The US dollar used to be good. Have you checked out what happened to international exchange rates lately? Our currency is a laughingstock, as our empire is fast becoming. Time to cut our losses, pull our troops back, and get ourselves into shape domestically. Ron Paul sees that it's better to get some humility, back down, and regain some respect, than to overshoot and fail completely, to be ignored and kicked around by the rest of the world forever after.
Sorry, you are correct. Romney has stolen several straw polls from Ron Paul, not by drawing multiple supporters as Paul does, but buying multiple votes per person. Thanks for that.
Also and more importantly, I believe that the leaders of that party need to have a candidate who will allow the many crimes of the last 7 years to go unpunished, so they need a person they already own. (that's also why McCain and Huckabee don't have many 'big' endorsements or money, btw).
McCain? If anything he is likely to let them go unpunished. He pretended that having to wear a flak jacket and be escorted by tanks and helicopters to grocery shopping is A-OK. Didn't he cave on torture ("allowing a 'just following orders' defense"), on habeas corpus, and on illegal detentions? Sad to see a good man fall.
Check this out: the San Francisco Republicans cancelled their straw poll because there were too many people ready to vote for Ron Paul: http://www.kcrg.com/explorepolitics/?feed=bim&id=12183556 Of note is the fact that Mitt Romney had some supporters waiting in line to vote multiple times.
They've tracked down the spammer and the software and configuration used. It's all about email and nothing about Web polls, let alone text message polls. So can the lies about "spamming the polls" please stop now? Thanks FOX.
Why are you bringing up John Walker Lindh? If he renounced his U.S. citizenship he's an enemy soldier and a P.O.W. If not he's a traitor and subject to civilian court.
Except... wait a second, he was tortured and blamed for deaths caused by a U.S. airstrike. Yes, we surely are on the moral high ground aren't we.
Article 4: A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy: [...] 6. Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
So any Afghani or Iraqi toting an AK-47 around and fighting U.S. forces was a lawful combatant, no?
Article 5: [...] Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
Every one of Bush's sham tribunals has eventually gotten chucked out by SCOTUS. Defense lawyers (when detainees are afforded them) and even prosecutors routinely complain about government pressure to ensure the detainees are found guilty, or unlawful, or whatever.
In addition, the evidence provided to the Trial Chamber does not indicate that the Bosnian Serbs who were detained were, as a group, at all times carrying their arms openly and observing the laws and customs of war. Article 4(A)(6) undoubtedly places a somewhat high burden on local populations to behave as if they were professional soldiers and the Trial Chamber, therefore, considers it more appropriate to treat all such persons in the present case as civilians.
It is important, however, to note that this finding is predicated on the view that there is no gap between the Third and the Fourth Geneva Conventions. If an individual is not entitled to the protections of the Third Convention as a prisoner of war (or of the First or Second Conventions) he or she necessarily falls within the ambit of Convention IV, provided that its article 4 requirements are satisfied. The Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention asserts that;
[e]very person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or again, a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law. We feel that this is a satisfactory solution - not only satisfying to the mind, but also, and above all, satisfactory from the humanitarian point of view." Jean Pictet (ed.) - Commentary: IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1958) - 1994 reprint edition.
Your point about the "war" being of indefinite duration is well taken. It's why I and many others have significant problems with these undeclared wars against vague targets like "terror".
Tell me then, why do we have the Bill or Rights? If nothing in the Constitution says that the government can, say, search my house, why bother specifically saying that the government can NOT search my house? If I have free speech, Inherently, then why is it in the Bill of Rights? What's the point?
Because they figured that without explicit constraints the government would infringe rights as soon as it had the chance. (Even with them, sadly! USA PATRIOT)
Basically it's an extra check and balance that must be violated before armed revolution is the only option left to restore inalienable rights. It at least slows tyranny down.
Hamilton feared explicitly that people like you would come along.
I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?
I agree with you. However, keep in mind that Firefox 3 will not run on DOS-based Windows environments (Windows 98). So users on those platforms will be forced to upgrade their OS or stop upgrading the real browser.
The real question, since we're doing comparisons, is does Microsoft still support those OSes?
One other fact to throw in there is that if some user or organization really desperately needs to have Windows 98 systems with a recent Firefox, there's nothing stopping them from paying for a contract for some firm to backport security fixes.
Microsoft's responsibility is to the vast majority of its customers, who typically take some time to implement updates. Microsoft learned a long timed ago that customers do not like a continual stream of fixes. Hence, patch Tuesday
Batching fixes and releasing them on a particular day of the week is entirely reasonable. Sitting on known issues until they start getting exploited is not.
If I understand you are saying Microsoft bears greater responsibility toward customers that ignore patches for unreasonable lengths of time than toward customers who responsibly evaluate security fixes and either work around or patch affected systems. That view is wrong and harmful.
Fine, he can make jokes about the elections, but don't waste everyone's time and money by making fools out of election people.
Did you not notice the part where he had to pay $2500 in filing fees? That covers their time and money. As for making fools out of "election people", whoever those are, all they had to do was put his name on the ballot with everyone else, done; if no one votes for him it ends there and no harm done. They made fools of themselves when they shut someone out, satirist or no, because they are afraid he might make people think just for a second about how screwed up the process is. Or they feared he might actually get some votes.
If you were actually doing real development work you would not need to have a BlackBerry on you 24/7. Development work can only be done well when reasonably isolated from day-to-day production issues and given resources (time, people, equipment) to do quality work.
I'm not dissing you... Looking back on my career so far, I've never had a purely development job. Employers (perhaps fairly) don't want to spend the money to get actual developers and actual system administrators. So it becomes a juggling act.
To me the first part is assert your own rights and responsibilities. Being on call all the time is not fair to you unless you're getting paid for it (at least $160k–$200k/yr) and if you are being constantly utilized at 75%-100% capacity it lowers the quality of work you deliver to your customer. Next, keep in mind your various deliverables (build X system, bugfix Y system, keep Z system running) and apportion your time accordingly. If one impacts another, let your customer know right away so they can make the business decision on priorities.
None of this is easy of course. But in my mind it's one of the things that distinguishes a software engineer from some hacker in the corner. If we want to be respected as professionals we must bring professional skills to the table.
Please provide legal citations to back up your claim that postdating checks is illegal.
I do not have citations handy myself, but my understanding is that while nothing stops you from postdating a check, and people aren't supposed to cash/deposit it until the date written on the check (keep in mind a date is a required component of a check legally), the bank is explicitly protected against any claims based on their cashing the check early.
The bank could charge NSF fees and the rest even if the check was presented early. Can't remember if you would have a claim against the person who presented it to the bank early. Contract terms can also alter the situation (such as "we process all checks electronically and don't look at the date" or something).
In the Senate maybe. I know in the House at least Ron Paul opposed the "USAPATRIOT" Act and argued for its repeal since.
I don't understand how anyone can claim to have voted for it in good conscience, given that most of them had not even read it before voting, and many at least were never given the chance to.
The Sunlight Rule would be a nice start to fixing the problem.
I appreciate your effort to view all sides of this issue and bring
balance to the discussion. Unfortunately your points are utter
hogwash.
The pricing model for ISP's was based on the idea that the
provider of that content paid for the bandwidth. That's why you can get a flat rate, in a nutshell.
It's based on the users of bandwidth paying for that bandwidth.
How do you explain consumer-only ISPs that don't host content? How do
they stay afloat?
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred
between the users, with noone paying for it. If I download a WoW patch
from Tom, Dick and Harry -- the WoW patch downloader being a modified
BitTorrent client -- we're all on flat rate, so noone
pays.
Tell me how "flat rate" equates to "noone[sic] pays". ISPs charge
the cost of their bandwidth divided by the number of customers, plus a
little on top for their operations.
Keep in mind that all connections have bandwidth limits, and most
have monthly transfer limits. (The latter should be treated as
fraud by the courts; ISPs love to shout "unlimited!"
in their advertisements. But that's a separate discussion.) If you
start transferring a lot, uploading or downloading, you have to get a
higher-priced account or pay for the extra data transferred a la
carte.
Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the
bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for
the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't
figure out how to bill for it.
Please. If I am a thoughtless user and I create a giant 10MB
dancing hamster video and mail it to my friends, and they start
forwarding it around, am I "cheating the ISPs"? (Collectively, by the
way... since when does everyone have to start considering the
welfare of every business out there? What happened to capitalism?)
The ISPs absolutely can figure out how to bill for it: charge by
connection time or by quantity of data transferred. Look at business
accounts; they have detailed billing for "burst" and "sustained"
transfers, transfer limits, and more. What they can't figure out is
how to avoid getting hoist by their own petard, after they made fun of
AOL for those practices, and then repeated AOL's mistakes.
What BitTorrent does, though, is best described as "not
playing nice" in that sense. It will keep opening more and more and
more connections until it fully saturates those 6 Mbit/s, everyone
else be damned.
So what are those "max connections" and "max bandwidth" settings
I've seen in every BitTorrent client I've ever used?
Now again, I'm not saying that Comcast and the gang are
doing the right thing there. I'm just saying what their problem
is. You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive
oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
We're in agreement there. But why does your unbiased simple
explanation contain numerous factual inaccuracies which all back up
the terrible business practices and fraud of the ISPs?
Forging the sender, you say? Sounds like wire fraud
Not to mention the false advertising... they say "unlimited Internet". "Unlimited" but there's a secret limit; they should be estopped from booting users for using their connection. They say "Internet" but they offer access to only a subset of the Internet and deliberately tamper with protocols they dislike.
I see this all the time from Web sites that want to offset something by placing it in a different typeface, so they put font-family: Arial; or so. Then I don't have Arial, the font-family declaration falls through, and it ends up as whatever serif font the rest of my body text is.
Not the first time "designers" ignore both W3C recommendations ("Authors are encouraged to offer a generic font family as a last alternative, for improved robustness.") and simple common sense. But hey, all the world's a glossy brochure!
What you all need to realize is that this would have happened with or without the idiotic "prank" the kid pulled. U.S. citizens are routinely attacked in their own homes (in law, their "castles") and killed when they defend their family.
Ron Paul voted against it in the first place and has tried to restore civil rights at every chance since then.
Most other politicians voted for it without reading it, or were swept up in panic and kneejerk reactions, and now tiptoe around the issue. Ron Paul is adamant in requiring habeas corpus, warrants, and everything else that America has stood for... until now.
Slashdot Mirror
The US dollar used to be good. Have you checked out what happened to international exchange rates lately? Our currency is a laughingstock, as our empire is fast becoming. Time to cut our losses, pull our troops back, and get ourselves into shape domestically. Ron Paul sees that it's better to get some humility, back down, and regain some respect, than to overshoot and fail completely, to be ignored and kicked around by the rest of the world forever after.
Sorry, you are correct. Romney has stolen several straw polls from Ron Paul, not by drawing multiple supporters as Paul does, but buying multiple votes per person. Thanks for that.
Check this out: the San Francisco Republicans cancelled their straw poll because there were too many people ready to vote for Ron Paul: http://www.kcrg.com/explorepolitics/?feed=bim&id=12183556 Of note is the fact that Mitt Romney had some supporters waiting in line to vote multiple times.
They've tracked down the spammer and the software and configuration used. It's all about email and nothing about Web polls, let alone text message polls. So can the lies about "spamming the polls" please stop now? Thanks FOX.
Why are you bringing up John Walker Lindh? If he renounced his U.S. citizenship he's an enemy soldier and a P.O.W. If not he's a traitor and subject to civilian court. Except... wait a second, he was tortured and blamed for deaths caused by a U.S. airstrike. Yes, we surely are on the moral high ground aren't we.
Hey look at this:
So any Afghani or Iraqi toting an AK-47 around and fighting U.S. forces was a lawful combatant, no?
Every one of Bush's sham tribunals has eventually gotten chucked out by SCOTUS. Defense lawyers (when detainees are afforded them) and even prosecutors routinely complain about government pressure to ensure the detainees are found guilty, or unlawful, or whatever.
Here's a great comment from a Wikipedia footnote:
Your point about the "war" being of indefinite duration is well taken. It's why I and many others have significant problems with these undeclared wars against vague targets like "terror".
Because they figured that without explicit constraints the government would infringe rights as soon as it had the chance. (Even with them, sadly! USA PATRIOT)
Basically it's an extra check and balance that must be violated before armed revolution is the only option left to restore inalienable rights. It at least slows tyranny down.
Here's some history on the BoR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#Arguments_against_the_Bill_of_Rights
Hamilton feared explicitly that people like you would come along.
I agree with you. However, keep in mind that Firefox 3 will not run on DOS-based Windows environments (Windows 98). So users on those platforms will be forced to upgrade their OS or stop upgrading the real browser.
The real question, since we're doing comparisons, is does Microsoft still support those OSes?
One other fact to throw in there is that if some user or organization really desperately needs to have Windows 98 systems with a recent Firefox, there's nothing stopping them from paying for a contract for some firm to backport security fixes.
Batching fixes and releasing them on a particular day of the week is entirely reasonable. Sitting on known issues until they start getting exploited is not.
If I understand you are saying Microsoft bears greater responsibility toward customers that ignore patches for unreasonable lengths of time than toward customers who responsibly evaluate security fixes and either work around or patch affected systems. That view is wrong and harmful.
I'm surprised to find some salesdroid on a “news for nerds” site. Since when is outright fraud merely a “marketing problem”?
XKCD: Effect an Effect
If you were actually doing real development work you would not need to have a BlackBerry on you 24/7. Development work can only be done well when reasonably isolated from day-to-day production issues and given resources (time, people, equipment) to do quality work.
I'm not dissing you... Looking back on my career so far, I've never had a purely development job. Employers (perhaps fairly) don't want to spend the money to get actual developers and actual system administrators. So it becomes a juggling act.
To me the first part is assert your own rights and responsibilities. Being on call all the time is not fair to you unless you're getting paid for it (at least $160k–$200k/yr) and if you are being constantly utilized at 75%-100% capacity it lowers the quality of work you deliver to your customer. Next, keep in mind your various deliverables (build X system, bugfix Y system, keep Z system running) and apportion your time accordingly. If one impacts another, let your customer know right away so they can make the business decision on priorities.
None of this is easy of course. But in my mind it's one of the things that distinguishes a software engineer from some hacker in the corner. If we want to be respected as professionals we must bring professional skills to the table.
It's "effect change". Nice post otherwise.
Please provide legal citations to back up your claim that postdating checks is illegal.
I do not have citations handy myself, but my understanding is that while nothing stops you from postdating a check, and people aren't supposed to cash/deposit it until the date written on the check (keep in mind a date is a required component of a check legally), the bank is explicitly protected against any claims based on their cashing the check early.
The bank could charge NSF fees and the rest even if the check was presented early. Can't remember if you would have a claim against the person who presented it to the bank early. Contract terms can also alter the situation (such as "we process all checks electronically and don't look at the date" or something).
In the Senate maybe. I know in the House at least Ron Paul opposed the "USAPATRIOT" Act and argued for its repeal since.
I don't understand how anyone can claim to have voted for it in good conscience, given that most of them had not even read it before voting, and many at least were never given the chance to.
The Sunlight Rule would be a nice start to fixing the problem.
I appreciate your effort to view all sides of this issue and bring balance to the discussion. Unfortunately your points are utter hogwash.
It's based on the users of bandwidth paying for that bandwidth. How do you explain consumer-only ISPs that don't host content? How do they stay afloat?
Tell me how "flat rate" equates to "noone[sic] pays". ISPs charge the cost of their bandwidth divided by the number of customers, plus a little on top for their operations.
Keep in mind that all connections have bandwidth limits, and most have monthly transfer limits. (The latter should be treated as fraud by the courts; ISPs love to shout "unlimited!" in their advertisements. But that's a separate discussion.) If you start transferring a lot, uploading or downloading, you have to get a higher-priced account or pay for the extra data transferred a la carte.
Please. If I am a thoughtless user and I create a giant 10MB dancing hamster video and mail it to my friends, and they start forwarding it around, am I "cheating the ISPs"? (Collectively, by the way... since when does everyone have to start considering the welfare of every business out there? What happened to capitalism?) The ISPs absolutely can figure out how to bill for it: charge by connection time or by quantity of data transferred. Look at business accounts; they have detailed billing for "burst" and "sustained" transfers, transfer limits, and more. What they can't figure out is how to avoid getting hoist by their own petard, after they made fun of AOL for those practices, and then repeated AOL's mistakes.
So what are those "max connections" and "max bandwidth" settings I've seen in every BitTorrent client I've ever used?
We're in agreement there. But why does your unbiased simple explanation contain numerous factual inaccuracies which all back up the terrible business practices and fraud of the ISPs?
Forging the sender, you say? Sounds like wire fraud Not to mention the false advertising... they say "unlimited Internet". "Unlimited" but there's a secret limit; they should be estopped from booting users for using their connection. They say "Internet" but they offer access to only a subset of the Internet and deliberately tamper with protocols they dislike.
Wait, you're at school, writing papers with lots of equations in them, and you're not using TeX? Why is that again?
What you all need to realize is that this would have happened with or without the idiotic "prank" the kid pulled. U.S. citizens are routinely attacked in their own homes (in law, their "castles") and killed when they defend their family.
Ron Paul voted against it in the first place and has tried to restore civil rights at every chance since then.
... until now.
Most other politicians voted for it without reading it, or were swept up in panic and kneejerk reactions, and now tiptoe around the issue. Ron Paul is adamant in requiring habeas corpus, warrants, and everything else that America has stood for