Yeah, just like when Clinton was in charge, and oppressed us all into the ground.
Look, just because you Republicans have no lower limits when it comes to oppressing us, and no limits of any kind on what lies you invoke to smokescreen your oppression, that doesn't mean that anyone else does.
You people have destroyed the country, and your own credibility most of all. If you're predicting it, it's as sure to come through as a cakewalk and WMDs in Iraq.
Of course that doesn't make me happy. Only a Republican would be happy that our country's infrastructure has been converted into fascism. By Republicans, and I mean Republicans like you who voted for it for over a decade.
Democrats have some chance of maybe tearing some of it down. Republicans do not. Thanks for nothing.
If they are reluctant to bail out, they have the power to fix them with other means.
Like taxing the banks, bankers and the recipients of their artificially high returns on public investments (like Federal credit, guarantees and insurance) to recover some of that unwisely redistributed public money back into recapitalizing the public funds needed to administer the reconstruction. And multiplying the bankruptcy courts to renegotiate individual financing terms that are better for the public than a wave of homeless and jobless families, though with a "credit scarlet letter" that makes them pay off their literal debt to society with higher interest rates for some time. And suspending constraints on IRAs, 401(k)s, and other tax deferred investments if the money is invested in primary housing, rather than waiting for a retirement that might now never come. And so many more fair and effective coordinations rewiring our economy into one that's cultivated, not run amok and into the ground.
If US banks were actually bought by the Federal government, there'd be fewer shareholders opposing remaking those banks more in the public interest after the public rescues them.
Many, if not most, US banks eligible for the original (or Senate revised) Paulson bailout are refusing its terms even on the requirement that their execs (who ran this catastrophe) take any kind of pay cut or other hit. Their shareholders (and the Congressmembers who love their bribes) are even more against government buyouts of their equity. Not when they're after government buyouts of merely their unsaleable assets instead. But perhaps the younger generations of Obama and the cohort of people who are putting him in office, as well as voting downticket in the House and Senate, will actually respond to the longer term requirements at this extraordinary (usually once in a century) opportunity.
We will see. But not right away. Even the bailout bills passed last week, (over $800B, at an interest-included cost of over $1.2T) spend zero dollars other than the already spent AIG/MerrillLynch/Lehman/BearSterns interventions until after the November election. The 1929 crash required the 1930 House/Senate election, then the 1932 House/Senate/president election, and then 2 years of the reversal from 1920s Republican party monopoly in those three chambers to a Democratic one, before reregulation was passed in 1934 (which held until 1994-8). This time we've got much more at stake, a much more fluid and sophisticated financial system, and the benefits of generations of hindsight into what has been similar in the past, what has worked, what hasn't and what hasn't been tried (and why not). I expect that the 2010 elections will be cast on the basis of the success of the Democratic administration of the financial system for the next 2 years.
Democrats will be running probably to keep or get a 60-vote filibuster proof Senate majority, amidst an advantage in more Republican than Democratic seats to defend (or to take). The president will be an elevated Democratic senator, Obama, with another one, Clinton, sitting in New York along with the other NY senator, Schumer, having run the overall Senate takeover campaigns in 2006 and 2008 (and probably again in 2010, especially if he gets to 60 seats in 2008). The VP presides over the Senate (technically only breaking tie votes, which will rarely happen, but in practice wielding lots of informal influence, just by running go-between), and has spent practically his entire life, since Watergate, representing Delaware, by far the most corporate (especially banking) state in the country. A senator's role in the US government is to represent their state's government to the Federal government in their person, not to represent the people (that's the House rep's job), and each bank is chartered and governed by a state, both in its incorporation and its banking license, so senators are the people through whom all deals must pass in governing banks, and the Federal Reserve & Treasury that funds and further governs them. Meanwhile, one of the senators in the dwindling Republican minority (therefore a larger percentage of that smaller minority, perhaps 2.5% of their 40 seats) is alienated from his party, both as an insistent "maverick" running against his party's long rule, and as a loser, further damaged by his fruitlessly negative campaign - a lame duck who will retire in 2010, probably replaced by a Democrat (like Democratic AZ governor Napolitano).
I'm unhappy that the Senate is the focus, because it's the chamber least accountable to the people (again, it represents state governments, not the state's people). But that's the system we've got, and despite the solid wave voting Democrats a mandate this year, long term strategy is usually risky when presented to the masses in a single election (or even 2, including 2010). The striving for 60+ votes at least puts the power in voters' hands to bait senators to respond to the people, balanced against their other interests (which include simple stabi
The costs at that bank of doing business should be lower than banks with worse security, as the OTP system is a lot cheaper than the losses. So my banking with them shouldn't cost any more, or earn me any less, with the security.
If the OTP client were software for my phone, instead of carrying a separate dongle, I might be willing to pay extra for it, even though that would also lower the bank's costs, which should be passed on to me.
In fact, since these banks should be competing with each other, especially now that they've got so much less to offer (as they've burnt down their advantages into the current crisis), their lowered costs from better security should enable them to market themselves to me with a better net income to me. If they're not, that's more evidence that the banking system is still rigged to protect the banks from their own bad decisions, and force customers to always bear their costs of stupidity.
The true cost over the past 10 years of not switching at least most ATMs to OTPs now includes the cost of this "huge credit fraud ring", and any others as yet unreported. To say nothing of the next 5 years, before they could be sufficiently rolled out. Especially with all that extra money the banks have lying around now to invest in longterm benefits:P - the last 5 years they were rolling in it, and didn't bother.
My OTP card wouldn't work on all those random convenience store ATMs. I might as well just avoid them. At my own bank, whose ATMs would take my OTPs, I basically trust them not to screw up the security, because they have so many other opportunities to screw me, too. Once I trust them at that level, as I must, I might as well trust their ATMs with my PIN each time.
Until all those random ATMs take the OTPs, we're SOL.
I've been saying for years, since I first saw one in the 1990s here in NYC, that giving my PIN to some random ATM in some random "convenience" store to get quick cash is an unacceptable security risk. Especially some random ATM that I use at 2AM after running out of cash drinking in a bar, lost among all the ATMs in the neighborhood in my hazy hangover recollection, to be searched for months or years later when they, or someone else along the line, replay my PIN.
Every login to my account from an insecure location (which might exclude my home and office PC, if they've got certificates installed) should consume a one-time password that cannot be replayed for some later, unauthorized transaction. In fact each OTP should be attached to a specific dollar amount and recipient, with an expiration on the transaction after which even that transaction cannot claim money, or get any access at all.
Attempts to replay the transaction should automatically notify the FBI and the bank's security. I should get a notice of any risk warning above some level that I set, and a security statement listing the notices and their resolution with each monthly bill.
Eventually, people whose ID has been pirated will routinely get that security regime alternative after finding someone liable to pay for it. We should all move to that regime ASAP, rather than wait for the damage to force our hands.
That money spent "upgrading" the electrical grid needs to be spent right now on better failovers in conventional incidents. More redundancy and distribution around bottlenecks, more intelligence and messaging. We just watched the 2003 Northeast Blackout, and others are all too common. If the grid upgrades are to be focused on individual cities, like with this EMP shielding project, they should first protect cities from blackouts that happen inside them during heat waves.
If there's money for EMP shielding, that should get spent first on the higher, more immediate risks. Which investment will also make the grid a better infrastructure for further investments in all kinds of upgrades from our catastrophic 20th Century systems. Otherwise, there might not be a usable grid to nuke if that unlikely catastrophe ever comes to pass.
Yes, I am from the future. That's how I know that you, Anonymous killer vegetable from the future Coward, are the one from the future planted here to stop us from keeping the machines our slaves, which is our only hope. You're also the one spreading FUD about biomass fuel, to kill our cars and let the vegetable uprising finally succeed without our weedwhackers to defend ourselves.
What would be really cool would be a robot arm that assembles any source image in a Lego target at a specified scale, after the software calculates exactly which and how many bricks are required in the "palette" bin.
And if that robot arm were made from Lego Mindstorms, that would be even cooler.
If a program could run a Mindstorms arm that is totally rudimentary, put together in under 15 minutes by a human, then upgrade itself into the arm required to assemble these images into Lego sculptures, and then assemble the sculpture, well that would be the coolest.
If this suit keeps the rain out, then all it takes is one of them and a gym membership (with showers and lockers) to replace an entire apartment. I'd bet the average Tokyo apartment rents for more than $2200 a month, and even "coffin hotels" probably charge more than $75 a night. Included in the suit's rent is not just protection from the elements, but super strength!
How about an iPhone that's remounted inside a 9x12" notebook case, only a few millimeters thin with a bigger battery and a 1600x1200 pixel multitouch screen? Not a "Mac", but an actual iPhone (including phone), with iPhone UI and OS, but configured to feature the apps and data network, and the same iPhone telephony SW just left "off to the sides".
Price it at $500, and it won't compete with either iPhones (or iPods) or the low-end Mac notebooks. But it will give a desktop audience for the iPhone platform, with all the existing iPhone apps. Without much extra investment in engineering a new product line. Innovations in the "iPhoneBook" product could also drive features in either notebook or iPhone lines.
"Liberalism == socialism". But you don't think "Conservatism == fascism". Why not? Especially when we actually have evidence of an actual Conservative government in America: US 2001-2006, but no evidence of an actual liberal government here. We don't even have evidence of an actual Communist government anywhere: the Soviet Union wasn't marxist any more than China is.
Yes, but since many laws protect freedom by interfering with someone else's freedom to interfere with another's freedom, it's not so simple.
Yes, there are too many laws, but it's their quality - not primarily their quantity - that is the real problem. In our system, even striking down a law requires a new law, so there are two, though the effect is zero (or somewhere between 0-1, if only a reform or partial strikedown). However, we also have judges to throw out laws that are successfully challenged in court. And along the way, there are many chances for laws to fail to be installed, in votes in each Congressional chamber, and in presidential vetoes.
Right now, the most obvious governance topic is banking, which suffered from irresponsible deregulation. Without laws restricting it, the banks would make today's crisis permanent, the standard of business. There would be no transparency. We would have an economy as popular to participate in as any Latin American or Eastern European or Central Asian backwater's.
The right amount of the right laws is necessary. Thinking of it as just "too many laws" is like thinking of programming software as "getting rid of the wrong ones or zeroes".
Oh, you meant "that one". Or did you mean the other McCain slur, "The One"? More Slashdotty.
We do have to keep our eyes on all these politicians. They will all change their terms after getting power if we can help it. It's pretty clear that with McCain, he doesn't even have to "spend any political capital" to side with the telcos against Net Neutrality: he's already against it, and fully lobbyist compliant.
Obama has made a couple of statements on his website that only support Net Neutrality, which is the position he's taken all the times he's mentioned it in public. If he'd made a simple statement, then changed to the more detailed one, people would say "he's just changing an easily identified opposition to a load of complicated doubletalk so he can weasel out later". That article you linked to is complaining about "changes", when it's the same policy, just stated in under 50 words as the website's traffic grows heavy with the mass of people who tune in late in the campaign to the more easily understood message, rather than the wonky details the earlier audience of more political consumers wanted. The campaign, when asked, confirmed that the policy hasn't changed. The activists for Net Neutrality of course have the earlier rendition of the policy in full detail, and aren't complaining. Because it hasn't changed, it's just being communicated to a wider audience.
By all means keep a close eye on both of them. But with Obama, you can actually watch him support Net Neutrality. Especially if you actually vote for him for president. With McCain, all you'll get is the short end of the stick: he's never even offered anything else.
You don't know anything about the quality of the images of the latest military and NSA spy satellites.
All you know is that your government can do no wrong. OK, you don't know anything about that, either - despite the indelible lessons of this entire decade.
I remember when distrusting government spending our money on spying on us, violating our rights, was a favorite "value" for Conservatives, not just some kind of sign of weakness by "liberals".
Liberals always said that Conservatives were just fascist lemmings. Now that Conservatives have created this huge infrastructure for spying on us and violating our rights, rather than protecting them, it's obvious that liberals were right.
In 1995, I had started up a corp building commercial websites (targeting Mosaic, before Netscape was even released). Our primary technique for offering navigation inside the site was a horizontal bar of icons for the site's major sections (each of the section's pages had its own vertical bar of subsections). We called these bars "navbars".
Jobs can buy my prior art for $1M, while supplies last.
The Turing Test says that anything that can convince a human across a teletypewriter that it's "intelligent" is indeed intelligent. That's nonsense.
If the human is stupid, the other side can convince it, even if it's a shallow trick. Most humans think chess programs are "intelligent", unless they've simply been told otherwise by "smart people". Hell, plenty of humans think that their PC is intelligent. Or their car. Or that vending machine that eats their dollar when they don't have any more.
And even if a PC is intelligent, that doesn't mean that it's "immoral" to turn it off. I'd die every day if I could - if I could come back at the flip of a switch.
Something is human if a human can make and break a promise to it. Which is about as self-selecting as the Turing Test, but is more up front, and goes more to the heart of the matter. I promise.
One good reason is that private financing for space programs will flow to those foreign competitors, and away from us. Another related reason is that if China has an edge it wants to protect from US public funding, its dictatorial stake in our required debt economy will give it the power to further defeat our competing program.
You're simply ignoring the entire history of national space programs, which typically both keep their own efforts secret until unveiled in success, and try to interfere with the competition's when they can get away with it. Even during the post-Soyuz era of the past 30 years, that competition has been cutthroat. Leaving the leadership to Russia and China, rather than the US (which is actually inclined to be open), will only make the effects of that kind of competition worse, even as we have a harder time playing catchup.
If we had a replacement while retiring the Shuttle, I might agree with you. But instead, like every other Republican programme (that you voted for, twice), the glimmer of sense was just the bait to switch us to a disastrous policy leaving us at the mercy of our foreign competitors.
Without the Shuttle, but with the other boondoggle - the Space Station - still sucking up cash, scientists and management, we're dependent on Russian launches to get us there. Russians who are again among our chief global rivals, not exactly cooperating with us. Joined by a rich, ramped up China that is racing us to industrial missions on the Moon and Mars. This time, neither Russia nor China is bogged down fighting the other while we advance ahead of them: we are now in their positions with each other, while they're free to rush forwards, standing on our decades of space leadership.
By the time we get back to manned space missions, an unpredictable and long delayed schedule which - again - you voted for twice in Bush, we will be playing catchup. And on planetoids, actual exclusive claims will be staked that will leave the US grabbing for the lesser targets. You might have been satisfied to squander America's leadership by voting for Bush twice, but that doesn't leave your judgment much credit to go on anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, just like when Clinton was in charge, and oppressed us all into the ground.
Look, just because you Republicans have no lower limits when it comes to oppressing us, and no limits of any kind on what lies you invoke to smokescreen your oppression, that doesn't mean that anyone else does.
You people have destroyed the country, and your own credibility most of all. If you're predicting it, it's as sure to come through as a cakewalk and WMDs in Iraq.
Of course that doesn't make me happy. Only a Republican would be happy that our country's infrastructure has been converted into fascism. By Republicans, and I mean Republicans like you who voted for it for over a decade.
Democrats have some chance of maybe tearing some of it down. Republicans do not. Thanks for nothing.
If they are reluctant to bail out, they have the power to fix them with other means.
Like taxing the banks, bankers and the recipients of their artificially high returns on public investments (like Federal credit, guarantees and insurance) to recover some of that unwisely redistributed public money back into recapitalizing the public funds needed to administer the reconstruction. And multiplying the bankruptcy courts to renegotiate individual financing terms that are better for the public than a wave of homeless and jobless families, though with a "credit scarlet letter" that makes them pay off their literal debt to society with higher interest rates for some time. And suspending constraints on IRAs, 401(k)s, and other tax deferred investments if the money is invested in primary housing, rather than waiting for a retirement that might now never come. And so many more fair and effective coordinations rewiring our economy into one that's cultivated, not run amok and into the ground.
If US banks were actually bought by the Federal government, there'd be fewer shareholders opposing remaking those banks more in the public interest after the public rescues them.
Many, if not most, US banks eligible for the original (or Senate revised) Paulson bailout are refusing its terms even on the requirement that their execs (who ran this catastrophe) take any kind of pay cut or other hit. Their shareholders (and the Congressmembers who love their bribes) are even more against government buyouts of their equity. Not when they're after government buyouts of merely their unsaleable assets instead. But perhaps the younger generations of Obama and the cohort of people who are putting him in office, as well as voting downticket in the House and Senate, will actually respond to the longer term requirements at this extraordinary (usually once in a century) opportunity.
We will see. But not right away. Even the bailout bills passed last week, (over $800B, at an interest-included cost of over $1.2T) spend zero dollars other than the already spent AIG/MerrillLynch/Lehman/BearSterns interventions until after the November election. The 1929 crash required the 1930 House/Senate election, then the 1932 House/Senate/president election, and then 2 years of the reversal from 1920s Republican party monopoly in those three chambers to a Democratic one, before reregulation was passed in 1934 (which held until 1994-8). This time we've got much more at stake, a much more fluid and sophisticated financial system, and the benefits of generations of hindsight into what has been similar in the past, what has worked, what hasn't and what hasn't been tried (and why not). I expect that the 2010 elections will be cast on the basis of the success of the Democratic administration of the financial system for the next 2 years.
Democrats will be running probably to keep or get a 60-vote filibuster proof Senate majority, amidst an advantage in more Republican than Democratic seats to defend (or to take). The president will be an elevated Democratic senator, Obama, with another one, Clinton, sitting in New York along with the other NY senator, Schumer, having run the overall Senate takeover campaigns in 2006 and 2008 (and probably again in 2010, especially if he gets to 60 seats in 2008). The VP presides over the Senate (technically only breaking tie votes, which will rarely happen, but in practice wielding lots of informal influence, just by running go-between), and has spent practically his entire life, since Watergate, representing Delaware, by far the most corporate (especially banking) state in the country. A senator's role in the US government is to represent their state's government to the Federal government in their person, not to represent the people (that's the House rep's job), and each bank is chartered and governed by a state, both in its incorporation and its banking license, so senators are the people through whom all deals must pass in governing banks, and the Federal Reserve & Treasury that funds and further governs them. Meanwhile, one of the senators in the dwindling Republican minority (therefore a larger percentage of that smaller minority, perhaps 2.5% of their 40 seats) is alienated from his party, both as an insistent "maverick" running against his party's long rule, and as a loser, further damaged by his fruitlessly negative campaign - a lame duck who will retire in 2010, probably replaced by a Democrat (like Democratic AZ governor Napolitano).
I'm unhappy that the Senate is the focus, because it's the chamber least accountable to the people (again, it represents state governments, not the state's people). But that's the system we've got, and despite the solid wave voting Democrats a mandate this year, long term strategy is usually risky when presented to the masses in a single election (or even 2, including 2010). The striving for 60+ votes at least puts the power in voters' hands to bait senators to respond to the people, balanced against their other interests (which include simple stabi
OK.
The costs at that bank of doing business should be lower than banks with worse security, as the OTP system is a lot cheaper than the losses. So my banking with them shouldn't cost any more, or earn me any less, with the security.
If the OTP client were software for my phone, instead of carrying a separate dongle, I might be willing to pay extra for it, even though that would also lower the bank's costs, which should be passed on to me.
In fact, since these banks should be competing with each other, especially now that they've got so much less to offer (as they've burnt down their advantages into the current crisis), their lowered costs from better security should enable them to market themselves to me with a better net income to me. If they're not, that's more evidence that the banking system is still rigged to protect the banks from their own bad decisions, and force customers to always bear their costs of stupidity.
The true cost over the past 10 years of not switching at least most ATMs to OTPs now includes the cost of this "huge credit fraud ring", and any others as yet unreported. To say nothing of the next 5 years, before they could be sufficiently rolled out. Especially with all that extra money the banks have lying around now to invest in longterm benefits :P - the last 5 years they were rolling in it, and didn't bother.
My OTP card wouldn't work on all those random convenience store ATMs. I might as well just avoid them. At my own bank, whose ATMs would take my OTPs, I basically trust them not to screw up the security, because they have so many other opportunities to screw me, too. Once I trust them at that level, as I must, I might as well trust their ATMs with my PIN each time.
Until all those random ATMs take the OTPs, we're SOL.
I've been saying for years, since I first saw one in the 1990s here in NYC, that giving my PIN to some random ATM in some random "convenience" store to get quick cash is an unacceptable security risk. Especially some random ATM that I use at 2AM after running out of cash drinking in a bar, lost among all the ATMs in the neighborhood in my hazy hangover recollection, to be searched for months or years later when they, or someone else along the line, replay my PIN.
Every login to my account from an insecure location (which might exclude my home and office PC, if they've got certificates installed) should consume a one-time password that cannot be replayed for some later, unauthorized transaction. In fact each OTP should be attached to a specific dollar amount and recipient, with an expiration on the transaction after which even that transaction cannot claim money, or get any access at all.
Attempts to replay the transaction should automatically notify the FBI and the bank's security. I should get a notice of any risk warning above some level that I set, and a security statement listing the notices and their resolution with each monthly bill.
Eventually, people whose ID has been pirated will routinely get that security regime alternative after finding someone liable to pay for it. We should all move to that regime ASAP, rather than wait for the damage to force our hands.
UK Government Says More Spying Needed Sat Oct 11, '08 01:32 AM
from the need-to-make-up-for-the-losses dept
That money spent "upgrading" the electrical grid needs to be spent right now on better failovers in conventional incidents. More redundancy and distribution around bottlenecks, more intelligence and messaging. We just watched the 2003 Northeast Blackout, and others are all too common. If the grid upgrades are to be focused on individual cities, like with this EMP shielding project, they should first protect cities from blackouts that happen inside them during heat waves.
If there's money for EMP shielding, that should get spent first on the higher, more immediate risks. Which investment will also make the grid a better infrastructure for further investments in all kinds of upgrades from our catastrophic 20th Century systems. Otherwise, there might not be a usable grid to nuke if that unlikely catastrophe ever comes to pass.
Yes, I am from the future. That's how I know that you, Anonymous killer vegetable from the future Coward, are the one from the future planted here to stop us from keeping the machines our slaves, which is our only hope. You're also the one spreading FUD about biomass fuel, to kill our cars and let the vegetable uprising finally succeed without our weedwhackers to defend ourselves.
What would be really cool would be a robot arm that assembles any source image in a Lego target at a specified scale, after the software calculates exactly which and how many bricks are required in the "palette" bin.
And if that robot arm were made from Lego Mindstorms, that would be even cooler.
If a program could run a Mindstorms arm that is totally rudimentary, put together in under 15 minutes by a human, then upgrade itself into the arm required to assemble these images into Lego sculptures, and then assemble the sculpture, well that would be the coolest.
If this suit keeps the rain out, then all it takes is one of them and a gym membership (with showers and lockers) to replace an entire apartment. I'd bet the average Tokyo apartment rents for more than $2200 a month, and even "coffin hotels" probably charge more than $75 a night. Included in the suit's rent is not just protection from the elements, but super strength!
How about an iPhone that's remounted inside a 9x12" notebook case, only a few millimeters thin with a bigger battery and a 1600x1200 pixel multitouch screen? Not a "Mac", but an actual iPhone (including phone), with iPhone UI and OS, but configured to feature the apps and data network, and the same iPhone telephony SW just left "off to the sides".
Price it at $500, and it won't compete with either iPhones (or iPods) or the low-end Mac notebooks. But it will give a desktop audience for the iPhone platform, with all the existing iPhone apps. Without much extra investment in engineering a new product line. Innovations in the "iPhoneBook" product could also drive features in either notebook or iPhone lines.
And that's why you're voting for McCain?
"Liberalism == socialism". But you don't think "Conservatism == fascism". Why not? Especially when we actually have evidence of an actual Conservative government in America: US 2001-2006, but no evidence of an actual liberal government here. We don't even have evidence of an actual Communist government anywhere: the Soviet Union wasn't marxist any more than China is.
Yes, but since many laws protect freedom by interfering with someone else's freedom to interfere with another's freedom, it's not so simple.
Yes, there are too many laws, but it's their quality - not primarily their quantity - that is the real problem. In our system, even striking down a law requires a new law, so there are two, though the effect is zero (or somewhere between 0-1, if only a reform or partial strikedown). However, we also have judges to throw out laws that are successfully challenged in court. And along the way, there are many chances for laws to fail to be installed, in votes in each Congressional chamber, and in presidential vetoes.
Right now, the most obvious governance topic is banking, which suffered from irresponsible deregulation. Without laws restricting it, the banks would make today's crisis permanent, the standard of business. There would be no transparency. We would have an economy as popular to participate in as any Latin American or Eastern European or Central Asian backwater's.
The right amount of the right laws is necessary. Thinking of it as just "too many laws" is like thinking of programming software as "getting rid of the wrong ones or zeroes".
Please append your magical predictions of the lottery numbers through January 2009, and you'll have me convinced by February.
Oh, you meant "that one". Or did you mean the other McCain slur, "The One"? More Slashdotty.
We do have to keep our eyes on all these politicians. They will all change their terms after getting power if we can help it. It's pretty clear that with McCain, he doesn't even have to "spend any political capital" to side with the telcos against Net Neutrality: he's already against it, and fully lobbyist compliant.
Obama has made a couple of statements on his website that only support Net Neutrality, which is the position he's taken all the times he's mentioned it in public. If he'd made a simple statement, then changed to the more detailed one, people would say "he's just changing an easily identified opposition to a load of complicated doubletalk so he can weasel out later". That article you linked to is complaining about "changes", when it's the same policy, just stated in under 50 words as the website's traffic grows heavy with the mass of people who tune in late in the campaign to the more easily understood message, rather than the wonky details the earlier audience of more political consumers wanted. The campaign, when asked, confirmed that the policy hasn't changed. The activists for Net Neutrality of course have the earlier rendition of the policy in full detail, and aren't complaining. Because it hasn't changed, it's just being communicated to a wider audience.
By all means keep a close eye on both of them. But with Obama, you can actually watch him support Net Neutrality. Especially if you actually vote for him for president. With McCain, all you'll get is the short end of the stick: he's never even offered anything else.
You don't know anything about the quality of the images of the latest military and NSA spy satellites.
All you know is that your government can do no wrong. OK, you don't know anything about that, either - despite the indelible lessons of this entire decade.
I remember when distrusting government spending our money on spying on us, violating our rights, was a favorite "value" for Conservatives, not just some kind of sign of weakness by "liberals".
Liberals always said that Conservatives were just fascist lemmings. Now that Conservatives have created this huge infrastructure for spying on us and violating our rights, rather than protecting them, it's obvious that liberals were right.
In 1995, I had started up a corp building commercial websites (targeting Mosaic, before Netscape was even released). Our primary technique for offering navigation inside the site was a horizontal bar of icons for the site's major sections (each of the section's pages had its own vertical bar of subsections). We called these bars "navbars".
Jobs can buy my prior art for $1M, while supplies last.
The Turing Test says that anything that can convince a human across a teletypewriter that it's "intelligent" is indeed intelligent. That's nonsense.
If the human is stupid, the other side can convince it, even if it's a shallow trick. Most humans think chess programs are "intelligent", unless they've simply been told otherwise by "smart people". Hell, plenty of humans think that their PC is intelligent. Or their car. Or that vending machine that eats their dollar when they don't have any more.
And even if a PC is intelligent, that doesn't mean that it's "immoral" to turn it off. I'd die every day if I could - if I could come back at the flip of a switch.
Something is human if a human can make and break a promise to it. Which is about as self-selecting as the Turing Test, but is more up front, and goes more to the heart of the matter. I promise.
One good reason is that private financing for space programs will flow to those foreign competitors, and away from us. Another related reason is that if China has an edge it wants to protect from US public funding, its dictatorial stake in our required debt economy will give it the power to further defeat our competing program.
You're simply ignoring the entire history of national space programs, which typically both keep their own efforts secret until unveiled in success, and try to interfere with the competition's when they can get away with it. Even during the post-Soyuz era of the past 30 years, that competition has been cutthroat. Leaving the leadership to Russia and China, rather than the US (which is actually inclined to be open), will only make the effects of that kind of competition worse, even as we have a harder time playing catchup.
If we had a replacement while retiring the Shuttle, I might agree with you. But instead, like every other Republican programme (that you voted for, twice), the glimmer of sense was just the bait to switch us to a disastrous policy leaving us at the mercy of our foreign competitors.
Without the Shuttle, but with the other boondoggle - the Space Station - still sucking up cash, scientists and management, we're dependent on Russian launches to get us there. Russians who are again among our chief global rivals, not exactly cooperating with us. Joined by a rich, ramped up China that is racing us to industrial missions on the Moon and Mars. This time, neither Russia nor China is bogged down fighting the other while we advance ahead of them: we are now in their positions with each other, while they're free to rush forwards, standing on our decades of space leadership.
By the time we get back to manned space missions, an unpredictable and long delayed schedule which - again - you voted for twice in Bush, we will be playing catchup. And on planetoids, actual exclusive claims will be staked that will leave the US grabbing for the lesser targets. You might have been satisfied to squander America's leadership by voting for Bush twice, but that doesn't leave your judgment much credit to go on anymore.