To fight the Qaeda we must suspend the Constitution, take off our shoes and surrender our toothpaste getting on airplanes, invade Iraq (but not Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but maybe Iran), pay $5 a gallon for gas. Rich people must pay no taxes, but everyone else must maximize oilcorp, pharmaco, telco, and bank profits, and hand Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street. Free 12MPG Hummers for everyone with a credit rating, and subprime mortgages for everyone without one! Because that's the American Way that the terrorists hate us for.
A launch loop would be held up at this altitude by momentum of the belt as it circulates around the structure, in effect it transfers the weight of the structure onto magnetic bearings at each end which support it.
I don't really get that. What exactly keeps the heavy rail track lifted 80Km in the air across 1500 Km?
I do assume that every car is a lethal threat, and allow them no space to get away with killing me. I'm clocking every single moving object out there on the road. That's one reason I'm ready to pounce when they attack. Either just steering to safety, or getting in their face when there's a safe chance to do it.
I just hope they tell everyone they know about the "maniac who attacked them", though I doubt they'll admit how they brought it down on their head. But so long as word gets out that bikers will indeed mess you up, maybe people will be more aware of bikers on the road. If that's a product of these little catastrophes, then my hyperreaction won't just be justified tactically in the moment, but will have a larger effect.
I like the risks of driving a bike. I don't like when people nearly kill me, but I do like venting righteous rage on them, especially when it really blows their mind because it destroys their ideas of where their own safety boundaries are. Life is full of little indignities over which we can't make a big stink, but every once in a while some serious conflict justifies really blowing a gasket, and getting it all out. Very theraputic. And, if people don't flirt with the disaster that any innocuous looking target could be (any biker helmet could have my head inside it), then we'll all get along just delightfully. Just don't make the mistake of believing that your big truck makes you immune to my insane anger.
Try cutting me off and I will smash your mirror. Threaten me with a gun and I'll take it from you and shoot you with it. That's self defense of me from you, who almost killed me with your car.
The way you know I won't attack you personally is that you don't drive me into the rage that merely destroys your car.
If you don't believe it, ask the cab driver who almost hit my wife in a crosswalk over the Winter.
You talk tough. Real tough. You're just another coward with a gun. A gun someone like me will use on you if you're generous enough to bring it to a fight that you start but won't finish.
Every 6-12 months I check in on the "Roomba" lines, whether just vacuums, or wet mops, or other kinds like this new "gutter cleaner". They all look pretty cool, and the idea is good. But every time I check with people who actually have them, I confirm that they break really easy. They wear out, or they can't take the kind of hard bump that most moving appliances have to take.
At $99, replacing them once or twice every couple-few years is a little expensive, compared to a $250 vacuum that lasts 5+ years. And when they break, there's the whole hassle of getting a new one.
Why isn't there a version of these clever little slaves that cost twice as much, but last twice or three times as long without breaking?
In 2004, Palm planned to convert PalmOS into nothing but a GUI and backwards compatibility API layer, replacing the OS with Linux. Lots of Palm software assets and licenses were transferred among Palm, China MobileSoft, and the Japanese "Access" mobile SW company over the next year or two.
By now, we should be able to get smartphones with easy Web access, the thousands of little PalmOS apps, and all the Linux apps, all upgradable at a "tap" over the air or USB from the Internet. But it never happened. Instead, Palm put out a couple of different models of Treo, which were excellent phones when released, but rapidly eclipsed by more frequent updated releases of Symbian and Windows phones.
I bet what happened was that just announcing a PalmOS/Linux smartphone earned its execs and directors a lot of money, money changed hands in the endless spinoffs/acquisitions/mergers, but no one ever paid a team to convert the phone to Linux or PalmOS as a layer on top of it.
Another good question is why I can't just install Linux on any of the new phones with HW compatible with it, and keep my telephone service contract. That should be easy by now, and shouldn't require Palm to do it.
What you want is a "dual wan" router. Which will give you two ways out, by default putting each connection between your local host and a remote host over a single WAN's route, but pool the two WANs so the less-full one gets the whole next connection.
Then you want to look into "bonding", or whatever the router vendor calls their version of it. It usually doesn't work, because the two different WANs usually take very different routes most of the way to the remote host, and the bonding has to accommodate all the hops between on each of the two WAN routes. But sometimes it does work, especially if the routers at both ends of the routes share the same bonding technique.
But you will indeed get immediate uptime benefits. Because if one WAN gives you, say, 99.9% uptime, that's 0.1% downtime, which is still over 31,000 seconds down a year, which is still almost 9 hours. But if you can get connections over either one WAN or the other (each at 99.9%), you can get 99.9999% uptime, which is only about 32 seconds a year, which is unattainable at reasonable prices for a home user.
I'd like to see a maglev train on an Andean mountain firing a ship into Earth orbit, which then deploys solar sails to catch the much more plentiful direct solar radiation to accelerate it away from the Earth. That seems like a better way to use the infrastructure we have on Earth, where at least 25-30% of the solar power is lost in the atmosphere and the air creates drag on the accelerated ship, and to use the microgravity and vacuum of space where it's easier to deploy light, flimsy solar collectors in the full sunlight.
On June 30, U.S. federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded June 30 deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future.
Under a White House policy issued in August 2005, all federal agencies must demonstrate the ability to pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks by this deadline.
What's so complicated about that "subject matter"? The government is required to support IPv6 on its networks by June 30, 2008. The government says it will be ready.
I say they're lying. I point at the rest of Bush's government's history of lying when it's so easy, compared to actually doing something right which is either hard, or makes the government work right, or both. My point is precisely on topic.
I drive a motorcycle in NYC, which is already really dangerous even when people are running only one machine, their car. It's even worse now that people are in their SUVs, sealed from the rest of the world and throwing their weight around in traffic - especially when they're not really NYC residents, but drive those trucks mostly in the suburbs where there's room for them to drive like fools. It's even worse than that with them talking to their phones pressed to their heads, distracted by what's in their hands rather than concentrating with their hands on the wheel. The worst are the SUV drivers with phones in their hands, and of course the very worst are the ones with both hands on a phone, looking at it while they text someone. It's totally insane, though they don't care since they feel like their giant truck will protect them in a collision.
A month ago, one of these assholes cut me off downtown, almost driving me into a parked car (except I'm a very good driver, so I barely recovered to save my life). They raced to the next red light, which was only a block away anyway. I drove up next to their window and waved at them. I wanted to tell them to watch out, as most of them just aren't aware of motorcycles at all, which don't register in their vision like cars do. They were busy texting someone, as they'd clearly been while they cut me off, and they ignored me. So I knocked on their window. They ignored me. I knocked harder, angrily now. They glanced up at me, obviously having seen me the entire time, and waved one hand, mockingly making an "oh, I'm scared" face (even though I wasn't threatening them or anything). They laughed silently inside their big truck, and bent back down to resume texting.
So I bashed off their side rearview mirror. I ripped it from the truck, and smashed at their truck over and over again while they watched in shock.
Then I drove away and got lost among NYC's millions of other cars. Fixing that mirror's got to cost hundreds of dollars and days off the road. If only I could have smashed their window and grabbed their phone, I'd call to check in on how it's going. Maybe next time. If they haven't learned to just shut up and drive already.
On Slashdot, TrollMods say that the truth about their government is "Flamebait" because they'd flame anything that doesn't lie about how awful their government has been. But they'd rather try to suppress it with trollMods than even bother to flame it.
That is precisely how their government manages to be so bad: everyone's too busy covering up its failures to get anything done right, or even find time to confess they're part of the failure.
The Wall Street Journal has a vested interest in telling readers not to think too much. It only takes about 10 seconds to read one of their "News in Brief" capsules, after which the WSJ wants its readers to just do whatever that slanted report implies. Since those readers run the economy, that means that the WSJ can get lots of money spent the way that its directors and their corporate cronies want.
Chief among those corporate cronies is Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal (along with its parent, the Dow Jones market data service) to match his Fox News Channel. If you want the strongest example of "not overthinking" (or thinking at all), just watch yourself some Fox "News" sometime.
On the user's PC, the NIA control software converts electrical potentials from the headband into usable input. Schuette explains that the software separates the different frequencies in these potentials using proprietary algorithms not unlike fast Fourier transforms. Running these algorithms on a continuously streaming flow of data can apparently hog some "serious CPU cycles," although we didn't see the control application eat up much more than 10-15% of our test rig's Core 2 Duo E6400.
A DSP that computes at 10-15% of a Core 2 Duo E6400 can't cost more than $20. The box that converts the headband's electrical signals into USB data should also process its own data into higher-level, usable symbols that doesn't eat up PC performance. Especially if the headband is going to hook a gamer's brain directly into the game, that extra 10-15% framerate is going to be necessary. Or all the headband players are going to be fat, bloody targets.
Leaving a "raw" mode on the box that sends the lowlevel raw sensed data to the PC is very valuable for developers who want to play around with the brain more closely. But as a product, I'd spend $20, or an extra $100, to get an extra 10-15% more juice out of my Pentium.
Just because this government says it's ready, or something is done, that doesn't mean that it is. It's now been over 5 years since Bush announced "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. All kinds of other lies about this government's accomplishments have masked exactly opposite failures, like their lies about the economy, their lies about security, their lies about the environment, their lies about leaving children behind, their lies about everything. Why shouldn't their network be just another grand lie?
I expect that the network will not run all IPv6 by Monday. And I expect that lots of it that does run IPv6 will run wrong or badly. In fact, I expect that the switchover will have screwed up all kinds of IPv4 networks that were working fine - especially if those networks were used to protect Americans from corporate or other predators. I expect that all kinds of "security shortcuts" done "temporarily" in order to meet this deadline will turn out to be permanent security breaches.
Because that is this government's mission: to screw up the government as much as possible, so their corporate and foreign cronies can attack us more effectively. Mission accomplished!
Louisiana full of illiterates - double digit percentages - people who cannot even read or write. They're already free to be among the stupidest people in the world. Why not make them free to learn lies alongside the truth, so they can be not just ignorant, but really really wrong?
After all, god loves stupid. God made more stupid than everything else combined. Louisianans are just following their role model.
This technique might mark a jump from Stone Age to Bronze Age in the techniques. But in the products, it's more like a jump from the original Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, to the 8008, which was when chips with an instruction set really came of age. Because DNA bases are the basic instructions for the ribosomes (which are the "nanoprocessors" of the DNA instructions into amino acids, and thereby into the proteins that do the work expressing traits).
This advance has humans now varying the instruction sets to more precisely craft "living nanotech" devices to the tasks to which we set them. Hopefully a few generations down the road we'll do something better than DOS.
People like to point at all the Congressional "recesses" as vacation time for lazy congressmembers. Some probably do fly on corporate jets to Scotland to play golf with strippers, but most of them spend the time flying back to their home district (or state, for senators) and meet with local people to work on their constituents' issues. Sure, those people are primarily local corporate types and other rich/powerful people who live, work or happen to pass through their home office neighborhood. But they're working, and that's the time they're listening to people outside Washington DC.
This bill, with its evil FISA telco amnesty in it, is not a sure thing. It was supposed to sail through last year, and this delay marks the third time it's failed to get installed as law. There are many ways it can die in the Senate, which has many rules letting individual senators kill a bill. So this is an excellent time to call, fax, snail mail, and just physically visit a senator, especially if they're yours, to explain how the Fourth of July is a good time for them to decide to defend the Constitution. Almost all of them will be marching in a parade during the holiday as if they're some kind of patriot or something. You can stand along the route with a big sign saying "NO FISA TELCO AMNESTY!", or print out the bill, mingle in the parade and try to hand it to them saying "read it first, then vote against it when you see that FISA telco amnesty ruins the Constitution". Look at their website for their appearance schedule, and make it hard for them to pretend they love our country while they're busy screwing it over.
Do it while you can, as secretly wiretapping you is only the first step in stealing the rest of your rights.
You can use Obama's contact form to send a comment asking him to vote against FISA telco amnesty.
Here's a list of some senators worth calling, because they're not totally in bed with Bush in every way, and so might not go along with this travesty. See if you can talk them, or their staffers, into doing the right thing, or at least not helping do the wrong thing. Remeber, the telcos will also get to hear you, and they should know they're not really getting away with it.
Thanks for mentioning up front that you think modding someone down is a good way to disagree with them if you're just slightly more lazy.
People kill people with guns. Only a demented fetishist springs to the defense of the gun when we're talking about how to control them. Without guns, people kill a lot less people, a lot less often.
The 2nd Amendment was put in place because of "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" - any other reason is just one you're pulling out of your "hat". As I explained (and as you ignored), that necessity is demonstrably wrong in several ways demonstrated for over two centuries. WRONG.
Cars and pools are constrained by laws, or there'd be a lot more people killed by them. But your gun fetish insists that the 2nd Amendment means everyone should get whatever gun they want. Even though guns are a lot more dangerous, and a lot less useful.
The mass murders by guns (and the people who shoot them) number over 29,000 a year.
You're just another coward living your life in fear of "the knife-wielding maniac" chasing after you. What will you need when your imaginary maniac chases you with a.22? How about with a.45 that they got because you helped flood the streets with guns? You going to carry a nuke, and escalate everyone else into mutually assured destruction along with you?
Several dozen Amendments to the Constitution demonstrate that the Founding Fathers were far from infallible - except that they allowed for their fallibility by making the Constitution amendable. And the repealed amendment shows that even amendments aren't infallible.
The rest of your comment is such obvious fallacious nonsense that I'm not going to bother ripping it to pieces, because anyone reading it who can't tell for themself isn't interested in making sense, anyway.
Arizona had 696 gunshot deaths in 1991 (the latest data I could quickly find, but I see no contrary evidence since), and only 14% more vehicle deaths. Yet many more people use cars than guns, many more hours a year. Guns are clearly a lot more dangerous than cars. Which isn't surprising, since guns are designed to kill people, and cars are designed to protect people from being killed. Oh, and Arizona, mostly desert, isn't Washington DC, entirely dense city.
But why should a gun fetishist stick to reason when arguing about how to control guns? What counts is whether you like guns, not whether lots of people are killed with them.
Jews were being herded around like animals in Germany for many years prior to 1938, but their guns didn't help. Their neighbors didn't lift their guns even when Jews got disarmed. And those neighbors got shipped off to camps, too, despite their puny guns in the face of the Nazi machine. Since gun fetishists like you haven't slowed down America's tyrannies though you've got all the guns you can carry, there is clearly not even a correlation between the two.
I suppose that those 29,000 gunshot dead Americans a year are all killed by "massive organized crime". None of them are accidental, or suicides, or murdered by people with permits. The "organized crime" doesn't include any irresponsible and underregulated sellers. Because that would mean that your fetish is helping kill people, and we can't have you feeling guilty for treating a lethal weapon like everyone should have one.
What are you waiting for? The ballot and soap boxes aren't working. All these guns are being stockpiled on the argument that the "ammo box" is necessary to protect us, but no one's using it for that. It's already too late to save substantial amounts of our liberties, but those ammo boxes are being used for nothing but weekend warrior hobbies and crimes.
Maybe all that talk about guns protecting our liberties is just a bunch of lies, so gun fetishists can have their dangerous toys, but leaves them too cowardly to use them for their necessary purpose "guaranteeing our security".
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To fight the Qaeda we must suspend the Constitution, take off our shoes and surrender our toothpaste getting on airplanes, invade Iraq (but not Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but maybe Iran), pay $5 a gallon for gas. Rich people must pay no taxes, but everyone else must maximize oilcorp, pharmaco, telco, and bank profits, and hand Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street. Free 12MPG Hummers for everyone with a credit rating, and subprime mortgages for everyone without one! Because that's the American Way that the terrorists hate us for.
I feel safer already.
I hope so. I've been told "next year" every year since 2004, including by the PalmSource project manager running China MobileSoft's project.
I don't really get that. What exactly keeps the heavy rail track lifted 80Km in the air across 1500 Km?
I do assume that every car is a lethal threat, and allow them no space to get away with killing me. I'm clocking every single moving object out there on the road. That's one reason I'm ready to pounce when they attack. Either just steering to safety, or getting in their face when there's a safe chance to do it.
I just hope they tell everyone they know about the "maniac who attacked them", though I doubt they'll admit how they brought it down on their head. But so long as word gets out that bikers will indeed mess you up, maybe people will be more aware of bikers on the road. If that's a product of these little catastrophes, then my hyperreaction won't just be justified tactically in the moment, but will have a larger effect.
I like the risks of driving a bike. I don't like when people nearly kill me, but I do like venting righteous rage on them, especially when it really blows their mind because it destroys their ideas of where their own safety boundaries are. Life is full of little indignities over which we can't make a big stink, but every once in a while some serious conflict justifies really blowing a gasket, and getting it all out. Very theraputic. And, if people don't flirt with the disaster that any innocuous looking target could be (any biker helmet could have my head inside it), then we'll all get along just delightfully. Just don't make the mistake of believing that your big truck makes you immune to my insane anger.
Try cutting me off and I will smash your mirror. Threaten me with a gun and I'll take it from you and shoot you with it. That's self defense of me from you, who almost killed me with your car.
The way you know I won't attack you personally is that you don't drive me into the rage that merely destroys your car.
If you don't believe it, ask the cab driver who almost hit my wife in a crosswalk over the Winter.
You talk tough. Real tough. You're just another coward with a gun. A gun someone like me will use on you if you're generous enough to bring it to a fight that you start but won't finish.
Every 6-12 months I check in on the "Roomba" lines, whether just vacuums, or wet mops, or other kinds like this new "gutter cleaner". They all look pretty cool, and the idea is good. But every time I check with people who actually have them, I confirm that they break really easy. They wear out, or they can't take the kind of hard bump that most moving appliances have to take.
At $99, replacing them once or twice every couple-few years is a little expensive, compared to a $250 vacuum that lasts 5+ years. And when they break, there's the whole hassle of getting a new one.
Why isn't there a version of these clever little slaves that cost twice as much, but last twice or three times as long without breaking?
Routers switch packets. The ones that don't recognize IPv6 packet formats aren't capable of switching packets. The ones that do, are.
In 2004, Palm planned to convert PalmOS into nothing but a GUI and backwards compatibility API layer, replacing the OS with Linux. Lots of Palm software assets and licenses were transferred among Palm, China MobileSoft, and the Japanese "Access" mobile SW company over the next year or two.
By now, we should be able to get smartphones with easy Web access, the thousands of little PalmOS apps, and all the Linux apps, all upgradable at a "tap" over the air or USB from the Internet. But it never happened. Instead, Palm put out a couple of different models of Treo, which were excellent phones when released, but rapidly eclipsed by more frequent updated releases of Symbian and Windows phones.
I bet what happened was that just announcing a PalmOS/Linux smartphone earned its execs and directors a lot of money, money changed hands in the endless spinoffs/acquisitions/mergers, but no one ever paid a team to convert the phone to Linux or PalmOS as a layer on top of it.
Another good question is why I can't just install Linux on any of the new phones with HW compatible with it, and keep my telephone service contract. That should be easy by now, and shouldn't require Palm to do it.
What you want is a "dual wan" router. Which will give you two ways out, by default putting each connection between your local host and a remote host over a single WAN's route, but pool the two WANs so the less-full one gets the whole next connection.
Then you want to look into "bonding", or whatever the router vendor calls their version of it. It usually doesn't work, because the two different WANs usually take very different routes most of the way to the remote host, and the bonding has to accommodate all the hops between on each of the two WAN routes. But sometimes it does work, especially if the routers at both ends of the routes share the same bonding technique.
But you will indeed get immediate uptime benefits. Because if one WAN gives you, say, 99.9% uptime, that's 0.1% downtime, which is still over 31,000 seconds down a year, which is still almost 9 hours. But if you can get connections over either one WAN or the other (each at 99.9%), you can get 99.9999% uptime, which is only about 32 seconds a year, which is unattainable at reasonable prices for a home user.
I'd like to see a maglev train on an Andean mountain firing a ship into Earth orbit, which then deploys solar sails to catch the much more plentiful direct solar radiation to accelerate it away from the Earth. That seems like a better way to use the infrastructure we have on Earth, where at least 25-30% of the solar power is lost in the atmosphere and the air creates drag on the accelerated ship, and to use the microgravity and vacuum of space where it's easier to deploy light, flimsy solar collectors in the full sunlight.
What are you talking about?
What's so complicated about that "subject matter"? The government is required to support IPv6 on its networks by June 30, 2008. The government says it will be ready.
I say they're lying. I point at the rest of Bush's government's history of lying when it's so easy, compared to actually doing something right which is either hard, or makes the government work right, or both. My point is precisely on topic.
Which article are you reading?
Moderation 0
50% Informative
50% Flamebait
TrollMods say it's flamebait, but the flamers are illiterate. How's that supposed to work?
I drive a motorcycle in NYC, which is already really dangerous even when people are running only one machine, their car. It's even worse now that people are in their SUVs, sealed from the rest of the world and throwing their weight around in traffic - especially when they're not really NYC residents, but drive those trucks mostly in the suburbs where there's room for them to drive like fools. It's even worse than that with them talking to their phones pressed to their heads, distracted by what's in their hands rather than concentrating with their hands on the wheel. The worst are the SUV drivers with phones in their hands, and of course the very worst are the ones with both hands on a phone, looking at it while they text someone. It's totally insane, though they don't care since they feel like their giant truck will protect them in a collision.
A month ago, one of these assholes cut me off downtown, almost driving me into a parked car (except I'm a very good driver, so I barely recovered to save my life). They raced to the next red light, which was only a block away anyway. I drove up next to their window and waved at them. I wanted to tell them to watch out, as most of them just aren't aware of motorcycles at all, which don't register in their vision like cars do. They were busy texting someone, as they'd clearly been while they cut me off, and they ignored me. So I knocked on their window. They ignored me. I knocked harder, angrily now. They glanced up at me, obviously having seen me the entire time, and waved one hand, mockingly making an "oh, I'm scared" face (even though I wasn't threatening them or anything). They laughed silently inside their big truck, and bent back down to resume texting.
So I bashed off their side rearview mirror. I ripped it from the truck, and smashed at their truck over and over again while they watched in shock.
Then I drove away and got lost among NYC's millions of other cars. Fixing that mirror's got to cost hundreds of dollars and days off the road. If only I could have smashed their window and grabbed their phone, I'd call to check in on how it's going. Maybe next time. If they haven't learned to just shut up and drive already.
Moderation -2
50% Flamebait
50% Troll
On Slashdot, TrollMods say that the truth about their government is "Flamebait" because they'd flame anything that doesn't lie about how awful their government has been. But they'd rather try to suppress it with trollMods than even bother to flame it.
That is precisely how their government manages to be so bad: everyone's too busy covering up its failures to get anything done right, or even find time to confess they're part of the failure.
The Wall Street Journal has a vested interest in telling readers not to think too much. It only takes about 10 seconds to read one of their "News in Brief" capsules, after which the WSJ wants its readers to just do whatever that slanted report implies. Since those readers run the economy, that means that the WSJ can get lots of money spent the way that its directors and their corporate cronies want.
Chief among those corporate cronies is Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal (along with its parent, the Dow Jones market data service) to match his Fox News Channel. If you want the strongest example of "not overthinking" (or thinking at all), just watch yourself some Fox "News" sometime.
A DSP that computes at 10-15% of a Core 2 Duo E6400 can't cost more than $20. The box that converts the headband's electrical signals into USB data should also process its own data into higher-level, usable symbols that doesn't eat up PC performance. Especially if the headband is going to hook a gamer's brain directly into the game, that extra 10-15% framerate is going to be necessary. Or all the headband players are going to be fat, bloody targets.
Leaving a "raw" mode on the box that sends the lowlevel raw sensed data to the PC is very valuable for developers who want to play around with the brain more closely. But as a product, I'd spend $20, or an extra $100, to get an extra 10-15% more juice out of my Pentium.
Just because this government says it's ready, or something is done, that doesn't mean that it is. It's now been over 5 years since Bush announced "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. All kinds of other lies about this government's accomplishments have masked exactly opposite failures, like their lies about the economy, their lies about security, their lies about the environment, their lies about leaving children behind, their lies about everything. Why shouldn't their network be just another grand lie?
I expect that the network will not run all IPv6 by Monday. And I expect that lots of it that does run IPv6 will run wrong or badly. In fact, I expect that the switchover will have screwed up all kinds of IPv4 networks that were working fine - especially if those networks were used to protect Americans from corporate or other predators. I expect that all kinds of "security shortcuts" done "temporarily" in order to meet this deadline will turn out to be permanent security breaches.
Because that is this government's mission: to screw up the government as much as possible, so their corporate and foreign cronies can attack us more effectively. Mission accomplished!
Louisiana full of illiterates - double digit percentages - people who cannot even read or write. They're already free to be among the stupidest people in the world. Why not make them free to learn lies alongside the truth, so they can be not just ignorant, but really really wrong?
After all, god loves stupid. God made more stupid than everything else combined. Louisianans are just following their role model.
This technique might mark a jump from Stone Age to Bronze Age in the techniques. But in the products, it's more like a jump from the original Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, to the 8008, which was when chips with an instruction set really came of age. Because DNA bases are the basic instructions for the ribosomes (which are the "nanoprocessors" of the DNA instructions into amino acids, and thereby into the proteins that do the work expressing traits).
This advance has humans now varying the instruction sets to more precisely craft "living nanotech" devices to the tasks to which we set them. Hopefully a few generations down the road we'll do something better than DOS.
People like to point at all the Congressional "recesses" as vacation time for lazy congressmembers. Some probably do fly on corporate jets to Scotland to play golf with strippers, but most of them spend the time flying back to their home district (or state, for senators) and meet with local people to work on their constituents' issues. Sure, those people are primarily local corporate types and other rich/powerful people who live, work or happen to pass through their home office neighborhood. But they're working, and that's the time they're listening to people outside Washington DC.
This bill, with its evil FISA telco amnesty in it, is not a sure thing. It was supposed to sail through last year, and this delay marks the third time it's failed to get installed as law. There are many ways it can die in the Senate, which has many rules letting individual senators kill a bill. So this is an excellent time to call, fax, snail mail, and just physically visit a senator, especially if they're yours, to explain how the Fourth of July is a good time for them to decide to defend the Constitution. Almost all of them will be marching in a parade during the holiday as if they're some kind of patriot or something. You can stand along the route with a big sign saying "NO FISA TELCO AMNESTY!", or print out the bill, mingle in the parade and try to hand it to them saying "read it first, then vote against it when you see that FISA telco amnesty ruins the Constitution". Look at their website for their appearance schedule, and make it hard for them to pretend they love our country while they're busy screwing it over.
Do it while you can, as secretly wiretapping you is only the first step in stealing the rest of your rights.
You can use Obama's contact form to send a comment asking him to vote against FISA telco amnesty.
Here's a list of some senators worth calling, because they're not totally in bed with Bush in every way, and so might not go along with this travesty. See if you can talk them, or their staffers, into doing the right thing, or at least not helping do the wrong thing. Remeber, the telcos will also get to hear you, and they should know they're not really getting away with it.
Thanks for mentioning up front that you think modding someone down is a good way to disagree with them if you're just slightly more lazy.
People kill people with guns. Only a demented fetishist springs to the defense of the gun when we're talking about how to control them. Without guns, people kill a lot less people, a lot less often.
The 2nd Amendment was put in place because of "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" - any other reason is just one you're pulling out of your "hat". As I explained (and as you ignored), that necessity is demonstrably wrong in several ways demonstrated for over two centuries. WRONG.
Cars and pools are constrained by laws, or there'd be a lot more people killed by them. But your gun fetish insists that the 2nd Amendment means everyone should get whatever gun they want. Even though guns are a lot more dangerous, and a lot less useful.
The mass murders by guns (and the people who shoot them) number over 29,000 a year.
You're just another coward living your life in fear of "the knife-wielding maniac" chasing after you. What will you need when your imaginary maniac chases you with a .22? How about with a .45 that they got because you helped flood the streets with guns? You going to carry a nuke, and escalate everyone else into mutually assured destruction along with you?
Several dozen Amendments to the Constitution demonstrate that the Founding Fathers were far from infallible - except that they allowed for their fallibility by making the Constitution amendable. And the repealed amendment shows that even amendments aren't infallible.
The rest of your comment is such obvious fallacious nonsense that I'm not going to bother ripping it to pieces, because anyone reading it who can't tell for themself isn't interested in making sense, anyway.
The Internet is not a lethal weapon.
Arizona had 696 gunshot deaths in 1991 (the latest data I could quickly find, but I see no contrary evidence since), and only 14% more vehicle deaths. Yet many more people use cars than guns, many more hours a year. Guns are clearly a lot more dangerous than cars. Which isn't surprising, since guns are designed to kill people, and cars are designed to protect people from being killed. Oh, and Arizona, mostly desert, isn't Washington DC, entirely dense city.
But why should a gun fetishist stick to reason when arguing about how to control guns? What counts is whether you like guns, not whether lots of people are killed with them.
Jews were being herded around like animals in Germany for many years prior to 1938, but their guns didn't help. Their neighbors didn't lift their guns even when Jews got disarmed. And those neighbors got shipped off to camps, too, despite their puny guns in the face of the Nazi machine. Since gun fetishists like you haven't slowed down America's tyrannies though you've got all the guns you can carry, there is clearly not even a correlation between the two.
I suppose that those 29,000 gunshot dead Americans a year are all killed by "massive organized crime". None of them are accidental, or suicides, or murdered by people with permits. The "organized crime" doesn't include any irresponsible and underregulated sellers. Because that would mean that your fetish is helping kill people, and we can't have you feeling guilty for treating a lethal weapon like everyone should have one.
What are you waiting for? The ballot and soap boxes aren't working. All these guns are being stockpiled on the argument that the "ammo box" is necessary to protect us, but no one's using it for that. It's already too late to save substantial amounts of our liberties, but those ammo boxes are being used for nothing but weekend warrior hobbies and crimes.
Maybe all that talk about guns protecting our liberties is just a bunch of lies, so gun fetishists can have their dangerous toys, but leaves them too cowardly to use them for their necessary purpose "guaranteeing our security".