Oh, we knew we were replaceable. We just mused over what the first week would be like, and whether the incompetence of certain people would be made obvious as they scrambled to bring things back up.
The plant is closed now after it was revealed that it lies directly over an earthquake fault, but the spent fuel rods are still stored there because there isn't any other place to put them.
Cowards. The plant at Diablo Canyon sits near to a few fault lines (about two miles away for the closest) and it still runs, even after recent quakes in the area including the San Simeon 6.5 quake last year.
Bring it back online! Face the risk like true intrepid explorers! The next generation of mutants may save your life!
It used to be (before a new workload came crashing down on everyone) that occasionally a large group of us would go to lunch together in one guy's Suburban (nicknamed the War Wagon). The head of the division (who knows the network back and forth and one of two people with access to the firewalls and high-level ACLs), the head of security (the other guy with access to the firewalls and high-level ACLs and backup IDS man), the primary IDS guy, the head of the networking team, the head of the database team (and the only one who knows some of the more archaic systems), and the head of the remote access team, together with a couple of us peons, would all load up in the War Wagon. One day, the driver had to swerve to avoid what could have become a very bad accident, and we spent the lunch wondering how the rest of the division would recover from the loss of seven or eight people, five of whom were key to operations.
What about Zoe Chastain-Shannon? Chad Cook? Roger Edgell? Jeffery Brown?
Those are people who have been killed in car crashes in the last day or two, but I expect that aside from a tiny fraction of Slashdotters who might have known them, they won't be mourned mostly because their deaths have no effect on us. The GP post is a very valid question -- the poster doesn't know who the person killed was, and so asks what made him so important in the community. He may not be mourned, but when a community suffers a loss, explaining what the loss is -- other than a person dying -- is helpful.
He did use a trick like this in one book, and said that it was based on real technology that was contained in publically-available literature, though he declined to reveal his sources lest someone be able to build his uber-flashlight.
There is little evidence that "tens of thousands" were turned away. Even your own link provides only a handful of witnesses, and little corroboration between them. Most of the problems were based in poll workers not fully understanding their roles and duties, a problem that happens from time to time with new poll workers. Subsequent analyses outside of the CCR report have shown that the claims were largely anecdotal, spreading and growing as rumors often do. One black person turned away because his name didn't appear on the voter roll at the place he thought it should can and does (and did) blossom into police blocking access to the polls to non-whites.
I don't disagree that there were logistical problems. The issues with the voting equipment is well-documented, and perhaps there were those who inadvertently voted for the wrong person. Little is said of those living in the panhandle of the state, which is in Central time zone, who may have not voted because the networks called the election before their polls closed. That also could have shifted the election one way or the other.
My point stands. The results were open to view. There was a public debate on it, and steps have been taken to remedy the situation. The mid-term elections went more or less smoothly, from what I've been able to tell, and there are expectations that things will continue to go smoothly. There is simply no need for anyone else to come in here like we're some backwater nation just figuring out what voting is about.
The elections went just fine. Post-election reviews of policies and procedures showed the allegations to be overblown, and that Bush would have won the recount anyway. The system worked as it was designed to. We learned a few things that showed that we needed a more uniform way of handling things, but that will come about from time to time.
BTW, while I recognize the occasional need for observers in some nations (like Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Iraq), most First World nations/Most Developed Countries have a mature setup that doesn't need international monitors, and I would support anyone in those countries who didn't want international observers in place. Mind you, I'm not just venting at the observers. I'm angry with a whole chain of people, including two presidents, two Secretaries of State, some Democrat Representatives, and the OSCE, and I'd support anyone in a similar circumstance in their own country if their processes were also mature and open.
The intent of the observers is to monitor for fairness. We have this, as has been shown. They're watching for openness. We have this, as has been shown. They're watching to make sure that rights are not violated. Aside from the occasional blip that will show up in any country's national elections where some minor misunderstanding or other will result in a tiny handful of people not being able to cast a ballot, this is not a problem here.
This is an example of a small group of people attempting to make sure that they are happy with how we do things inside our country. Nobody's getting imprisoned, tortured, or killed for how they vote, nor are they being prevented from voting, aside from the occasional person who happens to be a convicted felon, and even some of them can vote. Hey, in a couple of states, even felons who are currently in prison can vote!
There's no reason for them to be here, and there was no reason for them to have been here in 2002 (informally watching the mid-term elections) or in 2003 (formally monitoring the California recall election). I'd be much happier if they just stayed home and let us handle our own house.
You're confusing "fluid" with "liquid" -- a very common mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Fluids can be gaseous, liquid, or even made up of solids -- anything that can flow. Solids can act as a fluid if they're small enough for the given environment (analysis of traffic bottlenecks is one example of the application of fluid dynamics on a macro scale).
Kerry's no better in that respect. Even if he did raise the taxes he promises and gets out of Iraq quickly, the programs he proposes would still result in more deficit. It's going back to the days of two candidates arguing who will be worse for the deficit, rather than who is going to just fix the damned thing.
Until FDR, no one had managed more than two terms. Washington would almost certainly have been elected if he'd wanted to continue serving. FDR's longevity scared a lot of politicians who feared that one person may be able to get a lock on the presidency and end up with too much power, regardless of Constitutional limitation (perhaps even gaining the political power to force through changes to benefit him).
There was a great deal of debate about it, and I can see both sides of the issue. Clinton would probably have been re-elected, and Reagan would have stood a decent chance, too. Ike was similarly popular on his way out, and may have had a shot at it had he chosen to run a third time.
LBJ (who took over and served only 14 months of Kennedy's term) said that he would refuse the party's nomination if it selected him. That's why he didn't run for re-election. From his televised speech:
With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office--the Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
Now, whether he believed what he said completely, or he didn't believe that he could win, or he was simply tired, I don't know. But it was a personal decision and not a Constitutional limitation that kept him from another term.
The Florida Supreme Court tried to apply alternate vote-counting rules not allowed under Florida law to ballots in specific counties. This was overturned on a 7-2 decision of the US Supreme Court. The FSC also tried to extend the date of certification when the certification date also was clearly stated under Florida law. This is the vote that was overturned on a 5-4 decision. The USSC basically said that the election results as then-currently counted under Florida law had to stay put, because the FSC was trying to rewrite election law on its own, which is not its role in the system.
And to correct your other point, the limit is ten years in office, which usually translates to two elected terms as president with some overlap in case the VP is moved up a notch. So no, even if you were right, he wouldn't be able to run twice more.
My step-grandfather owned his own sign-making shop when he was alive, and spent many hours out on the floor. Later on, when he developed cancer and heart disease, he was put on a catheter. He marveled at it, and said that if he had known about it before that he would have used it when at work. He subsequently proved his point by working a couple of days a week (about as much as he could do on his medication) with the catheter in place. He claimed that he got more than an hour of extra work done everyday by doing so, factoring in time to, in, and from the bathroom, and the time to lock the tools and then set them up again (some of the stuff he used was dangerous to leave out unattended, and had to be locked in a safe mode of sorts).
Microsoft has said that they will not make IE6 SP2 available for older versions of Windows, not that they won't provide security patches.
Generally speaking, I don't criticize the Slashdot crew because they have enough story submissions to read through that things will slip past, but this is ridiculous. Microsoft has committed to several more years of Windows 2000 support, and there are still a couple of years left on Millenium. Because they view the browser as part of the OS, it would be asinine to think that they would patch XP's IE and leave the older ones to sit where they are now.
That's a really odd thing to get out because I've heard very little from him about it other than responding to a reporter's question on one or two occasions.
As for how many participated, it was five, I think -- two Dems, two Reps, and one Green. Everyone was in it for him/herself, and there was very little in the way of helping each other over any point at all.
It was only California, so in a sense it was local, but it's a locality that includes one in eight people in the US. His solutions seemed largely to be of the idea that the government should take on more responsibilities, require businesses to provide more pay and benefits to their employees, and that the state should raise taxes to cover conversion to renewable energy sources -- all at a time when businesses were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) leaving the state because of costs and government regulations.
California, during the recall campaign last year, allowed Peter Camejo of the Green Party to participate. It was interesting to see so many candidates (also there were Schwarzeneggar, Bustamante, McClintock, and Huffington) saying their piece. What it showed, though, was that Camejo (specifically the candidate) was so disconnected from reality as to make Huffington and Bustamante (both far-left liberals themselves) want to distance themselves from him.
Badnarik may be better able to hold his own in a debate, but the first widely-viewed debate involving a member of a higher-tier third party didn't impress most people.
A good chunk of them work in Los Angeles. There's plenty of space up there that's less expensive and less disruptive to the views -- but that's just not chic. The City of Brea (one of the northernmost cities in the county) passed a law banning further housing development on its hills largely because the residents were sick of their hilly landscapes disappearing under construction.
That doesn't stop a lot of them from doing so, if only to get patients to stop complaining that the doctor isn't taking care of them. Personally, I'd explain the situation, and then explain that prescribing an ineffective remedy for their ailment would be against my Hippocratic oath. They're welcome to go elsewhere, though their insurance company may not be too happy about paying for another doctor visit so soon.
Perhaps, but the idea of me owning the property also works on the premise of having enough money to pay for top-notch attorneys to fight those that would try to go around me.
I remember driving as a child through some areas of northern Orange County and looking at tree- and scrub-covered hills that are now blanketed with houses. There are large tracts of hilly land in Southern California that are subject to development that I would love to see purchased and set aside before they can be razed. I'd love to be the one to purchase them, too, just so that I could entertain developers for a bit, just to tell them that I have no intentions of selling their land just because they're running out of places to put expensive homes.
The funny thing is (to many people)... I lean to the right on a lot of things, often including the environment. I'm not sure if I'd like the conservation more because of the conservation itself or the red-faced developers blowing a gasket.
A couple of years ago, I heard actor Rick Schroeder in an interview on the radio. He had just bought a ranch off in Wyoming or Montana or somewhere like that, something huge with thousands of acres. He said that when he's home, he likes to go once a day to visit a new acre. How cool is that? He could do that for YEARS and still find something new on a regular basis. I would love to be able to do that.
I had a biology teacher that once speculated that aside from chemical concerns, environments with pools of liquid made up of something that did not float when frozen would present a nearly impossible environment in which to grow, because if the crystals sank, then a pool could end up freezing anything that grew in the bottom of it, rather than providing the insulating environment that ice and other similar floating-when-frozen materials do.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, we knew we were replaceable. We just mused over what the first week would be like, and whether the incompetence of certain people would be made obvious as they scrambled to bring things back up.
The plant is closed now after it was revealed that it lies directly over an earthquake fault, but the spent fuel rods are still stored there because there isn't any other place to put them.
Cowards. The plant at Diablo Canyon sits near to a few fault lines (about two miles away for the closest) and it still runs, even after recent quakes in the area including the San Simeon 6.5 quake last year.
Bring it back online! Face the risk like true intrepid explorers! The next generation of mutants may save your life!
It used to be (before a new workload came crashing down on everyone) that occasionally a large group of us would go to lunch together in one guy's Suburban (nicknamed the War Wagon). The head of the division (who knows the network back and forth and one of two people with access to the firewalls and high-level ACLs), the head of security (the other guy with access to the firewalls and high-level ACLs and backup IDS man), the primary IDS guy, the head of the networking team, the head of the database team (and the only one who knows some of the more archaic systems), and the head of the remote access team, together with a couple of us peons, would all load up in the War Wagon. One day, the driver had to swerve to avoid what could have become a very bad accident, and we spent the lunch wondering how the rest of the division would recover from the loss of seven or eight people, five of whom were key to operations.
What about Zoe Chastain-Shannon? Chad Cook? Roger Edgell? Jeffery Brown?
Those are people who have been killed in car crashes in the last day or two, but I expect that aside from a tiny fraction of Slashdotters who might have known them, they won't be mourned mostly because their deaths have no effect on us. The GP post is a very valid question -- the poster doesn't know who the person killed was, and so asks what made him so important in the community. He may not be mourned, but when a community suffers a loss, explaining what the loss is -- other than a person dying -- is helpful.
No, it was Debt of Honor, though it wasn't a 747 that was downed, but something smaller (not revealed to avoid spoilers).
Been reading Clancy lately, have you?
He did use a trick like this in one book, and said that it was based on real technology that was contained in publically-available literature, though he declined to reveal his sources lest someone be able to build his uber-flashlight.
There is little evidence that "tens of thousands" were turned away. Even your own link provides only a handful of witnesses, and little corroboration between them. Most of the problems were based in poll workers not fully understanding their roles and duties, a problem that happens from time to time with new poll workers. Subsequent analyses outside of the CCR report have shown that the claims were largely anecdotal, spreading and growing as rumors often do. One black person turned away because his name didn't appear on the voter roll at the place he thought it should can and does (and did) blossom into police blocking access to the polls to non-whites.
I don't disagree that there were logistical problems. The issues with the voting equipment is well-documented, and perhaps there were those who inadvertently voted for the wrong person. Little is said of those living in the panhandle of the state, which is in Central time zone, who may have not voted because the networks called the election before their polls closed. That also could have shifted the election one way or the other.
My point stands. The results were open to view. There was a public debate on it, and steps have been taken to remedy the situation. The mid-term elections went more or less smoothly, from what I've been able to tell, and there are expectations that things will continue to go smoothly. There is simply no need for anyone else to come in here like we're some backwater nation just figuring out what voting is about.
Hence my anger at the current SecState.
Memo to the OSCE:
Re: International observers for US elections
Fuck off.
The elections went just fine. Post-election reviews of policies and procedures showed the allegations to be overblown, and that Bush would have won the recount anyway. The system worked as it was designed to. We learned a few things that showed that we needed a more uniform way of handling things, but that will come about from time to time.
BTW, while I recognize the occasional need for observers in some nations (like Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Iraq), most First World nations/Most Developed Countries have a mature setup that doesn't need international monitors, and I would support anyone in those countries who didn't want international observers in place. Mind you, I'm not just venting at the observers. I'm angry with a whole chain of people, including two presidents, two Secretaries of State, some Democrat Representatives, and the OSCE, and I'd support anyone in a similar circumstance in their own country if their processes were also mature and open.
The intent of the observers is to monitor for fairness. We have this, as has been shown. They're watching for openness. We have this, as has been shown. They're watching to make sure that rights are not violated. Aside from the occasional blip that will show up in any country's national elections where some minor misunderstanding or other will result in a tiny handful of people not being able to cast a ballot, this is not a problem here.
This is an example of a small group of people attempting to make sure that they are happy with how we do things inside our country. Nobody's getting imprisoned, tortured, or killed for how they vote, nor are they being prevented from voting, aside from the occasional person who happens to be a convicted felon, and even some of them can vote. Hey, in a couple of states, even felons who are currently in prison can vote!
There's no reason for them to be here, and there was no reason for them to have been here in 2002 (informally watching the mid-term elections) or in 2003 (formally monitoring the California recall election). I'd be much happier if they just stayed home and let us handle our own house.
You're confusing "fluid" with "liquid" -- a very common mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Fluids can be gaseous, liquid, or even made up of solids -- anything that can flow. Solids can act as a fluid if they're small enough for the given environment (analysis of traffic bottlenecks is one example of the application of fluid dynamics on a macro scale).
Kerry's no better in that respect. Even if he did raise the taxes he promises and gets out of Iraq quickly, the programs he proposes would still result in more deficit. It's going back to the days of two candidates arguing who will be worse for the deficit, rather than who is going to just fix the damned thing.
Until FDR, no one had managed more than two terms. Washington would almost certainly have been elected if he'd wanted to continue serving. FDR's longevity scared a lot of politicians who feared that one person may be able to get a lock on the presidency and end up with too much power, regardless of Constitutional limitation (perhaps even gaining the political power to force through changes to benefit him).
There was a great deal of debate about it, and I can see both sides of the issue. Clinton would probably have been re-elected, and Reagan would have stood a decent chance, too. Ike was similarly popular on his way out, and may have had a shot at it had he chosen to run a third time.
LBJ (who took over and served only 14 months of Kennedy's term) said that he would refuse the party's nomination if it selected him. That's why he didn't run for re-election. From his televised speech:
With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office--the Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
Now, whether he believed what he said completely, or he didn't believe that he could win, or he was simply tired, I don't know. But it was a personal decision and not a Constitutional limitation that kept him from another term.
No, technically he was elected.
The Florida Supreme Court tried to apply alternate vote-counting rules not allowed under Florida law to ballots in specific counties. This was overturned on a 7-2 decision of the US Supreme Court. The FSC also tried to extend the date of certification when the certification date also was clearly stated under Florida law. This is the vote that was overturned on a 5-4 decision. The USSC basically said that the election results as then-currently counted under Florida law had to stay put, because the FSC was trying to rewrite election law on its own, which is not its role in the system.
And to correct your other point, the limit is ten years in office, which usually translates to two elected terms as president with some overlap in case the VP is moved up a notch. So no, even if you were right, he wouldn't be able to run twice more.
My step-grandfather owned his own sign-making shop when he was alive, and spent many hours out on the floor. Later on, when he developed cancer and heart disease, he was put on a catheter. He marveled at it, and said that if he had known about it before that he would have used it when at work. He subsequently proved his point by working a couple of days a week (about as much as he could do on his medication) with the catheter in place. He claimed that he got more than an hour of extra work done everyday by doing so, factoring in time to, in, and from the bathroom, and the time to lock the tools and then set them up again (some of the stuff he used was dangerous to leave out unattended, and had to be locked in a safe mode of sorts).
Man, you people are gullible.
Microsoft has said that they will not make IE6 SP2 available for older versions of Windows, not that they won't provide security patches.
Generally speaking, I don't criticize the Slashdot crew because they have enough story submissions to read through that things will slip past, but this is ridiculous. Microsoft has committed to several more years of Windows 2000 support, and there are still a couple of years left on Millenium. Because they view the browser as part of the OS, it would be asinine to think that they would patch XP's IE and leave the older ones to sit where they are now.
That's a really odd thing to get out because I've heard very little from him about it other than responding to a reporter's question on one or two occasions.
As for how many participated, it was five, I think -- two Dems, two Reps, and one Green. Everyone was in it for him/herself, and there was very little in the way of helping each other over any point at all.
It was only California, so in a sense it was local, but it's a locality that includes one in eight people in the US. His solutions seemed largely to be of the idea that the government should take on more responsibilities, require businesses to provide more pay and benefits to their employees, and that the state should raise taxes to cover conversion to renewable energy sources -- all at a time when businesses were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) leaving the state because of costs and government regulations.
California, during the recall campaign last year, allowed Peter Camejo of the Green Party to participate. It was interesting to see so many candidates (also there were Schwarzeneggar, Bustamante, McClintock, and Huffington) saying their piece. What it showed, though, was that Camejo (specifically the candidate) was so disconnected from reality as to make Huffington and Bustamante (both far-left liberals themselves) want to distance themselves from him.
Badnarik may be better able to hold his own in a debate, but the first widely-viewed debate involving a member of a higher-tier third party didn't impress most people.
I wish. Need money for that -- especially there. The Irvine Company isn't known for being cheap.
A good chunk of them work in Los Angeles. There's plenty of space up there that's less expensive and less disruptive to the views -- but that's just not chic. The City of Brea (one of the northernmost cities in the county) passed a law banning further housing development on its hills largely because the residents were sick of their hilly landscapes disappearing under construction.
That doesn't stop a lot of them from doing so, if only to get patients to stop complaining that the doctor isn't taking care of them. Personally, I'd explain the situation, and then explain that prescribing an ineffective remedy for their ailment would be against my Hippocratic oath. They're welcome to go elsewhere, though their insurance company may not be too happy about paying for another doctor visit so soon.
Perhaps, but the idea of me owning the property also works on the premise of having enough money to pay for top-notch attorneys to fight those that would try to go around me.
I remember driving as a child through some areas of northern Orange County and looking at tree- and scrub-covered hills that are now blanketed with houses. There are large tracts of hilly land in Southern California that are subject to development that I would love to see purchased and set aside before they can be razed. I'd love to be the one to purchase them, too, just so that I could entertain developers for a bit, just to tell them that I have no intentions of selling their land just because they're running out of places to put expensive homes.
The funny thing is (to many people)... I lean to the right on a lot of things, often including the environment. I'm not sure if I'd like the conservation more because of the conservation itself or the red-faced developers blowing a gasket.
A couple of years ago, I heard actor Rick Schroeder in an interview on the radio. He had just bought a ranch off in Wyoming or Montana or somewhere like that, something huge with thousands of acres. He said that when he's home, he likes to go once a day to visit a new acre. How cool is that? He could do that for YEARS and still find something new on a regular basis. I would love to be able to do that.
I had a biology teacher that once speculated that aside from chemical concerns, environments with pools of liquid made up of something that did not float when frozen would present a nearly impossible environment in which to grow, because if the crystals sank, then a pool could end up freezing anything that grew in the bottom of it, rather than providing the insulating environment that ice and other similar floating-when-frozen materials do.