It has to be collected and retained like an old fashioned paper ballot. In which case, electronic voting offers nothing.
Say it prints out the vote. The tally still says what CEO "I am committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to G.W. Bush" wants the tally to say.
Canada counts paper ballots under the watchful eye of partisans, and gets it done in a few hours. How many ballots can you count in an hour? Hire enough counters and let the parties watch. Done fsking deal.
I was in the odd position of being called a luddite by a computer science academic. He was Russian, and figured electronic vote rigging was not such a new thing. I have a little more of a security background, and I think the challenges of securing the system end-end are insurmountable. As the systems are now, they are laughably easy to corrupt. And is there any greater incentive to cheat than political power?
Our library shells out big bucks for web access to some databases and journals.
In this, non-porn searches are similar to porn searches: the good stuff costs. (Not that I'd know anything about this, of course!) Lexus/Nexus search, anyone?
Seattle has a municipal fiber net, linking schools, libraries, and community colleges. The ISP is a state agency. We've enjoyed a gigabit uplink - schaweeeeet! Since we own the fiber, we can lease it to the ISP agency for the cost of the ISP hookup, which they are cool with. They don't have to maintain and pay for T1s.
And Qwest has its genitals in its anus where they belong. Everybody hates Qwest. Verizon would rather pay more to set up a tower than lease some space on theirs. They wouldn't lease us space in a conduit that goes under a street to our facility (and nowhere else). There's a guy who used to be in charge of leasing this stuff. His job is now not leasing stuff.
If it's just a claim, the U.S. has a counter-claim and until resolution of the claims it has the right to fly there. Hell, I claim the rock.
As for spying, call it "intelligence gathering". China has the right to fly outside U.S. territory as well. The Russkies used to tail U.S. fleets with long-range bombers/spy craft.
I run a Samba+LDAP "windows" domain. Why? We could have purchased a windows server. It would have been easier for me. We paid a consultant a fair amount for the help (this was before Samba 3 or TNG). Sometimes printing goes tits up for no discernable reason.
It's still worth it. We were hit by a software audit- no need to track CALS. We set up authenticated wireless access - again, no need to ask, "Per seat or per connection?" and be damned either way. We own the solution, we're not renting. No "All your base..." click-through agreements. (Which I render null and void anyway by crossing my fingers as I click.)
Security is better. The server is immune to win32 attacks (though some smb protocol vulnerabilities may be yet be present).
The technical part of my job presents enough challenges without precious "mental bandwidth" (in Ballmer's phrase) being syphoned off on distractions like licensing. It's INCREDIBLY time-consuming and that effort is totally wasted. It doesn't advance our mission at all.
I just want to do tech stuff. Proprietary software introduces friction that has to be weighed against any purported benefits like a more polished UI.
then it's still indescriminate. If you know or should know that your bombing is wildly inaccurate and you still persist because, well, you aren't that concerned about what else is in the area, that's a legitimate cause for concern.
I didn't see the purported clear thinking on the issues. I did see a presumption that I was in favor of massacres perpetrated by commies. That earned you a presumption of "kjrwd". Your conjecture of qualities I lack tends to confirm it.
Incidentally, in your understanding of history, you described S. Vietnam as a separate country. It was actually part of Vietnam, which was partitioned pending elections which the U.S. decided against holding. It knew the North's government would win. That doesn't mean that the elections would have proven a model of democracy. The massive migration south also suggests that the North's government wasn't viewed favorably by a lot of people who got a chance to vote with their feet. Still, the U.S. took a temporarily partitioned state and attempted to make it permanent by suspending elections.
And where do you get the idea that I assume U.S. troops regularly commit war crimes? I do say, and the evidence supports it, that much of the conduct of the war in Vietnam was criminal. The bombing was akin to a cop firing a shotgun into a crowd in the belief that a perp was present. Except shotguns are a little more accurate. Much of the ground war in the province where My Lai was located was also conducted in a criminal fashion. Free-fire zones - not cool.
And do you suppose the right-wing support of central american death squads is morally consistent? Saddam was the same thug in the 1980's when he was shaking hands with Rummy as he was when W. invaded Iraq. The thing is, the right is as full of it as the straw-man left it attacks.
Finally, I find it unpatriotic to hold Americans to no better a standard than the militia of some tinpot dictator. We're not the best because we're the baddest. We're the best because of a lot of things, most of which reflect on a presumption of inherent worth and dignity in humans. The expansive definition of citizenship is to me the biggest thing - it transcends ethnicity/nationality. I admire Germany and Japan, but they have, to me, backward notions of what it takes to be a citizen.
I saw a lot of folks who could describe themselves, with a straight face and without irony, as "overachievers". There was something missing from them, for the most part. Not the implacable, invincible Borg, but essentailly Stepford People. And wannabes. And as ferociously competitive as they are in the industry, I saw unmistakable evidence from the lowly trenches that as an institution they were large enough where intra-tribal competition was sapping it. A small tribe (or company) will tend to be more focussed and unified in the face of external threats. A large entity will have people who see personal advantage in the failure of others, even if the company (or tribe) as a whole suffers from the defeat. Which reminds me of an old joke: How many med students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: one to do it, and the other to kick the chair out from under him/her.
When I was allegedly testing there, I saw a fair amount of typical weasel-world politics. A coworker's assessment was "snake pit". He blue-badged, so it was an attractive snake pit, I guess.
There was one kick-ass tester with a shitheel boss. She asked to join another team, several team leaders were into it, and when shitheel heard about it, she was frog-marched out. They lost a lot of talent and product knowledge due to his ego. He also spent a day and a half trying to find out what dept. was hiring another guy (my team leader) permanently to try to torpedo it. When the guy got his blue badge, he brought it round to neener the shitheel.
On the other hand, there was one rightious developer. Pretty young guy, he would sit quietly in meetings, let people babble, and then say, "This is what we should do..." (almost always involving more work for him) and it was so. And it was demonstrably right that it be so. He was the only guy there who lived up to the MS self image that I met.
Or perhaps I've been hitting the Buffy dvd's too hard.
The SPA came after us (another unnamed school). We had our shit together, license-wise. Just about my biggest priority when I came on board. We even had a hardware/software auditing package so we could refuse to use theirs. (Demo version - first one's free! But you can't see the output...) We put a fair amount of effort into turning the data (count of exe's by filename and by workstation) into information. They refused to give us the list of member company executables to search for, so we gave them the raw output. In small font. We didn't give them a dime. We didn't owe them a dime.
When you run windows update and it completes "successfully" and for whatever reason, you are still wide open- that's when you give serious consideration to a serious OS. Like *BSD or a linux. Or an Amiga.
It's just poorly architected, like one of my perl scripts. Only, I don't get paid to sell perl scripts.
Dropping bombs indescriminately (which was the case in the air force up until after the Gulf War - only 10% had any kind of guidance then, and even in Afghanistan the proportion was under 2/3rds guided. CEP measured in hundreds of yards...)
Any chance you are just a knee-jerk right wing dipshit? Pretty strong. Yeah, massacres by commies are bad. I'd try to stop them. Massacres by Serbs, Croats, Hutus and Tutsis are bad. Massacres by U.S. troops, representing the greatest, and at our best, most enlightened nation in the world are especially bad because it is such a come-down from our ideals.
The law says several things - willful killing of non-combatants is unlawful. Indescriminate use of firepower and bombs is acceptable. You shouldn't be surprised to find that military law is as contradictory as civilian.
When a bombing run flattens a hamlet, the civilians are just as dead as when Calley (and his Captain) perpetrated the retail killing at My Lai.
Suppose you were on the scene at the My Lai massacre, when American troops were murdering civilians. Would it be treason to urge them to stop? No. Would it be treason to use force to try to stop them? Maybe. Would it be wrong? Certainly not. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson ordered his crew chief to "open up on the Americans" if they fired on Vietnamese civilians he was shielding with his helicopter.
If you view the Vietnam War as one big massacre, you have a moral obligation to do what you can to stop it. That view is one reasonable people could hold. The U.S. dropped more tonnage of bombs on agricultural N. Vietnam than on Nazi Germany and Japan. The B52 crews Hanoi Jane was hoping would be shot down were following lawful orders and yet perpetrating massacres. It's a problem.
I have a lot of respect for the troops. I have no respect for the current CIC. If my own brother were shooting civilians, I'd stop him if I had the chance. Would you stand by just because of the uniform?
In an open society, you can live according to your religious tradition (within limits, as is the case in France). In a fundamentalist society, only the clerics with the guns have the apparent ear of god, and everyone else is a heretic. Witness the horrific violence of the Taliban on Shiites. Do women in Saudi Arabia get to opt out of Wahabi doctrine? I don't think so. That's why the West should want open societies - so that those who don't want to be repressed by religious maniacs don't have to be. But if they wish to live according to extremely conservative religious precepts, they can. Orthodox Jewry seems to do o.k. in the decadent West, and the U.S. has a long history of thriving fundie christian culture.
I grant that it's hard to influence societies this way. The Chinese seem to get pissed off when the U.S. criticizes their kleptocratic, tyrannical, deeply fucked up government. Yo! Nitwits! That's *your* neck the boot is on! We think it is wrong for your shithead government to oppress...you! (The popular, nationalist-based resentment leads them to some goofy conclusions: there appears to be a consensus that their air force is unable to obtain jet fighters that can outrun or outmanouver a propeller driven EP-3 spyplane. They'd put it differently, of course, but that's the only way it could be the U.S. pilot's fault. Maybe China could buy some WWII surplus from the Phillipines. You really have to be a moron, or blinded, to think that a pilot is going to put 24 crewmen at risk initiating a game of chicken. But a fighter jock under orders to harrass a spy plane...that's different. There's no question that China owes the U.S. an apology and reparations. It was only the small matter of hostages that prevented it. Long digression, but, yeah, I agree that people can be stupid in identifying with their governments)
I think the U.S. should clean up its act, but it should also condemn human rights abuses everywhere. Not just nutbag Islamic states (which does not include all Islamic states, or states with Islamic majorities). Bombing a country into a democracy is a pretty retarded way to go about it, I grant you. No argument here on that.
I will grant that support of corrupt and oppressive governments in the Middle East has done a lot to make us hated there. Support for Israel is another big thing.
On a more fundamental - or fundamentalist - level, we have two conflicting world views. bin-laden wants fundamentalist islamic states everywhere. The West wants pluralistic, open societies. (though the political leadership wants corporate-dominated societies...) How do you resist the former? Turkey might be a target for violent transformation to a sharia-based society. Support the modernizing government, and the suicide attacks at home start all over. Don't support them, and another state is assimilated. Next.
I guess my point is that some fraction of terrorism is produced by one's illegitimate actions. The remainder is produced by the legitimate ones. I think it is the moral, sound, and sensible thing to do to oppose the creation of fundamentalist states. (At home and abroad!)
Under Gore we would not have a half trillion deficit and growing larger (because of the usual cowardly politician trick of deferring the pain to later years).
Under Gore we would not have an energy policy of INCREASING oil consumption.
Under Gore we would not see religious bigotry proposed as national policy.
Under Gore we would not see a tax policy goal of entrenching wealth.
Under Gore we would not see the concept of overtime eviscerated.
Under Gore we would not see environmental laws written by and for the convenience of polluters.
The Dems are a centrist party, the Republicans right-wing (and run by feudalists).
No difference? How pure a stance you are making! How stupid.
In a domestic violence case, some whacko sent a couple of death threats from a couple of our public access machines.
The police department got the ip address of the client machine from yahoo, and came to us. When they had the proper authorization, we turned the hard drives over to them.
The detective said it was good we could track the dhcp addresses. In a serious enough case (threaten El Presidente, serial killer), if we couldn't identify the relevant machines they would have taken all of them to find what they wanted.
He had passed the 4 (?) core exams for the win2k mcse. A jobs program had put him through a boot camp. When he got to me, I asked him to bring up the control panel.
Deer in headlights.
Ok. Hit the start button and go to control panel.
More bambi.
O.k....lower left corner. Left-click...
I am not making this up. It's possible the guy went into cranial vapor lock under pressure, but even in brainlock you should be able to find the control panel. Or at least the start button.
Nice guy, good attitude, might be some aptitude, but the thought that he was going to get hired as an admin somewhere after his internship was weird.
My brother is a big guy, in good shape. He was avidly recruited and, to put it bluntly, needed someone to impose some discipline on him. I think it was the last day or week of Boot Camp that they gave him one last chance to "come clean" about any previous drug use, and he took it.
Boy, did he regret it. (There was a lot, of various and scary substances.) They kept him, but tagged him as a shitbird. I visited him at Boot Camp and he was completely motivated. He actually regretted not signing up for the longer tour. That was before the little conversation. Their perception changed, their treatment changed, his performance changed. He lost his enthusiasm and they lost someone with real potential.
His timing sucked, too. A month after his advanced training (the stuff you do to learn how to do your job, as opposed to the basic shit) Saddam revised Iraq's borders south. THey must have thought, "O.k., who hasn't had time to forget how to do this stuff...He was shipped to Saudi Arabia in August 1990 and didn't get home until five months or so after the shooting was over.
The U.S. industrialized after Britain (enjoying 250 years of relative decline!), largely with British funds. Lots of defaulting later...
The government was also heavily involved in the developing economy. Land grants to railroads. Protectionism. If it was capitalism, it was of the cronyism kind.
I can't think of a country that has jump-started its economy following the IMF/World Bank precepts. My scalp itches for the tin-foil cap when I think of all those economists with advanced degrees pushing what doesn't work on desperate countries, in the face of decades of failure and abundant counter-examples. Could it be they like inducing poverty?
Then I think of medicine, which was for hundreds of years more dangerous than illness. Bleeding. Medicines made from mercury. It had the same theological nature as economics. Maybe there's hope for the dismal science yet.
Then I think of the economists I know, and I'm back to thinking along the plotlines of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
On the 1950's t.v. show, a bad guy in a bad suit would empty a revolver at Superman, who would puff out his chest and let the bullets ricochet off his body. Then the bad guy would hurl his empty gun at Superman, who would then duck.
The nice thing about that is you can use it any time you want! Another good one is "cry me a river"
I see. I should continue to use closed source, accidentally disclosed (but only to bad people) so that MS can accumulate capital. That helps me a lot. That's definitely my goal in life. Thanks for clearing that up.
Slashdot Mirror
It has to be collected and retained like an old fashioned paper ballot. In which case, electronic voting offers nothing.
Say it prints out the vote. The tally still says what CEO "I am committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to G.W. Bush" wants the tally to say.
Canada counts paper ballots under the watchful eye of partisans, and gets it done in a few hours. How many ballots can you count in an hour? Hire enough counters and let the parties watch. Done fsking deal.
I was in the odd position of being called a luddite by a computer science academic. He was Russian, and figured electronic vote rigging was not such a new thing. I have a little more of a security background, and I think the challenges of securing the system end-end are insurmountable. As the systems are now, they are laughably easy to corrupt. And is there any greater incentive to cheat than political power?
if she doesn't sue you for sexual harrassment.
On the other hand, she could get you for neglecting your affectionate duties.
Rock. Hard place.
M&M enterprises contracts with the Germans to have the squadron bomb its own airfield in exchange for taking a load of Egyptian cotton off its hands.
Bleak view of human and corporate nature.
Bwahahahahahaha! (*sniff*)
I kill myself.
Our library shells out big bucks for web access to some databases and journals.
In this, non-porn searches are similar to porn searches: the good stuff costs. (Not that I'd know anything about this, of course!) Lexus/Nexus search, anyone?
Seattle has a municipal fiber net, linking schools, libraries, and community colleges. The ISP is a state agency. We've enjoyed a gigabit uplink - schaweeeeet! Since we own the fiber, we can lease it to the ISP agency for the cost of the ISP hookup, which they are cool with. They don't have to maintain and pay for T1s.
And Qwest has its genitals in its anus where they belong. Everybody hates Qwest. Verizon would rather pay more to set up a tower than lease some space on theirs. They wouldn't lease us space in a conduit that goes under a street to our facility (and nowhere else). There's a guy who used to be in charge of leasing this stuff. His job is now not leasing stuff.
then the U.S. was trespassing.
If it's just a claim, the U.S. has a counter-claim and until resolution of the claims it has the right to fly there. Hell, I claim the rock.
As for spying, call it "intelligence gathering". China has the right to fly outside U.S. territory as well. The Russkies used to tail U.S. fleets with long-range bombers/spy craft.
I run a Samba+LDAP "windows" domain. Why? We could have purchased a windows server. It would have been easier for me. We paid a consultant a fair amount for the help (this was before Samba 3 or TNG). Sometimes printing goes tits up for no discernable reason.
It's still worth it. We were hit by a software audit- no need to track CALS. We set up authenticated wireless access - again, no need to ask, "Per seat or per connection?" and be damned either way. We own the solution, we're not renting. No "All your base..." click-through agreements. (Which I render null and void anyway by crossing my fingers as I click.)
Security is better. The server is immune to win32 attacks (though some smb protocol vulnerabilities may be yet be present).
The technical part of my job presents enough challenges without precious "mental bandwidth" (in Ballmer's phrase) being syphoned off on distractions like licensing. It's INCREDIBLY time-consuming and that effort is totally wasted. It doesn't advance our mission at all.
I just want to do tech stuff. Proprietary software introduces friction that has to be weighed against any purported benefits like a more polished UI.
then it's still indescriminate. If you know or should know that your bombing is wildly inaccurate and you still persist because, well, you aren't that concerned about what else is in the area, that's a legitimate cause for concern.
I didn't see the purported clear thinking on the issues. I did see a presumption that I was in favor of massacres perpetrated by commies. That earned you a presumption of "kjrwd". Your conjecture of qualities I lack tends to confirm it.
Incidentally, in your understanding of history, you described S. Vietnam as a separate country. It was actually part of Vietnam, which was partitioned pending elections which the U.S. decided against holding. It knew the North's government would win. That doesn't mean that the elections would have proven a model of democracy. The massive migration south also suggests that the North's government wasn't viewed favorably by a lot of people who got a chance to vote with their feet. Still, the U.S. took a temporarily partitioned state and attempted to make it permanent by suspending elections.
And where do you get the idea that I assume U.S. troops regularly commit war crimes? I do say, and the evidence supports it, that much of the conduct of the war in Vietnam was criminal. The bombing was akin to a cop firing a shotgun into a crowd in the belief that a perp was present. Except shotguns are a little more accurate. Much of the ground war in the province where My Lai was located was also conducted in a criminal fashion. Free-fire zones - not cool.
And do you suppose the right-wing support of central american death squads is morally consistent? Saddam was the same thug in the 1980's when he was shaking hands with Rummy as he was when W. invaded Iraq. The thing is, the right is as full of it as the straw-man left it attacks.
Finally, I find it unpatriotic to hold Americans to no better a standard than the militia of some tinpot dictator. We're not the best because we're the baddest. We're the best because of a lot of things, most of which reflect on a presumption of inherent worth and dignity in humans. The expansive definition of citizenship is to me the biggest thing - it transcends ethnicity/nationality. I admire Germany and Japan, but they have, to me, backward notions of what it takes to be a citizen.
Probably based on a different sample.
I saw a lot of folks who could describe themselves, with a straight face and without irony, as "overachievers". There was something missing from them, for the most part. Not the implacable, invincible Borg, but essentailly Stepford People. And wannabes. And as ferociously competitive as they are in the industry, I saw unmistakable evidence from the lowly trenches that as an institution they were large enough where intra-tribal competition was sapping it. A small tribe (or company) will tend to be more focussed and unified in the face of external threats. A large entity will have people who see personal advantage in the failure of others, even if the company (or tribe) as a whole suffers from the defeat. Which reminds me of an old joke: How many med students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: one to do it, and the other to kick the chair out from under him/her.
When I was allegedly testing there, I saw a fair amount of typical weasel-world politics. A coworker's assessment was "snake pit". He blue-badged, so it was an attractive snake pit, I guess.
There was one kick-ass tester with a shitheel boss. She asked to join another team, several team leaders were into it, and when shitheel heard about it, she was frog-marched out. They lost a lot of talent and product knowledge due to his ego. He also spent a day and a half trying to find out what dept. was hiring another guy (my team leader) permanently to try to torpedo it. When the guy got his blue badge, he brought it round to neener the shitheel.
On the other hand, there was one rightious developer. Pretty young guy, he would sit quietly in meetings, let people babble, and then say, "This is what we should do..." (almost always involving more work for him) and it was so. And it was demonstrably right that it be so. He was the only guy there who lived up to the MS self image that I met.
Inviting either in is a big mistake...
Or perhaps I've been hitting the Buffy dvd's too hard.
The SPA came after us (another unnamed school). We had our shit together, license-wise. Just about my biggest priority when I came on board. We even had a hardware/software auditing package so we could refuse to use theirs. (Demo version - first one's free! But you can't see the output...) We put a fair amount of effort into turning the data (count of exe's by filename and by workstation) into information. They refused to give us the list of member company executables to search for, so we gave them the raw output. In small font. We didn't give them a dime. We didn't owe them a dime.
When you run windows update and it completes "successfully" and for whatever reason, you are still wide open- that's when you give serious consideration to a serious OS. Like *BSD or a linux. Or an Amiga.
It's just poorly architected, like one of my perl scripts. Only, I don't get paid to sell perl scripts.
Dropping bombs indescriminately (which was the case in the air force up until after the Gulf War - only 10% had any kind of guidance then, and even in Afghanistan the proportion was under 2/3rds guided. CEP measured in hundreds of yards...)
Any chance you are just a knee-jerk right wing dipshit? Pretty strong. Yeah, massacres by commies are bad. I'd try to stop them. Massacres by Serbs, Croats, Hutus and Tutsis are bad. Massacres by U.S. troops, representing the greatest, and at our best, most enlightened nation in the world are especially bad because it is such a come-down from our ideals.
The law says several things - willful killing of non-combatants is unlawful. Indescriminate use of firepower and bombs is acceptable. You shouldn't be surprised to find that military law is as contradictory as civilian.
When a bombing run flattens a hamlet, the civilians are just as dead as when Calley (and his Captain) perpetrated the retail killing at My Lai.
Suppose you were on the scene at the My Lai massacre, when American troops were murdering civilians. Would it be treason to urge them to stop? No. Would it be treason to use force to try to stop them? Maybe. Would it be wrong? Certainly not. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson ordered his crew chief to "open up on the Americans" if they fired on Vietnamese civilians he was shielding with his helicopter.
If you view the Vietnam War as one big massacre, you have a moral obligation to do what you can to stop it. That view is one reasonable people could hold. The U.S. dropped more tonnage of bombs on agricultural N. Vietnam than on Nazi Germany and Japan. The B52 crews Hanoi Jane was hoping would be shot down were following lawful orders and yet perpetrating massacres. It's a problem.
I have a lot of respect for the troops. I have no respect for the current CIC. If my own brother were shooting civilians, I'd stop him if I had the chance. Would you stand by just because of the uniform?
In an open society, you can live according to your religious tradition (within limits, as is the case in France). In a fundamentalist society, only the clerics with the guns have the apparent ear of god, and everyone else is a heretic. Witness the horrific violence of the Taliban on Shiites. Do women in Saudi Arabia get to opt out of Wahabi doctrine? I don't think so. That's why the West should want open societies - so that those who don't want to be repressed by religious maniacs don't have to be. But if they wish to live according to extremely conservative religious precepts, they can. Orthodox Jewry seems to do o.k. in the decadent West, and the U.S. has a long history of thriving fundie christian culture.
I grant that it's hard to influence societies this way. The Chinese seem to get pissed off when the U.S. criticizes their kleptocratic, tyrannical, deeply fucked up government. Yo! Nitwits! That's *your* neck the boot is on! We think it is wrong for your shithead government to oppress...you! (The popular, nationalist-based resentment leads them to some goofy conclusions: there appears to be a consensus that their air force is unable to obtain jet fighters that can outrun or outmanouver a propeller driven EP-3 spyplane. They'd put it differently, of course, but that's the only way it could be the U.S. pilot's fault. Maybe China could buy some WWII surplus from the Phillipines. You really have to be a moron, or blinded, to think that a pilot is going to put 24 crewmen at risk initiating a game of chicken. But a fighter jock under orders to harrass a spy plane...that's different. There's no question that China owes the U.S. an apology and reparations. It was only the small matter of hostages that prevented it. Long digression, but, yeah, I agree that people can be stupid in identifying with their governments)
I think the U.S. should clean up its act, but it should also condemn human rights abuses everywhere. Not just nutbag Islamic states (which does not include all Islamic states, or states with Islamic majorities). Bombing a country into a democracy is a pretty retarded way to go about it, I grant you. No argument here on that.
I will grant that support of corrupt and oppressive governments in the Middle East has done a lot to make us hated there. Support for Israel is another big thing.
On a more fundamental - or fundamentalist - level, we have two conflicting world views. bin-laden wants fundamentalist islamic states everywhere. The West wants pluralistic, open societies. (though the political leadership wants corporate-dominated societies...) How do you resist the former? Turkey might be a target for violent transformation to a sharia-based society. Support the modernizing government, and the suicide attacks at home start all over. Don't support them, and another state is assimilated. Next.
I guess my point is that some fraction of terrorism is produced by one's illegitimate actions. The remainder is produced by the legitimate ones. I think it is the moral, sound, and sensible thing to do to oppose the creation of fundamentalist states. (At home and abroad!)
Under Gore we would not have a half trillion deficit and growing larger (because of the usual cowardly politician trick of deferring the pain to later years).
Under Gore we would not have an energy policy of INCREASING oil consumption.
Under Gore we would not see religious bigotry proposed as national policy.
Under Gore we would not see a tax policy goal of entrenching wealth.
Under Gore we would not see the concept of overtime eviscerated.
Under Gore we would not see environmental laws written by and for the convenience of polluters.
The Dems are a centrist party, the Republicans right-wing (and run by feudalists).
No difference? How pure a stance you are making! How stupid.
In a domestic violence case, some whacko sent a couple of death threats from a couple of our public access machines.
The police department got the ip address of the client machine from yahoo, and came to us. When they had the proper authorization, we turned the hard drives over to them.
The detective said it was good we could track the dhcp addresses. In a serious enough case (threaten El Presidente, serial killer), if we couldn't identify the relevant machines they would have taken all of them to find what they wanted.
He had passed the 4 (?) core exams for the win2k mcse. A jobs program had put him through a boot camp. When he got to me, I asked him to bring up the control panel.
Deer in headlights.
Ok. Hit the start button and go to control panel.
More bambi.
O.k....lower left corner. Left-click...
I am not making this up. It's possible the guy went into cranial vapor lock under pressure, but even in brainlock you should be able to find the control panel. Or at least the start button.
Nice guy, good attitude, might be some aptitude, but the thought that he was going to get hired as an admin somewhere after his internship was weird.
My brother is a big guy, in good shape. He was avidly recruited and, to put it bluntly, needed someone to impose some discipline on him. I think it was the last day or week of Boot Camp that they gave him one last chance to "come clean" about any previous drug use, and he took it.
Boy, did he regret it. (There was a lot, of various and scary substances.) They kept him, but tagged him as a shitbird. I visited him at Boot Camp and he was completely motivated. He actually regretted not signing up for the longer tour. That was before the little conversation. Their perception changed, their treatment changed, his performance changed. He lost his enthusiasm and they lost someone with real potential.
His timing sucked, too. A month after his advanced training (the stuff you do to learn how to do your job, as opposed to the basic shit) Saddam revised Iraq's borders south. THey must have thought, "O.k., who hasn't had time to forget how to do this stuff...He was shipped to Saudi Arabia in August 1990 and didn't get home until five months or so after the shooting was over.
The U.S. industrialized after Britain (enjoying 250 years of relative decline!), largely with British funds. Lots of defaulting later...
The government was also heavily involved in the developing economy. Land grants to railroads. Protectionism. If it was capitalism, it was of the cronyism kind.
I can't think of a country that has jump-started its economy following the IMF/World Bank precepts. My scalp itches for the tin-foil cap when I think of all those economists with advanced degrees pushing what doesn't work on desperate countries, in the face of decades of failure and abundant counter-examples. Could it be they like inducing poverty?
Then I think of medicine, which was for hundreds of years more dangerous than illness. Bleeding. Medicines made from mercury. It had the same theological nature as economics. Maybe there's hope for the dismal science yet.
Then I think of the economists I know, and I'm back to thinking along the plotlines of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
from "Raising Arizona" - only then it was "ourselves"
On the 1950's t.v. show, a bad guy in a bad suit would empty a revolver at Superman, who would puff out his chest and let the bullets ricochet off his body. Then the bad guy would hurl his empty gun at Superman, who would then duck.
Why duck? (Why not a chicken?)
"grow up"
The nice thing about that is you can use it any time you want! Another good one is "cry me a river"
I see. I should continue to use closed source, accidentally disclosed (but only to bad people) so that MS can accumulate capital. That helps me a lot. That's definitely my goal in life. Thanks for clearing that up.