Oh give me a fucking break, do you really think that all of Bush's stumping speeches are available online? Since many of them were infused with ad-hoc additions, like those of many other politicians often are, even if the scripts are available they don't meet your standard of accuracy. And yet you are likely one of the Right Wingers whom will unrepentently swing around such accusations as the one you complain about and refuse to explain yourself. If I were not trying to be decent and balanced, according to the original meaning--pre-Nixon, then I would tell you to fuck off, but I'll leave that assumption and accusation for you to make. So now, tell me, am I wrong, and are you going to provide proof if I am?
All I have to say is that the system of winning power in the USA that the Right Wing political establishment in the USA has been using is exactly the same type of strategy used by the Right Wing politicians of 1930's Germany. Today we call them Nazis due to the name of the party that eventually won out--but that was in a true multi-party political system; something that we have never has in the USA. BTW: It seems that the Right Wing parties in Australia are up to the same tatics as their brethren in the USA. Doesn't that bode well for the free world?
The Republican Noise Machine By David Brock, SHould clear this up for you..... BTW: He used to be a reporter for the conservative press in the USA, so he isn't full of shit. (Unlike, some would say, Al Franken, whom frankly is just overly abrasive and a little quick to judge.) It is highly odd that in our "Shining City Upon a Hill" (to quote Pres. Reagan's horrible misuse of a biblical metaphor) the press is held to such low standards that reality TV seems to be more down to earth (and truthful) on most days.
The problem with how you are viewing this is that for you it is all an attack on you personally. That is kinda a part of the whole Repulican party mantra: That the whole fucking world revolves about what you want for yourself; and not that the world will revolve around whatever it wants as a gigantic whole (and some would argue group (im)moral cluster-fuck)--and that therefore we should all try to think about "We the People," and not about "I the Person."
I am going to ask you to look at the big picture now: e.g. "Is a tax cut for ME going to make it easier for the U.S.A. government to help pay for much needed improvement to our repulic's (since the U.S.A. is in fact a republic of states) schools?" The answer to this question is a resounding "NO!" This, my friend, is (in a nutshell) the difference between Repulican politics (What is Good for ME) and Decmocratic Party politics (What Might Work for the Most People Possible Without Ticking Off Too Many People--at First).
Now, I consider myself in some ways to be an old-line politcal (not social, or religious) conservative (a Jefferesonian, for those whom happen to know what that means--as opposed to being a Federalist)--but in other ways downright heavily (but not radically) progressive. This is why I find folk like Bush and Ashcroft to be abhorrent people. They seem to think that their personal beliefs must be held by all in the world--kinda like the other (I see them as radical) fundamentallist and religious literallist folk out there (may they be Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, or otherwise). (I really hate to bring it up, but the world has changed a lot during the history of man, and to take the words of anybody completely literally, especially concerning spiritual and political matters--since most people cannot separate the two in their minds--is not all that well thought out, or particularly safe.) Now in light of this I want things to change--at the government level--as little as truly makes sense, and for people to stay the hell out of my personal life and business. Yet at the same time, I support things like separating the legal definition of marriage from the often-religious one in our legal codes (otherwise represented as making homosexual marriage legal) despite the fact that I do not involve myself in so-called alternative lifestyles. So now, in another nutshell, I have presented the point of view of a "Social Progressive."
If you would like to comment on whom may just happen to be right/wrong/whatever then I'm sure that some people would like to hear it. As for me, I think that I've made my point.
You do realize that it would be easier to just support ECMA/JavaScript + DOM1/DOM2 + HTML 4.01 + CSS1 in place of making sure that you are IE (whatever version) compatible--since that is what IE currently, and for a good deal of the recent past, supports. Hell, if you do that then you don't even have to worry about what OS they run...
I mean really, would Jesus wear a Rolex? Yes, he would--he was the son of a very wealthy man (and his brother--read that as you wish--James "The Just" became the leader of the temple not all that long before it was reduced to the current remains of the "old city")--artisans such as carpenters (in a place where people usually lived in mud-brick houses--and anything large made of wood was a luxury item of some sort) were quite well off. That is what was really damn odd about Jesus of Nazareth, and is indeed part of the reason that we remember him today--he was the only prophet of the time in his part of the world that wasn't some poor "crazy" person (instead, some would argue, he was a rich "crazy" person). So yes, he would wear a Rolex--but only when it would benefit him in some really important way (otherwise he would risk ticking off the poor folk too much).
Oh well, that's what we get for being happy once we have our bread and circus. Our world is going the very same way as that of the Romans (for one example) for the very same reasons. People don't learn their history and thusly they repeat it. With any luck we'll all be dead of old age the next time this happens--just so that we won't have to watch it all happen all over again......
All I have to say is that I'm not really going to take seriously somebody whom talks about security problems but still serves webpages from a M$ IIS server..........
" I don't know if the networks aren't really setup for data, or if they just don't want to sell it for some reason."
Oh please tell me that you aren't that stupid! Do you know what the bandwidth of a voice call is (sound via ADPCM, via a digital DATA system)? (The truth is that it varies between encodings, but is is usually about 64kb/s when sent uncompressed--a-la landline service. GSM is something more like 19.2kb/s--lots of compression used==funny sounding voice.) And what, perchance is this data routed over? Oh yes, it is an x.25/frame relay style network. (I know that x.25 and frame relay aren't the same thing, and if you had better grammar skills you'd have realized that already--non-native speakers exempted.) I've got some news for you--they have the capability to make cheap data access available just a easily as IP data blocks get ferried from one location to the next in the landline system by frame relay. In fact, according to the telcom act (as ammended 1996, and probably hasn't changed here) they don't even really have much right to know if they are routing raw data or voice--outside of the technical concerns of actually making the connections needed--when it comes down to information posted about the call to the billing system. Granted, that is a very strict interpretation of the law as written (and ONLY applies in the USA, so far as I know)--God forbid they enforce it that way, and prevent the providers from raping anybody whom doesn't just kiss their feet due to their sheer glory--I don't know about all of the case law. But, you should get the point by now. It is about taking everybody who wants to use the full power of the tool given and making their lives as difficult and expensive as possible because they didn't just pony up with lots of cash like good plebian sheep should. (You should also have the vocabulary necessary to see what is wrong with that kind of reasoning.)
The internet is not subject to the same types of local controls that the phone services are subject to. End of Story. And actually, if you didn't notice, cell phone usage can only be limited once the emergency has gotten to such large propotions that they won't be doing anybody much good anyhow--since they will be swamped with 911 calls.
It isn't about the WAN--it is about the size of the antenna. Think about it. Miles and miles of powerlines already make great antennas for all sorts of things that we wish they didn't pick up (WAER in Syracuse, NY, for instance--the transmitter is downtown in the university area). One can only imagine the havoc that having wide bandwidth signals spewing from such a large antenna would cause if it were done at high enough power levels to be useful. Hell, internet over plain cable TV lines does bad things to RF freespace spectrum that isn't allocated to the cable system as primary--due to poor installations. You think that the power distribution grid is any better? Ha! You can hear a 60Hz hum on many frequencies in many places in US due to leakage on the power lines. Imagine adding internet width spectra to that!
So, the question is not LAN/WAN--it is antenna size!
Ummm....the TRS-80 laptop that I have in my possesion is based on the Intel 8085 chip................. That is not the same as a Z80 by any stretch of the imagination.......
Kevin's NEW plex86 only does linux right now, but he doesn't really care about any other OS's right now. He's about proof-of-concept, not a finished product. I know, because I maintain the old plex86 project (currently on savannah)--and hope to work more on it soon. Granted, don't expect any new features until I can make it all maintainable by some of us folks who are a bit short of the genius mark.........
The original plex86 runs windows 95 ok, and I'm working on fixing it up so that one day it may even run something less primitive from M$. It also happens to run reactOS, QNX, some old mach versions, and minix (from what I hear). Basically, if it will run on a crappy 386 clone it will run on plex86 (the old version, hosted on savannah--not Kevin's latest toy/ attempt to get a job doing what he enjoys, which is on sf.net).
Ok then, hot shot, then help out the original plex86 project (kevin likes to name his new projects the same thing that many people negotiated be the name of the old projects)--which is just a different processor core for bochs + some cruft I'm working on removing. Bochs isn't optimised worth a damn because they don't see the need to. Not that I think they are right--but hey, you can try to convince them otherwise--I'm not going to try anymore (I'd be wasting effort I could be spending on getting enough of my work done to spend some time on the code of the project I've adopted).
Yes, there is a law...
They only people/organizations that can legally demand your SSN are (last time I checked):
The Federal Government
The local State Governemnt, and only for proof of ID cross-checking purposes
Your Employer, and technically speaking, only for tax purposes
Your Bank(s)--including third-party lenders (you should know why)
Not anybody other than the IRS, the military, and the court system seem to care about these restrictions, however. Most people don't even know that they exist. E.G.: Ever go to college? As for SSN's and the local state government, you can now request in many states that they NOT put your SSN on your driver's license--NH being one of them. However, many DMV employees still don't know this (even though it is part of the driver's Ed course--and thus they are supposed to have the current reference handy to check on)--and it can be quite a pain to do. Also, if you do have your SSN removed from your driver's license you can expect to have to carry a copy of your SS ID-card around anyway (for banking, ID checking, etc.)--so the benefit ID-theft wise is nearly nil. (Note that I DO NOT mean a literal Xerox-type copy--as I believe that would be a federal crime). Changes to the system (being more strict as to the legal use of SSN's) were in the works pre-2001, but Ashcroft may well have nixed them as part of all of this "Homeland Security" B.S.
Dang it, most of the East has power. For once they even said it on the news (while ignoring the fact that most of the people watching in the Boston TV market--for one example--just don't much give a shit what happens in NYC--even when it is important). Sure, we need to know that part of the grid went down--but here in NH, where I am now--about 22Mi from the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant--I don't think that anything is likely to happen if it didn't happen already.
The decision to fly the Challenger was mostly made by Rocketdyne and Rockwell International execs who were convinced that everything was ok because of the incomplete information they asked for the engineers to supply. There was ample private idiocy to blame. The government was only to blame in that it (oh God) took the execs at their word that the system would still be safe at a launch temperature of about 56 deg. F (after a night at about 38 deg F). Private company bravado had a lot to do with it. My source of information: "A Gift of Fire," a book about that very type of screw-up.
Now, when it comes to who runs the show, I've got news for you. When stockholders are answered to before customers are all hell breaks loose. CEO's become needlessly ostentatiously rich, employees become commodities, customers get ignored, and other evil things happen. Get your information straight before you criticize other people. (Granted privatization isn't always the cause of said things, nor is the stock market, but they are contributing factors that cannot be ignored.)
Who the frig really believes that they'll ACTUALLY tell us what happened when they know? C'mon people, somebody had to have done something really imcompetent at a really high level here for a blackout of this magnitude to actually happen--assuming that it wasn't caused by some sort of solar flare or something. They ain't gonna tell us jack shit.
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Oh give me a fucking break, do you really think that all of Bush's stumping speeches are available online? Since many of them were infused with ad-hoc additions, like those of many other politicians often are, even if the scripts are available they don't meet your standard of accuracy. And yet you are likely one of the Right Wingers whom will unrepentently swing around such accusations as the one you complain about and refuse to explain yourself. If I were not trying to be decent and balanced, according to the original meaning--pre-Nixon, then I would tell you to fuck off, but I'll leave that assumption and accusation for you to make. So now, tell me, am I wrong, and are you going to provide proof if I am?
A worldview describes a hell of a lot more than sombody's religion
"He" wasn't stupid either, if you know anything about learning disabilities......
All I have to say is that the system of winning power in the USA that the Right Wing political establishment in the USA has been using is exactly the same type of strategy used by the Right Wing politicians of 1930's Germany. Today we call them Nazis due to the name of the party that eventually won out--but that was in a true multi-party political system; something that we have never has in the USA.
BTW: It seems that the Right Wing parties in Australia are up to the same tatics as their brethren in the USA. Doesn't that bode well for the free world?
The Republican Noise Machine By David Brock, SHould clear this up for you.....
BTW: He used to be a reporter for the conservative press in the USA, so he isn't full of shit. (Unlike, some would say, Al Franken, whom frankly is just overly abrasive and a little quick to judge.)
It is highly odd that in our "Shining City Upon a Hill" (to quote Pres. Reagan's horrible misuse of a biblical metaphor) the press is held to such low standards that reality TV seems to be more down to earth (and truthful) on most days.
The problem with how you are viewing this is that for you it is all an attack on you personally. That is kinda a part of the whole Repulican party mantra:
That the whole fucking world revolves about what you want for yourself; and not that the world will revolve around whatever it wants as a gigantic whole (and some would argue group (im)moral cluster-fuck)--and that therefore we should all try to think about "We the People," and not about "I the Person."
I am going to ask you to look at the big picture now: e.g. "Is a tax cut for ME going to make it easier for the U.S.A. government to help pay for much needed improvement to our repulic's (since the U.S.A. is in fact a republic of states) schools?" The answer to this question is a resounding "NO!" This, my friend, is (in a nutshell) the difference between Repulican politics (What is Good for ME) and Decmocratic Party politics (What Might Work for the Most People Possible Without Ticking Off Too Many People--at First).
Now, I consider myself in some ways to be an old-line politcal (not social, or religious) conservative (a Jefferesonian, for those whom happen to know what that means--as opposed to being a Federalist)--but in other ways downright heavily (but not radically) progressive. This is why I find folk like Bush and Ashcroft to be abhorrent people. They seem to think that their personal beliefs must be held by all in the world--kinda like the other (I see them as radical) fundamentallist and religious literallist folk out there (may they be Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, or otherwise). (I really hate to bring it up, but the world has changed a lot during the history of man, and to take the words of anybody completely literally, especially concerning spiritual and political matters--since most people cannot separate the two in their minds--is not all that well thought out, or particularly safe.) Now in light of this I want things to change--at the government level--as little as truly makes sense, and for people to stay the hell out of my personal life and business. Yet at the same time, I support things like separating the legal definition of marriage from the often-religious one in our legal codes (otherwise represented as making homosexual marriage legal) despite the fact that I do not involve myself in so-called alternative lifestyles. So now, in another nutshell, I have presented the point of view of a "Social Progressive."
If you would like to comment on whom may just happen to be right/wrong/whatever then I'm sure that some people would like to hear it. As for me, I think that I've made my point.
You do realize that it would be easier to just support ECMA/JavaScript + DOM1/DOM2 + HTML 4.01 + CSS1 in place of making sure that you are IE (whatever version) compatible--since that is what IE currently, and for a good deal of the recent past, supports. Hell, if you do that then you don't even have to worry about what OS they run...
I mean really, would Jesus wear a Rolex?
Yes, he would--he was the son of a very wealthy man (and his brother--read that as you wish--James "The Just" became the leader of the temple not all that long before it was reduced to the current remains of the "old city")--artisans such as carpenters (in a place where people usually lived in mud-brick houses--and anything large made of wood was a luxury item of some sort) were quite well off. That is what was really damn odd about Jesus of Nazareth, and is indeed part of the reason that we remember him today--he was the only prophet of the time in his part of the world that wasn't some poor "crazy" person (instead, some would argue, he was a rich "crazy" person). So yes, he would wear a Rolex--but only when it would benefit him in some really important way (otherwise he would risk ticking off the poor folk too much).
Oh well, that's what we get for being happy once we have our bread and circus. Our world is going the very same way as that of the Romans (for one example) for the very same reasons. People don't learn their history and thusly they repeat it. With any luck we'll all be dead of old age the next time this happens--just so that we won't have to watch it all happen all over again......
All I have to say is that I'm not really going to take seriously somebody whom talks about security problems but still serves webpages from a M$ IIS server..........
Did you note the fact that they re-defined "T1" on their page?
" I don't know if the networks aren't really setup for data, or if they just don't want to sell it for some reason."
Oh please tell me that you aren't that stupid! Do you know what the bandwidth of a voice call is (sound via ADPCM, via a digital DATA system)? (The truth is that it varies between encodings, but is is usually about 64kb/s when sent uncompressed--a-la landline service. GSM is something more like 19.2kb/s--lots of compression used==funny sounding voice.) And what, perchance is this data routed over? Oh yes, it is an x.25/frame relay style network. (I know that x.25 and frame relay aren't the same thing, and if you had better grammar skills you'd have realized that already--non-native speakers exempted.) I've got some news for you--they have the capability to make cheap data access available just a easily as IP data blocks get ferried from one location to the next in the landline system by frame relay. In fact, according to the telcom act (as ammended 1996, and probably hasn't changed here) they don't even really have much right to know if they are routing raw data or voice--outside of the technical concerns of actually making the connections needed--when it comes down to information posted about the call to the billing system. Granted, that is a very strict interpretation of the law as written (and ONLY applies in the USA, so far as I know)--God forbid they enforce it that way, and prevent the providers from raping anybody whom doesn't just kiss their feet due to their sheer glory--I don't know about all of the case law.
But, you should get the point by now. It is about taking everybody who wants to use the full power of the tool given and making their lives as difficult and expensive as possible because they didn't just pony up with lots of cash like good plebian sheep should. (You should also have the vocabulary necessary to see what is wrong with that kind of reasoning.)
Then your TV isn't installed properly.
The internet is not subject to the same types of local controls that the phone services are subject to. End of Story. And actually, if you didn't notice, cell phone usage can only be limited once the emergency has gotten to such large propotions that they won't be doing anybody much good anyhow--since they will be swamped with 911 calls.
It isn't about the WAN--it is about the size of the antenna. Think about it. Miles and miles of powerlines already make great antennas for all sorts of things that we wish they didn't pick up (WAER in Syracuse, NY, for instance--the transmitter is downtown in the university area). One can only imagine the havoc that having wide bandwidth signals spewing from such a large antenna would cause if it were done at high enough power levels to be useful. Hell, internet over plain cable TV lines does bad things to RF freespace spectrum that isn't allocated to the cable system as primary--due to poor installations. You think that the power distribution grid is any better? Ha! You can hear a 60Hz hum on many frequencies in many places in US due to leakage on the power lines. Imagine adding internet width spectra to that!
So, the question is not LAN/WAN--it is antenna size!
Ummm....the TRS-80 laptop that I have in my possesion is based on the Intel 8085 chip................. That is not the same as a Z80 by any stretch of the imagination.......
Kevin's NEW plex86 only does linux right now, but he doesn't really care about any other OS's right now. He's about proof-of-concept, not a finished product. I know, because I maintain the old plex86 project (currently on savannah)--and hope to work more on it soon. Granted, don't expect any new features until I can make it all maintainable by some of us folks who are a bit short of the genius mark.........
The original plex86 runs windows 95 ok, and I'm working on fixing it up so that one day it may even run something less primitive from M$. It also happens to run reactOS, QNX, some old mach versions, and minix (from what I hear). Basically, if it will run on a crappy 386 clone it will run on plex86 (the old version, hosted on savannah--not Kevin's latest toy/ attempt to get a job doing what he enjoys, which is on sf.net).
Ok then, hot shot, then help out the original plex86 project (kevin likes to name his new projects the same thing that many people negotiated be the name of the old projects)--which is just a different processor core for bochs + some cruft I'm working on removing. Bochs isn't optimised worth a damn because they don't see the need to. Not that I think they are right--but hey, you can try to convince them otherwise--I'm not going to try anymore (I'd be wasting effort I could be spending on getting enough of my work done to spend some time on the code of the project I've adopted).
Or, if he were still alive, you could just run Dijkstra on it.....
No, you need GIS.........
Not anybody other than the IRS, the military, and the court system seem to care about these restrictions, however. Most people don't even know that they exist. E.G.: Ever go to college?
As for SSN's and the local state government, you can now request in many states that they NOT put your SSN on your driver's license--NH being one of them. However, many DMV employees still don't know this (even though it is part of the driver's Ed course--and thus they are supposed to have the current reference handy to check on)--and it can be quite a pain to do. Also, if you do have your SSN removed from your driver's license you can expect to have to carry a copy of your SS ID-card around anyway (for banking, ID checking, etc.)--so the benefit ID-theft wise is nearly nil. (Note that I DO NOT mean a literal Xerox-type copy--as I believe that would be a federal crime). Changes to the system (being more strict as to the legal use of SSN's) were in the works pre-2001, but Ashcroft may well have nixed them as part of all of this "Homeland Security" B.S.
Dang it, most of the East has power. For once they even said it on the news (while ignoring the fact that most of the people watching in the Boston TV market--for one example--just don't much give a shit what happens in NYC--even when it is important). Sure, we need to know that part of the grid went down--but here in NH, where I am now--about 22Mi from the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant--I don't think that anything is likely to happen if it didn't happen already.
Now, when it comes to who runs the show, I've got news for you. When stockholders are answered to before customers are all hell breaks loose. CEO's become needlessly ostentatiously rich, employees become commodities, customers get ignored, and other evil things happen. Get your information straight before you criticize other people. (Granted privatization isn't always the cause of said things, nor is the stock market, but they are contributing factors that cannot be ignored.)
Who the frig really believes that they'll ACTUALLY tell us what happened when they know? C'mon people, somebody had to have done something really imcompetent at a really high level here for a blackout of this magnitude to actually happen--assuming that it wasn't caused by some sort of solar flare or something. They ain't gonna tell us jack shit.