I agree. Throwing out the machines is an absolute waste of money. If the systems were poorly designed or there isn't a way to validate the accuracy of the election, address that. But an optical voting system is (or should be) far less intuitive to the user than a touch screen system. If that's not the case, it's because the touch screen software was poorly designed--not because there's anything inherently wrong or suspicious with using a touch screen to vote. What could be easier than pressing the name of the candidate you wish to vote for?
Don't ignore China. The Cold War is not over--it was only paused for a decade while the other player in the War took over. China is getting extremely rich and is using a lot of their money to build up their military. China may be our only significant military threat (though the Soviet Union seems to be wanting to become a player again), but China is a big threat. Nobody wants to go nuclear and the only thing protecting us from conventional attack by China is a body of water called the Pacific and the fact that China doesn't (yet) have an effective way to project their conventional forces to the other side of the ocean.
We're gambling big time with China. We're gambling that their prosperity will continue to move their country towards a free and democratic free marker system before that same prosperity gives them the money to build overwhelming military strength. It might work, it might not. But we better be ready for the contingency of us losing that bet.
Too many people are forgetting the dangerous world we live in. I grew up in the end of the Cold War and, even so, it's easy to forget the very real threat. Those that grew up in the 90's and more recently don't even remember it except in their history books. As amazing as it sounds, too many people have gotten so used to "peace" that they don't think real war is a possibility. That's why 9/11 was such a shock to so many people. It was only made easier because they were "just terrorists" so people could taken comfort that it was just a few kooks. But countries can be just as dangerous--the only reason is that, recently, they generally aren't is precisely because of our massive military capability.
The only reason that China hasn't taken Taiwan is because of the U.S. North Korea hasn't attacked South Korea because of the U.S. Iran and Syria haven't invaded Israel because Israel taught them some lessons and because of the combined military threat of Israel and the U.S.
As unpopular as the view may be, peace is not made possible by diplomats talking about nonsense in the U.N. Peace is made possible by very powerful military forces that either make action by the other side impossible, or so costly to both sides that neither side will benefit from it. Yes, Mutually Assured Destruction was expensive. The Cold War was expensive. But they're far cheaper than all-out war between the participating countries. It's easy to dream about not spending money on a "senseless" military, but it's precisely that military that allows peace to exist.
Military spending is the price of peace. AND freedom.
Senseless waste of cash on military posturing. It's why Japan is one of the top economies right now.
That's one reason. The other reason is because they can depend on someone else spending lots of cash on "military posturing" to defend them.
There are a lot of peacenik kooks out there that like to try to adopt some holier-than-thou attitude that presumes that any military "posturing" is "senseless." The reality is that the world has always been--and continues to be--a very dangerous place. Feel free to hate Bush all you want. Feel free to think that Iraq was a bad idea. But be under no illusion: The world is every bit as dangerous today as it was in the 1930's--probably more so. Yes, it sucks that we have to spend so much money on our military and so many of our "allies" get relatively free rides. But the cold hard truth is that the free world does need to be defended and often fought for. I wouldn't mind some help doing so, but I'd rather we make the investment ourselves than that no-one make the investment.
Hehehe. The image of a 21-foot X-Wing barely leaving the ground, spiraling out of control because one or more of the engines hasn't ignited with the others, while flapping it's wings as it goes nose first into the ground is enough to make me grin. I can just imagine someone there as it takes off, "Ok, we just got airborne--quick, flap the wings before the dang thing crashes in 2 seconds." "Did you see it? Did you see it flap its wings before it fireballed into the ground? I did! I saw it!" I will be looking forward to the YouTube video and if the wings don't flap before the fireball, I'll be disappointed.
I have a better idea. Why not make a 5-10' model of the Death Star... launch it straight up with a powerful engine and when it gets to altitude, press the self-destruct button. It'll look just like the movie. That way when the things explodes, they can say "We meant to do that!" I hope they can add the nifty effect that they added in the CGI'd version of the original movie.
But seriously, until it has flown it is entirely wrong to say that it actually flies, espceially something that has like a 5% chance of "flying" for any period of time at all.
There's a 50/50 chance of it flying... but there's only a 10% chance of that!
Well, technically it's more of a SCUD missile, as it has no appreciable guidance. If you did put in GPS and terrain-following radar, then you'd have your cruise missile. And you'd be sure to get a visit from men in dark suits in the middle of the night...
... Asking how much it costs and could you mass produce them?
Then they're ahead of Comcast. Every month I gave Comcast something like $55 and, every month, they give me access to the Internet for some subset of that time. It's getting pretty dang bad. I'm going so far as to consider going back to Qwest, and that' saying something!
It's been a little over a year, but nothing I tried to install with Wine would work. Well, one thing: SimCity2000. Nothing else would install. I got QuickBooks 2000 to work--it wouldn't install, but if I copied it from the installed directory from Windows (bypassing the install), it worked.
Perhaps Wine has improved drastically in the last year, but it didn't improve at all in the 2.5 years I was using Linux on my desktop--in fact, it got worse. I originally tried using Wine and a few apps installed, but not enough. So I used Win4Lin. A few years later I wanted to ditch Win4Lin so I installed the latest version of Wine. At that point, not even the programs that used to work would install anymore.
A few months later, I got a new laptop and left Windows XP on it. My old Linux laptop now is just my in-home-office Linux server, which it works fine as.
The legalese being quoted ((c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.) is usually a generic catch-all used by web hosting providers and ISP so that they can protect their name based on misuse of their service. Usually, this would include things like launching DoS's, spamming, phishing, hacking, etc. If enough people to do this from their network, it does damage the name or reputation of AT&T and they could easily end up on blacklists, and AT&T could be popularly associated with those activities because of some kind of implicit tolerance. That catch-all clause allows them to shut things like this down.
Yes, that clause could be interpreted as giving them the right to shut you down if you speak out against AT&T. But is there any evidence whatsoever that that has actually been done?
But what's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment."
Oh, please. That's got to be the goofiest premise I've seen in a long time.
Code is kept "secret" because the companies, rightly or wrongly, think it gives them a competitive advantage. Heck, some companies should be embarrassed about the appearance of their product, do you really think some suits care about how it looks on the inside? Does Coke keep its formula secret because it's embarrassed or because it wants to make its product harder to copy? Same goes for software.
Heck, many open source products are no beauty to peer into, either. The code is so nasty that the argument of "If you don't like it, you can fix or modify it yourself" is reduced to a smart-ass comment with no real validity. Modify that code? First you have to be able to understand the mess. Unless you've been responsible for the mess from the beginning, or have a lot of time to invest in figuring out the mess, good luck with that.
The founding fathers were for the most part the rich upper class of American society. They wrote the Constitution to suit themselves (for example, the Electoral College system made sure that the common people did not, in their ignorance, interfere with the political process), and the CEOs of major companies are their successors, the people the constitution waas written to benefit.
I can't believe this message was moderated as "Insightful." It's actually ignorance and cynical.
The electoral college only impacts presidential elections, and since the president can be overridden by Congress that are not elected by the electoral college, the political process can be "interfered" with by the common people just fine. And the electoral college, in practice, elects the person that is selected by the people--there are only a few cases of "unfaithful electors" in the electoral college.
Anyone who can honestly read the Constitution and come to the conclusion that it was written to protect the wealthy really needs to take their cynicism down a notch or ten.
Others in this thread are right: The patent system is being abused in ways that were not envisioned by the founding fathers.
It didn't take much. Trolls like you are dispatched as easily and quickly as garbage is taken out to the curb on trash day. Unfortunately, trouncing you in this thread has been no more satisfying than taking out the trash. But someone has to do it.
I know trolls are trolls, but to refresh your memory:
You said: The southern border is a false problem. The problems are in and must be solved in each country from which refugees come, not the path they take to get to the US.
I said: I'm an American that lived 10 years in Mexico (just moved back in 2006) and married a Mexican while I was there. I crossed the border many times (legally), went through the legal immigration process for my wife, and have known quite a few people who entered the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas. I am just slightly knowledgeable on this topic, sir.
You said: I could claim false qualifications too just as easily, nut job.
I said: Unfortunately for you, my qualifications are not false whereas any claims you make on the topic obviously are.
You said: You fucking changed your point, and then claimed victory.
So, no, I didn't change the point. I said that our troops should be used to defend the southern border, you said it was not a problem, I said it WAS a problem and offered you very significant personal experience that positions me to be knowledgeable about the topic, you questioned those qualifications, I reiterated them, and then you said I changed the topic. Riiiiiggght.
Be gone, trollster, you have been thoroughly discarded with yesterday's refuse. As all trolls are.
I could claim false qualifications too just as easily, nut job.
Unfortunately for you, my qualifications are not false whereas any claims you make on the topic obviously are. I lived in Mexico 10 years, speak Spanish fluently, am married to a Mexican citizen, and have gone through the legal process of getting my wife a LPR (Legal Permanent Resident) card to live and work in the U.S. I did that myself, filing the appropriate I-130, I-131, and I-485--not using an immigration attorney. And if you search through my past postings at Slashdot prior to 2006, you'll find plenty of posts that made reference to the fact that I was living in Mexico at that time.
That's why you've ended up looking like a fool so far. Because I actually know something about the topic.:)
Naive in that you think the bases anywhere are about protecting the sovereignty of nations. They are to maintain American influence and dominion for national interests.
There's some of that, too. But that influence and our national interests can be maintained with the bases I described.
The southern border is a false problem. The problems are in and must be solved in each country from which refugees come, not the path they take to get to the US.
I'm an American that lived 10 years in Mexico (just moved back in 2006) and married a Mexican while I was there. I crossed the border many times (legally), went through the legal immigration process for my wife, and have known quite a few people who entered the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas. I am just slightly knowledgeable on this topic, sir.
There are two main problems regarding the southern border: 1) Inadequate opportunities and low pay in Mexico. 2) The fact that American companies are willing to hire illegals. If either problem were solved, the problem would largely go away. We cannot fix the problems of Mexico and, so far, we haven't had the political determination to address American companies hiring illegals. That leaves us with the alternative of defending our southern border. We have hundreds of thousands of troops already on the payroll and if we withdrew our military from the over-abundance of international bases and stationed them along the border, the problem of illegal immigration would largely disappear despite a lack of action on #1 and #2.
I find your entire model for thought lacking and poorly thought out. Talking points from talk radio are not actually reasonable, nut job.
Talk radio? Try living in Mexico for a decade, crossing the border more than a hundred times, dealing with and living in Mexican society and realities, becoming fluent in Spanish, and knowing some illegal aliens here in the U.S. When you've done these things, come back and we'll talk. Until then, you remain an uninformed trolling A.C. and your opinions and lack of knowledge on the topic are laughable.
There is nothing naive in any of my message. Some may want to take issue with my stance that Iraq wasn't about oil, and that's fine. But we do not need much of a presence in Europe anymore, our presence in the Middle East is adequate as is, and we only need a presence in the general area of China.
Further, I am correct that our military--even at half its current strength--would be enough to defend the mainland against any conventional assault. No other nation has a significant naval force capable of invading us or projecting significant air power and, even if they had it, we could see it coming days ahead and sink it in either of our moats (more commonly known as the Atlantic and Pacific). Our threats today are terrorism and a massive military deployed worldwide is not necessary or able to deter or respond to that.
As for our southern border, it is you who is naive if you don't think it needs defending. I'm an American and I'm married to a Mexican, but even *I* realize our immigration policies must be enforced. Our southern border is a sieve and will remain such until we actively defend it. Considering our main violent threat today is terrorists, infiltration is a huge threat... and they have thousands of miles of unprotected border that they can choose from when deciding where to infiltrate.
Again, I know you're a troll but... how about taking issue with some of the specifics of my position rather than just trolling?
How much longer can the US keep up its huge military spending necessary to support an empire of it current size? We know from history that every empire falls eventually. You might not think of the US as currently having an empire as such but it does have the largest military on the planet and bases in an awful lot of other countries.
Military bases around the world does not an empire make. Personally, though, I think we should definitely remove ourselves from places that are capable of defending themselves now. We need maybe one or two supply bases in Europe to help protect our interests in the Mediterranean. We need something in the Middle East--be it an ongoing presence in Iraq or just in Oman--which can protect our interests in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. And we need something in either Japan or South Korea--but not both.
I don't think it would take that much money to support that military level. The rest of our troops should be at home. And when they're not training, they should be defending our southern border, helping build levees, etc. We need military readiness, but most of that can be domestic and put the troops to productive use domestically in peacetime.
Will it be possible to support such a huge military when the worlds oil supplies run even lower.
All the more reason to have a military. I personally do not think Iraq was about oil. I do not doubt, however, that there will be wars over energy in the future.
These are all questions that the US people need to ask in order to ensure that if they are no longer able to enforce their will overseas militarily no other nation tries looking for revenge against a weakened opponent.
The reality is that our military could be less than half as strong as it is now and there'd still be no other country (or reasonable group of countries) that could project a threat against the U.S. mainland in a conventional assault. Sure, there are some countries that could nuke us, but that's the case regardless of the size of our military.
The threat to the future of the United States is not our military spending. We could easily afford the current military spending if it were the principle expenditure of the Federal Government. The real threat to the solvency of the United States is the social programs that have been instituted in the last 75 years and which are entirely outside what the Federal Government was originally designed to do.
I don't argue that at all. But if you allow it to be overridable, the defense itself becomes useless because the average DFU will simply override it when he shouldn't. It's a catch-22. You can't protect the user from himself without being evil and running into a whole host of other issues.
Personally, I think the reality is that dumb users have to be allowed to be dumb. Their machines will be compromised. Their zombied machines will churn out spam. Such is life. All we can do is be smart so that our machines aren't compromised, and we can set up walls to protect ourselves from the effects of the compromised machines of DFUs. I don't think it has ever been possible to protect stupid people from themselves.
But I only love this idea if I am the one who gives that hardware it's marching orders.
Which defeats the whole purpose.
With few exceptions, anti-virus programs protect the computer from the user that is using it. I haven't run anti-virus software on my Windows machine for 10 years. Well, that's not quite true. For some reason, I got nervous one day that I had a virus so I installed some anti-virus software and it told me I had something like 20 security risks. I almost puked. Then I realized all it had found was some ad/tracking cookies in my browser directory. Big deal.
The fact is, if the user knows what he's doing, he's rarely going to get a virus. Even on Windows.
So, at the end of the day, anti-virus software protects the computer from the user. In order to do that, you have to take control away from the user. The user already does give the computer its marching orders and that is the problem.
I have no idea what the solution is, but leaving it up to the end-user does not solve the problem in the real world. Unfortunately, they need to be protected from themselves.
Yes, I am a software developer, and I've seen how they solve it: Either acceleration (which I mentioned, but you ignored because it didn't match your argument) or 800 button pushes (which I also mentioned, and you seem to have fixed your eyes on).
I didn't ignore. It wasn't the issue. My question was not how others have done it. My question to you was whether or not you were creative enough to be able to imagine a button-based solution that would be both accurate and also allow quick navigation among 800+ songs? The scroll wheel has the "advantage"* of acceleration for quick general navigation while buttons have the advantage of precise navigation for specific selection. Can you imagine some solution that would provide both advantages? I'm sure you can unless you try to be intentionally obtuse.
* I say "advantage" because I really am not convinced it is one. When I'm at the top of the list and want to get to a song in the M's, I'm screwed. If I start going moderately fast, the dang thing zips into fast mode and zips me right on past M's into the O's, P's, or even R's. So I'm forced to carefully go slow so that the thing doesn't get into fast-scroll mode--and navigating 800+ songs with the scroll wheel in slow mode is no faster than doing it with a logical button configuration would be. About the only time the scroll wheel's "fast mode" is useful to me is if I have to be in the A's or B's and want to quickly zip to the Y's. For anything else, I find myself carefully moderating my speed so I don't lose control of the scroll and zip to the end of the alphabet.
The problem is that the alphabet is too short for it to work efficiently. If the alphabet had 100 or 150 characters, the fast mode would be great. But it's only 26 characters long. By the time the thing gets into fast mode, I'm usually 1/4th of the way through the alphabet. Once in fast mode, it seems I can almost immediately skip 10+ characters by the time I can respond to the fact that I'm now in fast mode. So getting into fast mode might take about 7 characters and then I almost immediately get another 10 added to that as I react to now being in fast mode. So by the time I "slow down," I'm already at the 17th letter of the alphabet. Again, the normal solution is intentionally avoiding fast mode at which point I'd rather have a semi-intelligent button design. And, no, 800+ button presses is not the most intelligent way to do it, even if that's the way it's been done by button-based units so far.
You can overshoot with either. With the scroll wheel (only), you can slow as you approach what you want.
You can overshoot with either, but with buttons you at least have the option of precise single-taps when you're already in the right area of the list. The problem here isn't the fast-scrolling. I personally don't like the fast scrolling of the iPod, but I can live with it. My problem is that when I'm already close to my target song, it's still hard to target the song I want whereas just a tap or two with buttons would get me precisely the song I want and I'd be done with it--even on a bumpy road or while running.
The handle on a gas pump is a better analogy, really.
Again, you are seldom trying to get exactly 0.001 gallons of gas in the car. The scroll wheel and the gas pump is tolerable for general navigation and approximation, but not for when you're looking for precision. With the gas pump, you don't need it. With the scroll wheel to select a song, you do.
Compare that to a button, where you'll end up several hundred songs past if it supports any kind of acceleration, or with 800 pushes if it doesn't.
Please don't tell me that you really don't have enough imagination to envision any other type of button-based interface that could effectively navigate 800 songs without a scrollwheel and without 800 button pushes? If you can't, I assume you're not in the software or hardware design industry. You're probably an accountant since accounting is a great industry for people that lack imagination and originality.
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I agree. Throwing out the machines is an absolute waste of money. If the systems were poorly designed or there isn't a way to validate the accuracy of the election, address that. But an optical voting system is (or should be) far less intuitive to the user than a touch screen system. If that's not the case, it's because the touch screen software was poorly designed--not because there's anything inherently wrong or suspicious with using a touch screen to vote. What could be easier than pressing the name of the candidate you wish to vote for?
Kudos to Florida for wasting taxpayer dollars.
Don't ignore China. The Cold War is not over--it was only paused for a decade while the other player in the War took over. China is getting extremely rich and is using a lot of their money to build up their military. China may be our only significant military threat (though the Soviet Union seems to be wanting to become a player again), but China is a big threat. Nobody wants to go nuclear and the only thing protecting us from conventional attack by China is a body of water called the Pacific and the fact that China doesn't (yet) have an effective way to project their conventional forces to the other side of the ocean.
We're gambling big time with China. We're gambling that their prosperity will continue to move their country towards a free and democratic free marker system before that same prosperity gives them the money to build overwhelming military strength. It might work, it might not. But we better be ready for the contingency of us losing that bet.
Too many people are forgetting the dangerous world we live in. I grew up in the end of the Cold War and, even so, it's easy to forget the very real threat. Those that grew up in the 90's and more recently don't even remember it except in their history books. As amazing as it sounds, too many people have gotten so used to "peace" that they don't think real war is a possibility. That's why 9/11 was such a shock to so many people. It was only made easier because they were "just terrorists" so people could taken comfort that it was just a few kooks. But countries can be just as dangerous--the only reason is that, recently, they generally aren't is precisely because of our massive military capability.
The only reason that China hasn't taken Taiwan is because of the U.S. North Korea hasn't attacked South Korea because of the U.S. Iran and Syria haven't invaded Israel because Israel taught them some lessons and because of the combined military threat of Israel and the U.S.
As unpopular as the view may be, peace is not made possible by diplomats talking about nonsense in the U.N. Peace is made possible by very powerful military forces that either make action by the other side impossible, or so costly to both sides that neither side will benefit from it. Yes, Mutually Assured Destruction was expensive. The Cold War was expensive. But they're far cheaper than all-out war between the participating countries. It's easy to dream about not spending money on a "senseless" military, but it's precisely that military that allows peace to exist.
Military spending is the price of peace. AND freedom.
That's one reason. The other reason is because they can depend on someone else spending lots of cash on "military posturing" to defend them.
There are a lot of peacenik kooks out there that like to try to adopt some holier-than-thou attitude that presumes that any military "posturing" is "senseless." The reality is that the world has always been--and continues to be--a very dangerous place. Feel free to hate Bush all you want. Feel free to think that Iraq was a bad idea. But be under no illusion: The world is every bit as dangerous today as it was in the 1930's--probably more so. Yes, it sucks that we have to spend so much money on our military and so many of our "allies" get relatively free rides. But the cold hard truth is that the free world does need to be defended and often fought for. I wouldn't mind some help doing so, but I'd rather we make the investment ourselves than that no-one make the investment.
Have they fixed the interface in GIMP yet? That's the main reason I don't use it.
Hehehe. The image of a 21-foot X-Wing barely leaving the ground, spiraling out of control because one or more of the engines hasn't ignited with the others, while flapping it's wings as it goes nose first into the ground is enough to make me grin. I can just imagine someone there as it takes off, "Ok, we just got airborne--quick, flap the wings before the dang thing crashes in 2 seconds." "Did you see it? Did you see it flap its wings before it fireballed into the ground? I did! I saw it!" I will be looking forward to the YouTube video and if the wings don't flap before the fireball, I'll be disappointed.
I have a better idea. Why not make a 5-10' model of the Death Star... launch it straight up with a powerful engine and when it gets to altitude, press the self-destruct button. It'll look just like the movie. That way when the things explodes, they can say "We meant to do that!" I hope they can add the nifty effect that they added in the CGI'd version of the original movie.
There's a 50/50 chance of it flying... but there's only a 10% chance of that!
... Asking how much it costs and could you mass produce them?
Then they're ahead of Comcast. Every month I gave Comcast something like $55 and, every month, they give me access to the Internet for some subset of that time. It's getting pretty dang bad. I'm going so far as to consider going back to Qwest, and that' saying something!
It's been a little over a year, but nothing I tried to install with Wine would work. Well, one thing: SimCity2000. Nothing else would install. I got QuickBooks 2000 to work--it wouldn't install, but if I copied it from the installed directory from Windows (bypassing the install), it worked.
Perhaps Wine has improved drastically in the last year, but it didn't improve at all in the 2.5 years I was using Linux on my desktop--in fact, it got worse. I originally tried using Wine and a few apps installed, but not enough. So I used Win4Lin. A few years later I wanted to ditch Win4Lin so I installed the latest version of Wine. At that point, not even the programs that used to work would install anymore.
A few months later, I got a new laptop and left Windows XP on it. My old Linux laptop now is just my in-home-office Linux server, which it works fine as.
The legalese being quoted ((c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.) is usually a generic catch-all used by web hosting providers and ISP so that they can protect their name based on misuse of their service. Usually, this would include things like launching DoS's, spamming, phishing, hacking, etc. If enough people to do this from their network, it does damage the name or reputation of AT&T and they could easily end up on blacklists, and AT&T could be popularly associated with those activities because of some kind of implicit tolerance. That catch-all clause allows them to shut things like this down.
Yes, that clause could be interpreted as giving them the right to shut you down if you speak out against AT&T. But is there any evidence whatsoever that that has actually been done?
Uh..... I can see where that would be useful. Neat party trick, though.
Oh, please. That's got to be the goofiest premise I've seen in a long time.
Code is kept "secret" because the companies, rightly or wrongly, think it gives them a competitive advantage. Heck, some companies should be embarrassed about the appearance of their product, do you really think some suits care about how it looks on the inside? Does Coke keep its formula secret because it's embarrassed or because it wants to make its product harder to copy? Same goes for software.
Heck, many open source products are no beauty to peer into, either. The code is so nasty that the argument of "If you don't like it, you can fix or modify it yourself" is reduced to a smart-ass comment with no real validity. Modify that code? First you have to be able to understand the mess. Unless you've been responsible for the mess from the beginning, or have a lot of time to invest in figuring out the mess, good luck with that.
I can't believe this message was moderated as "Insightful." It's actually ignorance and cynical.
The electoral college only impacts presidential elections, and since the president can be overridden by Congress that are not elected by the electoral college, the political process can be "interfered" with by the common people just fine. And the electoral college, in practice, elects the person that is selected by the people--there are only a few cases of "unfaithful electors" in the electoral college.
Anyone who can honestly read the Constitution and come to the conclusion that it was written to protect the wealthy really needs to take their cynicism down a notch or ten.
Others in this thread are right: The patent system is being abused in ways that were not envisioned by the founding fathers.
It didn't take much. Trolls like you are dispatched as easily and quickly as garbage is taken out to the curb on trash day. Unfortunately, trouncing you in this thread has been no more satisfying than taking out the trash. But someone has to do it.
I know trolls are trolls, but to refresh your memory:
So, no, I didn't change the point. I said that our troops should be used to defend the southern border, you said it was not a problem, I said it WAS a problem and offered you very significant personal experience that positions me to be knowledgeable about the topic, you questioned those qualifications, I reiterated them, and then you said I changed the topic. Riiiiiggght.
Be gone, trollster, you have been thoroughly discarded with yesterday's refuse. As all trolls are.
Unfortunately for you, my qualifications are not false whereas any claims you make on the topic obviously are. I lived in Mexico 10 years, speak Spanish fluently, am married to a Mexican citizen, and have gone through the legal process of getting my wife a LPR (Legal Permanent Resident) card to live and work in the U.S. I did that myself, filing the appropriate I-130, I-131, and I-485--not using an immigration attorney. And if you search through my past postings at Slashdot prior to 2006, you'll find plenty of posts that made reference to the fact that I was living in Mexico at that time.
That's why you've ended up looking like a fool so far. Because I actually know something about the topic. :)
There's some of that, too. But that influence and our national interests can be maintained with the bases I described.
I'm an American that lived 10 years in Mexico (just moved back in 2006) and married a Mexican while I was there. I crossed the border many times (legally), went through the legal immigration process for my wife, and have known quite a few people who entered the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas. I am just slightly knowledgeable on this topic, sir.
There are two main problems regarding the southern border: 1) Inadequate opportunities and low pay in Mexico. 2) The fact that American companies are willing to hire illegals. If either problem were solved, the problem would largely go away. We cannot fix the problems of Mexico and, so far, we haven't had the political determination to address American companies hiring illegals. That leaves us with the alternative of defending our southern border. We have hundreds of thousands of troops already on the payroll and if we withdrew our military from the over-abundance of international bases and stationed them along the border, the problem of illegal immigration would largely disappear despite a lack of action on #1 and #2.
Talk radio? Try living in Mexico for a decade, crossing the border more than a hundred times, dealing with and living in Mexican society and realities, becoming fluent in Spanish, and knowing some illegal aliens here in the U.S. When you've done these things, come back and we'll talk. Until then, you remain an uninformed trolling A.C. and your opinions and lack of knowledge on the topic are laughable.
I know I shouldn't respond to a troll, but...
There is nothing naive in any of my message. Some may want to take issue with my stance that Iraq wasn't about oil, and that's fine. But we do not need much of a presence in Europe anymore, our presence in the Middle East is adequate as is, and we only need a presence in the general area of China.
Further, I am correct that our military--even at half its current strength--would be enough to defend the mainland against any conventional assault. No other nation has a significant naval force capable of invading us or projecting significant air power and, even if they had it, we could see it coming days ahead and sink it in either of our moats (more commonly known as the Atlantic and Pacific). Our threats today are terrorism and a massive military deployed worldwide is not necessary or able to deter or respond to that.
As for our southern border, it is you who is naive if you don't think it needs defending. I'm an American and I'm married to a Mexican, but even *I* realize our immigration policies must be enforced. Our southern border is a sieve and will remain such until we actively defend it. Considering our main violent threat today is terrorists, infiltration is a huge threat... and they have thousands of miles of unprotected border that they can choose from when deciding where to infiltrate.
Again, I know you're a troll but... how about taking issue with some of the specifics of my position rather than just trolling?
Military bases around the world does not an empire make. Personally, though, I think we should definitely remove ourselves from places that are capable of defending themselves now. We need maybe one or two supply bases in Europe to help protect our interests in the Mediterranean. We need something in the Middle East--be it an ongoing presence in Iraq or just in Oman--which can protect our interests in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. And we need something in either Japan or South Korea--but not both.
I don't think it would take that much money to support that military level. The rest of our troops should be at home. And when they're not training, they should be defending our southern border, helping build levees, etc. We need military readiness, but most of that can be domestic and put the troops to productive use domestically in peacetime.
All the more reason to have a military. I personally do not think Iraq was about oil. I do not doubt, however, that there will be wars over energy in the future.
The reality is that our military could be less than half as strong as it is now and there'd still be no other country (or reasonable group of countries) that could project a threat against the U.S. mainland in a conventional assault. Sure, there are some countries that could nuke us, but that's the case regardless of the size of our military.
The threat to the future of the United States is not our military spending. We could easily afford the current military spending if it were the principle expenditure of the Federal Government. The real threat to the solvency of the United States is the social programs that have been instituted in the last 75 years and which are entirely outside what the Federal Government was originally designed to do.
I don't argue that at all. But if you allow it to be overridable, the defense itself becomes useless because the average DFU will simply override it when he shouldn't. It's a catch-22. You can't protect the user from himself without being evil and running into a whole host of other issues.
Personally, I think the reality is that dumb users have to be allowed to be dumb. Their machines will be compromised. Their zombied machines will churn out spam. Such is life. All we can do is be smart so that our machines aren't compromised, and we can set up walls to protect ourselves from the effects of the compromised machines of DFUs. I don't think it has ever been possible to protect stupid people from themselves.
Which defeats the whole purpose.
With few exceptions, anti-virus programs protect the computer from the user that is using it. I haven't run anti-virus software on my Windows machine for 10 years. Well, that's not quite true. For some reason, I got nervous one day that I had a virus so I installed some anti-virus software and it told me I had something like 20 security risks. I almost puked. Then I realized all it had found was some ad/tracking cookies in my browser directory. Big deal.
The fact is, if the user knows what he's doing, he's rarely going to get a virus. Even on Windows.
So, at the end of the day, anti-virus software protects the computer from the user. In order to do that, you have to take control away from the user. The user already does give the computer its marching orders and that is the problem.
I have no idea what the solution is, but leaving it up to the end-user does not solve the problem in the real world. Unfortunately, they need to be protected from themselves.
I honestly don't see where a fiber-optic cable is going to make a USB hard drive easier to use, but the extra speed sounds nice.
I didn't ignore. It wasn't the issue. My question was not how others have done it. My question to you was whether or not you were creative enough to be able to imagine a button-based solution that would be both accurate and also allow quick navigation among 800+ songs? The scroll wheel has the "advantage"* of acceleration for quick general navigation while buttons have the advantage of precise navigation for specific selection. Can you imagine some solution that would provide both advantages? I'm sure you can unless you try to be intentionally obtuse.
* I say "advantage" because I really am not convinced it is one. When I'm at the top of the list and want to get to a song in the M's, I'm screwed. If I start going moderately fast, the dang thing zips into fast mode and zips me right on past M's into the O's, P's, or even R's. So I'm forced to carefully go slow so that the thing doesn't get into fast-scroll mode--and navigating 800+ songs with the scroll wheel in slow mode is no faster than doing it with a logical button configuration would be. About the only time the scroll wheel's "fast mode" is useful to me is if I have to be in the A's or B's and want to quickly zip to the Y's. For anything else, I find myself carefully moderating my speed so I don't lose control of the scroll and zip to the end of the alphabet.
The problem is that the alphabet is too short for it to work efficiently. If the alphabet had 100 or 150 characters, the fast mode would be great. But it's only 26 characters long. By the time the thing gets into fast mode, I'm usually 1/4th of the way through the alphabet. Once in fast mode, it seems I can almost immediately skip 10+ characters by the time I can respond to the fact that I'm now in fast mode. So getting into fast mode might take about 7 characters and then I almost immediately get another 10 added to that as I react to now being in fast mode. So by the time I "slow down," I'm already at the 17th letter of the alphabet. Again, the normal solution is intentionally avoiding fast mode at which point I'd rather have a semi-intelligent button design. And, no, 800+ button presses is not the most intelligent way to do it, even if that's the way it's been done by button-based units so far.
The problem definitely exists on my iPod Nano purchased last December and running the latest firmware.
Then why haven't you done it? :)
You can overshoot with either, but with buttons you at least have the option of precise single-taps when you're already in the right area of the list. The problem here isn't the fast-scrolling. I personally don't like the fast scrolling of the iPod, but I can live with it. My problem is that when I'm already close to my target song, it's still hard to target the song I want whereas just a tap or two with buttons would get me precisely the song I want and I'd be done with it--even on a bumpy road or while running.
Again, you are seldom trying to get exactly 0.001 gallons of gas in the car. The scroll wheel and the gas pump is tolerable for general navigation and approximation, but not for when you're looking for precision. With the gas pump, you don't need it. With the scroll wheel to select a song, you do.
Please don't tell me that you really don't have enough imagination to envision any other type of button-based interface that could effectively navigate 800 songs without a scrollwheel and without 800 button pushes? If you can't, I assume you're not in the software or hardware design industry. You're probably an accountant since accounting is a great industry for people that lack imagination and originality.