Science has been bad news for Bush's agenda. Bush has spent more on science than any other President in the history of the United States, so to say that he is anti-science is sharply distortionary. Did he actually say that? Or did he merely call attention to the fact that the Bush administration has a long track record of trying to hush up the results of scientific enquiry that belie the myths of his corporate/neocon agenda?
What's "mixed" about earmarks for the Creation Science Institute? Great news, but unfortunately they have to split the take with the Discovery Institute and Ken Ham's dinosaurs-in-the-garden-of-eden museum.
It's too bad a respectable organization like the Creation Science Institute has to split the funding with such poseurs.
Isn't is nice to see that governments rather go after internet gambling, something that really doesn't dother me at all, and completely ignore spam, something that is really annoying to us, the normal people... Coming down on gambling will garner the votes of a vocal bloc who think it's immoral. How many of "us, the normal people" will ever be single-issue voters with a focus on spam?
You don't even need to be religious to see that the commodization of human life, to say nothing of unfettered transhumanism, are not, on their face, good things.
OTOH, a lot of us think most religious beliefs are also affronts to human dignity. Let the Pope clean his own house before he starts pointing fingers.
What? He can't clean his own house because all those beliefs are what God wants his followers to peddle? -- That's exactly why I find the whole thing an affront to human dignity.
The housing market has probably corrected see link below. If a recession hits it will likely be because of the fallout in the mortgage industry. However, there are a lot of sectors to the economy doing OK, and I actually doubt there will be much of a recession if any at all just because of one sector. Thank God I can still get free economic advice from anonymous cowards on Slashdot!
Perhaps the state could sell some of the Diebold devices to help pay the bill that they're stuck with. They may garner a cult following(like the iPhone) of hackers and tinkerers. The devices are worthless as voting machines but they may be coaxed into second lives as kiosk-style internet machines, etc. Or sell them to a(nother) country where the ruling class considers it important *not* to get accurate vote counts.
Maybe after a few hundred more years running this huge "democracy experiment" we'll finally get right the basics, like counting the votes. That will only happen if democracy survives the experiment. Otherwise the politicians in power will ensure that it is *not* fixed.
Diebold are going to have real trouble building their reputation back up after this; even though other machines may be vulnerable, the fact that this case has been so well publicised is seriously going to damage Diebold's public image. How well is it actually known and understood outside geek circles?
How is that news? Sorry; I forgot to add the sarcasm tag.
I would recommend skepticism regarding the details of the accusation until more evidence comes to light, but the idea that the government would lie about some questionable activity wouldn't have been surprising even seven years ago. Or seventy.
Private sector people, overall, are more likely to be responsible. lol. Back here in reality, people in the private sector tend to do whatever they think they can get away with.
The other thing that has yet to be understood is that space connects everything. Action at a distance is possible because the two objects are connected by the very same space. If I have a long stick and you hold the other end of it and I thrust my end towards you, you will instantly faster than the speed of light feel it at your end. So, if you want to travel to Alpha Centari all you need is a tube full of yous between here and there. To make the trip, you step into this end of the tube, forcing another you out at the other end. Reverse the process for the trip home.
You'd almost think that after declaring a war on terror an organization wouldn't use terror against enemies in the most literal way possible... Exactly what I thought about the Mother of all Bombs, which they admitted was useless except for terrorizing the enemy.
we are amazed at the hype that the MapReduce proponents have spread about how it represents a paradigm shift in the development of scalable, data-intensive applications. So much hype that I never even heard of it before their complain hit Slasdot...
The best thing about Bush leaving the White House at the end of his EIGHT YEAR TERM will be not having to listen to you morons go on and on and on about Bush. Like the Republicans who still go on and on about Clinton after seven years?
I just love these kinds of stories that flush out all the Bush Hating, DailyKos, Left Wing, Anarchist, shit bags. Be sure to delete your post from your computer's cache, Dick.
Personally, I think the electoral college is one of the lower priorities for election reform in the US Yeah, the first priority is making sure peoples votes actually get counted, so that the correct electors are seated.
When Bush's people went to court to prevent people's votes from being counted, that should have warned us what priorites would guide the way they would run the country.
Interesting. The While House with a budget of $$$$ has to recycle 'tapes'. How charmingly frugal! I don't have a White House budget but I never recycle my archival DVDs or tapes. Yeah, but you don't have to fund a war you screwed up.
"White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed."
"White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no intention to admit any e-mails were deliberately destroyed."
There, fixed it. I don't know why the media even bothers quoting a politician or spokesman when what they say is 100% predictable. What did they expect him to say? "Yes, it is a clear violation of federal law, and we suspect the orders came from Cheney's office."
Where are all the people who used to defend all the early signs that Bush was worse than Nixon?
You got us into this mess, by voting for Bush twice, and convincing other people it was OK to to do so. When your boys were riding high, you were unstoppable, especially in your bragging. Now where are you, when Bush is obviously worse than Nixon, and as bad as (or worse than) the rest of us said he was? In case you haven't noticed, some people are *still* defending him.
I know a guy who, having donated his brain to the RNC, wanted to argue that WMD justified our presence in Iraq after a cache of pre-1991 chemical munitions were found a couple of years ago.
Now he argues that the California wild fires are because "the ecologists" won't let the logging companies go in and thin out the forests around all those rich people's mountain villas.
The same thing is happening anywhere someone can be sued, not just the President.
Many companies (like Microsoft) are trying to keep email useful by making it company policy that email is not preserved.
Once you have something that could be preserved... the temptation is powerful to require people to preserve it, and thereby stifle it's use. It's called "records retention policy", and it has been around since long before e-mail was common.
Most big companies have an annual "records retention day", i.e. a records _destruction_ day, where everyone has to destroy stuff and confirm to their supervisor that they are in compliance with company policy. The policy is written to ensure that almost all communications are destroyed as soon as the law allows, and they make no bones about the fact that it's to make sure nothing comes back to bite them when there's a lawsuit.
The law requires different retention periods for different kinds of stuff. The idea that the oilmen running the White House would be unaware of this is ludicrous.
It's beyond stupidity to think that reusing backup tapes is OK in a situation like this.
Seriously, anybody who is involved with system administration for an organization like the White House understands the implications of not having archival backups of everything. There is zero chance that somebody did this as an economy measure. You're probably right, but the Bush administration doesn't exactly have a good track record on hiring for competence. The sysadmin is probably a VB programmer who got the job because he helped jam the phone lines on election day.
Al Gore and my local talk radio station both say 'the debate is over' The scientific debate *is* over, just as the scientific debates over the age of the earth and the reality of evolution are over.
But that doesn't end the _public_ debate, which is kept going because you've got some people who desperately want the public to believe something other than reality.
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It's too bad a respectable organization like the Creation Science Institute has to split the funding with such poseurs.
OTOH, a lot of us think most religious beliefs are also affronts to human dignity. Let the Pope clean his own house before he starts pointing fingers.
What? He can't clean his own house because all those beliefs are what God wants his followers to peddle? -- That's exactly why I find the whole thing an affront to human dignity.
I would recommend skepticism regarding the details of the accusation until more evidence comes to light, but the idea that the government would lie about some questionable activity wouldn't have been surprising even seven years ago. Or seventy.
Government agency lies; news at 11.
When Bush's people went to court to prevent people's votes from being counted, that should have warned us what priorites would guide the way they would run the country.
"White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no intention to admit any e-mails were deliberately destroyed."
There, fixed it. I don't know why the media even bothers quoting a politician or spokesman when what they say is 100% predictable. What did they expect him to say? "Yes, it is a clear violation of federal law, and we suspect the orders came from Cheney's office."
You got us into this mess, by voting for Bush twice, and convincing other people it was OK to to do so. When your boys were riding high, you were unstoppable, especially in your bragging. Now where are you, when Bush is obviously worse than Nixon, and as bad as (or worse than) the rest of us said he was? In case you haven't noticed, some people are *still* defending him.
I know a guy who, having donated his brain to the RNC, wanted to argue that WMD justified our presence in Iraq after a cache of pre-1991 chemical munitions were found a couple of years ago.
Now he argues that the California wild fires are because "the ecologists" won't let the logging companies go in and thin out the forests around all those rich people's mountain villas.
Many companies (like Microsoft) are trying to keep email useful by making it company policy that email is not preserved.
Once you have something that could be preserved... the temptation is powerful to require people to preserve it, and thereby stifle it's use. It's called "records retention policy", and it has been around since long before e-mail was common.
Most big companies have an annual "records retention day", i.e. a records _destruction_ day, where everyone has to destroy stuff and confirm to their supervisor that they are in compliance with company policy. The policy is written to ensure that almost all communications are destroyed as soon as the law allows, and they make no bones about the fact that it's to make sure nothing comes back to bite them when there's a lawsuit.
The law requires different retention periods for different kinds of stuff. The idea that the oilmen running the White House would be unaware of this is ludicrous.
Seriously, anybody who is involved with system administration for an organization like the White House understands the implications of not having archival backups of everything. There is zero chance that somebody did this as an economy measure. You're probably right, but the Bush administration doesn't exactly have a good track record on hiring for competence. The sysadmin is probably a VB programmer who got the job because he helped jam the phone lines on election day.
He's certainly right about the war and a few other things, but you've got to consider the whole candidate.
We've only been hearing this since about the day after the first CD player came out.
But that doesn't end the _public_ debate, which is kept going because you've got some people who desperately want the public to believe something other than reality.