Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to tax DSL and Cable in roughly the same way that telephone lines are taxed (is that feasible?)
i think this is true for cable already. and if you have dsl, you are by necessity paying the telephone line tax anyway. it would seem to me that the voip issue would mostly apply to cable anyway- if you have dsl, you pretty much by definition have a phone line already- in that case, i suppose a voip provider could be used to get a cheape second phone line, but in any case you are still paying the taxes to have the physical line run to your home
When I jumped through the Joker hoops to tell them that I wanted to transfer my domain name, they opened a "transfer window". I was shocked when they said that, during the transfer window, _any_ registrar could grab my domain.
I suspect that the people at Joker were trying to intimidate (or FUD) you into staying with them instead of transferring to another registrar. The protocol specifies that the gaining registrar has to get confirmation of the identity of the domain owner making the request before initiating the transfer. The new policy is intended to prevent losing registrars from putting onerous restrictions on domain owners wishing to leave them for another registrar.
If you build an entire product around a technology that is only available on one platform, then so long as you do not wish to rebuild that product, you are locked to that platform, whether it is open source or not.
Probably the best bet is to raise the retirement age.
I agree with this, although you'd probably here screaming and hollering to no end about this. The reason the pyramid scheme worked so well at first was that when Social Security was founded, the average person lived less than 3 years beyond the retirment age, and many people never reached it. Now, the average American lives about 20 years past retirment age.
At the current rate of Social Security taxes, and the current Social Security benefit amount, the average retiree will get as much money from Social Security in their first four years of retirement as they put into it their entire working career.
XUL only works in mozilla. HTML/Javascript will work in any browser (to varying degrees). As another poster said, lockin is bad, regardless of who it is you are being locked in to.
this bug has been around forever, although i've never actually seen it, even though i read slashdot in firefox pretty much everyday, and have since before it was firefox. (maybe it's because i use light mode?)
anyway, the bug was fixed fairly recently in the mainline, but was not able to make it into firefox 1.0 because there was not enough time to test for regressions. if i understood the bug correctly, it happens because slashdot uses a 100% width table without fixed width columns for it's layout, so firefox has to load the whole table, and then reflow it and determine column widths after it has been loaded. so, basically, slashdot is using a poor (and rare) but more or less valid table layout that is very difficult to render properly.
I went to bed a little before midnight MST, and NBC already had 269 for Bush at that time. I didn't really watch any of the other networks, but FOX was definitely not the first to give Ohio to Bush.
That was my first thought too, as soon as i saw the number 32,000. But looks like somebody did absolute value away the sign, for whatever reason. Otherwise, the votes wouldn't have been counting down- after getting to 32767 votes, they would have started counting up from -32768.
While I second your apology, I wouldn't be so quick to make promises. After all, many Americans were already promising the same thing not too long after the last time he was elected. (or not elected, if you're one of the many still beating that dead horse)
TTCPS is already obsolete. i have upgraded my home network to NTCPS (n Tin Cans and Pieces of String where n is the number of computers on the network). this has reduced the latnecy on large networks by an order of magnitude for me.
To avoid fraud, why not submit the ballot into more than one ballot box. One for each candidate on the ticket
because then people can tell just by watching which ballot box you stick your ballot into which candidate you voted for. this makes it much easier for unscrupulous employers, poll challengers, or anyone else to try and intimidate people into voting for one candidate or the other. you may think i'm being paranoid, but the very reason that we have as much privacy in the voting booth is because of problems like this in the past, particularly in less scrupulous voting districts such as chicago. by making a voter submit his ballot into a different box depending on whcih candidate he voted for, you have just removed all of the privacy from the voting booths. you might as well show which candidate a voter is about to cast his vote for on a big projector screen above the voting booth.
This also, by the way, is the same reason that any voting scheme that ties each vote to a GUID is likely to be shot down.
Considering they filed the requests well before the actual result of the election was known (they may have had a good idea of the popular vote percantage, but the electoral vote was still definitely up in the air), I would say, yse they would have. In fact, I suspect thaat they were going to file the requests no matter what the outcome of the elections was.
Thirty years ago, when we started meddling in their affairs, were we aware of the consequences, determined to act anyway, or were we ignorant of the ultimate result of our actions?
To be honest, I have no idea what the answer to that is. My suspicion is that we did not understand the potential consequnces at the time, however, we haven't done a very good job of learning and adjusting our actions accordingly since then, either.
We've got access to the oil and the uranium we need to free ourselves from their politics.
I'd like to believe this is true, but I doubt it. If we weren't interested in their oil, the middle east would look a lot more like Africa, with all of its civil wars and nations of people in poverty while the ruling warlords bask in their power and wealth. Example: When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. along with most of the world, threw a fit. But when Isreal invaded Gaza and the West Bank, with weapons we gave them, we looked the other way, and gave them more weapons. It wasn't until almost 15 years later that we started pushing for a peaceful solution to the situation in the West Bank (and not very hard at that). Why? Kuwait has oil, and we didn't want Saddam Hussein to control that oil. But the West Bank has no oil, and we didn't want to piss off our only strong ally in the region by telling them what they did was wrong.
But will doing so set the course for a global conflict in the next generation?
Perhaps. As long as the people of the region value their holy lands more than human lives, there will continue to be war and conflict in the Middle East. As long as the rest of the world values their oil more than human lives we will continue to pick sides and involve ourselves in the conflicts. If nobody needed all of the oil in the middle east, the rest of the world would have left them to duke it out amongst themselves a long time ago.
Of course we didn't do that, and now we've got a real mess on our hands. We gave our good buddies in Isreal nukular weapons, and several other countries in the region have attempted or are attempting to create their own. Simply pulling out of the region now would at the very least be a disaster in the region, and given the "eye for an eye" belief of many people in the area it would quite likely spread much further than that.
The real issue now is that we need to start looking at our overall policy towards the Middle East and figure out what needs to change. If we continue with the same policies in the region that we have been following for the last 30 years, then for every terrorist we find, catch, or kill, 10 more will spring up to take his place. This is one point where i think Kerry really screwed up in the campaign. Bush came off as being much tougher on terrorists, but nobody ever bothered to point out that fact that if we keep following Bush's current policies, we will only increase the number of terrorists out there for us to catch (until the Bin Laden video was released, but who's really going to take election advice from him?). Kerry's position, on the other hand, sounded to a lot of people like "I'll do everything Bush is doing, but I'll do it better." And as much as terror was made an issue during the campaign, not once did anyone ever address the fact that maybe we need to stop and take a long look at what it is that we're doing that caused this problem in the first place, and whether we can do anything to change that.
Of course a lot of people have pointed out that a big part of Kerry's problem was that appeared to be too intellectual. (probably not quite the right word, but close) His message was much too complex, where as Bush was always very simple, straight-forward, and consistent. So trying to go into a deep discussion of our policies in the Midlle East and how we are in essence inviting the terrorists to come attack us again probably would have gone right over most people's heads and hurt him even more. Personally, I found it very irritating to watch the debates and hear Bush say the same stupid sound bites over and over again, even when I agreed with his stance on the issues, but apparently I was in the minority.
The existance of laws is not enough to prevent people from breaking them. It is possible that an elector would feel strongly enough about a candidate to break faith with his electorate. So far no one has ever been prosecuted for breaking a faithless elector law. However, the care with which the parties select their electors makes the existance of the laws mostly irrelevant anyway, regardless of whether they are enforced.
Our enemies have declared war on us for 30 years of meddling in their affairs. Religion has little to do with it (other than the fact that their religion supports the eye for an eye mentality).
Seriously, the youth vote was just as bad this year as it was four years ago.....
how do you figure that? sure, it was still only 17% of the overall voter turnout, same as four years ago. but considering overall voter turnout increased byt like 50%, there were a hell of a lot more 18-26 year olds voting in this election than there were in the last election. not as many as i would have liked, but still a significant improvement.
That's definitely a good point. I don't know of any cases, in recent history at least, where a faithless elector actually voted for the other major party. They either refused to cast a vote (D.C. in 2000) or they voted for a third party or independent candidate that was pretty close to their party's platform. This is probably why, despite all the states that have laws against faithless electors (including D.C.), nobody has ever been prosecuted for breaking them.
Um, the Colorado river has *never* flown into the Gulf of Mexico. Heard of the continental divide? Anyway, as far as I am aware, the Colorado river still flows at least to the Mexico border, and I'm pretty sure it makes it all the way to the Gulf of California. There was talk years ago of creating a diversion tunnel that would use the water of the Colorado river to water the Los Angeles valley, which would have dried up the Colorado river before reaching the ocean, but that never happened. Regardless, that has less to do with dams and hydroelectric power than with the fact that people were trying to build one of the nations largest cites in the middle of the desert, and weren't willing to adjust their lifestyle to deal with that fact.
Oh, the point of that was that the "Cheese" that most Americans use *has* to be individually wrapped because otherwise it would just be a big glop of goo, and the oil would separate out of it.
One example is individually wrapped cheese. Why is that necessary?
Most Americans don't realize there is a difference between processed vegetable oil (usually labeled as Cheese food or Cheese product) and actual cheese. While the so-called American Cheese is barely acceptable when you throw a slice on a greasy hamburger or use it for a quick grilled "cheese" sandwich, it tastes awful compared to any real cheese.
Agreed, they dislike like the (mainland) French more than most Americans do. But it's probably more an issue that they don't percieve the influence that American policies have on them because we are so remote to them, and they don't see enough American tourists there to get irritated by them. Most people from Corsica probably care as much about America's foreign policy as people from rural Nebraska care about the Europeans opinion of us as a country. (Which judging by the election results and the exit poll data is not at all. It seems Americans are more interested in discriminating against gays than maintaining amiable relations with the rest of the world.)
I will concede that this may be true. I'm new to the area so I don't know that much about local politics. However, if people with an interest and a desire to change the outcome of an election are allowed unsecured access to the ballots, any election system would be suceptible to ballot box stuffing. (Or discarding of ballots, whatever that's called.) Even electronic voting machines that produce a paper "receipt" would be suceptible to this attack. If the ballots aren't secured, and you can't trust the people running the ballot counting machine, than all bets are off, regardless of what mechanism is used to tabulate the votes. So even if everything you said is true, I still prefer the paper ballots I used yesterday to any other mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to tax DSL and Cable in roughly the same way that telephone lines are taxed (is that feasible?)
i think this is true for cable already. and if you have dsl, you are by necessity paying the telephone line tax anyway. it would seem to me that the voip issue would mostly apply to cable anyway- if you have dsl, you pretty much by definition have a phone line already- in that case, i suppose a voip provider could be used to get a cheape second phone line, but in any case you are still paying the taxes to have the physical line run to your home
When I jumped through the Joker hoops to tell them that I wanted to transfer my domain name, they opened a "transfer window". I was shocked when they said that, during the transfer window, _any_ registrar could grab my domain.
I suspect that the people at Joker were trying to intimidate (or FUD) you into staying with them instead of transferring to another registrar. The protocol specifies that the gaining registrar has to get confirmation of the identity of the domain owner making the request before initiating the transfer. The new policy is intended to prevent losing registrars from putting onerous restrictions on domain owners wishing to leave them for another registrar.
If you build an entire product around a technology that is only available on one platform, then so long as you do not wish to rebuild that product, you are locked to that platform, whether it is open source or not.
Probably the best bet is to raise the retirement age.
I agree with this, although you'd probably here screaming and hollering to no end about this. The reason the pyramid scheme worked so well at first was that when Social Security was founded, the average person lived less than 3 years beyond the retirment age, and many people never reached it. Now, the average American lives about 20 years past retirment age.
At the current rate of Social Security taxes, and the current Social Security benefit amount, the average retiree will get as much money from Social Security in their first four years of retirement as they put into it their entire working career.
XUL only works in mozilla. HTML/Javascript will work in any browser (to varying degrees). As another poster said, lockin is bad, regardless of who it is you are being locked in to.
this bug has been around forever, although i've never actually seen it, even though i read slashdot in firefox pretty much everyday, and have since before it was firefox. (maybe it's because i use light mode?)
anyway, the bug was fixed fairly recently in the mainline, but was not able to make it into firefox 1.0 because there was not enough time to test for regressions. if i understood the bug correctly, it happens because slashdot uses a 100% width table without fixed width columns for it's layout, so firefox has to load the whole table, and then reflow it and determine column widths after it has been loaded. so, basically, slashdot is using a poor (and rare) but more or less valid table layout that is very difficult to render properly.
i wouldn't care about any of that if the could just get the 1.0 dom and css 1 and 2 working properly...
Easy- if you're looking for good deals on quality parts, good customer service, and intelligent sales staff, Fry's Electronics is the way to go....
(please, please, please don't anybody actaully take that seriously)
Opps, My mistake. What I meant to say was:
FOX was definately not the only staation to call Ohio for Bush before 1AM MST.
I went to bed a little before midnight MST, and NBC already had 269 for Bush at that time. I didn't really watch any of the other networks, but FOX was definitely not the first to give Ohio to Bush.
That was my first thought too, as soon as i saw the number 32,000. But looks like somebody did absolute value away the sign, for whatever reason. Otherwise, the votes wouldn't have been counting down- after getting to 32767 votes, they would have started counting up from -32768.
While I second your apology, I wouldn't be so quick to make promises. After all, many Americans were already promising the same thing not too long after the last time he was elected. (or not elected, if you're one of the many still beating that dead horse)
TTCPS is already obsolete. i have upgraded my home network to NTCPS (n Tin Cans and Pieces of String where n is the number of computers on the network). this has reduced the latnecy on large networks by an order of magnitude for me.
To avoid fraud, why not submit the ballot into more than one ballot box. One for each candidate on the ticket
because then people can tell just by watching which ballot box you stick your ballot into which candidate you voted for. this makes it much easier for unscrupulous employers, poll challengers, or anyone else to try and intimidate people into voting for one candidate or the other. you may think i'm being paranoid, but the very reason that we have as much privacy in the voting booth is because of problems like this in the past, particularly in less scrupulous voting districts such as chicago. by making a voter submit his ballot into a different box depending on whcih candidate he voted for, you have just removed all of the privacy from the voting booths. you might as well show which candidate a voter is about to cast his vote for on a big projector screen above the voting booth.
This also, by the way, is the same reason that any voting scheme that ties each vote to a GUID is likely to be shot down.
Considering they filed the requests well before the actual result of the election was known (they may have had a good idea of the popular vote percantage, but the electoral vote was still definitely up in the air), I would say, yse they would have. In fact, I suspect thaat they were going to file the requests no matter what the outcome of the elections was.
Thirty years ago, when we started meddling in their affairs, were we aware of the consequences, determined to act anyway, or were we ignorant of the ultimate result of our actions?
To be honest, I have no idea what the answer to that is. My suspicion is that we did not understand the potential consequnces at the time, however, we haven't done a very good job of learning and adjusting our actions accordingly since then, either.
We've got access to the oil and the uranium we need to free ourselves from their politics.
I'd like to believe this is true, but I doubt it. If we weren't interested in their oil, the middle east would look a lot more like Africa, with all of its civil wars and nations of people in poverty while the ruling warlords bask in their power and wealth. Example: When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. along with most of the world, threw a fit. But when Isreal invaded Gaza and the West Bank, with weapons we gave them, we looked the other way, and gave them more weapons. It wasn't until almost 15 years later that we started pushing for a peaceful solution to the situation in the West Bank (and not very hard at that). Why? Kuwait has oil, and we didn't want Saddam Hussein to control that oil. But the West Bank has no oil, and we didn't want to piss off our only strong ally in the region by telling them what they did was wrong.
But will doing so set the course for a global conflict in the next generation?
Perhaps. As long as the people of the region value their holy lands more than human lives, there will continue to be war and conflict in the Middle East. As long as the rest of the world values their oil more than human lives we will continue to pick sides and involve ourselves in the conflicts. If nobody needed all of the oil in the middle east, the rest of the world would have left them to duke it out amongst themselves a long time ago.
Of course we didn't do that, and now we've got a real mess on our hands. We gave our good buddies in Isreal nukular weapons, and several other countries in the region have attempted or are attempting to create their own. Simply pulling out of the region now would at the very least be a disaster in the region, and given the "eye for an eye" belief of many people in the area it would quite likely spread much further than that.
The real issue now is that we need to start looking at our overall policy towards the Middle East and figure out what needs to change. If we continue with the same policies in the region that we have been following for the last 30 years, then for every terrorist we find, catch, or kill, 10 more will spring up to take his place. This is one point where i think Kerry really screwed up in the campaign. Bush came off as being much tougher on terrorists, but nobody ever bothered to point out that fact that if we keep following Bush's current policies, we will only increase the number of terrorists out there for us to catch (until the Bin Laden video was released, but who's really going to take election advice from him?). Kerry's position, on the other hand, sounded to a lot of people like "I'll do everything Bush is doing, but I'll do it better." And as much as terror was made an issue during the campaign, not once did anyone ever address the fact that maybe we need to stop and take a long look at what it is that we're doing that caused this problem in the first place, and whether we can do anything to change that.
Of course a lot of people have pointed out that a big part of Kerry's problem was that appeared to be too intellectual. (probably not quite the right word, but close) His message was much too complex, where as Bush was always very simple, straight-forward, and consistent. So trying to go into a deep discussion of our policies in the Midlle East and how we are in essence inviting the terrorists to come attack us again probably would have gone right over most people's heads and hurt him even more. Personally, I found it very irritating to watch the debates and hear Bush say the same stupid sound bites over and over again, even when I agreed with his stance on the issues, but apparently I was in the minority.
The existance of laws is not enough to prevent people from breaking them. It is possible that an elector would feel strongly enough about a candidate to break faith with his electorate. So far no one has ever been prosecuted for breaking a faithless elector law. However, the care with which the parties select their electors makes the existance of the laws mostly irrelevant anyway, regardless of whether they are enforced.
Our enemies have declared war on us for 30 years of meddling in their affairs. Religion has little to do with it (other than the fact that their religion supports the eye for an eye mentality).
Seriously, the youth vote was just as bad this year as it was four years ago.....
how do you figure that? sure, it was still only 17% of the overall voter turnout, same as four years ago. but considering overall voter turnout increased byt like 50%, there were a hell of a lot more 18-26 year olds voting in this election than there were in the last election. not as many as i would have liked, but still a significant improvement.
That's definitely a good point. I don't know of any cases, in recent history at least, where a faithless elector actually voted for the other major party. They either refused to cast a vote (D.C. in 2000) or they voted for a third party or independent candidate that was pretty close to their party's platform. This is probably why, despite all the states that have laws against faithless electors (including D.C.), nobody has ever been prosecuted for breaking them.
Um, the Colorado river has *never* flown into the Gulf of Mexico. Heard of the continental divide? Anyway, as far as I am aware, the Colorado river still flows at least to the Mexico border, and I'm pretty sure it makes it all the way to the Gulf of California. There was talk years ago of creating a diversion tunnel that would use the water of the Colorado river to water the Los Angeles valley, which would have dried up the Colorado river before reaching the ocean, but that never happened. Regardless, that has less to do with dams and hydroelectric power than with the fact that people were trying to build one of the nations largest cites in the middle of the desert, and weren't willing to adjust their lifestyle to deal with that fact.
Oh, the point of that was that the "Cheese" that most Americans use *has* to be individually wrapped because otherwise it would just be a big glop of goo, and the oil would separate out of it.
One example is individually wrapped cheese. Why is that necessary?
Most Americans don't realize there is a difference between processed vegetable oil (usually labeled as Cheese food or Cheese product) and actual cheese. While the so-called American Cheese is barely acceptable when you throw a slice on a greasy hamburger or use it for a quick grilled "cheese" sandwich, it tastes awful compared to any real cheese.
Agreed, they dislike like the (mainland) French more than most Americans do. But it's probably more an issue that they don't percieve the influence that American policies have on them because we are so remote to them, and they don't see enough American tourists there to get irritated by them. Most people from Corsica probably care as much about America's foreign policy as people from rural Nebraska care about the Europeans opinion of us as a country. (Which judging by the election results and the exit poll data is not at all. It seems Americans are more interested in discriminating against gays than maintaining amiable relations with the rest of the world.)
I will concede that this may be true. I'm new to the area so I don't know that much about local politics. However, if people with an interest and a desire to change the outcome of an election are allowed unsecured access to the ballots, any election system would be suceptible to ballot box stuffing. (Or discarding of ballots, whatever that's called.) Even electronic voting machines that produce a paper "receipt" would be suceptible to this attack. If the ballots aren't secured, and you can't trust the people running the ballot counting machine, than all bets are off, regardless of what mechanism is used to tabulate the votes. So even if everything you said is true, I still prefer the paper ballots I used yesterday to any other mechanism.