No, it's a requirement of ideologues on any side. Example:
Republican ideologue: The US is a Christian nation founded by Christians, so people should accept that prayer and the Bible have a role in government, and then all will be well.
Democrat ideologue: We have to provide every handup to people who need it, because to not do so is inhumane, and then all will be well.
Green ideologue: We can shift everything to wind and solar and tidal power, and not have to be reliant on oil for power ever again, and it will be cheaper and more reliable, and then all will be well.
Libertarian ideologue: We have to think of America first, and get out of every foreign nation, and drop all taxes and trade barriers, and then all will be well.
Pragmatists are usually somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, pragmatists rarely like to yell much.
Or perhaps you could file a complaint with the military and see the soldiers involved brought up on charges, just like what happened to several US military members recently, at least one of whom has been convicted of murder.
Actually, yes, in many cases, state-level judges are elected, usually for four- or six-year terms, but occasionally for life. Federal judges are appointed by the president and confirmed (or denied) by the Senate, and there are clear impeachment rules to allow the Senate to remove a sitting judge if malfeasance is suspected.
I've never said that global warming is a fantasy. What I have said is that we can't latch onto one idea at the expense of all others. That leads to a great deal of hype and cuts the idea's public believeability.
Haiti was grazed by a tropical storm (not strong enough to be called a hurricane) and around 2000 people have died with another 100000 or so left homeless and starving
A lot of this has to do with the rampant deforestation in Haiti. Notice that the Dominican Republic, which is on the same island, did not suffer nearly as badly, as it still has much of its forest remaining. There's a picture where you can pretty clearly see the border of Haiti and the DR -- DR is green, and Haiti is not.
If the sun is increasing its output, even cutting CO2 and methane in the atmosphere almost to zero may not be of much help.
I don't think we have more than a couple hundred years or so of reasonably accurate overall hurricane reporting, and even of those that have hit land, it's not more than a few hundred years of accurate records in North America. I imagine the records are even worse for typhoons in the Pacific, though the Indian Ocean cyclones may have somewhat better records, having been part of civilized life for a few thousand years there.
Well, I did some rough calculations, and given the area of the disc on the page (12,469 square meters) and using a rough density of dry air at sea level (1.25kg/m^3), a 13m-thick cylinder of air passing through the disc area at the named nominal 13m/s (in other words, one second of air) would have a KE of about 17MJ. This suggests about 17MW would be the theoretical 100% efficiency at that velocity, putting this a little under one-third efficiency, which would be about on par with what is usually expected.
I think I got that right. Feel free to correct me. (Not like Slashdotters need permission for that, but I'm feeling polite this morning.)
Indeed. In fact, when I saw this headline, I went looking for another story I saw just a few days ago that says that this may be part of a normal cycle of increasing and decreasing cyclone counts and intensities. It doesn't rule out global warming effects, but it does present an alternate theory.
I have seen some other alternate theories to cover possible issues with global warming. Increases in geothermal activity under Greenland, for example, causing increased movement of the glaciers there. There's been the suggestion that increased energy output by the sun (a fraction of a percent, but at the level of the sun's output, that adds up pretty quickly) may be more at fault than man-made atmospheric releases. I don't mind research into man-made effects -- I'm all for getting off of oil dependency, and tech innovations are Very Good Things(TM) in general -- but alternate ideas do need to be suggested, considered, and explored.
I'm going to have to disagree that the district system is not needed, because it's bad enough that we get senators all from one viewpoint of the state (usually big-city of some sort) without having the representatives a touch more beholden to the more local interests. The jerrymandering issue I recognize, and I have long supported the idea of the courts handling the districting procedures. Right now, the California legislative districts are done in such a way that the composition of the Legislature in terms of party just does not change. It's a straight 2:1 Democrat:Republican mix.
We're learning how many back-room deals are going on, too. The Democratic candidate for the Congressional district currently held by Republican David Dreier just lost ALL local Democrat support -- the local party office and even a neighboring Democrat representative pulled their support, with the Democrat representative backing DREIER in his run, all because the challenger to Dreier came out against illegal immigration, a position supported by the majority of Dreier's constituents. John and Ken may get a little out there sometimes, but this is something they've shone a great big spotlight on, and the cockroaches are running for cover.
Establishment requires publicity, and showing up with a 10% or 15% vote fraction garners that. Just don't pull a Reform Party and put a nutcase in as your candidate...
Would STV require a change to the Constitution for use on federal elections? You seem to be talking about adding indirect election to the House and Senate, basically (well, at least the House).
The number of ballots should equal the number of people who cast ballots, though, should it not? And would this not provide the number you're looking for?
No, the mujahideen as a general group were our proxies there, but there were several bands. Some were Afghan, some were Arab, some were mixed. Some were funded by the Saudis, some by Pakistan, some by the CIA, and some (like bin Laden) provided their own resources.
It's not forgetting. It's actually getting a clue of how the whole dynamic worked. It was a tangled, complex web, and sometimes bands of mujahideen would fight each other until they came under Soviet pressure.
The CIA may not have known. The ISI has been well-known for years to be a maze of politics and shifting loyalties; Musharraf has had to move people around in it dozens of times to keep the agency from turning on him, and it's my understanding that Nawaz Sharif had to do the same thing periodically before him.
You may see it as a duty, but it is legally a right. You have the right to vote, but there is nothing besides personal initiative and self-interest compelling you to do so.
The Constitution itself provides the ability for the states to remove the right for felons to vote in the Fourteenth Amendment. Felons lose a number of their rights. For example, they're limited in speech and assembly (whom they can speak and meet with), they're limited in travel (not free to leave certain jurisdictions without permission), they can no longer own firearms, and they can have their property searched at any time during their sentence without a warrant (or at least while in prison or on parole). Maybe these are a bit harsh for some people. Return the right to vote to those that at least have completed their sentence, and I imagine you'll see a significant shift in power as the formerly disenfranchised exercise their newfound rights.
I would like to see the process streamlined so that undocumented workers, who are here and are paying taxes and contributing to our society, can obtain citizenship more simply and easily.
"Undocumented workers" is a euphemism for those that have crossed into the US illegally. Crossing the border without proper authorization or a valid claim for refugee status is illegal.
Growing up in Texas, and apparently in construction, Cobb must have seen the number of illegals employed by the industry, which is far more now than what it was. California alone has some two million illegal immigrants costing the California government $5.5 billion in medical, education, welfare, and criminal costs, and we get only a tiny fraction of that (a few hundred million dollars) in compensation from the federal government. That's two million out of 35 million -- or about 5% of the state.
We have to remember that we are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, with, of course, the exception of the Native people of this continent.
The vast majority of the immigration that built up the US in the late 1800s and first two-thirds or so of the 1900s was legal. They were largely screened for health issues; how many illegal immigrants arriving now have hepatitis, or tuberculosis? How many of them have criminal backgrounds?
Three million a year get past the border patrol, according to a recent Time magazine article. Some of them are found and deported, and still others will leave on their own, but the majority will stay and attempt to find work and place their kids in school. This means that the lowest rungs of the ladder -- where teens and the unskilled find employment -- are taken by those that will work under the table for less money. It's a corruption of the government and the companies that this continues at the pace that it does.
A few are going to get in almost no matter what we do. We could build a 100m tall wall on the border and inspect every ship, boat, car, truck, and plane, and someone will find a way to sneak some people in. But the current rate cannot be sustained, and Mr. Cobb's idea of basically granting an amnesty on those here now will just lead to more arriving, just as happened after Reagan's ill-advised amnesty.
Consider also that many European groups consider themselves to be minorities -- Italians and the Irish seem to be particularly vocal about this -- and they fall into the Caucasian level.
And at what genetic level does one become a minority? One black ancestor six generations ago may have little influence on your current genetics, but does it make you black?
A capitalistic society is not necessarily "dog eat dog" in that the profits are invested in a manner that reflects self-interest. If that interest is a private charity, for example, then the capitalist ideal survives because the investment to the charity is not a tax, is not mandated by government, and is not tax-deductible. Another business may see something entirely differently, and choose to invest in capital goods, more workers, or bigger bank accounts. Self-interest is the motivating factor in pure capitalism.
It's not just the south that blocks the right to vote for felons. Of the 50 states, 48 of them block voting by inmates; 33 block voting by those on parole; and 28 block voting by those on probation. It's a very wide-spread practice, and I think justified -- the whole point of a sentence is to punish someone by removing that person's freedoms.
Now, whether the voting rights should be returned after a person has completed a sentence is another matter entirely. Personally, I'm in favor of restoration of most rights once a sentence is complete, voting among them.
A Mossad asset? I hope that was an incidental inclusion.
As for a CIA asset, no, I don't think bin Laden never had anything to do with the CIA except maybe in a very tangential way. He may have used weapons paid for by the Saudi government in its alliance with the CIA, but as journalist Robert Fisk (no friend of Blair or Bush) has mentioned after interviewing him on more than one occasion (the last one in 1998), he despised the United States.
There was a story he wrote (at least I think it was Fisk) -- which I can't find now, frustratingly enough -- that on one occasion in Afghanistan while the Soviets were still there, his guides told him to keep quiet and out of sight because they were passing near bin Laden's camp, and that bin Laden would likely kill him for being a Westerner.
Osama bin Laden didn't need CIA funding, remember. He brought access to millions of dollars with him, and based on recent reports of his half-brother, has had access to more through a shared account in Switzerland that was used to dispense inheritances. With money, you can get pretty much anything. With religious zealoutry, and you can get people to do pretty much anything. Combine them, and you have a powerful and flexible force that is well-trained, well-equipped, and well-motivated, as we've seen with al Qaeda.
You may want to check the version on your Humor Detector. The battery may be dead, or you may not have gotten the upgrade to firmware version v7.38, which fixes occasional lapses in detection.
I'm all for nuclear power. I think we should scrap most of our existing power plants and go all-nuclear, with breeder reactors to minimize the need to mining new ore and to minimize the storage needs of fuel waste (which would, for the uninitiated, be turned back into useful fuel through the breeder process). I figure with a couple hundred billion dollars, some standardized designs, and a bit of regulatory magic, it could be done in 20 years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Republican ideologue: The US is a Christian nation founded by Christians, so people should accept that prayer and the Bible have a role in government, and then all will be well.
Democrat ideologue: We have to provide every handup to people who need it, because to not do so is inhumane, and then all will be well.
Green ideologue: We can shift everything to wind and solar and tidal power, and not have to be reliant on oil for power ever again, and it will be cheaper and more reliable, and then all will be well.
Libertarian ideologue: We have to think of America first, and get out of every foreign nation, and drop all taxes and trade barriers, and then all will be well.
Pragmatists are usually somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, pragmatists rarely like to yell much.
Or perhaps you could file a complaint with the military and see the soldiers involved brought up on charges, just like what happened to several US military members recently, at least one of whom has been convicted of murder.
The most common number I've seen is about 6,400 Iraqi military KIA in 2004.
Actually, yes, in many cases, state-level judges are elected, usually for four- or six-year terms, but occasionally for life. Federal judges are appointed by the president and confirmed (or denied) by the Senate, and there are clear impeachment rules to allow the Senate to remove a sitting judge if malfeasance is suspected.
I've never said that global warming is a fantasy. What I have said is that we can't latch onto one idea at the expense of all others. That leads to a great deal of hype and cuts the idea's public believeability.
Haiti was grazed by a tropical storm (not strong enough to be called a hurricane) and around 2000 people have died with another 100000 or so left homeless and starving
A lot of this has to do with the rampant deforestation in Haiti. Notice that the Dominican Republic, which is on the same island, did not suffer nearly as badly, as it still has much of its forest remaining. There's a picture where you can pretty clearly see the border of Haiti and the DR -- DR is green, and Haiti is not.
If the sun is increasing its output, even cutting CO2 and methane in the atmosphere almost to zero may not be of much help.
I don't think we have more than a couple hundred years or so of reasonably accurate overall hurricane reporting, and even of those that have hit land, it's not more than a few hundred years of accurate records in North America. I imagine the records are even worse for typhoons in the Pacific, though the Indian Ocean cyclones may have somewhat better records, having been part of civilized life for a few thousand years there.
Well, I did some rough calculations, and given the area of the disc on the page (12,469 square meters) and using a rough density of dry air at sea level (1.25kg/m^3), a 13m-thick cylinder of air passing through the disc area at the named nominal 13m/s (in other words, one second of air) would have a KE of about 17MJ. This suggests about 17MW would be the theoretical 100% efficiency at that velocity, putting this a little under one-third efficiency, which would be about on par with what is usually expected.
I think I got that right. Feel free to correct me. (Not like Slashdotters need permission for that, but I'm feeling polite this morning.)
Indeed. In fact, when I saw this headline, I went looking for another story I saw just a few days ago that says that this may be part of a normal cycle of increasing and decreasing cyclone counts and intensities. It doesn't rule out global warming effects, but it does present an alternate theory.
I have seen some other alternate theories to cover possible issues with global warming. Increases in geothermal activity under Greenland, for example, causing increased movement of the glaciers there. There's been the suggestion that increased energy output by the sun (a fraction of a percent, but at the level of the sun's output, that adds up pretty quickly) may be more at fault than man-made atmospheric releases. I don't mind research into man-made effects -- I'm all for getting off of oil dependency, and tech innovations are Very Good Things(TM) in general -- but alternate ideas do need to be suggested, considered, and explored.
I'm going to have to disagree that the district system is not needed, because it's bad enough that we get senators all from one viewpoint of the state (usually big-city of some sort) without having the representatives a touch more beholden to the more local interests. The jerrymandering issue I recognize, and I have long supported the idea of the courts handling the districting procedures. Right now, the California legislative districts are done in such a way that the composition of the Legislature in terms of party just does not change. It's a straight 2:1 Democrat:Republican mix.
We're learning how many back-room deals are going on, too. The Democratic candidate for the Congressional district currently held by Republican David Dreier just lost ALL local Democrat support -- the local party office and even a neighboring Democrat representative pulled their support, with the Democrat representative backing DREIER in his run, all because the challenger to Dreier came out against illegal immigration, a position supported by the majority of Dreier's constituents. John and Ken may get a little out there sometimes, but this is something they've shone a great big spotlight on, and the cockroaches are running for cover.
Establishment requires publicity, and showing up with a 10% or 15% vote fraction garners that. Just don't pull a Reform Party and put a nutcase in as your candidate...
Would STV require a change to the Constitution for use on federal elections? You seem to be talking about adding indirect election to the House and Senate, basically (well, at least the House).
The number of ballots should equal the number of people who cast ballots, though, should it not? And would this not provide the number you're looking for?
Trolls push it all along into the open. Duh. :)
No, the mujahideen as a general group were our proxies there, but there were several bands. Some were Afghan, some were Arab, some were mixed. Some were funded by the Saudis, some by Pakistan, some by the CIA, and some (like bin Laden) provided their own resources.
It's not forgetting. It's actually getting a clue of how the whole dynamic worked. It was a tangled, complex web, and sometimes bands of mujahideen would fight each other until they came under Soviet pressure.
The CIA may not have known. The ISI has been well-known for years to be a maze of politics and shifting loyalties; Musharraf has had to move people around in it dozens of times to keep the agency from turning on him, and it's my understanding that Nawaz Sharif had to do the same thing periodically before him.
You may see it as a duty, but it is legally a right. You have the right to vote, but there is nothing besides personal initiative and self-interest compelling you to do so.
The Constitution itself provides the ability for the states to remove the right for felons to vote in the Fourteenth Amendment. Felons lose a number of their rights. For example, they're limited in speech and assembly (whom they can speak and meet with), they're limited in travel (not free to leave certain jurisdictions without permission), they can no longer own firearms, and they can have their property searched at any time during their sentence without a warrant (or at least while in prison or on parole). Maybe these are a bit harsh for some people. Return the right to vote to those that at least have completed their sentence, and I imagine you'll see a significant shift in power as the formerly disenfranchised exercise their newfound rights.
I would like to see the process streamlined so that undocumented workers, who are here and are paying taxes and contributing to our society, can obtain citizenship more simply and easily.
"Undocumented workers" is a euphemism for those that have crossed into the US illegally. Crossing the border without proper authorization or a valid claim for refugee status is illegal.
Growing up in Texas, and apparently in construction, Cobb must have seen the number of illegals employed by the industry, which is far more now than what it was. California alone has some two million illegal immigrants costing the California government $5.5 billion in medical, education, welfare, and criminal costs, and we get only a tiny fraction of that (a few hundred million dollars) in compensation from the federal government. That's two million out of 35 million -- or about 5% of the state.
We have to remember that we are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, with, of course, the exception of the Native people of this continent.
The vast majority of the immigration that built up the US in the late 1800s and first two-thirds or so of the 1900s was legal. They were largely screened for health issues; how many illegal immigrants arriving now have hepatitis, or tuberculosis? How many of them have criminal backgrounds?
Three million a year get past the border patrol, according to a recent Time magazine article. Some of them are found and deported, and still others will leave on their own, but the majority will stay and attempt to find work and place their kids in school. This means that the lowest rungs of the ladder -- where teens and the unskilled find employment -- are taken by those that will work under the table for less money. It's a corruption of the government and the companies that this continues at the pace that it does.
A few are going to get in almost no matter what we do. We could build a 100m tall wall on the border and inspect every ship, boat, car, truck, and plane, and someone will find a way to sneak some people in. But the current rate cannot be sustained, and Mr. Cobb's idea of basically granting an amnesty on those here now will just lead to more arriving, just as happened after Reagan's ill-advised amnesty.
Consider also that many European groups consider themselves to be minorities -- Italians and the Irish seem to be particularly vocal about this -- and they fall into the Caucasian level.
And at what genetic level does one become a minority? One black ancestor six generations ago may have little influence on your current genetics, but does it make you black?
A capitalistic society is not necessarily "dog eat dog" in that the profits are invested in a manner that reflects self-interest. If that interest is a private charity, for example, then the capitalist ideal survives because the investment to the charity is not a tax, is not mandated by government, and is not tax-deductible. Another business may see something entirely differently, and choose to invest in capital goods, more workers, or bigger bank accounts. Self-interest is the motivating factor in pure capitalism.
It's not just the south that blocks the right to vote for felons. Of the 50 states, 48 of them block voting by inmates; 33 block voting by those on parole; and 28 block voting by those on probation. It's a very wide-spread practice, and I think justified -- the whole point of a sentence is to punish someone by removing that person's freedoms.
Now, whether the voting rights should be returned after a person has completed a sentence is another matter entirely. Personally, I'm in favor of restoration of most rights once a sentence is complete, voting among them.
You only have to be 35 on the date of inauguration to run for president. Article II, Section 1, Clause 5.
A Mossad asset? I hope that was an incidental inclusion.
As for a CIA asset, no, I don't think bin Laden never had anything to do with the CIA except maybe in a very tangential way. He may have used weapons paid for by the Saudi government in its alliance with the CIA, but as journalist Robert Fisk (no friend of Blair or Bush) has mentioned after interviewing him on more than one occasion (the last one in 1998), he despised the United States.
There was a story he wrote (at least I think it was Fisk) -- which I can't find now, frustratingly enough -- that on one occasion in Afghanistan while the Soviets were still there, his guides told him to keep quiet and out of sight because they were passing near bin Laden's camp, and that bin Laden would likely kill him for being a Westerner.
Osama bin Laden didn't need CIA funding, remember. He brought access to millions of dollars with him, and based on recent reports of his half-brother, has had access to more through a shared account in Switzerland that was used to dispense inheritances. With money, you can get pretty much anything. With religious zealoutry, and you can get people to do pretty much anything. Combine them, and you have a powerful and flexible force that is well-trained, well-equipped, and well-motivated, as we've seen with al Qaeda.
You may want to check the version on your Humor Detector. The battery may be dead, or you may not have gotten the upgrade to firmware version v7.38, which fixes occasional lapses in detection.
I'm all for nuclear power. I think we should scrap most of our existing power plants and go all-nuclear, with breeder reactors to minimize the need to mining new ore and to minimize the storage needs of fuel waste (which would, for the uninitiated, be turned back into useful fuel through the breeder process). I figure with a couple hundred billion dollars, some standardized designs, and a bit of regulatory magic, it could be done in 20 years or so.
It's more complex than that. You forget the eighth layer in the OSI model.
Politics.