The corruption you state is moot, since graft and fraud are external to the issue. If you put accountability measures in place for charities, then you reduce or eliminate that problem. We're talking about the best ways to help people, not what happens when malcontents subvert the process by lining their own pockets. I just don't understand how you've drawn this inextricable link between fraud, waste, and abuse to federal aid (from tax revenue). You make what I think are some groundless non sequitors. If I give $1000 to a charity, what happens to that money has absolutely nothing to do with the mechanism by which I give it money, but only with how the charity uses that money. What we can do is make charitable organizations accountable. When you make statements like "tax-and-spend wealth redistribution," it sounds more to me like you're adulterating the argument with an ideology.
There a hideously corrupt organizations and some that divert practically every penny possible to their intended ends. I don't know who you gave to in Ethiopia, but I'd never send money to an unaccountable overseas entity (or anywhere for that matter). Go with the names you know you can trust or do the research to prove they are trustworthy. There's been much discussion on this topic on the last few years, don't let bad charitable "investments" spoil the whole barrel.
Wow, I love it when people try to play along with the Bush administration's legalese games. So, if Taliban fighters in the service of a country too dirt poor to afford uniforms, then well technically they're not uniformed soldiers! (I literally heard this argument being made on cable TV news) Our government can't concoct some sort of loophole in law, then exploit it to afford people with NO rights whatsoever. If Bush thinks there should be a new category, then petition for it to be defined, don't start making up your own damned rules as you go along.
And, assuming your clip is valid, you only have to meet 1 of the listed criteria (..."one of the following categories...").
This is indicative of the hoax that the "free market" is. People cheat, lie, and steal. You have to regulate to keep them from doing it. The more complex the system, the more complex the regulations. Anyone with more than a pedestrian knowledge of U.S. corporate history knows how bad corporations act unless you've got their nads in a vice. Dumping toxins in rivers, lying about reactor meltdowns, covering up research on potentially lethal medical side effects, all the way up to murdering witnesses and whistleblowers.
The university gets to brag about being high tech and leverage laptops for course work without ponying up the resources themselves. Poor students get yet another college bill to pay and probably not much educational payoff in the process. My old college came up with a "PCs required" policy with the outragious claim that poor students could just take out more financial aid to cover the costs. When will people understand that a lot of students are already on the borderline financially when it comes to affording college. The cost of this laptop might not sound like much to some, but there are thousands of students who will be deterred from higher education by this large of a nudge on their financial burden.
Ignorance, the summation of the parent post. The President already had the right to spy on conversations with terrorists, provided he asked for a warrant that could even be awarded RETROACTIVELY. FISA courts only rejected something like 4 requests of 1,000s. The only rational explanation is that Bush decided to start spying in a manner that violates even the lose FISA interpretation of the 4th amendment. EVERY TIME IN OUR HISTORY THAT WE'VE SACRIFICED RIGHTS FOR TEMPORARY SECURITY, THE LEADERSHIP HAS TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF THE PEOPLE.
You didn't give up your RIGHT to drive at 100 mph any more than I give up my rights to murder anyone I don't like. Our government fails when its citizens take the lazy, unaccountable viewpoint that "we'll let THEM take care of it." That's why we're on the road to a police state and half of us are too stupid to even see it coming.
Citizens of the world, I advise you to duck. The New American Empire is coming...
What does the recipient of the leaked information have to do with being a whistleblower (we're talking in action not some limited-application legalese definition)? As for your Watergate hero theory, it's ridiculous. Whistleblowers are almost always committing career suicide. The media is the PERFECT place to send this information. The last few years of complicent "agencies" spouting the party line and not doing their damned jobs should prove to you how reliable the system is. You leak valuable information to the media, and you know that the public will be informed. You leak to an "agency," and you have to cross your fingers and hope some bureaucrat is more concerned with justice than keeping his job.
Apply your "report-to-the-appropriate-agencies" theory to every scandal we've had in the last 5 years and tell me how many of them would have made it to the public arena. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Halliburton, Cheney's energy task force, torture memos, Eastern European gulags, 9-11 commission report; the "appropriate agencies" have been doing their damnedest so keep this information for getting out and going after the people brave enough to call out our government on its own BS. You castigate this whistleblower/leaker all you want, I'm standing by him.
While I don't agree with the parent, the argument that defense spending per capita or percentage of GDP is the only valid measure is pointless. If I go out and buy a military sniper rifle, then I'd rank as one of the top military spenders! The fact is we (U.S.A.) spend a crapload of our tax revenue on the military. Who gives a damn if Eritrea spends a higher percentage of peanuts on defense?
Uh, maybe YOU don't care about the President violating the 4th amendment and blatantly ignoring a law specifically designed to implement the safeguards it describes. But, I guess you Bushheads don't care about living in a police state as long as the police are Republicans.
If you don't like it, then go live in Russia. We have a fourth amendment in this country that explicitly prohibits what the President did. We also have the FISA act which explicitly declares itself as the *sole* means by which the President fulfills his fourth amendment duties in order to receive a wiretap. There's nothing wrong with taps with probable cause AND A WARRANT. If there weren't a Republican majority, Bush would be impeached and out of office. Even Republicans are saying he overstepped his bounds.
The only reason the President would piss on FISA is because he must be spying on persons that he knows he'd never get a legitimate warrant against. And, that would not be members of Al Qaida or terrorist organizations (read that as you and me).
Go read the 4th amendment. I did when this scandal broke. That's the standard by which warrants are awarded by our courts. Bush decided that he didn't in fact need the courts to rule and that n violation of our Constitution, he'd go ahead and tap at his leisure. THAT IS AGAINST THE LAW! The last time we let a president get away with this, we had the executive branch spying on political enemies and breaking into psychologists' offices looking for dirt. The point is, you cannot trust the executive to rule on wiretaps without oversight, WHICH IS WHAT THE LAW STATES. Pay attention to the current hearings with Gonzales.
Spoken like a true ignoramus. By your logic then, the government should be able to bug, film, and record everything we do anywhere since, "Hey, you shouldn't be doing anything wrong in the frist place" (mispelling intended).
You should have paid attention in history class during the Nixon lessons. Then, maybe you'd understand the danger of giving our government this kind of unchecked power. It's also a violation of the fundamental rights we all have as citizens, you know that whole stupid "unreasonable search and seizure" thing?
If you're American too, I pray for our country's sake that your post was intended to be satirical. If it was satire, great job impersonating a moron!
IMO geeks are too geeky to be occupied with issues of race. Hey, there are Linux partitions to format. I'm a black male far too experienced with racism and the poorly-disguised look of awe the first time someone sees me after we've talked on the phone. IT interviews are the only ones I've walked into and never drawn a discernable reaction. IT offices are among the most integrated as previous posts have shown.
I guess you forgot about how the Bushies started floating the idea of suspending the 2004 presidential elections in the event of a terrorist attack. The US is on march towards a police state and most of us don't seem to notice.
Posts like this drive me crazy. The parent is basically stating that his only source of news is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Michael Savage and to hell with any other news source out there that reports otherwise.
Do you understand the difference between "whistleblowing" when you see your government behaving illegally and "leaking" when all you're up to is a political smear?
Do you realize that whistleblowers outing our government's illegal activity is a good thing?
Do you realize that preventing our government spying on us with no oversight or limitations is one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy?
Have you read the bi-partisan 9/11 commission report that details exactly how Clinton took terrorism seriously and that silly politics is what lead Bush and the Republicans to sleep on the Al Qaida threat?
Do you realize the huge danger to our democracy if you give your executive branch a "by all means available" pass?
Don't you think it's possible that Bush isn't as great a president as you think he is?
I'm a news junkie and I used to watch 4 hours straight of MSNBC before 9/11. Donahue was definitely a vocal lefty, but he had a pretty good show. He peeved the brass though by being just as vocal in opposing the Iraq invasion when most people were too cowardly to do it. Well, MSNBC promptly cancelled his show and started airing these ultra nationalist "God bless America" promos to prove that they really weren't really anti-war pinko commies. They then followed up by recruiting a line-up of Faux News wannabes (Tucker "Just as big a dick in person" Carlson, Joe "Killer" Scarborough, and Rita "My balls just dropped" Crosby). Yeah, Keith Olbermann represents the lefties, but he's a damned sports journalist with absolutely no business in a prime time slot. Even Chris Matthews is trying to go right. My God, his post-White House Christmas Ball sucking up to the President was disgusting and provided a nice example of how our mainstream media icons are really nothing more than sycophants.
And, MSNBC wonders why their ratings suck. You're not going to be the next Fox News when conservatives are convinced that any news they weren't fed from the Republican spin machine is leftie biased.
OMG I loved this show, but it was gone before it had a chance (bought all the DVDs though). The quality of the animation is practically unmatched (Futurama is close) especially for a "kids' show". There are some great satirical episodes too like "Voting of the Doomed" and "The Girl Who Cried Gnome."
Manic woman in crowd: "Oh my God! That little girl is trapped in a hole. Someone call the media!"
The rationale behind the staff-donor ban is that there's a potential opportunity for abuse; research heads forcing their interns and grad students to submit to tests. Ask a grad, you can imagine what professors would have them doing if there weren't these types of restrictions. One of my physics professors in college told a story of how he was sent into the center of a Gaussian surface experiment to investigate a "spark"!
Plus, egg donation is a painful procedure from what I understand.
This is the old Nemesis star theory (also blamed for perturbing Oort cloud objects). I remember reading about it at least 10 years ago. But, I also recall reading back then that we had the ability to measure perturbations that it would cause with enough accuracy to confirm its existence within a few years (that being I'd think 15 years ago). Any resident astronomers?
And, in the aftermath you get to see how hypocritical our government (U.S.) is when it comes to authoritarian regimes. We're more than happy to open up the gates for business with China, yet we crack down on democracies (Venezuela, Haiti) who don't fit in with our Project for the New American Century.
Forget all that "Freedom is on the march" propaganda and start looking at our REAL foreign policy.
Some dog breeds are natural "runners" or escape artists. They love to run free and get too distracted to come home very quickly. I owned a Husky (you see where this is going from the tense) who loved to get out and run. If she was out long enough to get bored of exploring, she'd come home. Otherwise, I'd get a call from the pound. People in my old neighborhood were good folk and I'd usually hear from a neighbor on last location. Unfortunately, I moved to the Big Bad City where people steal purebred dogs "'cause they're pretty" and I never saw her again after she got out once here in town.
Forget the cell capability, a GPS unit on your dog would be a godsend (or is that dogsend?) for those of us with runners and escapers.
The integrity trend downward in news has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the new corporate culture that's taken over the newsroom. It's all about profit margins, which means salacious stories about bimbo heiresses. You managed to squeeze in all the liberal-slant myths about the media, yet somehow right-wing hype seems to stick in the average Joe's mind. Wonder where it all comes from since we're not all listening to Rush and Fox?
72% of us thought Iraq planned the 9-11 attacks when we invaded Iraq and the liberal media planted that Bush godsend in our minds?
Maybe the upsurge in right-wing media sources is responsible for the dumbing down of the news?
Yeah, Dan Rather was an idiot for selling us those awfully bad forgeries, but Bush still managed to jump over hundreds of more qualified candidates to get into the Champagne Unit when he barely qualified to fly, still skipped out on Guard duty, still skipped out on his drug test, still didn't fulfill his obligations, still checked "NO" on volunteering for combat duty in Vietnam, and his remaining records still mysteriously burst into flames when he decided to run for office. Don't let one bogus document plant (yes *plant*) discredit the whole story.
Inflammatory posts and ACs go hand-in-hand I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
The corruption you state is moot, since graft and fraud are external to the issue. If you put accountability measures in place for charities, then you reduce or eliminate that problem. We're talking about the best ways to help people, not what happens when malcontents subvert the process by lining their own pockets. I just don't understand how you've drawn this inextricable link between fraud, waste, and abuse to federal aid (from tax revenue). You make what I think are some groundless non sequitors. If I give $1000 to a charity, what happens to that money has absolutely nothing to do with the mechanism by which I give it money, but only with how the charity uses that money. What we can do is make charitable organizations accountable. When you make statements like "tax-and-spend wealth redistribution," it sounds more to me like you're adulterating the argument with an ideology.
There a hideously corrupt organizations and some that divert practically every penny possible to their intended ends. I don't know who you gave to in Ethiopia, but I'd never send money to an unaccountable overseas entity (or anywhere for that matter). Go with the names you know you can trust or do the research to prove they are trustworthy. There's been much discussion on this topic on the last few years, don't let bad charitable "investments" spoil the whole barrel.
Wow, I love it when people try to play along with the Bush administration's legalese games. So, if Taliban fighters in the service of a country too dirt poor to afford uniforms, then well technically they're not uniformed soldiers! (I literally heard this argument being made on cable TV news) Our government can't concoct some sort of loophole in law, then exploit it to afford people with NO rights whatsoever. If Bush thinks there should be a new category, then petition for it to be defined, don't start making up your own damned rules as you go along.
And, assuming your clip is valid, you only have to meet 1 of the listed criteria (..."one of the following categories...").
"We believe we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault"
You, Sir, would also be the first to have bothered.
This is indicative of the hoax that the "free market" is. People cheat, lie, and steal. You have to regulate to keep them from doing it. The more complex the system, the more complex the regulations. Anyone with more than a pedestrian knowledge of U.S. corporate history knows how bad corporations act unless you've got their nads in a vice. Dumping toxins in rivers, lying about reactor meltdowns, covering up research on potentially lethal medical side effects, all the way up to murdering witnesses and whistleblowers.
The university gets to brag about being high tech and leverage laptops for course work without ponying up the resources themselves. Poor students get yet another college bill to pay and probably not much educational payoff in the process. My old college came up with a "PCs required" policy with the outragious claim that poor students could just take out more financial aid to cover the costs. When will people understand that a lot of students are already on the borderline financially when it comes to affording college. The cost of this laptop might not sound like much to some, but there are thousands of students who will be deterred from higher education by this large of a nudge on their financial burden.
Ignorance, the summation of the parent post. The President already had the right to spy on conversations with terrorists, provided he asked for a warrant that could even be awarded RETROACTIVELY. FISA courts only rejected something like 4 requests of 1,000s. The only rational explanation is that Bush decided to start spying in a manner that violates even the lose FISA interpretation of the 4th amendment. EVERY TIME IN OUR HISTORY THAT WE'VE SACRIFICED RIGHTS FOR TEMPORARY SECURITY, THE LEADERSHIP HAS TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF THE PEOPLE.
You didn't give up your RIGHT to drive at 100 mph any more than I give up my rights to murder anyone I don't like. Our government fails when its citizens take the lazy, unaccountable viewpoint that "we'll let THEM take care of it." That's why we're on the road to a police state and half of us are too stupid to even see it coming.
Citizens of the world, I advise you to duck. The New American Empire is coming...
What does the recipient of the leaked information have to do with being a whistleblower (we're talking in action not some limited-application legalese definition)? As for your Watergate hero theory, it's ridiculous. Whistleblowers are almost always committing career suicide. The media is the PERFECT place to send this information. The last few years of complicent "agencies" spouting the party line and not doing their damned jobs should prove to you how reliable the system is. You leak valuable information to the media, and you know that the public will be informed. You leak to an "agency," and you have to cross your fingers and hope some bureaucrat is more concerned with justice than keeping his job.
Apply your "report-to-the-appropriate-agencies" theory to every scandal we've had in the last 5 years and tell me how many of them would have made it to the public arena. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Halliburton, Cheney's energy task force, torture memos, Eastern European gulags, 9-11 commission report; the "appropriate agencies" have been doing their damnedest so keep this information for getting out and going after the people brave enough to call out our government on its own BS. You castigate this whistleblower/leaker all you want, I'm standing by him.
While I don't agree with the parent, the argument that defense spending per capita or percentage of GDP is the only valid measure is pointless. If I go out and buy a military sniper rifle, then I'd rank as one of the top military spenders! The fact is we (U.S.A.) spend a crapload of our tax revenue on the military. Who gives a damn if Eritrea spends a higher percentage of peanuts on defense?
Uh, maybe YOU don't care about the President violating the 4th amendment and blatantly ignoring a law specifically designed to implement the safeguards it describes. But, I guess you Bushheads don't care about living in a police state as long as the police are Republicans.
"...I've had to lug around my 12kg Athlon 64 notebook..."
:)
"With these tools I'm often sorely tempted to leave behind my shoulder breaking laptop..."
Wow, I know Slashdotters don't have any muscle mass, but you have to be especially noodly armed
...since I'll only be working the touchscreen with one hand. Oops, make that six.
If you don't like it, then go live in Russia. We have a fourth amendment in this country that explicitly prohibits what the President did. We also have the FISA act which explicitly declares itself as the *sole* means by which the President fulfills his fourth amendment duties in order to receive a wiretap. There's nothing wrong with taps with probable cause AND A WARRANT. If there weren't a Republican majority, Bush would be impeached and out of office. Even Republicans are saying he overstepped his bounds.
The only reason the President would piss on FISA is because he must be spying on persons that he knows he'd never get a legitimate warrant against. And, that would not be members of Al Qaida or terrorist organizations (read that as you and me).
Go read the 4th amendment. I did when this scandal broke. That's the standard by which warrants are awarded by our courts. Bush decided that he didn't in fact need the courts to rule and that n violation of our Constitution, he'd go ahead and tap at his leisure. THAT IS AGAINST THE LAW! The last time we let a president get away with this, we had the executive branch spying on political enemies and breaking into psychologists' offices looking for dirt. The point is, you cannot trust the executive to rule on wiretaps without oversight, WHICH IS WHAT THE LAW STATES. Pay attention to the current hearings with Gonzales.
"Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency"
Reminds me of the Futurama episode on last night about Hermes and the Central Bureaucracy. Truth is stranger than fiction I guess.
Spoken like a true ignoramus. By your logic then, the government should be able to bug, film, and record everything we do anywhere since, "Hey, you shouldn't be doing anything wrong in the frist place" (mispelling intended). You should have paid attention in history class during the Nixon lessons. Then, maybe you'd understand the danger of giving our government this kind of unchecked power. It's also a violation of the fundamental rights we all have as citizens, you know that whole stupid "unreasonable search and seizure" thing? If you're American too, I pray for our country's sake that your post was intended to be satirical. If it was satire, great job impersonating a moron!
IMO geeks are too geeky to be occupied with issues of race. Hey, there are Linux partitions to format. I'm a black male far too experienced with racism and the poorly-disguised look of awe the first time someone sees me after we've talked on the phone. IT interviews are the only ones I've walked into and never drawn a discernable reaction. IT offices are among the most integrated as previous posts have shown.
I guess you forgot about how the Bushies started floating the idea of suspending the 2004 presidential elections in the event of a terrorist attack. The US is on march towards a police state and most of us don't seem to notice.
Posts like this drive me crazy. The parent is basically stating that his only source of news is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Michael Savage and to hell with any other news source out there that reports otherwise.
Do you understand the difference between "whistleblowing" when you see your government behaving illegally and "leaking" when all you're up to is a political smear?
Do you realize that whistleblowers outing our government's illegal activity is a good thing?
Do you realize that preventing our government spying on us with no oversight or limitations is one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy?
Have you read the bi-partisan 9/11 commission report that details exactly how Clinton took terrorism seriously and that silly politics is what lead Bush and the Republicans to sleep on the Al Qaida threat?
Do you realize the huge danger to our democracy if you give your executive branch a "by all means available" pass?
Don't you think it's possible that Bush isn't as great a president as you think he is?
I'm a news junkie and I used to watch 4 hours straight of MSNBC before 9/11. Donahue was definitely a vocal lefty, but he had a pretty good show. He peeved the brass though by being just as vocal in opposing the Iraq invasion when most people were too cowardly to do it. Well, MSNBC promptly cancelled his show and started airing these ultra nationalist "God bless America" promos to prove that they really weren't really anti-war pinko commies. They then followed up by recruiting a line-up of Faux News wannabes (Tucker "Just as big a dick in person" Carlson, Joe "Killer" Scarborough, and Rita "My balls just dropped" Crosby). Yeah, Keith Olbermann represents the lefties, but he's a damned sports journalist with absolutely no business in a prime time slot. Even Chris Matthews is trying to go right. My God, his post-White House Christmas Ball sucking up to the President was disgusting and provided a nice example of how our mainstream media icons are really nothing more than sycophants.
And, MSNBC wonders why their ratings suck. You're not going to be the next Fox News when conservatives are convinced that any news they weren't fed from the Republican spin machine is leftie biased.
OMG I loved this show, but it was gone before it had a chance (bought all the DVDs though). The quality of the animation is practically unmatched (Futurama is close) especially for a "kids' show". There are some great satirical episodes too like "Voting of the Doomed" and "The Girl Who Cried Gnome."
Manic woman in crowd: "Oh my God! That little girl is trapped in a hole. Someone call the media!"
The rationale behind the staff-donor ban is that there's a potential opportunity for abuse; research heads forcing their interns and grad students to submit to tests. Ask a grad, you can imagine what professors would have them doing if there weren't these types of restrictions. One of my physics professors in college told a story of how he was sent into the center of a Gaussian surface experiment to investigate a "spark"!
Plus, egg donation is a painful procedure from what I understand.
This is the old Nemesis star theory (also blamed for perturbing Oort cloud objects). I remember reading about it at least 10 years ago. But, I also recall reading back then that we had the ability to measure perturbations that it would cause with enough accuracy to confirm its existence within a few years (that being I'd think 15 years ago). Any resident astronomers?
And, in the aftermath you get to see how hypocritical our government (U.S.) is when it comes to authoritarian regimes. We're more than happy to open up the gates for business with China, yet we crack down on democracies (Venezuela, Haiti) who don't fit in with our Project for the New American Century.
Forget all that "Freedom is on the march" propaganda and start looking at our REAL foreign policy.
Some dog breeds are natural "runners" or escape artists. They love to run free and get too distracted to come home very quickly. I owned a Husky (you see where this is going from the tense) who loved to get out and run. If she was out long enough to get bored of exploring, she'd come home. Otherwise, I'd get a call from the pound. People in my old neighborhood were good folk and I'd usually hear from a neighbor on last location. Unfortunately, I moved to the Big Bad City where people steal purebred dogs "'cause they're pretty" and I never saw her again after she got out once here in town.
Forget the cell capability, a GPS unit on your dog would be a godsend (or is that dogsend?) for those of us with runners and escapers.
The integrity trend downward in news has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the new corporate culture that's taken over the newsroom. It's all about profit margins, which means salacious stories about bimbo heiresses. You managed to squeeze in all the liberal-slant myths about the media, yet somehow right-wing hype seems to stick in the average Joe's mind. Wonder where it all comes from since we're not all listening to Rush and Fox?
72% of us thought Iraq planned the 9-11 attacks when we invaded Iraq and the liberal media planted that Bush godsend in our minds?
Maybe the upsurge in right-wing media sources is responsible for the dumbing down of the news?
Yeah, Dan Rather was an idiot for selling us those awfully bad forgeries, but Bush still managed to jump over hundreds of more qualified candidates to get into the Champagne Unit when he barely qualified to fly, still skipped out on Guard duty, still skipped out on his drug test, still didn't fulfill his obligations, still checked "NO" on volunteering for combat duty in Vietnam, and his remaining records still mysteriously burst into flames when he decided to run for office. Don't let one bogus document plant (yes *plant*) discredit the whole story.
Inflammatory posts and ACs go hand-in-hand I guess...