They proscribe the amounts, beneficiaries and methods by which much of the federal budget is spent. In every way that is important, the Senate writes the checks.
Sure, no senator physically signs the checks, but that's just a minor detail. An important point that substantiates what I said before is that the white house actually has a big part of the budget writing process now.
The reason for this is that our country, during the course of the last 18 years or so, has been falling deeper and deeper into what I'll call a "strong presidency" structure.
Congress is nothing short of a glorified presidential sock puppet now. The House are a bunch of feckless weaklings and the Senate are a bunch of self serving check writers. They do his bidding. They might throw a few curve balls with confirmations, but overall, they serve at the leisure of the president. He says jump, and they do so with reckless abandon so long as the money keeps flowing.
If Congress doesn't fall in line, we call them obstructionists to progress. If SCOTUS steps out of bounds, we say they're legislating from the bench. People need to radically shift how they think about government and what role the president was supposed to have, as envisioned by our founding fathers. They didn't want a strong president, or even a strong federal government for that matter.
While this may seem impractical in light of our global military and financial dominance, it is to the detriment of our country that the federal government is so powerful. Sadly, the average citizen doesn't understand enough about government structure to even understand that a charismatic leader isn't good for us. We need a highly intelligent ho-hum leader and we need a senate with balls to make the country better.
When I think of hard news, I don't think of the running commentary we call Fox News. I don't dislike them because of their bias, I dislike them because they don't report anything even resembling the truth. They twist everything and take it out of context to make it mean whatever they want.
At least the other news organizations have the common decency to just ignore things they can't spin honestly.
Not necessarily. China has enough investment in US bonds that they really have a lot of control over the USD valuation. They could manipulate the exchange rates by periodically selling blocks of bonds at a very low price, dropping the USD and raising the yuan.
They wouldn't though since they only very recently decided the yuan should have a higher value at all, let alone reducing the USD. The only reason manufacturing has been moving to china at all is because the yuan/USD exchange rate was favorable. If the yuan goes up or the USD goes down, they won't see as much trade with the US.
As corny as it sounds, we're in this together. China needs the US to succeed so we don't stop buying shit from them or default on our bonds. Like a junkie, they keep us just happy enough to keep giving them money or at least borrowing money from them.
Much like political attitudes in the US gravitate from left to right and back again like a pendulum, so does our desire for cheap foreign manufacturing.
Companies are increasingly becoming aware that Chinese manufacturers are not always less expensive and can be difficult to work with. Work that goes to China sometimes comes back, or goes to Mexico. Control over your manufacturing process is sometimes more important than per unit cost.
As evidence, I have a relatively small 18' above ground pool. Capacity is 6,000 gallons. Calculated weight is 49,900 pounds, approximately.
If my pool were to instantly topple over and run uphill into my house, it would easily cave in the wall. That's a lot of water. On the other hand, the nearest neighbor is about 35 feet away and the risk of serious property damage is really very small, even in a worst case scenario.
I hear ya on the pool chemicals though. The warnings on my PH-Up and PH-Down bottles are pretty scary. I think the words "serious injury or death" appear in about 8 places.
My biggest concern in all this isn't really the fees, but that the government is actively scouring aerial photography and/or satellite imagery of citizens property without probable cause.
I know the courts disagree because such things have been done for years in search of marijuana farms but... to me, it just smells of 4th amendment violation. If you have a privacy fence completely surrounding the pool, the government shouldn't have any right to inspect the contents of that area unless they have probable cause that a crime has been committed there.
Property taxes go to general funds. As do income, sales and excise taxes.
Fees for permits on the other hand should go to supporting that program only. Government relying on fees for general income is a bad idea because then they just start inventing new things to require permits on.
I would love it if someone made a quake mod that loads excel spreadsheets of my choice, pastes the charts on mobs and lets me run around shooting my bosses shitty charts.
I think small business owners really need a lot more broad architectural knowledge. There is a wealth of OSS software out there, ready and willing to empower business owners and bring their technology costs down.
With just a dabble of everything from scripting to SQL to installing packages, any business owner should be able to manage a reasonably small domain with a mail server, web server and website.
The definitions of unauthorized access to a computer system vary quite a lot by state, but rest assured, all 50 states have their own laws against accessing a computer system against the owners wishes.
Even if you finagled router logins from a company(*), the courts could find such information does not constitute authorization to use the login to access private data on the network.
*This of course being wildly unlikely, since even if they're open to clients outside the LAN, the only people who would have the information are likely to know better than to give it out.
Strangely enough, I'm pretty sure the US and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons made the world safer overall. I can't say the same regarding North Korea or Iran having nukes. They might actually use them without fear of retaliation.
Yes you do. 0.8% is fatal and honestly, by consuming even everclear, I don't think you could ingest it fast enough to get your BAC to.8% before you die. Only way to hit.8% before you die is to inject it directly into your veins.
I think you meant.08%, which is our legal limit in all 50 states now. That's the per se limit, meaning being at.08% or higher BAC means you are by law impaired, even if you demonstrate in field sobriety testing that you are within your faculties to operate a vehicle.
You can still get a DUI if you blow under.08% but most police won't waste their time with that unless they can demonstrate that you are impaired beyond just your alcohol consumption(pills, sleep deprivation, whatever).
No, jail has not been shown to lower recidivism in DUI offenders. Neither have larger fines or lowering the BAC limit.
At.02, there is no discernible loss of coordination or CNS depression. Your posts seem awefully biased so I won't try to further convince you of the insanity of a hard-line stance. Drinking and driving stems from our countries attitudes towards alcohol. Being forbidden for minors makes it impossible for them to learn to consume alcohol responsibly in the presence of adults. Instead, they learn to drink from other minors and end up in a binge drinking cycle.
The number of binging teens as a percentage of all teens who have had alcohol is very high. We need to change our alcohol culture before we can end drunk driving, and no amount of laws, fines or jail cells will change that.
I wouldn't call forbidding DRM on public domain a loose interpretation. It's a reasonable law solving a reasonable problem: media producers putting DRM on everything they sell so they can sell more.
I'm genuinely bothered by the level of disregard we have in the US over the original intentions of copyrights. It's supposed to be a trade - copy protections for a limited period traded for free public consumption when the copy protections run out. In our country, copyrights have been turned into a massive joke. There is no longer a cultural benefit for copyrights because they effectively never expire. I will be dead and gone long before any media made while I was growing up gets into the public domain and I'm not even very old.
We have so little control over our elected officials that they can't even vote for the publics best interests. They vote blindly for the corporations and we all suffer.
They could have made more fanboys if they just started off with Donna getting half naked from the start instead of waiting until the last season.
Good show though. I hope in my heart that horse-trading politics aren't really like the show, but in my brain I know they really are and that's where we get all our shitty laws from. For every shitty law, 10 senators walked away happy that they got something out of the deal and everyone else toes the line.
Sorry to break it to you, but it won't be running on oil or gas. Maybe there will be an uptick in natural gas, especially if the natural gas can be efficiently pulled out of thawing permafrost in Alaska. I hear there is a mind boggling amount up there, but from a technology standpoint we're just not there yet.
Sadly, the majority of our increased energy demands in the next 10-15 years will be in coal. The US has huge coal deposits. Coal plants are relatively cheap to build and cheap to operate. Our ability to create new hydroelectric dams on the west coast is severely limited. Even if we could build new dams, it takes a decade to build a dam and then you're still only producing as much as the rain flow allows. Solar cell might take off but not until the technology reaches a shorter break-even point and the regulatory mess that we have now is fixed. We have a huge growth potential for solar thermal with salt or oil reservoirs feeding steam generators. It's only practical in the desert but if we invested more in +500kV transmission lines, that would take a huge strain off the western grid. Wave looks promising technologically but it doesn't scale well with current plans and nobody is really talking about where the hell we can put it. Wind is nice, but it's not at all a base-load worthy source; even the most die hard fans of wind admit it can never replace base load demand because its so unpredictable. Solar thermal peaks during the day, but with the salt or oil reservoir you can continue generating at night also. It's like a capacitor, but for heat instead of electricity.
Out of all the energy technologies we have now, coal is the only one our country can ramp up fast enough to meet a huge spike in energy consumption due to a oil availability fallout. Solar thermal could be ramped up equally as quickly but generation would all be centered around just a couple of southwestern states, doing little for anyone outside the WECC NERC region.
Not sure if you know why, but the European Union passed a Restriction on Hazardous Substances law which limits among other things lead in all products sold in the EU. Sadly. the market in the EU is so large that many manufacturers simply changed over all their production lines to use lead-free solder and other products.
What I've heard that with lead-free solder is that it will eventually grow hair like structures between wave soldered IC pins that are closely spaced and they aren't protected with conformal coatings. This causes malfunctions in equipment. Lead prevented that from happening but it was decided, for whatever reason, that being lead-free was better for the environment than the waste the changeover created.
That's a good point. I'm curious to know also if the battery production was taken into account when they decided electric vehicles would be better.
Surely from a pure power plant versus tailpipe emissions, the power plant won out. They scale better than auto gas engines do.
I'm still on the fence about lead. I'm glad it's gone from a lot of industrial and consumer products, but at the same time it did serve a valuable purpose. And when it comes to batteries, lead-acid batteries are dead simple to recycle. Lithium on the other hand isn't.
I'm not sure where you're getting your legal theories from but it isn't right.
If I steal a car in Minnesota, the state doesn't lose jurisdiction because I go to Wisconsin. Both states can prosecute me, but only Wisconsin can arrest me. Minnesota has to ask Wisconsin nicely(via extradition) to hand me back to them. The charges aren't necessarily the same though.
In this hypothetical, Wisconsin could prosecute me for probably a variety of misdemeanors or maybe even felonies. Likely, they would prefer to extradite me to Minnesota because MN could prosecute me for felony theft which carries a max 10 year sentence.
There are multiple jurisdictions involved, any of which could choose to pursue the case if they wanted to. They include:
University police where laptop was stolen from
Local police where the laptop is now
State AG from both states
FBI, because laptop traveled state lines
The best revenge is that which you can obtain for yourself. Find out what ISP has the IP address. Contact the local police where that ISP is and ask that they contact the ISP to get the subscriber data for that IP. If that doesn't work, you can sue John Doe from your own jurisdiction and force the ISP to provide the information you seek. The police may be more willing to take up the case if you do the legwork.
Another option too is to contact the prosecuting attorney who handles the university polices cases. They might be able to pressure the police to take action, considering the ease with which the criminal can be identified.
Lastly, but certainly not leastly, post the IP address to 4chan. They have more than enough unscrupulous individuals that could find the person for you. If nothing else, they will at least DDOS the IP for you.
If they're counting Flash by simply comparing number of SWF files to HTML files, that might be right.
If you were to compare traffic from flash content and compare that to HTML or other web traffic, I think you'd see that a very high percentage of bandwidth is consumed by flash video.
My biggest concern with 4k video is simply that they will be compressing the video to a bitrate that is reasonably cheap for them to serve up. So if that's 5Mb or 10Mb, fine, whatever, but it still won't have the quality of a bluray DVD.
When Americans are all rolling 100Mbit fiber, I think 4k video will be a lot more practical.
Slashdot Mirror
They proscribe the amounts, beneficiaries and methods by which much of the federal budget is spent. In every way that is important, the Senate writes the checks.
Sure, no senator physically signs the checks, but that's just a minor detail. An important point that substantiates what I said before is that the white house actually has a big part of the budget writing process now.
The reason for this is that our country, during the course of the last 18 years or so, has been falling deeper and deeper into what I'll call a "strong presidency" structure.
Congress is nothing short of a glorified presidential sock puppet now. The House are a bunch of feckless weaklings and the Senate are a bunch of self serving check writers. They do his bidding. They might throw a few curve balls with confirmations, but overall, they serve at the leisure of the president. He says jump, and they do so with reckless abandon so long as the money keeps flowing.
If Congress doesn't fall in line, we call them obstructionists to progress. If SCOTUS steps out of bounds, we say they're legislating from the bench. People need to radically shift how they think about government and what role the president was supposed to have, as envisioned by our founding fathers. They didn't want a strong president, or even a strong federal government for that matter.
While this may seem impractical in light of our global military and financial dominance, it is to the detriment of our country that the federal government is so powerful. Sadly, the average citizen doesn't understand enough about government structure to even understand that a charismatic leader isn't good for us. We need a highly intelligent ho-hum leader and we need a senate with balls to make the country better.
When I think of hard news, I don't think of the running commentary we call Fox News. I don't dislike them because of their bias, I dislike them because they don't report anything even resembling the truth. They twist everything and take it out of context to make it mean whatever they want.
At least the other news organizations have the common decency to just ignore things they can't spin honestly.
WA is unusual in this regard.
New politicians rarely repeal taxes passed before they got in office. In fact, politicians rarely repeal ANY laws.
Not necessarily. China has enough investment in US bonds that they really have a lot of control over the USD valuation. They could manipulate the exchange rates by periodically selling blocks of bonds at a very low price, dropping the USD and raising the yuan.
They wouldn't though since they only very recently decided the yuan should have a higher value at all, let alone reducing the USD. The only reason manufacturing has been moving to china at all is because the yuan/USD exchange rate was favorable. If the yuan goes up or the USD goes down, they won't see as much trade with the US.
As corny as it sounds, we're in this together. China needs the US to succeed so we don't stop buying shit from them or default on our bonds. Like a junkie, they keep us just happy enough to keep giving them money or at least borrowing money from them.
Much like political attitudes in the US gravitate from left to right and back again like a pendulum, so does our desire for cheap foreign manufacturing.
Companies are increasingly becoming aware that Chinese manufacturers are not always less expensive and can be difficult to work with. Work that goes to China sometimes comes back, or goes to Mexico. Control over your manufacturing process is sometimes more important than per unit cost.
As evidence, I have a relatively small 18' above ground pool. Capacity is 6,000 gallons. Calculated weight is 49,900 pounds, approximately.
If my pool were to instantly topple over and run uphill into my house, it would easily cave in the wall. That's a lot of water. On the other hand, the nearest neighbor is about 35 feet away and the risk of serious property damage is really very small, even in a worst case scenario.
I hear ya on the pool chemicals though. The warnings on my PH-Up and PH-Down bottles are pretty scary. I think the words "serious injury or death" appear in about 8 places.
My biggest concern in all this isn't really the fees, but that the government is actively scouring aerial photography and/or satellite imagery of citizens property without probable cause.
I know the courts disagree because such things have been done for years in search of marijuana farms but... to me, it just smells of 4th amendment violation. If you have a privacy fence completely surrounding the pool, the government shouldn't have any right to inspect the contents of that area unless they have probable cause that a crime has been committed there.
Property taxes go to general funds. As do income, sales and excise taxes.
Fees for permits on the other hand should go to supporting that program only. Government relying on fees for general income is a bad idea because then they just start inventing new things to require permits on.
I would love it if someone made a quake mod that loads excel spreadsheets of my choice, pastes the charts on mobs and lets me run around shooting my bosses shitty charts.
Plzthx.
I think small business owners really need a lot more broad architectural knowledge. There is a wealth of OSS software out there, ready and willing to empower business owners and bring their technology costs down.
With just a dabble of everything from scripting to SQL to installing packages, any business owner should be able to manage a reasonably small domain with a mail server, web server and website.
The definitions of unauthorized access to a computer system vary quite a lot by state, but rest assured, all 50 states have their own laws against accessing a computer system against the owners wishes.
Even if you finagled router logins from a company(*), the courts could find such information does not constitute authorization to use the login to access private data on the network.
*This of course being wildly unlikely, since even if they're open to clients outside the LAN, the only people who would have the information are likely to know better than to give it out.
Strangely enough, I'm pretty sure the US and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons made the world safer overall. I can't say the same regarding North Korea or Iran having nukes. They might actually use them without fear of retaliation.
Yes you do. 0.8% is fatal and honestly, by consuming even everclear, I don't think you could ingest it fast enough to get your BAC to .8% before you die. Only way to hit .8% before you die is to inject it directly into your veins.
I think you meant .08%, which is our legal limit in all 50 states now. That's the per se limit, meaning being at .08% or higher BAC means you are by law impaired, even if you demonstrate in field sobriety testing that you are within your faculties to operate a vehicle.
You can still get a DUI if you blow under .08% but most police won't waste their time with that unless they can demonstrate that you are impaired beyond just your alcohol consumption(pills, sleep deprivation, whatever).
No, jail has not been shown to lower recidivism in DUI offenders. Neither have larger fines or lowering the BAC limit.
At .02, there is no discernible loss of coordination or CNS depression. Your posts seem awefully biased so I won't try to further convince you of the insanity of a hard-line stance. Drinking and driving stems from our countries attitudes towards alcohol. Being forbidden for minors makes it impossible for them to learn to consume alcohol responsibly in the presence of adults. Instead, they learn to drink from other minors and end up in a binge drinking cycle.
The number of binging teens as a percentage of all teens who have had alcohol is very high. We need to change our alcohol culture before we can end drunk driving, and no amount of laws, fines or jail cells will change that.
I wouldn't call forbidding DRM on public domain a loose interpretation. It's a reasonable law solving a reasonable problem: media producers putting DRM on everything they sell so they can sell more.
I'm genuinely bothered by the level of disregard we have in the US over the original intentions of copyrights. It's supposed to be a trade - copy protections for a limited period traded for free public consumption when the copy protections run out. In our country, copyrights have been turned into a massive joke. There is no longer a cultural benefit for copyrights because they effectively never expire. I will be dead and gone long before any media made while I was growing up gets into the public domain and I'm not even very old.
We have so little control over our elected officials that they can't even vote for the publics best interests. They vote blindly for the corporations and we all suffer.
I think it's time for a little direct democracy.
They could have made more fanboys if they just started off with Donna getting half naked from the start instead of waiting until the last season.
Good show though. I hope in my heart that horse-trading politics aren't really like the show, but in my brain I know they really are and that's where we get all our shitty laws from. For every shitty law, 10 senators walked away happy that they got something out of the deal and everyone else toes the line.
Sorry to break it to you, but it won't be running on oil or gas. Maybe there will be an uptick in natural gas, especially if the natural gas can be efficiently pulled out of thawing permafrost in Alaska. I hear there is a mind boggling amount up there, but from a technology standpoint we're just not there yet.
Sadly, the majority of our increased energy demands in the next 10-15 years will be in coal. The US has huge coal deposits. Coal plants are relatively cheap to build and cheap to operate. Our ability to create new hydroelectric dams on the west coast is severely limited. Even if we could build new dams, it takes a decade to build a dam and then you're still only producing as much as the rain flow allows. Solar cell might take off but not until the technology reaches a shorter break-even point and the regulatory mess that we have now is fixed. We have a huge growth potential for solar thermal with salt or oil reservoirs feeding steam generators. It's only practical in the desert but if we invested more in +500kV transmission lines, that would take a huge strain off the western grid. Wave looks promising technologically but it doesn't scale well with current plans and nobody is really talking about where the hell we can put it. Wind is nice, but it's not at all a base-load worthy source; even the most die hard fans of wind admit it can never replace base load demand because its so unpredictable. Solar thermal peaks during the day, but with the salt or oil reservoir you can continue generating at night also. It's like a capacitor, but for heat instead of electricity.
Out of all the energy technologies we have now, coal is the only one our country can ramp up fast enough to meet a huge spike in energy consumption due to a oil availability fallout. Solar thermal could be ramped up equally as quickly but generation would all be centered around just a couple of southwestern states, doing little for anyone outside the WECC NERC region.
Not sure if you know why, but the European Union passed a Restriction on Hazardous Substances law which limits among other things lead in all products sold in the EU. Sadly. the market in the EU is so large that many manufacturers simply changed over all their production lines to use lead-free solder and other products.
What I've heard that with lead-free solder is that it will eventually grow hair like structures between wave soldered IC pins that are closely spaced and they aren't protected with conformal coatings. This causes malfunctions in equipment. Lead prevented that from happening but it was decided, for whatever reason, that being lead-free was better for the environment than the waste the changeover created.
That's a good point. I'm curious to know also if the battery production was taken into account when they decided electric vehicles would be better.
Surely from a pure power plant versus tailpipe emissions, the power plant won out. They scale better than auto gas engines do.
I'm still on the fence about lead. I'm glad it's gone from a lot of industrial and consumer products, but at the same time it did serve a valuable purpose. And when it comes to batteries, lead-acid batteries are dead simple to recycle. Lithium on the other hand isn't.
I'm not sure where you're getting your legal theories from but it isn't right.
If I steal a car in Minnesota, the state doesn't lose jurisdiction because I go to Wisconsin. Both states can prosecute me, but only Wisconsin can arrest me. Minnesota has to ask Wisconsin nicely(via extradition) to hand me back to them. The charges aren't necessarily the same though.
In this hypothetical, Wisconsin could prosecute me for probably a variety of misdemeanors or maybe even felonies. Likely, they would prefer to extradite me to Minnesota because MN could prosecute me for felony theft which carries a max 10 year sentence.
There are multiple jurisdictions involved, any of which could choose to pursue the case if they wanted to. They include:
The best revenge is that which you can obtain for yourself. Find out what ISP has the IP address. Contact the local police where that ISP is and ask that they contact the ISP to get the subscriber data for that IP. If that doesn't work, you can sue John Doe from your own jurisdiction and force the ISP to provide the information you seek. The police may be more willing to take up the case if you do the legwork.
Another option too is to contact the prosecuting attorney who handles the university polices cases. They might be able to pressure the police to take action, considering the ease with which the criminal can be identified.
Lastly, but certainly not leastly, post the IP address to 4chan. They have more than enough unscrupulous individuals that could find the person for you. If nothing else, they will at least DDOS the IP for you.
If they're counting Flash by simply comparing number of SWF files to HTML files, that might be right.
If you were to compare traffic from flash content and compare that to HTML or other web traffic, I think you'd see that a very high percentage of bandwidth is consumed by flash video.
Javascript is not more intricate than C++. Not by a long shot.
My biggest concern with 4k video is simply that they will be compressing the video to a bitrate that is reasonably cheap for them to serve up. So if that's 5Mb or 10Mb, fine, whatever, but it still won't have the quality of a bluray DVD.
When Americans are all rolling 100Mbit fiber, I think 4k video will be a lot more practical.