I'm not sure if it's AP's fault for it being blown out of proportion or whether they simply followed protocol on a hardline rule of no doctored photos no matter how harmless or whether the fault lies at the feet of other media organisations.
When I saw this originally on the BBC the other day I have to admit it's arguably the most pointless slow-news day excuse for a story I'd seen in a while.
I thought the thing would be slightly interesting. Heck, it reminded me of a Reagan pic. Of course, he was rarely seen in public unless he had an actual flag in the background so maybe that's where this is coming from. Honestly, this is something that I don't mind at all. It's not slanting the actual content any other than putting a government logo in the background. Oh hum. Heck, my office is a mess. I'd want every pic of me in my office to have the departmental logo behind it instead of my office space!
Do you think that the President Elect of the United States might have greater personal security concerns than McCain's version of a working class hero? This isn't a matter of "being critical of the president".
You know my first reaction to this? It's a good thing that this happened. Why? Because it would take a data breach of a major government official before anything really serious is done about the problem. There is a part of me that really hopes that the president and congress get all sorts of personnel data stolen/breached just so they'll start to take the subject seriously.
Now as far as the office of the President and the white house goes... I'd hope that however the white house has their cell phone plan that say that they have some contract and have 50-1000 (how ever many) phones and some peon is in charge of paying bills, setting up/backing up address books other info of officals and that the phone company shouldn't ever know which phones are assigned to which personnel. I'd actually want all their phone conversions encrypted and what not. (Actually, I'd want every cell phone call encrypted as well.)
Now, if this happened to be his personnel cell phone before he became famous president/government official, I can understand how this happened. I'd hope the President of the US or heck of any country or major business has more important things to do than fiddle with their personnel cell phones/tech support/data breaches.
I'll now have that mental image of the President spending an hour on hold trying to get through the cell phone tech support mini hell before he can complain to the cell phone management rather than spending time doing whatever it is presidents do most of the time.
Hmm... It all comes down to money and power. We've got alittle money and we usually pay monthly subscriptions to an ISP to connect through them to "the internet." They in turn have various amounts of money and power and try to use it to assure that they will always have money and power...
I don't think that they are thinking long term. They are just trying to screw their end consumers, all the content publishers, maybe the government and other ISPs for as much as they can. The government is our tool for clubbing all those ISPs that we can't usually affect.
It's true that in many places, in the East Coast and in California, advocates for the blind have lobbied for requirements for noise generators (not just study of the issue), but that's very different from any particular state passing (or even "trying to pass") a law requiring that.
This reminds me of one of the first things that my mom taught me whenever I went into the front yard. Stay in the yard, don't go into the street, and if you ever need to actually cross the street look both ways first. Well, obviously blind people should never cross the street.
To flip this around. Why not make a law that requires blind people to hire a min wage worker to look both ways for them whenever they need to cross the street? Obviously that's a silly idea, but it would create lots of new jobs and it helps the disabled from killing themselves due to their disadvantages so it must be a somewhat decent idea.
Yeah this week's study is about how online gaming within a game and your peer group is generally good for your development. Next week's study will be about the evils of allowing your kids unstructured online gaming within their peer group as they learn behaviors that parents, educators, or "others" don't like kids learning of or about, or doing.
Anyway, Gembe was sentenced to probation in Germany for the breach and leak. Interesting that the FBI apparently took this so much more seriously than the German courts.
With all the other folks that I'd rather the FBI actually go after, they pic this guy! O.k. maybe its that he was an easy target that another police department already tracked down. I'd much rather them spend time/money on all those ID thefts and those massive data breaches from various companies of CC/personal info. Source code to a game? I could care less about and wouldn't really want them to spend much effort on it.
If I knew that they spent more effort looking for this guy than all those other guys, I'd really be upset. Actually, there is a part of me that wonders if the FBI has any legs to stand on. If the thing happened in Germany and the Germany government let the guy off for what ever reason, any other foreign government isn't magically allowed to arrest him and try him just because he is within their grounds now.
The trouble with walls, as we saw recently in New Orleans, is that if they break you're fucked.
What we learned from New Orleans is that if you ignore 25+ years of warnings that you need to build a higher wall than you will be screwed if you don't. I hate to be cold towards those people, but the folks from NO were ass holes to a lot of people that went down to help them. The NO incident should never have happened. It was their own fault. Now all other US citizens are paying for their inaction. Now all those tiny communities around NO that got wiped out is another story; I don't mind giving government money/help to them. They at least were nice to most that came down to help them. They also didn't get nearly the news coverage of the big corrupt city that screwed itself.
Also seeing the things NO has totally wasted the federal money on really irritates me. A part of me would have rather just had most NO population moved out and dispersed around the country to never come back. If they need to rebuild/repair a port then they could build it up river on slightly higher ground.
Short of a volcano erupting nearby or having 100 large ships sailing back and forth from India with gravel I doubt there is any way to extend or raise the island. Who knows - perhaps they could turn themselves into a modern Venice, living on stilts or pioneer a technique to construct super massive floating land extensions or similar, but I'm not sure I would be very comfortable to living there.
The volcano idea would be "very bad" if it actually did add a few feet to the islands. I think that I'd much rather be slowly flooded than instantly killed under a cloud of rock.
Now the 100 large ship idea has potential. What they really need to figure out is how to float their entire set of islands. That way it wouldn't matter what the sea level is they'd be safe. Anyone have ideas on doing that one though?
If anything we most likely do have the tech to build a few small islands/large barges ships like the so called Freedom ship concept. It would mainly come to money on if anyone did that though. It would be far to expensive unless we had neat nanotech or robots that we could just tell go build said island/boat and wait 10-20 years for them to finish.
I once read a touching BBC article where a village farmer complained that he was losing his country so Westerners could drive in their cars.
I always thought most Bangladeshis not killed by cataclysmic flooding would escape into neighboring countries, especially West Bengal in India, but the Maldives seems to have a "good" (at least practical) idea. Sadly the Bangladeshi government is too inefficient, corrupt, and schizophrenic to manage something as well thought out, costly, and long term as that.
I fully expect to have to explain to my kids that Bangladesh was where their grandparents were from but that it no long exists (above the ocean, anyway).
Sounds like its same the world over "the poor"/"have nots" complaining that their problems are caused by "the rich"/"have tons." I figure any one with resources/money will just move. It seems like your parents moved from Bangladesh rather than stay and "try to fix it." I believe most governments are inefficient, corrupt, and schizophrenic and those include most of "the good" democratic ones. The US government won't come up with a solution. Those countries that "are in danger" due to these problems are the ones that will/need to "find solutions" to the problem.
You can always tell your kids that your country sank like Atlantis.
Having said that, I feel for the people's plight since I am a Dutch citizen. Lord knows we won't be keeping our feet dry easily if the water levels rise that much. At present, my birth place is already 7 meters below sea level as it is. Thing is that there are 17 million of us, not ~400000.
Hey I have plenty of faith that the Dutch of all people will actually build a workable solution. I'm curious if that solution would be to build a larger wall around your country. There is always the option of building all your houses, buildings, roadways or structures in general to float.
In a direct democracy either every person needs to devote a lot of time to understanding every issue related to proposed laws, or a lot of uninformed people get to enforce their opinions. The entire point of representative democracy is that most people have better things to do with their time than study all of the issues behind every piece of legislation, so we pick people with a similar world-view to ourselves to do it for us. If you want an idea of how direct democracy would work, go for a ride in a taxi and listen to all of the uninformed opinions the driver has, then remember that his vote on every law would have the same weight as yours.
I read slashdot. Folks on slashdot have voting rights... That usually scares the hell out of me. I kinda think every taxi cab driver has just as much right to vote as any one on this forum. Have you actually listened to what other people have to say?
I'm kinda mixed about 98% of how our so called government is run and picked. I think kids should all vote. What age limit? I don't know maybe 6 years old. There are days that I don't trust how elections are run in this country. What do I think needs to be done? Why simple... we should combine the voting crap with the IRS. Just think of it as paying or turning in your tax forms at the same time you vote every year. I guess to really make it complete we'd also combine the census crap in there and make it a yearly thing.
for those around here that remember 1998, the Rio PMP300 was the 2nd but the most important MP3 player that came on the market. Not exactly ripping it up at 32 MB of RAM but an important introduction nonetheless and ultimately led to Creative and then Apple following with their MP3 players. Given that, in 10 years we may all have them on our key chains next to the USB terabyte drives.
Nah, it'll be yet another feature for our everything device the cellphone/pda/mp3 player/video player/data storage device/camera. Now it'll also be a projector. If we ever figure out force fields or 3d light projection, we'll toss a holo projector in there as well. There is a part of me that thinks it may be "simpler" if we figure out how to just interface data storage and I/O directly with the human mind... I know that we've been working on that as well, but I kinda feel that we'll shrink down that everything device to a smaller than current watch battery size before we figure out how to nicely biologically interface it with us.
I want some one to finally toss that everything device into a decent looking pair of glasses. (Not one that some one across the room makes you feel/look like a dork for wearing/using.) I'll just have to wait for it all to shrink, shrink, and shrink some more before it all easily fits there.
Most people when they talk about God have it all wrapped up with other issues, like the survival of consciousness after death, eternal reward or punishment, omnescience and omnipotence, and many others. They even have very specific definitions of those concepts in mind. For example, if they don't like the concept of God, they often assume that God, if 'He" exists, must know everything, even where knowing certain things simultaneously supposedly creates a paradox. They then point to that paradox as proof God doesn't exist. It becomes a definition problem - Is it still fair to call something God if it only knows as much as can be known, and there are things which simply can't be known? Should we refuse to call something God if it can't make a four sided triangle?
I change my mind all the time on the matter of god. I raised Christain, or atleast dragged to Baptist churchs, so that's the first religion that got the chance to imprint on me. I do believe in god/gods watching everything in the universe.
I'm very mixed on the active god thing. I was raised to pray about social problems that are totally out of my hands or that I'm having a difficult problem with... This has personally worked very well when I've done it. So I believe something slightly powerful can attempt to fullfill very limiited requests.
I believe in souls. I'm not sure that I'd want science to ever actually prove that they exist. I'm of various opinions on what'd happen to a soul after the death of a body You've got a limited set of choices, it vanishes/dies, a ghost effect is attached to an area/object for a limited time then dies off or released after some event, it gets put back into the nearest material body with no respect for its past life, it gets put into a body with some judgement call on its behavior in its previous life, it gets sentenced for a limited time to stay with others of the same type and be punished/rewarded in the manner that they chose/build for themselves, and then their is the really fun one everyone it sent to the same exact after life and we all get what we want regardless on our actions in our past life.
As long as it's not the first two options, I'll be happy. I'd really like it to be something of the last to options though. Again I don't really want science to prove/disprove this feeling that I've got about the after life.
Not insane or clueless, just dont read neo-con trash mags like Drudge, Fox News, and the National Journal. You hardly prove your point by posting links to known ultra-conservative sites. You could have posted a link to Stormfront for all that matters to try to prove your point.
You mean slashdot, wired, gizmodo, and fark aren't ultra-neocon? Damn, I'm going to have to change my bookmarks. Well, at least I get to keep my webcomics like http://edgeknight.comicgenesis.com/
Expect the same for the Slashdot community members who were so eager to get him elected. When they find out what they really bought, I don't expect them to admit they were wrong. I expect them to somehow blame Republicans anyway, or simply deny that anything is wrong to begin with.
I can say that I didn't vote this nut into office. My family voted against him. Of course, we really didn't like any of our options.
I'm starting to wish some one would make a script that would pick a random place within the US and the nearest person to that spot gets selected. You could fill most elected offices that way. Give them 3 months in office and then let us vote to kick them out or keep them for the rest of the year, and randomly pick some one else if they happen to loose the vote. It couldn't be worse than what we've currently got.
Watching on CNN the sea of people in Chicago cheering for President Elect Obama and his victory speech convinced me that this was one of those unique moments, the kind that people decades from now will remember and ask each other "Do you remember where you were when Obama was elected?" Truly a great moment.
Heck, if we can vote in Reagan, Clinton, both sets of Bushs and actually consider Clinton's wife, why the heck couldn't this guy get 8 years? We are that stupid. My wife utterly hates Obama. I can understand it on her views of the issues. I didn't want either set of the crazies to win, but it was far too late for that.
I'm sorry, but I really hope that his 8 years are boring and non-interesting. I want Obama to have the most forgettable 8 years possible in office when viewed from 50 years down the line.
I think Washington D.C. will become a radioactive wasteland and the survivors will spend their waking hours hunting mutant ants in collapsed subways.
So you think that the rest of the US is going to have some urban renewal in the DC metro area for the good of the nation? If it got rid of all the politicians, some one might consider it worth it.
I don't think we'd be that extreme though. If we really wanted to get rid of folks in the DC metro area or higher government officals, we'd just have a reign of terror.
I think that the GP meant that MLK's famous dream has been fulfilled, not that Obama is somehow as great as Dr King.
Um, no it hasn't. Well maybe his dream did come true as I haven't ever really paid attention to the details. I've always assumed that it really meant that folks wouldn't even blink at color/gender/religion when making choices and just choose whoever. I say no it hasn't because there is far, far too much yeah we've got a "black" guy running for a president and now, you'll see all this yeah we aren't racist because we voted for the "black" democrat.
It'd be fulfilled when "color/gender/religion" doesn't come up once during the pre-election fighting. To many people on both sides have made this election about "color/race/gender" so no we aren't really any where near "the dream." O.k. if "the dream" was only to have a "black male" elected due to a large black electorate, then sure "the dream" has come true. I'd actually say that there was as much or more excitement about the white females running. That alone right there should have told you that we aren't anywhere near treating males/females the same. There wouldn't have been any excitement that a female/black/non-certain religion person got elected if we were there yet.
Just one step closer to Douglas Adams' statement that, in such a large Universe, most things one could possibly imagine (and a lot one would rather not), grow somewhere.
If you've got decent genetics/bioengineering and don't have it growing near you already, you soon will. It's only a matter of time before we grow our own cars and homes. It's just a matter of making it cheaper/easier than existing methods.
You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks.... which is an excellent argument against electing judges.
I don't know. I think that they picked the wrong branch for that. I'd almost have liked our president to be unelected except by the house/senate. Lately, I've really, really been thinking that I'd like any control over those damn federal supreme court judges. There is a part of me that thinks that they need elections to get in, and if large enough percentage of folks dislike how they've been judging crap, we need to be able to kick them out.
Of course, I think that if any elected official gets out of office with a 60% or more disapproval rating that they need to spend at least the same amount of time in jail for when they were in office. (Actually, that's kinder than what I really think.)
More specific to elections though, isn't it about time we abolished the electoral college and go right to a popular vote? There is clearly no legitimate reason for it to still be around. Electors rarely switch their votes, and, as the article points out, the founders saying it's a good idea does not make it so.
It may be a great thing for large states, but for small states the current system is better. Heck that's why we have the senate; it was a comprise because otherwise we wouldn't be the US. The constitution wouldn't have been ratified without smaller population states having equal power to larger population states in some form. I find it funny that everyone that wants to change things in that way comes from a large state.
I'm alot less impressed with the founding fathers than the average person, but I'm not sure it's a great idea to change stuff willy nilly. We've been changing stuff since just after it was ratified. Look how much we've bent alot of pieces of it and have tried our hardest apparently to put as many rules and regulations up as to gut a few of them. The 2nd is the obvious target lately, but really the 1st is also taken alot of pounding. Of course alot of people don't if really note the rest. There is a part of me that thinks that we need to add a few more. Like a right to data privacy and a right to use various drugs (be it beer, smoking tobacco, or harder stuff). Even if got something like that passed, it would take less than 10 years for someone to try to gut them with rules and regulations.
A agree entirely, and I'm amazed that California of all places has a curfew for teenagers. The nearest we have to that in the UK is an ASBO (anti-social behaviour order), which forbids individual petty criminals from certain acts -- for instance, banning them from a public place they vandalised, or imposing a curfew. You need to be arrested, taken to court and found guilty to get one though. It's meant to be better than sending people to prison etc.
Gosh, I don't remember not having the legal curfew anymore. I made it out of HS in 1996 in Arkansas in the US. I don't remember if it was a county or a statewide curfew, but it was pretty much from 10:30 pm to 3:30 pm. O.k. there was a little break in there between 7 am - 8 am as well.
I'm for universal voting rights instead of 18 and up. Mainly this is because most of those laws and school rules have been made and enforced against students who had zero input into the rules that the schools are run by. There is a strong part of me that thinks that the student body needs to vote on if any given section of the student hand book actually applies to their class.
Think about it. What if I or any group, said that you and your friends weren't allowed to be outside of work or your home except from 5 pm to 7 pm and 7 am to 8 am and used the excuse that we are older/wiser/here before you/that you aren't mature enough to make choices as the reason for restricting you. Oh, and we'd also remove your right to vote unless you matched our group. You wouldn't like that would you? Well, that's exactly what we do to students.
Why must people with no idea on a particular subject always be in charge of the budgets around a particular subject?
Its like a basic rule of nature. God's in his retirement home; he assigned one of his best agents to run hell, and then his worst agent to run the universe in general, and his second worst agent to run heaven. That explains everything.
Having read TFA, it looks very much like, by any technological definition, he was authorized. There would have to be pretty clear indications that he wasn't supposed to be there.
Is this sorta of like having \\servername\info\staff and then \\servername\info\students and giving all students access to the staff directory and also having spreadsheets with SSNs out there as well? I actually shudder to think how often that kinda of thing actually goes on. Or what's even more common is some staff person puts something in the student folders that all the students can see, but that wasn't meant to be published. We all know how common that is.
Or what's worse, student has a name similar to a staff member and other staff keep e-mailing staff related crap to the student thinking its the staff person and blaming the student reading their e-mail.
FTA "First, the facts. Crist is behind on his rent payments, and his landlord starts to evict him by hiring Sell to remove Crist's belongings and throw them away. Sell comes a cross Crist's computer, and he hands over the computer to his friend Hipple who he knows is looking for a computer. Hipple starts to look through the files, and he comes across child pornography: Hipple freaks out and calls the police. The police then conduct a warrantless forensic examination of the computer" So yea, I agree that the question here is whether they had a right to search it or not. Seems like the DA realized that they didn't, and tried to bypass the 4th with the "hash" theory, which the court rightly smacked down.
Um, sounds like the police and Hipple never had rights to look at it to begin with. "legally" Now the police will look at anything that you bring up to them and ask them to. If you are a business owner, and say you think that an employee is doing "something" on their machine please look. Well, the employee has no exceptions of privacy. The employee doesn't legally own the computer in that example and whoever does can ask the cops to do/scan anything that they want. The cops don't need a warrant in that case.
Now Hipple just bringing a computer up to the cops. Well, the cops would assume that Hipple legally owns the damn thing and they don't then need warrant in that case to scan/search it. Now if Hipple has physical possession, but didn't legally buy it that's a whole another can of worms. The police are basically in the clear for what they did, but I'm fairly certain that they are legally SOL on any evidence obtained that way.
I'm iffy on if the cops even should have the right to image a HD without a warrant.
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I'm not sure if it's AP's fault for it being blown out of proportion or whether they simply followed protocol on a hardline rule of no doctored photos no matter how harmless or whether the fault lies at the feet of other media organisations.
When I saw this originally on the BBC the other day I have to admit it's arguably the most pointless slow-news day excuse for a story I'd seen in a while.
I thought the thing would be slightly interesting. Heck, it reminded me of a Reagan pic. Of course, he was rarely seen in public unless he had an actual flag in the background so maybe that's where this is coming from. Honestly, this is something that I don't mind at all. It's not slanting the actual content any other than putting a government logo in the background. Oh hum. Heck, my office is a mess. I'd want every pic of me in my office to have the departmental logo behind it instead of my office space!
Do you think that the President Elect of the United States might have greater personal security concerns than McCain's version of a working class hero? This isn't a matter of "being critical of the president".
You know my first reaction to this? It's a good thing that this happened. Why? Because it would take a data breach of a major government official before anything really serious is done about the problem. There is a part of me that really hopes that the president and congress get all sorts of personnel data stolen/breached just so they'll start to take the subject seriously.
Now as far as the office of the President and the white house goes... I'd hope that however the white house has their cell phone plan that say that they have some contract and have 50-1000 (how ever many) phones and some peon is in charge of paying bills, setting up/backing up address books other info of officals and that the phone company shouldn't ever know which phones are assigned to which personnel. I'd actually want all their phone conversions encrypted and what not. (Actually, I'd want every cell phone call encrypted as well.)
Now, if this happened to be his personnel cell phone before he became famous president/government official, I can understand how this happened. I'd hope the President of the US or heck of any country or major business has more important things to do than fiddle with their personnel cell phones/tech support/data breaches.
I'll now have that mental image of the President spending an hour on hold trying to get through the cell phone tech support mini hell before he can complain to the cell phone management rather than spending time doing whatever it is presidents do most of the time.
Hmm... It all comes down to money and power. We've got alittle money and we usually pay monthly subscriptions to an ISP to connect through them to "the internet." They in turn have various amounts of money and power and try to use it to assure that they will always have money and power...
I don't think that they are thinking long term. They are just trying to screw their end consumers, all the content publishers, maybe the government and other ISPs for as much as they can. The government is our tool for clubbing all those ISPs that we can't usually affect.
It's true that in many places, in the East Coast and in California, advocates for the blind have lobbied for requirements for noise generators (not just study of the issue), but that's very different from any particular state passing (or even "trying to pass") a law requiring that.
This reminds me of one of the first things that my mom taught me whenever I went into the front yard. Stay in the yard, don't go into the street, and if you ever need to actually cross the street look both ways first. Well, obviously blind people should never cross the street.
To flip this around. Why not make a law that requires blind people to hire a min wage worker to look both ways for them whenever they need to cross the street? Obviously that's a silly idea, but it would create lots of new jobs and it helps the disabled from killing themselves due to their disadvantages so it must be a somewhat decent idea.
Yeah this week's study is about how online gaming within a game and your peer group is generally good for your development. Next week's study will be about the evils of allowing your kids unstructured online gaming within their peer group as they learn behaviors that parents, educators, or "others" don't like kids learning of or about, or doing.
Anyway, Gembe was sentenced to probation in Germany for the breach and leak. Interesting that the FBI apparently took this so much more seriously than the German courts.
With all the other folks that I'd rather the FBI actually go after, they pic this guy! O.k. maybe its that he was an easy target that another police department already tracked down. I'd much rather them spend time/money on all those ID thefts and those massive data breaches from various companies of CC/personal info. Source code to a game? I could care less about and wouldn't really want them to spend much effort on it.
If I knew that they spent more effort looking for this guy than all those other guys, I'd really be upset. Actually, there is a part of me that wonders if the FBI has any legs to stand on. If the thing happened in Germany and the Germany government let the guy off for what ever reason, any other foreign government isn't magically allowed to arrest him and try him just because he is within their grounds now.
The trouble with walls, as we saw recently in New Orleans, is that if they break you're fucked.
What we learned from New Orleans is that if you ignore 25+ years of warnings that you need to build a higher wall than you will be screwed if you don't. I hate to be cold towards those people, but the folks from NO were ass holes to a lot of people that went down to help them. The NO incident should never have happened. It was their own fault. Now all other US citizens are paying for their inaction. Now all those tiny communities around NO that got wiped out is another story; I don't mind giving government money/help to them. They at least were nice to most that came down to help them. They also didn't get nearly the news coverage of the big corrupt city that screwed itself.
Also seeing the things NO has totally wasted the federal money on really irritates me. A part of me would have rather just had most NO population moved out and dispersed around the country to never come back. If they need to rebuild/repair a port then they could build it up river on slightly higher ground.
Short of a volcano erupting nearby or having 100 large ships sailing back and forth from India with gravel I doubt there is any way to extend or raise the island. Who knows - perhaps they could turn themselves into a modern Venice, living on stilts or pioneer a technique to construct super massive floating land extensions or similar, but I'm not sure I would be very comfortable to living there.
The volcano idea would be "very bad" if it actually did add a few feet to the islands. I think that I'd much rather be slowly flooded than instantly killed under a cloud of rock.
Now the 100 large ship idea has potential. What they really need to figure out is how to float their entire set of islands. That way it wouldn't matter what the sea level is they'd be safe. Anyone have ideas on doing that one though?
If anything we most likely do have the tech to build a few small islands/large barges ships like the so called Freedom ship concept. It would mainly come to money on if anyone did that though. It would be far to expensive unless we had neat nanotech or robots that we could just tell go build said island/boat and wait 10-20 years for them to finish.
I once read a touching BBC article where a village farmer complained that he was losing his country so Westerners could drive in their cars.
I always thought most Bangladeshis not killed by cataclysmic flooding would escape into neighboring countries, especially West Bengal in India, but the Maldives seems to have a "good" (at least practical) idea. Sadly the Bangladeshi government is too inefficient, corrupt, and schizophrenic to manage something as well thought out, costly, and long term as that.
I fully expect to have to explain to my kids that Bangladesh was where their grandparents were from but that it no long exists (above the ocean, anyway).
Sounds like its same the world over "the poor"/"have nots" complaining that their problems are caused by "the rich"/"have tons." I figure any one with resources/money will just move. It seems like your parents moved from Bangladesh rather than stay and "try to fix it." I believe most governments are inefficient, corrupt, and schizophrenic and those include most of "the good" democratic ones. The US government won't come up with a solution. Those countries that "are in danger" due to these problems are the ones that will/need to "find solutions" to the problem.
You can always tell your kids that your country sank like Atlantis.
Having said that, I feel for the people's plight since I am a Dutch citizen. Lord knows we won't be keeping our feet dry easily if the water levels rise that much. At present, my birth place is already 7 meters below sea level as it is. Thing is that there are 17 million of us, not ~400000.
Hey I have plenty of faith that the Dutch of all people will actually build a workable solution. I'm curious if that solution would be to build a larger wall around your country. There is always the option of building all your houses, buildings, roadways or structures in general to float.
In a direct democracy either every person needs to devote a lot of time to understanding every issue related to proposed laws, or a lot of uninformed people get to enforce their opinions. The entire point of representative democracy is that most people have better things to do with their time than study all of the issues behind every piece of legislation, so we pick people with a similar world-view to ourselves to do it for us. If you want an idea of how direct democracy would work, go for a ride in a taxi and listen to all of the uninformed opinions the driver has, then remember that his vote on every law would have the same weight as yours.
I read slashdot. Folks on slashdot have voting rights... That usually scares the hell out of me. I kinda think every taxi cab driver has just as much right to vote as any one on this forum. Have you actually listened to what other people have to say?
I'm kinda mixed about 98% of how our so called government is run and picked. I think kids should all vote. What age limit? I don't know maybe 6 years old. There are days that I don't trust how elections are run in this country. What do I think needs to be done? Why simple... we should combine the voting crap with the IRS. Just think of it as paying or turning in your tax forms at the same time you vote every year. I guess to really make it complete we'd also combine the census crap in there and make it a yearly thing.
for those around here that remember 1998, the Rio PMP300 was the 2nd but the most important MP3 player that came on the market. Not exactly ripping it up at 32 MB of RAM but an important introduction nonetheless and ultimately led to Creative and then Apple following with their MP3 players. Given that, in 10 years we may all have them on our key chains next to the USB terabyte drives.
Nah, it'll be yet another feature for our everything device the cellphone/pda/mp3 player/video player/data storage device/camera. Now it'll also be a projector. If we ever figure out force fields or 3d light projection, we'll toss a holo projector in there as well. There is a part of me that thinks it may be "simpler" if we figure out how to just interface data storage and I/O directly with the human mind... I know that we've been working on that as well, but I kinda feel that we'll shrink down that everything device to a smaller than current watch battery size before we figure out how to nicely biologically interface it with us.
I want some one to finally toss that everything device into a decent looking pair of glasses. (Not one that some one across the room makes you feel/look like a dork for wearing/using.) I'll just have to wait for it all to shrink, shrink, and shrink some more before it all easily fits there.
Most people when they talk about God have it all wrapped up with other issues, like the survival of consciousness after death, eternal reward or punishment, omnescience and omnipotence, and many others. They even have very specific definitions of those concepts in mind. For example, if they don't like the concept of God, they often assume that God, if 'He" exists, must know everything, even where knowing certain things simultaneously supposedly creates a paradox. They then point to that paradox as proof God doesn't exist. It becomes a definition problem - Is it still fair to call something God if it only knows as much as can be known, and there are things which simply can't be known? Should we refuse to call something God if it can't make a four sided triangle?
I change my mind all the time on the matter of god. I raised Christain, or atleast dragged to Baptist churchs, so that's the first religion that got the chance to imprint on me. I do believe in god/gods watching everything in the universe.
I'm very mixed on the active god thing. I was raised to pray about social problems that are totally out of my hands or that I'm having a difficult problem with... This has personally worked very well when I've done it. So I believe something slightly powerful can attempt to fullfill very limiited requests.
I believe in souls. I'm not sure that I'd want science to ever actually prove that they exist. I'm of various opinions on what'd happen to a soul after the death of a body You've got a limited set of choices, it vanishes/dies, a ghost effect is attached to an area/object for a limited time then dies off or released after some event, it gets put back into the nearest material body with no respect for its past life, it gets put into a body with some judgement call on its behavior in its previous life, it gets sentenced for a limited time to stay with others of the same type and be punished/rewarded in the manner that they chose/build for themselves, and then their is the really fun one everyone it sent to the same exact after life and we all get what we want regardless on our actions in our past life.
As long as it's not the first two options, I'll be happy. I'd really like it to be something of the last to options though.
Again I don't really want science to prove/disprove this feeling that I've got about the after life.
Not insane or clueless, just dont read neo-con trash mags like Drudge, Fox News, and the National Journal. You hardly prove your point by posting links to known ultra-conservative sites. You could have posted a link to Stormfront for all that matters to try to prove your point.
You mean slashdot, wired, gizmodo, and fark aren't ultra-neocon? Damn, I'm going to have to change my bookmarks. Well, at least I get to keep my webcomics like http://edgeknight.comicgenesis.com/
Expect the same for the Slashdot community members who were so eager to get him elected. When they find out what they really bought, I don't expect them to admit they were wrong. I expect them to somehow blame Republicans anyway, or simply deny that anything is wrong to begin with.
I can say that I didn't vote this nut into office. My family voted against him. Of course, we really didn't like any of our options.
I'm starting to wish some one would make a script that would pick a random place within the US and the nearest person to that spot gets selected. You could fill most elected offices that way. Give them 3 months in office and then let us vote to kick them out or keep them for the rest of the year, and randomly pick some one else if they happen to loose the vote. It couldn't be worse than what we've currently got.
Watching on CNN the sea of people in Chicago cheering for President Elect Obama and his victory speech convinced me that this was one of those unique moments, the kind that people decades from now will remember and ask each other "Do you remember where you were when Obama was elected?" Truly a great moment.
Heck, if we can vote in Reagan, Clinton, both sets of Bushs and actually consider Clinton's wife, why the heck couldn't this guy get 8 years? We are that stupid. My wife utterly hates Obama. I can understand it on her views of the issues. I didn't want either set of the crazies to win, but it was far too late for that.
I'm sorry, but I really hope that his 8 years are boring and non-interesting. I want Obama to have the most forgettable 8 years possible in office when viewed from 50 years down the line.
I think Washington D.C. will become a radioactive wasteland and the survivors will spend their waking hours hunting mutant ants in collapsed subways.
So you think that the rest of the US is going to have some urban renewal in the DC metro area for the good of the nation? If it got rid of all the politicians, some one might consider it worth it.
I don't think we'd be that extreme though. If we really wanted to get rid of folks in the DC metro area or higher government officals, we'd just have a reign of terror.
I think that the GP meant that MLK's famous dream has been fulfilled, not that Obama is somehow as great as Dr King.
Um, no it hasn't. Well maybe his dream did come true as I haven't ever really paid attention to the details. I've always assumed that it really meant that folks wouldn't even blink at color/gender/religion when making choices and just choose whoever. I say no it hasn't because there is far, far too much yeah we've got a "black" guy running for a president and now, you'll see all this yeah we aren't racist because we voted for the "black" democrat.
It'd be fulfilled when "color/gender/religion" doesn't come up once during the pre-election fighting. To many people on both sides have made this election about "color/race/gender" so no we aren't really any where near "the dream." O.k. if "the dream" was only to have a "black male" elected due to a large black electorate, then sure "the dream" has come true. I'd actually say that there was as much or more excitement about the white females running. That alone right there should have told you that we aren't anywhere near treating males/females the same. There wouldn't have been any excitement that a female/black/non-certain religion person got elected if we were there yet.
Just one step closer to Douglas Adams' statement that, in such a large Universe, most things one could possibly imagine (and a lot one would rather not), grow somewhere.
If you've got decent genetics/bioengineering and don't have it growing near you already, you soon will. It's only a matter of time before we grow our own cars and homes. It's just a matter of making it cheaper/easier than existing methods.
You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks. ... which is an excellent argument against electing judges.
I don't know. I think that they picked the wrong branch for that. I'd almost have liked our president to be unelected except by the house/senate. Lately, I've really, really been thinking that I'd like any control over those damn federal supreme court judges. There is a part of me that thinks that they need elections to get in, and if large enough percentage of folks dislike how they've been judging crap, we need to be able to kick them out.
Of course, I think that if any elected official gets out of office with a 60% or more disapproval rating that they need to spend at least the same amount of time in jail for when they were in office. (Actually, that's kinder than what I really think.)
More specific to elections though, isn't it about time we abolished the electoral college and go right to a popular vote? There is clearly no legitimate reason for it to still be around. Electors rarely switch their votes, and, as the article points out, the founders saying it's a good idea does not make it so.
It may be a great thing for large states, but for small states the current system is better. Heck that's why we have the senate; it was a comprise because otherwise we wouldn't be the US. The constitution wouldn't have been ratified without smaller population states having equal power to larger population states in some form. I find it funny that everyone that wants to change things in that way comes from a large state.
I'm alot less impressed with the founding fathers than the average person, but I'm not sure it's a great idea to change stuff willy nilly. We've been changing stuff since just after it was ratified. Look how much we've bent alot of pieces of it and have tried our hardest apparently to put as many rules and regulations up as to gut a few of them. The 2nd is the obvious target lately, but really the 1st is also taken alot of pounding. Of course alot of people don't if really note the rest. There is a part of me that thinks that we need to add a few more. Like a right to data privacy and a right to use various drugs (be it beer, smoking tobacco, or harder stuff). Even if got something like that passed, it would take less than 10 years for someone to try to gut them with rules and regulations.
A agree entirely, and I'm amazed that California of all places has a curfew for teenagers. The nearest we have to that in the UK is an ASBO (anti-social behaviour order), which forbids individual petty criminals from certain acts -- for instance, banning them from a public place they vandalised, or imposing a curfew. You need to be arrested, taken to court and found guilty to get one though. It's meant to be better than sending people to prison etc.
Gosh, I don't remember not having the legal curfew anymore. I made it out of HS in 1996 in Arkansas in the US. I don't remember if it was a county or a statewide curfew, but it was pretty much from 10:30 pm to 3:30 pm. O.k. there was a little break in there between 7 am - 8 am as well.
I'm for universal voting rights instead of 18 and up. Mainly this is because most of those laws and school rules have been made and enforced against students who had zero input into the rules that the schools are run by. There is a strong part of me that thinks that the student body needs to vote on if any given section of the student hand book actually applies to their class.
Think about it. What if I or any group, said that you and your friends weren't allowed to be outside of work or your home except from 5 pm to 7 pm and 7 am to 8 am and used the excuse that we are older/wiser/here before you/that you aren't mature enough to make choices as the reason for restricting you. Oh, and we'd also remove your right to vote unless you matched our group. You wouldn't like that would you? Well, that's exactly what we do to students.
Why must people with no idea on a particular subject always be in charge of the budgets around a particular subject?
Its like a basic rule of nature. God's in his retirement home; he assigned one of his best agents to run hell, and then his worst agent to run the universe in general, and his second worst agent to run heaven. That explains everything.
Having read TFA, it looks very much like, by any technological definition, he was authorized. There would have to be pretty clear indications that he wasn't supposed to be there.
Is this sorta of like having \\servername\info\staff and then \\servername\info\students and giving all students access to the staff directory and also having spreadsheets with SSNs out there as well? I actually shudder to think how often that kinda of thing actually goes on. Or what's even more common is some staff person puts something in the student folders that all the students can see, but that wasn't meant to be published. We all know how common that is.
Or what's worse, student has a name similar to a staff member and other staff keep e-mailing staff related crap to the student thinking its the staff person and blaming the student reading their e-mail.
FTA "First, the facts. Crist is behind on his rent payments, and his landlord starts to evict him by hiring Sell to remove Crist's belongings and throw them away. Sell comes a cross Crist's computer, and he hands over the computer to his friend Hipple who he knows is looking for a computer. Hipple starts to look through the files, and he comes across child pornography: Hipple freaks out and calls the police. The police then conduct a warrantless forensic examination of the computer" So yea, I agree that the question here is whether they had a right to search it or not. Seems like the DA realized that they didn't, and tried to bypass the 4th with the "hash" theory, which the court rightly smacked down.
Um, sounds like the police and Hipple never had rights to look at it to begin with. "legally" Now the police will look at anything that you bring up to them and ask them to. If you are a business owner, and say you think that an employee is doing "something" on their machine please look. Well, the employee has no exceptions of privacy. The employee doesn't legally own the computer in that example and whoever does can ask the cops to do/scan anything that they want. The cops don't need a warrant in that case.
Now Hipple just bringing a computer up to the cops. Well, the cops would assume that Hipple legally owns the damn thing and they don't then need warrant in that case to scan/search it. Now if Hipple has physical possession, but didn't legally buy it that's a whole another can of worms. The police are basically in the clear for what they did, but I'm fairly certain that they are legally SOL on any evidence obtained that way.
I'm iffy on if the cops even should have the right to image a HD without a warrant.