. as the concatenation is bone stupid, but is a result of other bone stupid decisions in PHP. The trouble is that PHP automatically coerces your results into other types, which results in craziness like "false" == 0 being true; if + were the concatenation operator, PHP wouldn't be able to tell whether to do string concatenation or addition.
Part of the fault allows rests with the unbelievably dreadful parser in the language, written completely ad hoc. If you want to see a bad parser, if you want to see really bad code in general, look at the PHP parser.
What makes e.g. Python good is a series of excellent decisions which make later decisions easier. What makes PHP execrable, terrible, dreadful, is a series of poor decisions at the beginning and a refusal to admit or realize them or correct for them.
I think the \ as namespace is a great idea as I think PHP should go away and this will hasten its inevitable though prolonged death.
Yes, I knew I was comparing apples and oranges, but the point was that the original number was off by well over an order of magnitude if not two. To seriously imagine that 5% of the items disappear from a store, each and every day, is madness.
Your average retailer is looking at 2% to 5% in shrinkage, every day.
Sorry, that's just not true. Your average retailer looks at less than 2% shrinkage, per year, check the stats.
And overall, most humans are still very moral. There's only a fairly small number of people who have the combination of energy and anti-social nature to do this. This could change - the neo-Cons have tried to make a virtue of psychopathy - but for right now your average guy is, if he's not feeling threatened, pretty decent.
It is counterintuitive and on its face offensive, but the entire point of my post was that setting a precedent for circumvention of our legal and justice system is not justified by catching a few pederasts unlawfully.
What you said was that it was a "grave injustice". It was not: I proved it: you did not succeed in refuting that.
I'm not sure where these mentions of sexual servitude or horrible deaths are.
Why, it's in the referenced article that you didn't bother to read. The FBI investigator claimed that the hacker saved the lives of two children; the charges included "sexual exploitation of children".
That's not what the issue is here. The hacker (according to our laws, which are the ones we are trying to enforce)
The hacker is claimed by the article to be in Turkey, where this sort of activity is not illegal.
illegally intruded this downloader's computer and used it to gather evidence, that evidence was given to the FBI, and the FBI used it in court to prosecute the defendant. This is not a legal use of informant in any sense.
Sorry, you are wrong. Read hereabout the exclusionary rule: "The Exclusionary Rule is designed to provide a remedy and disincentive, short of criminal prosecution, for prosecutors and police who illegally gather evidence in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in the Bill of Rights, which provide for protection from unreasonable searches and seizure and compelled self-incrimination." Note that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments protect individuals from search and seizure by the government, not by other private citizens.
The hacker is not "acting as the agent of the FBI" -- if you'd *read the article* you'd see that he simply provided anonymous tips that were later used to apprehend the criminals. Again, this happens all the time. Cocaine dealers turn in their upstream dealers; kidnappers turn in their accomplices; thieves rat on other thieves; in each case, they got their information during the commission of a crime. In fact, police routinely outfit criminals with a wire and use them to gather information which holds up in court -- this is far closer to the idea of "acting as an agent of the FBI" than simply an anonymous tipster is.
Again, I ask you -- what would you have wanted to have happen? Should the police have ignored the information and, according to the article, allowed two children to die horribly?
For all the reasons you've listed 1069 isn't performing performing any good, but a grave injustice.
Hard to believe a caring human being could hold such a morally awful position.
Looking at the facts of the case as stated, the result appears to be that two children were saved from sexual servitude or even horrible deaths and that two pederasts were jailed. If what we are told is true, justice was clearly done -- if you wish to refute me, please identify who is being unjustly treated. The childen? The criminals? The police? Please do not claim that you, as a representative of the "people", are experiencing an injustice, because you are not.
If this hacker really did present the police with information which would allow them to save two children from sexual abuse, what would you have wanted to happen?
I believe what you are actually claiming is that allowing law enforcement officials to operate in this fashion is illegal and would allow possible injustices to occur in the future. I agree that sometimes injustices must occur because of the "system", the rules that ensure fairness: this is not one of those cases.
Do you really believe that police shouldn't be allowed to use evidence gathered by criminals? Why? Exactly how do you think law enforcement works, anyway? Police routinely use informers, stool pigeons and the like -- why is this wrong? There are very specific rules on conduct, on admissability of evidence, and defence attorneys routinely and often successfully challenge the believability of such witnesses because of their poor character, but there's nothing intrinsically "unjust" in having criminals testify against other criminals, it happens every day.
In fact, it's not even clear that the hacker is doing anything that is illegal.
If the facts are as presented, the police had physical evidence linking the criminals with the children in question -- the possibly-unreliable hacker's information would be presented as corroborating evidence. It's interesting to note that the defense attorney did not in fact challenge the reliability of the evidence as gathered.
I might add that I'm very much a liberal and strongly support strict oversight of the police and limits to their powers. But this is not one of those cases I think illustrates any sort of problem, and worse, I think you seriously damage our case by screaming about "injustice" in a case where your mother or any common-sense person would see that justice was obviously done (if the facts are as presented in the short article in question).
Oh, and don't waste the Franklin quotation! It gets a little weaker each time we use it pointlessly. Save it for things where it really applies.
Now, if the police weren't wasting their time on victimless crimes like drugs, they might actually have time to deal with thefts and things like that. The fact that you and many others simply accept the fact that police won't even bother to investigate most crimes shows how low most people's expectations are.
"The biggest reason is that even if they did pull good fingerprints from your window, tracked them to a known criminal, got a warrant, entered his place, and found him along with your stereo in his bedroom, the criminal would get an average sentence of a few days to a few weeks, (most likely suspended,) plus probation and possibly reparations."
Got any source for this extremely dubious claim? There are few places that grand theft auto won't get you a year. If it's a "known criminal" as in your example, and they've committed two felonies before, in many states the "three strikes" laws will put them away for a long, long time, even if the last crime is extremely minor, but there are often mandatory minimum sentences even for first-time offenders.
Not that I don't agree with the underlying idea, that the cops are lazy and won't follow up on crimes. But it's not because we have "soft on crime" judges out there; it's because the police are basically responsible to no one.
More on civilian deaths in Iraq here. Yes, I know the title says "Casualties" but it talks about deaths too.
Even the lowest number, 30,000, is more than all the people you've ever talked to in your life. The real number is probably around 100,000. That's like 30 9/11's, except that the population of Iraq is about one-tenth that of the US so proportionally it's really like 300 9/11's -- and also that there were very few casualties that weren't killed in 9/11 whereas there are at least two Iraqis seriously injured for each one killed.
There's this really good service called Google that lets you search for this sort of information on the internet so next time you can just look it up the information for yourself.
"In the Iraq War, up to 15,000 military combaants were killed in the face of up to 4,300 civilian noncombatant deaths. During the Desert Storm conflict, 20,000 Iraqi soldiers and 3,500 civilians were killed. 68% of the munitions used in this war were precision-guided, compared with 6.5 % in 1991. I think these statistics speak for themselves."
4300 non-combatant deaths in the Iraq war? Where in world did you get that number?! President Bush himself said (in a speech on December 12, 2005) that there were 30,000 non-combatant casualties; other, less medacious sources estimate the true number is between two and four times as much as *that* but even that ultra-lowball number from Bush himself is *7* times your 4,300 figure.
Before correcting your numbers, you might also note that these two wars were utterly, utterly different. The Gulf War took weeks; the Iraq was is taking years. The Gulf War was a conventional war where two armies squared off against each other; the Iraq War has nearly entirely been a form of urban guerilla warfare.
Finally, perhaps you have forgotten, but the Iraqi people aren't supposed to be the enemy in this "war", at least so claims Bush. Carpet bombing innocent civilians who have done nothing to you is no way to win their hearts and minds.
Face it, everyone in the world warned the crazy murderous Republicans that invading Iraq would end up being a terrible mistake -- and it turned out to be a worse bloodbath than even our darkest fears. To claim we should have *started* by committing mass murder of innocents makes it clear that you are not entirely a sane human being. I pity your family and intimates.
In fact, I don't really think that soldiers are happier with their limbs blown off and replaced with prosthetics, no matter how good these prosthetics are. Nor do I really think that Iraqis or anyone else enjoys being killed and their country destroyed. Nor do I think that spending a trillion dollars -- that's one million million dollars -- to do all this was anything other than a bad idea.
This was intended as satire. I figured that it was so broad that no one could possibly take it seriously but....
The soldiers get exciting new limbs instead of the boring old ones they had before.
The Iraqis get killed and get to get their country destroyed.
And we the taxpayers get to piss away a trillion dollars. Did you need that money? You would have just wasted it selfishly on yourself!
I guess the only people who lose are Halliburton because they actually have to do some work. No wonder they mark up all their services 100%, who can blame them? What patriots!
I agree with you that it's only a small minority that causes the trouble. The cops I know are fine; but I used to live next door to a cocaine club and it was very clear then that the cops in the area were on the take. I'd sometimes complain to them after they were called to break up some fight at 6 in the morning and they'd say, "Hey, the place has a license!" and I'd say, "But it's 6 in the morning! By law they should have closed two hours ago! And they literally have piles of cocaine on the bar, go look!"
And they couldn't even look me in the eyes.
I've been here in New York City 20 years and I have to say that I've grown more and more frightened of the police. My friends are mainly older and two of them have told me flat out that they wouldn't let their kids enter the police force now. After the mass illegal arrests at the RNC where dozens of cops were proven by video to have perjured themselves repeatedly -- yet not one of them was even reprimanded -- I don't know a single politically active person who doesn't see a cop as a potential enemy now.
Oops, I started this with the intention of backing you up -- but it didn't work out.:-( Sorry, thanks for a polite and civilized comment anyway.
Most people understand that it's possible for things to be legal without being moral.
As for "Bush Derangement Syndrome": we've had 9/11, Iraq, New Orleans, massive election fraud, wholesale looting of the Treasury, wiretapping, Enron, the "Patriot" act repealing half the Bill of Rights....
We've pissed away thousands of American lives, a hundred thousand foreign ones, and a *trillion* dollars for nothing.
Now two-thirds of us hate the man whose greed, dishonesty and incompetence caused this and hunger for change before yet another catastrophe occurs.
There are more of us than you -- *you* are the ones with the syndrome -- Idiot Blindness Syndrome.
Producing a nuclear explosion is tricky (getting into the uranium refining business is the hardest part), but it isn't as difficult as making a bomb you can deliver with some reliability to the desired destination, which is extremely hard.
Libya probably just realized that they weren't actually going to be able to produce a bomb that could be delivered and detonated anywhere outside of Libya itself, and simply bailed on the whole project.
Good move but they probably had no other choice.
Saddam probably dismantled his nuclear weapons program for the same reason.
Today, Iran might well think that they have a chance of actually making a useful bomb while the US is caught in the tarbaby of Iraq.
While I understand why people think it will somehow improve the "balance of power", I think the parent poster's "bullied kid with a gun" metaphor is more accurate.
President Bush has made every possible mistake so far, except to start a nuclear war. Surely he'll do this before the end of his term, just for completeness' sake?
You see, the original poster wasn't serious when he was talking about mirrors -- and I was being even more unserious talking about drilling a hole through the earth.
But keep studying... with some work, you'll be able to imitate a human yet.
Mirrors still won't get you to the speed of light because the total path travelled by the light is significantly greater than the distance from one side of the earth to the other. In order to actually attain the speed of light, you'd have to drill right through the earth and transmit directly.
If that's "good customer service" I'll eat my hat.
I have a brand-new G5 Mac. Every time I try to import photos, iPhoto crashes... it used to be intermittent but now it's every time. And can I get service? No.
Good to know -- but -- while being a polyglot is important (I speak four languages myself and am slowly working on a fifth), and she's had a lot of important jobs -- this isn't evidence of competence.
In particular, she's been secretary of state for a while now, and foreign relations are pretty well at their lowest ebb in at least 50 years -- it's been blunder after blunder.
Being active in "good causes" doesn't mean that you aren't "evil" in the larger sense. Tom DeLay, truly an evil man, spends quite a lot of his time helping children (admittedly, a lot of that money gets kicked back to his friends, so I guess it's ambiguous...)
Perhaps I'm not so familiar with her career before her ill-starred tenure at the White House, but I don't see much proof of even competence on the part of Ms. Rice, let alone talent?
I'd also be curious to see some evidence as to her non-evil nature...
Would you consider perhaps refuting any of my actual arguments rather than bringing in some irrelevant, straw-man argument?
Is it not the case that the Blue States make more money per capita and more money overall than the Red States? Is it not the case that people in the Blue States have achieved higher educational levels on average? Is it not the case that many Republicans have publicly spoken out against teaching evolution and about the literal truth of the Bible? Is it not the case that many prominent Conservative thinkers have recently repudiated the Bush government?
I also note that neither you nor the parent poster was actually able to name a bright, non-evil person who supports President Bush. Feel free to go ahead and prove me wrong by naming such a person.
Slashdot Mirror
. as the concatenation is bone stupid, but is a result of other bone stupid decisions in PHP. The trouble is that PHP automatically coerces your results into other types, which results in craziness like "false" == 0 being true; if + were the concatenation operator, PHP wouldn't be able to tell whether to do string concatenation or addition.
Part of the fault allows rests with the unbelievably dreadful parser in the language, written completely ad hoc. If you want to see a bad parser, if you want to see really bad code in general, look at the PHP parser.
What makes e.g. Python good is a series of excellent decisions which make later decisions easier. What makes PHP execrable, terrible, dreadful, is a series of poor decisions at the beginning and a refusal to admit or realize them or correct for them.
I think the \ as namespace is a great idea as I think PHP should go away and this will hasten its inevitable though prolonged death.
Yes, I knew I was comparing apples and oranges, but the point was that the original number was off by well over an order of magnitude if not two. To seriously imagine that 5% of the items disappear from a store, each and every day, is madness.
Your average retailer is looking at 2% to 5% in shrinkage, every day.
Sorry, that's just not true. Your average retailer looks at less than 2% shrinkage, per year, check the stats.
And overall, most humans are still very moral. There's only a fairly small number of people who have the combination of energy and anti-social nature to do this. This could change - the neo-Cons have tried to make a virtue of psychopathy - but for right now your average guy is, if he's not feeling threatened, pretty decent.
You're just a truly horrible person.
Let us hope your turn is next and that you die sick, miserable and alone.
It is counterintuitive and on its face offensive, but the entire point of my post was that setting a precedent for circumvention of our legal and justice system is not justified by catching a few pederasts unlawfully.
What you said was that it was a "grave injustice". It was not: I proved it: you did not succeed in refuting that.
I'm not sure where these mentions of sexual servitude or horrible deaths are.
Why, it's in the referenced article that you didn't bother to read. The FBI investigator claimed that the hacker saved the lives of two children; the charges included "sexual exploitation of children".
That's not what the issue is here. The hacker (according to our laws, which are the ones we are trying to enforce)
The hacker is claimed by the article to be in Turkey, where this sort of activity is not illegal.
illegally intruded this downloader's computer and used it to gather evidence, that evidence was given to the FBI, and the FBI used it in court to prosecute the defendant. This is not a legal use of informant in any sense.
Sorry, you are wrong. Read hereabout the exclusionary rule: "The Exclusionary Rule is designed to provide a remedy and disincentive, short of criminal prosecution, for prosecutors and police who illegally gather evidence in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in the Bill of Rights, which provide for protection from unreasonable searches and seizure and compelled self-incrimination." Note that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments protect individuals from search and seizure by the government, not by other private citizens.
The hacker is not "acting as the agent of the FBI" -- if you'd *read the article* you'd see that he simply provided anonymous tips that were later used to apprehend the criminals. Again, this happens all the time. Cocaine dealers turn in their upstream dealers; kidnappers turn in their accomplices; thieves rat on other thieves; in each case, they got their information during the commission of a crime. In fact, police routinely outfit criminals with a wire and use them to gather information which holds up in court -- this is far closer to the idea of "acting as an agent of the FBI" than simply an anonymous tipster is.
Again, I ask you -- what would you have wanted to have happen? Should the police have ignored the information and, according to the article, allowed two children to die horribly?
For all the reasons you've listed 1069 isn't performing performing any good, but a grave injustice.
Hard to believe a caring human being could hold such a morally awful position.
Looking at the facts of the case as stated, the result appears to be that two children were saved from sexual servitude or even horrible deaths and that two pederasts were jailed. If what we are told is true, justice was clearly done -- if you wish to refute me, please identify who is being unjustly treated. The childen? The criminals? The police? Please do not claim that you, as a representative of the "people", are experiencing an injustice, because you are not.
If this hacker really did present the police with information which would allow them to save two children from sexual abuse, what would you have wanted to happen?
I believe what you are actually claiming is that allowing law enforcement officials to operate in this fashion is illegal and would allow possible injustices to occur in the future. I agree that sometimes injustices must occur because of the "system", the rules that ensure fairness: this is not one of those cases.
Do you really believe that police shouldn't be allowed to use evidence gathered by criminals? Why? Exactly how do you think law enforcement works, anyway? Police routinely use informers, stool pigeons and the like -- why is this wrong? There are very specific rules on conduct, on admissability of evidence, and defence attorneys routinely and often successfully challenge the believability of such witnesses because of their poor character, but there's nothing intrinsically "unjust" in having criminals testify against other criminals, it happens every day.
In fact, it's not even clear that the hacker is doing anything that is illegal.
If the facts are as presented, the police had physical evidence linking the criminals with the children in question -- the possibly-unreliable hacker's information would be presented as corroborating evidence. It's interesting to note that the defense attorney did not in fact challenge the reliability of the evidence as gathered.
I might add that I'm very much a liberal and strongly support strict oversight of the police and limits to their powers. But this is not one of those cases I think illustrates any sort of problem, and worse, I think you seriously damage our case by screaming about "injustice" in a case where your mother or any common-sense person would see that justice was obviously done (if the facts are as presented in the short article in question).
Oh, and don't waste the Franklin quotation! It gets a little weaker each time we use it pointlessly. Save it for things where it really applies.
You're quite right -- I misread it. My apologies.
Now, if the police weren't wasting their time on victimless crimes like drugs, they might actually have time to deal with thefts and things like that. The fact that you and many others simply accept the fact that police won't even bother to investigate most crimes shows how low most people's expectations are.
"The biggest reason is that even if they did pull good fingerprints from your window, tracked them to a known criminal, got a warrant, entered his place, and found him along with your stereo in his bedroom, the criminal would get an average sentence of a few days to a few weeks, (most likely suspended,) plus probation and possibly reparations."
Got any source for this extremely dubious claim? There are few places that grand theft auto won't get you a year. If it's a "known criminal" as in your example, and they've committed two felonies before, in many states the "three strikes" laws will put them away for a long, long time, even if the last crime is extremely minor, but there are often mandatory minimum sentences even for first-time offenders.
Not that I don't agree with the underlying idea, that the cops are lazy and won't follow up on crimes. But it's not because we have "soft on crime" judges out there; it's because the police are basically responsible to no one.
President Bush admits there are 30,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.
More on civilian deaths in Iraq here. Yes, I know the title says "Casualties" but it talks about deaths too.
Even the lowest number, 30,000, is more than all the people you've ever talked to in your life. The real number is probably around 100,000. That's like 30 9/11's, except that the population of Iraq is about one-tenth that of the US so proportionally it's really like 300 9/11's -- and also that there were very few casualties that weren't killed in 9/11 whereas there are at least two Iraqis seriously injured for each one killed.
There's this really good service called Google that lets you search for this sort of information on the internet so next time you can just look it up the information for yourself.
"In the Iraq War, up to 15,000 military combaants were killed in the face of up to 4,300 civilian noncombatant deaths. During the Desert Storm conflict, 20,000 Iraqi soldiers and 3,500 civilians were killed. 68% of the munitions used in this war were precision-guided, compared with 6.5 % in 1991. I think these statistics speak for themselves."
4300 non-combatant deaths in the Iraq war? Where in world did you get that number?! President Bush himself said (in a speech on December 12, 2005) that there were 30,000 non-combatant casualties; other, less medacious sources estimate the true number is between two and four times as much as *that* but even that ultra-lowball number from Bush himself is *7* times your 4,300 figure.
Before correcting your numbers, you might also note that these two wars were utterly, utterly different. The Gulf War took weeks; the Iraq was is taking years. The Gulf War was a conventional war where two armies squared off against each other; the Iraq War has nearly entirely been a form of urban guerilla warfare.
Finally, perhaps you have forgotten, but the Iraqi people aren't supposed to be the enemy in this "war", at least so claims Bush. Carpet bombing innocent civilians who have done nothing to you is no way to win their hearts and minds.
Face it, everyone in the world warned the crazy murderous Republicans that invading Iraq would end up being a terrible mistake -- and it turned out to be a worse bloodbath than even our darkest fears. To claim we should have *started* by committing mass murder of innocents makes it clear that you are not entirely a sane human being. I pity your family and intimates.
No, no -- let me explain.
In fact, I don't really think that soldiers are happier with their limbs blown off and replaced with prosthetics, no matter how good these prosthetics are. Nor do I really think that Iraqis or anyone else enjoys being killed and their country destroyed. Nor do I think that spending a trillion dollars -- that's one million million dollars -- to do all this was anything other than a bad idea.
This was intended as satire. I figured that it was so broad that no one could possibly take it seriously but....
What is this fixation that the approximately one-third of Americans who still support Bush have about killing the other two thirds?
You're already killing people all over the world. If you want to kill Americans, why not start with yourselves?
Wow, such utterly driving wit! I am floored by your astonishing brilliance!
Please, please, tell me where you learned to write like that. And that astonishing, creative name: "itsdave". Wow. Just.... wow.
You know, I'll bet your name really is Dave! What a twist! How subtle!
The soldiers get exciting new limbs instead of the boring old ones they had before.
The Iraqis get killed and get to get their country destroyed.
And we the taxpayers get to piss away a trillion dollars. Did you need that money? You would have just wasted it selfishly on yourself!
I guess the only people who lose are Halliburton because they actually have to do some work. No wonder they mark up all their services 100%, who can blame them? What patriots!
Hey, Sherm, thanks for a very reasonable post!
:-( Sorry, thanks for a polite and civilized comment anyway.
I agree with you that it's only a small minority that causes the trouble. The cops I know are fine; but I used to live next door to a cocaine club and it was very clear then that the cops in the area were on the take. I'd sometimes complain to them after they were called to break up some fight at 6 in the morning and they'd say, "Hey, the place has a license!" and I'd say, "But it's 6 in the morning! By law they should have closed two hours ago! And they literally have piles of cocaine on the bar, go look!"
And they couldn't even look me in the eyes.
I've been here in New York City 20 years and I have to say that I've grown more and more frightened of the police. My friends are mainly older and two of them have told me flat out that they wouldn't let their kids enter the police force now. After the mass illegal arrests at the RNC where dozens of cops were proven by video to have perjured themselves repeatedly -- yet not one of them was even reprimanded -- I don't know a single politically active person who doesn't see a cop as a potential enemy now.
Oops, I started this with the intention of backing you up -- but it didn't work out.
Most people understand that it's possible for things to be legal without being moral.
As for "Bush Derangement Syndrome": we've had 9/11, Iraq, New Orleans, massive election fraud, wholesale looting of the Treasury, wiretapping, Enron, the "Patriot" act repealing half the Bill of Rights....
We've pissed away thousands of American lives, a hundred thousand foreign ones, and a *trillion* dollars for nothing.
Now two-thirds of us hate the man whose greed, dishonesty and incompetence caused this and hunger for change before yet another catastrophe occurs.
There are more of us than you -- *you* are the ones with the syndrome -- Idiot Blindness Syndrome.
Producing a nuclear explosion is tricky (getting into the uranium refining business is the hardest part), but it isn't as difficult as making a bomb you can deliver with some reliability to the desired destination, which is extremely hard.
Libya probably just realized that they weren't actually going to be able to produce a bomb that could be delivered and detonated anywhere outside of Libya itself, and simply bailed on the whole project.
Good move but they probably had no other choice.
Saddam probably dismantled his nuclear weapons program for the same reason.
Today, Iran might well think that they have a chance of actually making a useful bomb while the US is caught in the tarbaby of Iraq.
While I understand why people think it will somehow improve the "balance of power", I think the parent poster's "bullied kid with a gun" metaphor is more accurate.
President Bush has made every possible mistake so far, except to start a nuclear war. Surely he'll do this before the end of his term, just for completeness' sake?
And the original is only two stories below this one...
During the transmission, the light beam moves at the speed of light (by definition, eh?)
The net speed of the information transfer is less than the speed of light.
Oh, I'm sorry! Let me explain!
You see, the original poster wasn't serious when he was talking about mirrors -- and I was being even more unserious talking about drilling a hole through the earth.
But keep studying... with some work, you'll be able to imitate a human yet.
Mirrors still won't get you to the speed of light because the total path travelled by the light is significantly greater than the distance from one side of the earth to the other. In order to actually attain the speed of light, you'd have to drill right through the earth and transmit directly.
If that's "good customer service" I'll eat my hat.
I have a brand-new G5 Mac. Every time I try to import photos, iPhoto crashes... it used to be intermittent but now it's every time. And can I get service? No.
Useless. The bloom is off the rose for me.
Good to know -- but -- while being a polyglot is important (I speak four languages myself and am slowly working on a fifth), and she's had a lot of important jobs -- this isn't evidence of competence.
In particular, she's been secretary of state for a while now, and foreign relations are pretty well at their lowest ebb in at least 50 years -- it's been blunder after blunder.
Being active in "good causes" doesn't mean that you aren't "evil" in the larger sense. Tom DeLay, truly an evil man, spends quite a lot of his time helping children (admittedly, a lot of that money gets kicked back to his friends, so I guess it's ambiguous...)
Still, thanks for the very interesting info...
Thanks for a well-written response.
Perhaps I'm not so familiar with her career before her ill-starred tenure at the White House, but I don't see much proof of even competence on the part of Ms. Rice, let alone talent?
I'd also be curious to see some evidence as to her non-evil nature...
Would you consider perhaps refuting any of my actual arguments rather than bringing in some irrelevant, straw-man argument?
Is it not the case that the Blue States make more money per capita and more money overall than the Red States? Is it not the case that people in the Blue States have achieved higher educational levels on average? Is it not the case that many Republicans have publicly spoken out against teaching evolution and about the literal truth of the Bible? Is it not the case that many prominent Conservative thinkers have recently repudiated the Bush government?
I also note that neither you nor the parent poster was actually able to name a bright, non-evil person who supports President Bush. Feel free to go ahead and prove me wrong by naming such a person.