I remember when a Latina got elected in Orange County, the most conservative county in the U.S. It is also becoming more and more Latino. Her opponent, a staunch conservative who had constantly engaged in race-baiting, declared that she must have gotten elected by illegal immigrants, demanded a recount, stormed around bitching about how illegals could be allowed to vote. Well, there was an investigation, and there was no evidence found supporting his claims.
Whites aren't standing around leering, no, at least most aren't, but there are many of them who can't wait to blame every problem they have on illegal immigrants. Should illegals be allowed to vote? No, but I really don't believe that there are that many of them even trying to. On election day most illegal aliens in the US will be where they usually are -- at work, doing their part to support the U.S. economy (and, of course, their families). Certainly there are more important problems in our electoral system -- like making sure the machines work properly and can verify votes -- than spending money and energy trying to intimidate people at the polls in the hopes that you might catch illegal aliens there.
What makes Ashcroft competent? His association with Assembly of God? His refusal to enforce laws that the NRA doesn't like even after the Bush Administration reluctantly re-started the war on terrorism? His refusal to go after terrorists and their ilk on the American right, despite that some have been found with WMD? His Puritanism, which extended even to covering up a statue of Justice? His open lying to Congress? His questioning of Congressmembers' patriotism? His refusal to release memos demanded by congressional investigations, or his arrogance in not even bothering to give a reason for refusing to release those memos when pressed? (and all of the latter happened after those memos were already in the hands of the Wall Street Journal!) Reno made some mistakes, no question about it. But she was always guided by a better sense of the national interest than Ashcroft, who makes it very clear he obeys a higher law than the Constitution. I don't give a damn what a man's religious beliefs are, but he's not hired to enforce those beliefs -- he's hired to protect the Constitution. And when Reno was called on her mistakes, she opened investigations and responded to Congressional inquiries; she didn't just call them traitors and storm off in a huff.
As for Elders, you're right, I had forgotten that comment, and you're correct it was a stupid one, as was her masturbation comment for that matter. Not because she was wrong in thinking these things but because she was rhetorically insensitive in presenting those ideas to the public in that manner. I guess it bothered me less because I felt she made sound policy decisions (and I agreed with the substance of most of her comments).
I was talking about Reno's stormtroopers; the point was even given waco (and Elian!) I still prefer her to the snake handling, Constitution-shredding weirdo who spent thousands of dollars of taxpayer money covering up boobs on the statue of Justice.
As for Elders, I'm judging her intelligence based on the content of what she said, not based on how she looked on TV once.
And if you want to talk about felons, a large number of Clinton's cabinet and adivsors were under investigation, indicted, and in several cases convicted, while he was in office. Mysterious deaths, disappearing law records, vindictive firings of innocent people... it was a circus. Or don't you recall? Clinton's Administration had more scandals than Reagan and Nixon combined.
The Clintons were under investigation because of a full frontal assault by right-wing forces on all levels who wanted revenge on the Democrats for beating Bush senior. None of those investigations turned up anything useful. All the Clinton "scandals" put together amounted to nothing -- some possibly shady private financial dealings (nothing near the order of Harkin or Halliburton) and of course the well-known blowjobs. Yes, Clinton was a philanderer. Big goddamned deal. It doesn't hold a candle to the Iran-Contra scandal, Watergate, or any of the dozens of scandals that rack the current administration. Clinton may have been a scoundrel but he didn't lie to take us to war against the wrong enemy, he didn't allow energy companies to dictate US energy policy and then hide the meetings from the American public, he didn't vindictively expose CIA agents in the field, threatening both their lives and ongoing CIA operations vital to national security, and he didn't let terrorists get ahold of 380 tons of explosives and decades-old nuclear material while pretending to fight a war on terrorism. And on your other points, Warren Christopher was a far better Secretary of Defense than Rumsfeld could ever be; the Clinton Administration responded to real threats and took our troops out of places they shouldn't have been in the first place (Mogadishu was a disaster but it was Bush I who put a half-hearted interventionary force into Somalia without a mission in the first place). Let's see, how many times did terrorists destroy the WTC under Clinton? None, and not from lack of trying. Both Clinton and Bush II underestimated the threat of Osama bin Laden and his crew, but Clinton still took it a hell of a lot more seriously then than Bush even does today!! Bush had never heard of al Qaeda until September 11th, and he still dropped the ball and focused on Saddam Hussein instead. Look at Bush's 9/20 speech on the terrorist attacks and you'll find almost verbatim copying of Clinton's speech in 1998 after Kenya and Tanzania. The few intelligent things Bush did to respond to terrorism were things the Clinton Administration had been doing already (and that Richard Clarke was telling him to do since the beginning of his presidency). But Bush soon abandoned even those things to lead us unilaterally into an illegal and self-destructive war.
Remember when the White House resembled a Frat House rather than a beacon of leadership the Free World?
I remember when the rest of the world looked to the U.S. for leadership rather than being completely alienated by its president's unilateral war games. I remember when the U.S. president could count on the support of our allies when he made foreign policy decisions. I remember when we weren't spending billions of dollars a month trying to control a country that wants us out while providing our real enemies, Islamist terrorists, exactly what they want and more -- massive instability, a pissed-off local Muslim population, a complete lack of security, large unprotected caches of weapons, and plenty of targets in the form of American soldiers (whose families Bush wouldn't even look in the eye until he came under massive amounts of political pressure). I remember when we had a president who actually read the newspapers, listened to input from our allies, and provoked respect from people around the world.
The CrapOS didn't print to dmesg when it had an error, I didn't find
*any* logs of any value in/var/log/ and more annoyingly I couldn't easily
find a dhcp client on the command line. (sudo networksetup is a joke).
In any real modern *BSD system, the kernel would print everything to the
dmesg, and all logs would be done in a sanitary fashion in/var/log/* via
syslog, and more importantly, I would have dhclient to use at my finger
tips. Just like a real FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD system.
In a "real *BSD system," I believe you have the option of turning off printing to dmesg and uninstalling dhclient. If you did that, would it still be *BSD? If so, the basis of your argument is wrong. BSD is not, to my knowledge, a "look and feel," but a UNIX system and a license. It seems to me -- though I am no expert -- that Apple has held to the letter of both.
Besides, don't whine about Apple taking and not giving back. If they are violating the BSD license, then you have an issue, but it seems to me they are operating within it completely (and, in fact, they have "given back" some things).
Your link is not to the USCCR's conclusion but to the dissenting opinion. You're (again) misrepresenting the conclusions of the USCCR, which were similar to Palast's conclusions. Also, Palast's conclusions have been backed up by other investigations.
This is especially important in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California where there are large numbers of illegal immigrants who may be influenced to illegally vote.
You misspelled "where there are large numbers of frightened redneck assholes who may be influenced to illegally intimidate anyone foreign-looking away from voting."
Did you even look at the link you cited? This is from Chapter 9:
"Perhaps the most dramatic undercount in Florida's election was the uncast ballots of countless eligible voters who were turned away at the polls or wrongfully purged from voter registration rolls. While statistical data, reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence, point to widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights, it is impossible to determine the extent of the disenfranchisement or to provide an adequate remedy to the persons whose voices were silenced in this historic election by a pattern and practice of injustice, ineptitude, and inefficiency. Despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic. And state officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."
In other words, it concluded the exact opposite of what you pretend it concluded.
Yes; both were far more competent than their counterparts under Bush. I'd take Reno any day over Ashcroft, stormtroopers and all! And Jocelyn Elders was extremely intelligent and competent. She just got canned for saying masturbation wasn't as evil as the right wing fundies claimed it was. Meanwhile, Bush has Elliot Abrams (a convicted felon, by the way) sitting the fundies down and explaining to them on their own terms that Bush's policy towards Israel is in accordance with Revelations in the Bible. These idiots should never have been taken seriously and should have been thrown out of the white house; instead Abrams paints a smile on his face and pretends to believe their apocalyptic bullshit just to keep their votes.
Well, they have to use all those extra cycles to do *something*. Compressing already compressed files seems like as good a use as anything. It keeps them off the streets....
$349.99 is a bit pricey, but with enough advertisements/sponsors etc, they might even be able give it away for free??
Well, it ain't free but you can get one really cheap -- there's this device that offers constant free music and talk streams all the time, and you can rip any stream you want by connecting another device. Most of the free music is paid for by advertising. It's pretty cool if you like advertising; they call it a "radio."
Of course, you can do this with your iPod currently -- using the belkin device someone else linked in this discussion, you can get photos from your camera to the iPod without having a laptop handy. BUT you can't view them. And it doesn't look like you will be able to view them on the new iPod either, unless you send them to iTunes first. At which point, the iPod is not storing the photos in their original format. In a way, Apple is actually making it more difficult to store and access your data here.
All that does (at least at this point) is let you store the photos; you will probably not be able to view them. It looks like you need to go through iTunes to view photos on the iPod; that way, they are entered in the iPod's database and they are stored in "iPod-viewable format," which is probably not the format you want to take pictures in. A serious photographer will want copies of their images in raw format. This belkin will let you store them there, but not view them or access them without a computer. So at this point you'd probably be better off with the Archos for photo storage needs, or just with a standard iPod, with which you can do the same thing.
I would say it is SanDisk that misses the boat in the above link -- the device there is cool, but it doesn't offer the crucial element that the ipod offers -- storage space. The benefit of something like the ipod is being able to shoot gigs upon gigs of raw format photos, store them, and keep shooting. The screen is nice just to flip through them and see what you have, or show your friends, but any real viewing will take place on a monitor or TV set.
The iPod does miss the boat too, however; at least at the moment it looks like you can only tranfer photos via iTunes (if you want to be able to view them on the screen), which means you need a computer to connect between your camera and the iPod (and also means that they will be stored in whatever format iTunes uses, not in raw format). There is already a tool out that lets you transfer photos to an iPod for storage, but again, you lose any iPod interface to looking at the photos.
Honestly this would be a cool gimmick but I wouldn't see myself buying one. I could see buying a device that was made to store photos that had a bigger screen, smaller clickwheel (or put it on the back), and an easy way to get information from photo media (CF, stick, whatever) into the device in whatever format you want, as well as an easy way to plug the device into a TV to play back. The point would be to eliminate the computer as the intermediary, so you can just carry around your camera and this thing... no need to buy new media every time you fill up the stick, and no need to run home to your computer in the middle of a shoot.
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Whites aren't standing around leering, no, at least most aren't, but there are many of them who can't wait to blame every problem they have on illegal immigrants. Should illegals be allowed to vote? No, but I really don't believe that there are that many of them even trying to. On election day most illegal aliens in the US will be where they usually are -- at work, doing their part to support the U.S. economy (and, of course, their families). Certainly there are more important problems in our electoral system -- like making sure the machines work properly and can verify votes -- than spending money and energy trying to intimidate people at the polls in the hopes that you might catch illegal aliens there.
As for Elders, you're right, I had forgotten that comment, and you're correct it was a stupid one, as was her masturbation comment for that matter. Not because she was wrong in thinking these things but because she was rhetorically insensitive in presenting those ideas to the public in that manner. I guess it bothered me less because I felt she made sound policy decisions (and I agreed with the substance of most of her comments).
As for Elders, I'm judging her intelligence based on the content of what she said, not based on how she looked on TV once.
And if you want to talk about felons, a large number of Clinton's cabinet and adivsors were under investigation, indicted, and in several cases convicted, while he was in office. Mysterious deaths, disappearing law records, vindictive firings of innocent people... it was a circus. Or don't you recall? Clinton's Administration had more scandals than Reagan and Nixon combined.
The Clintons were under investigation because of a full frontal assault by right-wing forces on all levels who wanted revenge on the Democrats for beating Bush senior. None of those investigations turned up anything useful. All the Clinton "scandals" put together amounted to nothing -- some possibly shady private financial dealings (nothing near the order of Harkin or Halliburton) and of course the well-known blowjobs. Yes, Clinton was a philanderer. Big goddamned deal. It doesn't hold a candle to the Iran-Contra scandal, Watergate, or any of the dozens of scandals that rack the current administration. Clinton may have been a scoundrel but he didn't lie to take us to war against the wrong enemy, he didn't allow energy companies to dictate US energy policy and then hide the meetings from the American public, he didn't vindictively expose CIA agents in the field, threatening both their lives and ongoing CIA operations vital to national security, and he didn't let terrorists get ahold of 380 tons of explosives and decades-old nuclear material while pretending to fight a war on terrorism. And on your other points, Warren Christopher was a far better Secretary of Defense than Rumsfeld could ever be; the Clinton Administration responded to real threats and took our troops out of places they shouldn't have been in the first place (Mogadishu was a disaster but it was Bush I who put a half-hearted interventionary force into Somalia without a mission in the first place). Let's see, how many times did terrorists destroy the WTC under Clinton? None, and not from lack of trying. Both Clinton and Bush II underestimated the threat of Osama bin Laden and his crew, but Clinton still took it a hell of a lot more seriously then than Bush even does today!! Bush had never heard of al Qaeda until September 11th, and he still dropped the ball and focused on Saddam Hussein instead. Look at Bush's 9/20 speech on the terrorist attacks and you'll find almost verbatim copying of Clinton's speech in 1998 after Kenya and Tanzania. The few intelligent things Bush did to respond to terrorism were things the Clinton Administration had been doing already (and that Richard Clarke was telling him to do since the beginning of his presidency). But Bush soon abandoned even those things to lead us unilaterally into an illegal and self-destructive war.
Remember when the White House resembled a Frat House rather than a beacon of leadership the Free World?
I remember when the rest of the world looked to the U.S. for leadership rather than being completely alienated by its president's unilateral war games. I remember when the U.S. president could count on the support of our allies when he made foreign policy decisions. I remember when we weren't spending billions of dollars a month trying to control a country that wants us out while providing our real enemies, Islamist terrorists, exactly what they want and more -- massive instability, a pissed-off local Muslim population, a complete lack of security, large unprotected caches of weapons, and plenty of targets in the form of American soldiers (whose families Bush wouldn't even look in the eye until he came under massive amounts of political pressure). I remember when we had a president who actually read the newspapers, listened to input from our allies, and provoked respect from people around the world.
The CrapOS didn't print to dmesg when it had an error, I didn't find *any* logs of any value in /var/log/ and more annoyingly I couldn't easily
find a dhcp client on the command line. (sudo networksetup is a joke).
In any real modern *BSD system, the kernel would print everything to the
dmesg, and all logs would be done in a sanitary fashion in /var/log/* via
syslog, and more importantly, I would have dhclient to use at my finger
tips. Just like a real FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD system.
In a "real *BSD system," I believe you have the option of turning off printing to dmesg and uninstalling dhclient. If you did that, would it still be *BSD? If so, the basis of your argument is wrong. BSD is not, to my knowledge, a "look and feel," but a UNIX system and a license. It seems to me -- though I am no expert -- that Apple has held to the letter of both.
Besides, don't whine about Apple taking and not giving back. If they are violating the BSD license, then you have an issue, but it seems to me they are operating within it completely (and, in fact, they have "given back" some things).
Your link is not to the USCCR's conclusion but to the dissenting opinion. You're (again) misrepresenting the conclusions of the USCCR, which were similar to Palast's conclusions. Also, Palast's conclusions have been backed up by other investigations.
You misspelled "where there are large numbers of frightened redneck assholes who may be influenced to illegally intimidate anyone foreign-looking away from voting."
In other words, it concluded the exact opposite of what you pretend it concluded.
Yes; both were far more competent than their counterparts under Bush. I'd take Reno any day over Ashcroft, stormtroopers and all! And Jocelyn Elders was extremely intelligent and competent. She just got canned for saying masturbation wasn't as evil as the right wing fundies claimed it was. Meanwhile, Bush has Elliot Abrams (a convicted felon, by the way) sitting the fundies down and explaining to them on their own terms that Bush's policy towards Israel is in accordance with Revelations in the Bible. These idiots should never have been taken seriously and should have been thrown out of the white house; instead Abrams paints a smile on his face and pretends to believe their apocalyptic bullshit just to keep their votes.
In an interview, the Republican campaign chairman said that the paperclips were only there to help the Republicans write letters.
Did you forget how many votes Florida was won by in 2000?
Well, they have to use all those extra cycles to do *something*. Compressing already compressed files seems like as good a use as anything. It keeps them off the streets....
All those teraflops and still no aliens? How many freaking teraflops do we need? Come on, folks, I just want one goddamned spaceman!!
Now how do you expect us to do that without reading the article?
Actually, it's so open to tampering, it makes me want to smoke hash.
No, no, he said "Bush," not "Microsoft."
Picture of George Bush waving a peace sign and the slogan "I'll bet you'll vote this time, Hippie!!"
And I, for one, welcome our new democratically elected overlords!
Yes but rumors will spread like wildfire on the Titanian internet. Which the Titanians will be browsing with their Apple Titanian powerbooks.....
Yeah, but if you want them to pee on your carpet, it's gonna cost extra. The pets will do it for free.
Of course, the only truly free cat will be free-as-in-willy....
Well, it ain't free but you can get one really cheap -- there's this device that offers constant free music and talk streams all the time, and you can rip any stream you want by connecting another device. Most of the free music is paid for by advertising. It's pretty cool if you like advertising; they call it a "radio."
Of course, you can do this with your iPod currently -- using the belkin device someone else linked in this discussion, you can get photos from your camera to the iPod without having a laptop handy. BUT you can't view them. And it doesn't look like you will be able to view them on the new iPod either, unless you send them to iTunes first. At which point, the iPod is not storing the photos in their original format. In a way, Apple is actually making it more difficult to store and access your data here.
All that does (at least at this point) is let you store the photos; you will probably not be able to view them. It looks like you need to go through iTunes to view photos on the iPod; that way, they are entered in the iPod's database and they are stored in "iPod-viewable format," which is probably not the format you want to take pictures in. A serious photographer will want copies of their images in raw format. This belkin will let you store them there, but not view them or access them without a computer. So at this point you'd probably be better off with the Archos for photo storage needs, or just with a standard iPod, with which you can do the same thing.
The iPod does miss the boat too, however; at least at the moment it looks like you can only tranfer photos via iTunes (if you want to be able to view them on the screen), which means you need a computer to connect between your camera and the iPod (and also means that they will be stored in whatever format iTunes uses, not in raw format). There is already a tool out that lets you transfer photos to an iPod for storage, but again, you lose any iPod interface to looking at the photos.
Honestly this would be a cool gimmick but I wouldn't see myself buying one. I could see buying a device that was made to store photos that had a bigger screen, smaller clickwheel (or put it on the back), and an easy way to get information from photo media (CF, stick, whatever) into the device in whatever format you want, as well as an easy way to plug the device into a TV to play back. The point would be to eliminate the computer as the intermediary, so you can just carry around your camera and this thing... no need to buy new media every time you fill up the stick, and no need to run home to your computer in the middle of a shoot.
iCaramba!