bunch of dead-enders. They're in the last throes. We just passed a turning point. We had the first independent Iraqi division. And then two months later the military said they were not really capable of being independent. We have Iraqi police taking the lead. And then sectarian violence goes through the roof until we redeploy Marines and soldiers to that area. Violence goes down, we hand it back to the Iraqi police and violence goes right back up.
14 of 18 provinces being in good shape sounds great to anyone who doesn't bother to find out that 90% of the (non-Kurdish) population lives in the provinces where violence and security are dramatically worse than they were when there was no Iraqi government or police whatsoever. It's kind of like being told you have a fatal brain tumor, but hey your body is in great shape from all that yoga!
When Bush or Rice go to Baghdad on an announced visit and don't have to wear bulletproof vests in one of the most heavily fortified areas on Earth, people will believe we're getting somewhere. It's a bit cynical to say how great and safe the country is and then fly in at 2am firing flares and chaff and running a disco ball the whole time just to jump out for a 30-minute photo opportunity with guests who had no idea you were coming because it's too dangerous to tell the President of the country you're visiting.
Except that assigning a new password and "destroying" the old one is a perfectly acceptable solution. So there is no need for anyone to be able to recover the old one. Destroying a document is not an acceptable solution -- if my boss needs me to recover a document, I need to be able to do it, whether it is by interacting with the application, searching through cache data, or scouring the individual hard disk sectors.
Ultimately it does come down to trust (or greater monitoring), but you can't remove the fundamental ability of IT to be able to access all corporate data in some manner if you expect them to provide comprehensive support to the organization.
That sounds great on a a bumper sticker, unfortunately it bears no relation to the administration's actual policy. The administration has repeatedly let it be known that the three-state solution is an unacceptable alternative. Even Fox News agrees on this matter, the three-state solution is seen by the administration as opening up too much influence to Iraq's neighbors. Bush frequently gives speeches extolling general principles that sound great, while letting Cheney and others go out and deliver the real policy which tends to be extremely not so great.
I know it is shocking news, but one purpose of the Legistative branch is to perform oversight on the Executive (and vice-versa). Some of the excesses of the Executive in the past few years have been direct results of the unwise concentration of power in the hands of one ideological group. Any situation that reduces that concentration of power is beneficial to America. No specific action is necessary, indeed at the federal level in particular it was commonly taken as a conservative axiom that government inaction is preferable to unwise action. It is a shame the GOP fell in love with spending and power once they got a taste of it.
I was also responding more generally to your sentiment that Iraq is going to magically turn around in the next 2 years and that the Legislature will take "credit" for it. The policy is mostly in the hands of, and hindered by, the Executive, and nothing coming out of that branch indicates we should see a change in outcome because we're not changing our input.
Just because more troops would have helped in 2003 does not mean more troops would help now. Indeed, more troops would hurt now. Of course, less troops would hurt now, too. We've been painted into a corner and are simply flushing money and lives down a toilet due to the fact that we are asking the military to solve a non-military problem, and we are asking ideologues to solve pragmatic problems. What would have been good solutions in 2003 before particular problems got out of control are no longer viable. It's a shame we bet so many men and women's lives on the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which has been a complete failure, when we already had the proper Powell Doctrine available to us from the beginning. It's a shame that we formed a civil authority comprised entirely by unqualified neoconservative sycophants rather than professional diplomats and administrators. It's a shame we ignored all advice that didn't fit into a predetermined ideological mold. But that's what happened.
So the trillion-dollar question is, knowing that these guys are bad at planning and implementing things in a professional manner, why should we allow them to continue being in charge? If we know that these guys have their egos and reputations wrapped up in their past decisions in such a way that makes it impossible to take a new course, why should we continue letting them chart the course? Every solution that is offered up is considered "unacceptable" by the current White House team, which begs the question of why they believe the current situation is acceptable when the American public, the Iraqi public, and the rest of the world all consider it unacceptable?
Go ahead and ask Bush about splitting Iraq into three states, about engaging Iraq's neighbors to try and use their influence for something other than chaos, ask about rapprochement with our European and Asian allies who we've alienated so that we can get assistance. All of these options are "unacceptable", because there's a big dick contest going on and nobody in the current White House can afford to admit to having made a mistake in policy. Nobody is allowed to admit that we aren't omnipotent and that sometimes we don't just want help from allies, we genuinely need it. I'm sorry if your masculinity is threatened by the idea that a new president will get more international cooperation, but the fact is Bush has made too much of his foreign policy into a big dick contest. The only way to change that equation is to remove his personality, and his administration, from the equation. Then both our allies and our opponents can have the flexibility to change course and claim victory while actually doing exactly what we want. The plan doesn't even have to change to become more successful, but you do need to change the players when their influence is actively harming the plan.
We need 64-bit Firefox ASAP, how else can we open web sites with more than 4GB of content?
It's funny, I was thrilled when Bush won in 2004. Because it was clear to anyone paying attention that Iraq was so ineptly planned that nobody would be able to turn around by that point. Bush had to stay in power so they couldn't blame someone else for fumbling their ball. And no matter who is in control of Congress, Bush is still the Commander in Chief right through the 2008 election.
The albatross of Iraq is going to be dangling around the Republican Party's neck for as long as amputees and bodybags are coming home, and no matter how hard they try they'll never be able to rewrite history to make the failure anyone's fault but their own. The only way the Republican party will keep control of the Executive branch in 2008 (barring divine intervention in Iraq, which Bush should have gotten by now considering his close relationship with Jesus!) is by candidates running in the exact opposite direction of every policy from the past 5 years (I suspect we'll be hearing the phrase "flip-flop" quite a bit as Republican Presidential candidates try to explain their foreign policy positions).
Neoconservatism, as stupid as it was, at least had the virtue of being such a colossally bad theory on the use of power that it failed spectacularly in only the first few years of implementation. Not very good for the tens of thousands who had to die just to prove what a bad idea it was, but it took Communism decades longer and millions more to be so equally, thoroughly, discredited.
I look forward to the day when real conservatives come back into power in the GOP and these chickenhawk neoconservative cowards are put back at the children's table where they belong.
I'm sure that's referring to US territories -- Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc. Possibly they did include Iraq, it wouldn't be an inappropriate place to categorize the country at the moment.
Actually, it was the credit cards with scratch-off one-time numbers I was thinking of, not smart cards (I had one of those cool second-by-second smart cards for my DoD work though!). I wish we'd get wider distribution of that low-tech security, unfortunately I suspect we have to wait for some massive publicized widespread keylogging trojan before most American banks will spend the capital. Penny wise and pound foolish.
There are command-line controls for Spotlight indexing, if that's what you're talking about. But once the initial index is done (and that usually doesn't slow down a system noticeably), you'll never need to pause a search, they're basically instant (really several seconds) for all results. The index is updated on file operations, so there's no noticeable performance decrease other than the extra milliseconds it takes to write the spotlight index when it updates a file. It's a completely different (and better) beast than Windows indexing service or search, which can take many minutes for results to be complete.
Maybe they only promote people who are familiar with the shift key? Or sentence structure and punctuation?
I'm not even sure what that means. Most banks (here in the US) just use a user/password combination that it easily logged if your system is compromised. I know elsewhere many banks have smart cards with one-time use PINs and such, which we'd love to have, but it just isn't an option for most Americans.
It was spread from a Windows machine to another Windows machine via an Apple-branded Windows removable storage device. No Macs were involved anywhere in this process (and indeed if a Mac had been, that would have stopped the virus!).
Most people would never put someone's elses earbud into their own ear, I know I would never do so.
Well, certainly with that attitude you'll never meet a girl this way. If you can't be attractive and interesting enough that she feels safe putting your headphones on, then you have no chance of getting her number, much less sharing bodily fluids with her.
World of difference between walking into a bar to get a drink and walking into a bar to meet random single people.
This would be news on most college campuses I've been to.
You make it sound like some crazy reckless idea to go to a public gathering place for adults with the intention of meeting new adults. It seems like a pretty logical thing to most other people. If you're looking for something, you go where that thing is likely to be gathered in large quantities.
Honestly, it's like walking into a bar you've never been in before.
Huh? How are you supposed to ever get a drink if you aren't allowed to enter a bar you've never been in before? Were you born in a bar and restricted to that bar for the rest of your life?
How in the world would a perfect girlfriend require you to delete porn and give up your hobbies?
It may shock most "nice guys" but the truth is many, many women like porn, like watching it with their boyfriend, and are confident enough with themselves that they aren't threatened by their boyfriend looking at it or having it, so long as it he is doing so in a healthy manner.
And feel free to be a geek who loves computers and star trek, just don't make that the center of your life. Having genuine passion about something "geeky" is sexier than being a generic football-watching beer guzzling suburban drone.
The problem with most geeks is they put women on pedestals, since they interact so rarely in a romantic context. Women don't need to be protected or pandered to, they want you to be yourself and be confident about yourself. If you're willing to change who you are just to attract her, you're too weak to keep her happy. As soon as you're willing to walk away becuse she doesn't like your porn/hobbies, then you're strong enough for her to want you.
But yes, you do need to take a shower and keep your hair (all over) groomed.
Time to find the old Vault-Dweller suit.