This report comes from NIST, an agency of the Commerce Department run by James Turner, who came from the Energy Department and has never been confirmed as a full Director. The Commerce Department, and NIST, is an Executive Branch agency overseen by Cabinet member Carlos Gutierrez, who of course is appointed by Bush.
No, Bush promised to "change the tone in Washington", and he sure did. To the tone of a trainwreck under Godzilla's claws.
Mainly by letting Cheney run the country (into the ground), while Bush took the "hard work" of being the Republican power monopoly's spokesmodel, "catapulting the propaganda".
What we need to get from the next VP is a commitment, from them or from the president, that they will burn down the Cheney Bunker. No Republican would ever do such a thing to their most powerful "legacy". We have to see whether Obama or Biden will do so.
Even if they don't, a Biden behind the Obama curtain is going to be a lot less evil than a Cheney behind the Bush curtain. This is where Democrats' famed "internal divisions and disorganization" protect the people. Which is why I usually start with Democrats as my default, and then see who could be better in the office than one of those "mavericks" who don't all vote lockstep on their secret agenda the way Republicans do.
The energy markets have been totally subsidized at every turn in this country, lately throwing it deeply into unsupportable debt - so long as it's centralized energy, like petrofuels or nukes. Now, if we had a really free market, kept free of monopolists by a government not controlled by monopolists and energy pirates like Enron, we might actually be able to use money to mediate the market. That's why I laugh at "free market" religious fundamentalists: their faithy system has totally failed.
What's that supposed to mean? I stand by everything I said in that post, and in this entire (increasingly intractably pointless) discussion.
What I said is no troll, but sensible logic. What you're saying has descended from ambiguity into cryptic nonsense. Why don't you shut it down already?
I'd send you TrollMods to prison to for helping them get away with it, but you'll be in prison soon enough, now that you've turned our country into a police state.
It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio's counties,
Of course they can be patched. If Diebold's Board of Directors' children were taken hostage until the patches tested OK, they'd be fixed by next week at the latest.
But I don't want it to come to that. I want Ohio to throw those rigged machines into the recycler, and get some machines that test good from a competitor. If it costs $10 BILLION to do it by Election Day, that's OK. Because Diebold should pay the entire bill. And then, if anything's left of Diebold after that, send its executives and directors all to jail. If they don't go quietly, then kidnap their children until they surrender.
These Diebold execs have stolen the future from most of America's children, and gotten paid a lot to do so. Let them fell the slap of a ton of steel in the face for a change.
Gibberish. First you say that I said the pilot could ignore the no-fly list, though I didn't. When I correct you on that, you ignore me.
Your father can ignore the no-fly list with his military ID. With my mere driver's license, I wouldn't be so "lucky". The pilot on the list wasn't so lucky, and couldn't even use lots of legal work to ignore the list. The military ID trumped legal recourse until this rule was just recently changed, as this story describes.
That is clarity. Your posts, though, are about as clear as a secret list of a million names that doesn't make us any safer and couldn't be challenged in court, even though that doesn't bother retired generals.
What source provided me what data? The no data you can show about Iranian special forces? Or the no data linking the "al Qaeda in Iraq" to the Qaeda that bombed us?
The "folks" (why do you Republicans hate "folks" so much that you always use that word instead of "assholes"?) who are suicide bombing are some of the vast majority of Iraqis who are neither Americans nor Binladen's Qaeda. You talk like you never heard of the Iraqi civil war. But since you seem to get all your "news" from only Rush Limbo, here's some more facts for you:
Disney/ABC is most certainly one of the top Bush media outlets. Hell, they squashed the Reagan biography in Bush's first term because it wasn't sufficiently hero worshipful. They then ran that BS "Path to 9/11" pack of lies as "nonfiction". ABC boosted the war at every chance, as well as kept quiet about any of Bush's mountain of catastrophic abuses, just like every other corporate mass media outlet.
Considering how many Iraqis have been put in wood chippers, gang raped, and specially treated Saddam style by Americans, with no end in sight I don't expect many thanks from them, no matter how "used to it" they should be by now.
And considering how many Americans can regurgitate only the lies they hear from Rush Limbo, I'm still not going to get used to it. No thanks for no truth.
There's very little Qaeda in Iraq, and it's just a brand name some local assholes use to puff themselves up and get publicity (it works).
There's also no real evidence of Iran's special forces in Iraq. There is plenty of Iranian political force in Iraq, but calling Iraq's Shia Arabs "Iranian" is the kind of insult that sparks wars that kill a million of both of them.
Killed with US help to both sides in the 1980s. Including Rumsfeld selling Saddam the poison gas that were the actual charges that actually got Saddam hanged for.
But "foreigners who want to completely destabilize the region" is right on the money. 200,000 Americans can shout together "Mission Accomplished".
Again, your side of this discussion isn't clear at all. I never said that anyone other than the retired general (and people like him) could ignore the no-fly list. I said that his privilege of showing his military ID gets him past the list, despite his matching the list (by name, which is all the list gives its enforcers). That is an arbitrary privilege, not part of the "security" system. Because he's a (retired) part of the police state, so he gets "trusted" in a way that other people don't.
It's clear from what many high-profile people (like Al Gore) have had to do to get past the no-fly list that the list itself doesn't contain identities, it contains names. And it's also clear that one's actual security risk to the planes is not at all the selection criteria to get one's name on the list. There's something like a million names on that list, and there aren't a million names of people who are actual security threats.
The Federal government acts with respect to Constitutional protections of our rights only so long as people use the Federal government to force that respect. A decade or more of people electing majorities in Congress which have actively disrespected those rights, and reelecting a president with nothing but public scorn for those rights, as a matter of public policy, has of course given those people the freedom to abuse our rights. This story is about one way we can force respect for some of our rights, "public petition for redress of grievances", to get more of them back. But we have to work at it. Fortunately, people like the guy now with standing to sue are working to fix rights protections for all of us. If fewer people will elect fewer rights abusers, the balance might reverse, and we may see our rights more protected than abused by our government.
The math is just fine, even if the numbers are approximate. Because the energy we're talking about is measured by the constant joules of heat that the devices first produce in wasteful chargers, which heat air that must be cooled.
Let's say these chargers consume 100W. 25% efficiency puts 25j of heat into the air every second. The air conditioner at 20% efficiency requires 125W to cool 25j of heat each second. The 75W of usable charging power costs 100W + 125W = 225W. That's an additional 125% over the charger's consumption of 100W.
We have to worry about all of it. We don't have enough to waste. Of course we also have to increase transport efficiency (60% of gasoline's energy is wasted as hot exhaust) and home heating (and cooling - solar panels convert the energy from wasteful heating that must be cooled with inefficient air conditioners into power for the lower cooling demands). But this story is not about that, it's about some new wasteful energy application. So when there's another story about that other waste, we can talk about it. We don't have to choose between some false duality - we have to reduce waste everywhere we can.
25% waste is not "trivial", just because you say so. Even the "vampire power" that wastes up to 10% of all residential energy consumption is not "trivial". The inconvenience of needing even more than the current 10% wasted vastly outweighs the small convenience.
We've already got enough wasteful energy tech "byproducts" heating the air without converting 25% of our mobile power into hot air in our homes and offices. That needs to be airconditioned away, which itself operates at something like 20% energy efficiency, so that extra 25% will cost an additional 125% in cooling power. The 75% used for charging will consume an extra 150%, so the whole affair will consume 3x the power it delivers to devices, for 33% efficiency, not 75%.
And if the chargers are on all the time, they're going to be wasting that extra energy all the time, the way wired adapter chargers do now. All those "always on" chargers use a significant percentage of the world's electric for no benefit whatsoever.
We should be working on tech that reduces these electric wastes, not multiplies them. We don't have enough energy to waste now, let alone to waste many times more.
Clearly Bill Gates has enough money to hire a comedian who hasn't had a TV show in nearly a decade to "endorse" his product. Unless maybe that Bee Movie stole its best ideas from Apple, too.
Isn't Seinfeld's entire career a show about hanging out with a group of pathetically petty backstabbers and cheaters, who waste every opportunity to ever do anything worthwhile, and instead just stick to dirty tricks and scams?
If only that Upper West Side apartment would crash once in a while, I'd expect that Seinfeld was already on the Microsoft payroll since the 1990s. Maybe it didn't crash because it was running on the last decent Microsoft OS, brand spanking new when the show was actually going, Windows NT.
I don't think you really know what's going on here.
Cheney and Rumsfeld kept their top-level jobs their whole lives because they were good at it. Sure, they caused catastrophes wherever they went. Sure, their careers cost America vast, often irreparable damage, and many, many lives (and even more of non-Americans). But their bosses made out like bandits. That's not "incompetent". That's highly productive, while not caring who or what they destroyto get what they want.
You must really be crazy to call the proven conspiracy of Bush's team members to arm Iran something worthy of a "tinfoil hat".
Especially when you yourself link Rumsfeld and Cheney with Ford. But then, you don't bother to point out that Rumsfeld and Cheney met while working together for Nixon. All of which is consistent with working with America's enemies.
You've got your tinfoil hat on backwards. It's frying your brain.
It's not "fortunate" that the US's military approach to the fallout from years of working both for and against Iran's theocrats is one that would throw the whole world into havoc. Making the havoc that reciprocal interaction with Iraq has caused look "quaint".
If your day is made by bombings closing the Persian Gulf, and the retaliatory strikes Iran can make in its own region and probably abroad, then the Iranians aren't the only punks around here.
What tinfoil hat? You're right about all those accusations about Iran. They just happen to also be partners in crime with our own government's people, as is very well documented. You do know that the Iran/Contra criminals were convicted on proven charges of conspiracy, right?
That wouldn't be ironic. That would simply be consequences.
And no coincidence. The Bush dynasty has been working closely with Iran, arming it, even protecting AQ Khan (the Pakistani whose stolen nuke secrets started the Iranian, N Korean and Libyan nuke projects). That's why the "Iran" in "Iran/Contra" was always the worst part of that traitorous operation out of Oliver North's White House basement office. And why the resumes of the Bush Jr "brain trust" are full of "Iran/Contra" experience.
I'm not really sure what you're saying in that post.
The fact is that this retired general gets to ignore the no-fly list because he's a retired general. That means his ID has special privileges attached to it. It's not a question of why he has special privileges: whether the person "enforcing" the list is respecting his service, or fears that he's got connections to make trouble for the "enforcer", or the "enforcer" backs down whenever someone denied stands their ground without being rude or obnoxious.
They get on the plane, despite being on the list, because of their lateral connection to the police state.
Which is why we hate police states. Not just because they enforce the law, but because they put the police above the law. If the police weren't invariably corrupt with too much power, a police state might not be too bad. But that kind of corruption, as we see hinted at here (even though it's probably innocuous in this retired general's case) is absolutely inevitable in a police state.
Oh, that fabled "refusal to be hijacked anymore" just isn't true. In a list of several 'notable' hijackings since 9/11/2001, only one hijacker was resisted by the passengers and crew - because he was just a drunk idiot. The rest behaved the way people usually do when someone threatens to kill them in the plane unless it lands where the hijacker wants: do what they say and hope the cops get them on the ground after everyone else gets away safe.
And John Walker Lindh had nothing to do with any hijacking, so I don't know what that's supposed to mean at all.
The "no fly" list is idiotic. A list of just names, not actual specific identity info, is a haystack for hiding needles. Maybe if we just used espionage, police and assassins to capture or kill the people running these terrorist gangs, instead of starting the wrong wars and funding countries that create terrorists (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the US), we might be getting somewhere, instead of spinning our wheels and wasting everyone's lives in a holding pattern or worse.
So having a common name isn't a problem so long as you've got some special privileges attached to your ID.
I'm glad your father is treated with respect. And that his exception proves the rule that this kind of police state requires you have some lateral connection to the police just to operate as a normal person with your normal rights.
Slashdot Mirror
This report comes from NIST, an agency of the Commerce Department run by James Turner, who came from the Energy Department and has never been confirmed as a full Director. The Commerce Department, and NIST, is an Executive Branch agency overseen by Cabinet member Carlos Gutierrez, who of course is appointed by Bush.
No, Bush promised to "change the tone in Washington", and he sure did. To the tone of a trainwreck under Godzilla's claws.
Mainly by letting Cheney run the country (into the ground), while Bush took the "hard work" of being the Republican power monopoly's spokesmodel, "catapulting the propaganda".
What we need to get from the next VP is a commitment, from them or from the president, that they will burn down the Cheney Bunker. No Republican would ever do such a thing to their most powerful "legacy". We have to see whether Obama or Biden will do so.
Even if they don't, a Biden behind the Obama curtain is going to be a lot less evil than a Cheney behind the Bush curtain. This is where Democrats' famed "internal divisions and disorganization" protect the people. Which is why I usually start with Democrats as my default, and then see who could be better in the office than one of those "mavericks" who don't all vote lockstep on their secret agenda the way Republicans do.
When FISA came to a vote as HR.6308 on July 9, 2008, Biden voted against it, Obama voted for it.
The energy markets have been totally subsidized at every turn in this country, lately throwing it deeply into unsupportable debt - so long as it's centralized energy, like petrofuels or nukes. Now, if we had a really free market, kept free of monopolists by a government not controlled by monopolists and energy pirates like Enron, we might actually be able to use money to mediate the market. That's why I laugh at "free market" religious fundamentalists: their faithy system has totally failed.
What's that supposed to mean? I stand by everything I said in that post, and in this entire (increasingly intractably pointless) discussion.
What I said is no troll, but sensible logic. What you're saying has descended from ambiguity into cryptic nonsense. Why don't you shut it down already?
Moderation 0
50% Troll
50% Interesting
I'd send you TrollMods to prison to for helping them get away with it, but you'll be in prison soon enough, now that you've turned our country into a police state.
OK, if you'll make it hanging, I'll help you kill the bastards. Texas style.
Of course they can be patched. If Diebold's Board of Directors' children were taken hostage until the patches tested OK, they'd be fixed by next week at the latest.
But I don't want it to come to that. I want Ohio to throw those rigged machines into the recycler, and get some machines that test good from a competitor. If it costs $10 BILLION to do it by Election Day, that's OK. Because Diebold should pay the entire bill. And then, if anything's left of Diebold after that, send its executives and directors all to jail. If they don't go quietly, then kidnap their children until they surrender.
These Diebold execs have stolen the future from most of America's children, and gotten paid a lot to do so. Let them fell the slap of a ton of steel in the face for a change.
Gibberish. First you say that I said the pilot could ignore the no-fly list, though I didn't. When I correct you on that, you ignore me.
Your father can ignore the no-fly list with his military ID. With my mere driver's license, I wouldn't be so "lucky". The pilot on the list wasn't so lucky, and couldn't even use lots of legal work to ignore the list. The military ID trumped legal recourse until this rule was just recently changed, as this story describes.
That is clarity. Your posts, though, are about as clear as a secret list of a million names that doesn't make us any safer and couldn't be challenged in court, even though that doesn't bother retired generals.
"Thou Shall Not Kill".
You, my hypocritical warmonger Christian, are going to burn in hell. Think of me when you do.
click [changes channel]
What source provided me what data? The no data you can show about Iranian special forces? Or the no data linking the "al Qaeda in Iraq" to the Qaeda that bombed us?
The "folks" (why do you Republicans hate "folks" so much that you always use that word instead of "assholes"?) who are suicide bombing are some of the vast majority of Iraqis who are neither Americans nor Binladen's Qaeda. You talk like you never heard of the Iraqi civil war. But since you seem to get all your "news" from only Rush Limbo, here's some more facts for you:
Disney/ABC is most certainly one of the top Bush media outlets. Hell, they squashed the Reagan biography in Bush's first term because it wasn't sufficiently hero worshipful. They then ran that BS "Path to 9/11" pack of lies as "nonfiction". ABC boosted the war at every chance, as well as kept quiet about any of Bush's mountain of catastrophic abuses, just like every other corporate mass media outlet.
Considering how many Iraqis have been put in wood chippers, gang raped, and specially treated Saddam style by Americans, with no end in sight I don't expect many thanks from them, no matter how "used to it" they should be by now.
And considering how many Americans can regurgitate only the lies they hear from Rush Limbo, I'm still not going to get used to it. No thanks for no truth.
There's very little Qaeda in Iraq, and it's just a brand name some local assholes use to puff themselves up and get publicity (it works).
There's also no real evidence of Iran's special forces in Iraq. There is plenty of Iranian political force in Iraq, but calling Iraq's Shia Arabs "Iranian" is the kind of insult that sparks wars that kill a million of both of them.
Killed with US help to both sides in the 1980s. Including Rumsfeld selling Saddam the poison gas that were the actual charges that actually got Saddam hanged for.
But "foreigners who want to completely destabilize the region" is right on the money. 200,000 Americans can shout together "Mission Accomplished".
Again, your side of this discussion isn't clear at all. I never said that anyone other than the retired general (and people like him) could ignore the no-fly list. I said that his privilege of showing his military ID gets him past the list, despite his matching the list (by name, which is all the list gives its enforcers). That is an arbitrary privilege, not part of the "security" system. Because he's a (retired) part of the police state, so he gets "trusted" in a way that other people don't.
It's clear from what many high-profile people (like Al Gore) have had to do to get past the no-fly list that the list itself doesn't contain identities, it contains names. And it's also clear that one's actual security risk to the planes is not at all the selection criteria to get one's name on the list. There's something like a million names on that list, and there aren't a million names of people who are actual security threats.
The Federal government acts with respect to Constitutional protections of our rights only so long as people use the Federal government to force that respect. A decade or more of people electing majorities in Congress which have actively disrespected those rights, and reelecting a president with nothing but public scorn for those rights, as a matter of public policy, has of course given those people the freedom to abuse our rights. This story is about one way we can force respect for some of our rights, "public petition for redress of grievances", to get more of them back. But we have to work at it. Fortunately, people like the guy now with standing to sue are working to fix rights protections for all of us. If fewer people will elect fewer rights abusers, the balance might reverse, and we may see our rights more protected than abused by our government.
The math is just fine, even if the numbers are approximate. Because the energy we're talking about is measured by the constant joules of heat that the devices first produce in wasteful chargers, which heat air that must be cooled.
Let's say these chargers consume 100W. 25% efficiency puts 25j of heat into the air every second. The air conditioner at 20% efficiency requires 125W to cool 25j of heat each second. The 75W of usable charging power costs 100W + 125W = 225W. That's an additional 125% over the charger's consumption of 100W.
We have to worry about all of it. We don't have enough to waste. Of course we also have to increase transport efficiency (60% of gasoline's energy is wasted as hot exhaust) and home heating (and cooling - solar panels convert the energy from wasteful heating that must be cooled with inefficient air conditioners into power for the lower cooling demands). But this story is not about that, it's about some new wasteful energy application. So when there's another story about that other waste, we can talk about it. We don't have to choose between some false duality - we have to reduce waste everywhere we can.
25% waste is not "trivial", just because you say so. Even the "vampire power" that wastes up to 10% of all residential energy consumption is not "trivial". The inconvenience of needing even more than the current 10% wasted vastly outweighs the small convenience.
We've already got enough wasteful energy tech "byproducts" heating the air without converting 25% of our mobile power into hot air in our homes and offices. That needs to be airconditioned away, which itself operates at something like 20% energy efficiency, so that extra 25% will cost an additional 125% in cooling power. The 75% used for charging will consume an extra 150%, so the whole affair will consume 3x the power it delivers to devices, for 33% efficiency, not 75%.
And if the chargers are on all the time, they're going to be wasting that extra energy all the time, the way wired adapter chargers do now. All those "always on" chargers use a significant percentage of the world's electric for no benefit whatsoever.
We should be working on tech that reduces these electric wastes, not multiplies them. We don't have enough energy to waste now, let alone to waste many times more.
Clearly Bill Gates has enough money to hire a comedian who hasn't had a TV show in nearly a decade to "endorse" his product. Unless maybe that Bee Movie stole its best ideas from Apple, too.
Isn't Seinfeld's entire career a show about hanging out with a group of pathetically petty backstabbers and cheaters, who waste every opportunity to ever do anything worthwhile, and instead just stick to dirty tricks and scams?
If only that Upper West Side apartment would crash once in a while, I'd expect that Seinfeld was already on the Microsoft payroll since the 1990s. Maybe it didn't crash because it was running on the last decent Microsoft OS, brand spanking new when the show was actually going, Windows NT.
I don't think you really know what's going on here.
Cheney and Rumsfeld kept their top-level jobs their whole lives because they were good at it. Sure, they caused catastrophes wherever they went. Sure, their careers cost America vast, often irreparable damage, and many, many lives (and even more of non-Americans). But their bosses made out like bandits. That's not "incompetent". That's highly productive, while not caring who or what they destroy to get what they want.
You must really be crazy to call the proven conspiracy of Bush's team members to arm Iran something worthy of a "tinfoil hat".
Especially when you yourself link Rumsfeld and Cheney with Ford. But then, you don't bother to point out that Rumsfeld and Cheney met while working together for Nixon. All of which is consistent with working with America's enemies.
You've got your tinfoil hat on backwards. It's frying your brain.
It's not "fortunate" that the US's military approach to the fallout from years of working both for and against Iran's theocrats is one that would throw the whole world into havoc. Making the havoc that reciprocal interaction with Iraq has caused look "quaint".
If your day is made by bombings closing the Persian Gulf, and the retaliatory strikes Iran can make in its own region and probably abroad, then the Iranians aren't the only punks around here.
What tinfoil hat? You're right about all those accusations about Iran. They just happen to also be partners in crime with our own government's people, as is very well documented. You do know that the Iran/Contra criminals were convicted on proven charges of conspiracy, right?
That wouldn't be ironic. That would simply be consequences.
And no coincidence. The Bush dynasty has been working closely with Iran, arming it, even protecting AQ Khan (the Pakistani whose stolen nuke secrets started the Iranian, N Korean and Libyan nuke projects). That's why the "Iran" in "Iran/Contra" was always the worst part of that traitorous operation out of Oliver North's White House basement office. And why the resumes of the Bush Jr "brain trust" are full of "Iran/Contra" experience.
I'm not really sure what you're saying in that post.
The fact is that this retired general gets to ignore the no-fly list because he's a retired general. That means his ID has special privileges attached to it. It's not a question of why he has special privileges: whether the person "enforcing" the list is respecting his service, or fears that he's got connections to make trouble for the "enforcer", or the "enforcer" backs down whenever someone denied stands their ground without being rude or obnoxious.
They get on the plane, despite being on the list, because of their lateral connection to the police state.
Which is why we hate police states. Not just because they enforce the law, but because they put the police above the law . If the police weren't invariably corrupt with too much power, a police state might not be too bad. But that kind of corruption, as we see hinted at here (even though it's probably innocuous in this retired general's case) is absolutely inevitable in a police state.
Oh, that fabled "refusal to be hijacked anymore" just isn't true. In a list of several 'notable' hijackings since 9/11/2001, only one hijacker was resisted by the passengers and crew - because he was just a drunk idiot. The rest behaved the way people usually do when someone threatens to kill them in the plane unless it lands where the hijacker wants: do what they say and hope the cops get them on the ground after everyone else gets away safe.
And John Walker Lindh had nothing to do with any hijacking, so I don't know what that's supposed to mean at all.
The "no fly" list is idiotic. A list of just names, not actual specific identity info, is a haystack for hiding needles. Maybe if we just used espionage, police and assassins to capture or kill the people running these terrorist gangs, instead of starting the wrong wars and funding countries that create terrorists (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the US), we might be getting somewhere, instead of spinning our wheels and wasting everyone's lives in a holding pattern or worse.
So having a common name isn't a problem so long as you've got some special privileges attached to your ID.
I'm glad your father is treated with respect. And that his exception proves the rule that this kind of police state requires you have some lateral connection to the police just to operate as a normal person with your normal rights.