Oh, come on now...most Americans don't know the wording of and powers granted in the PATRIOT Act; you're trying to tell me people in other countries have parsed it and decided that we're hypocrites based on its passage? I sincerely doubt it. Our economic and military position has much more bearing on a foreigner's outlook.
The votes are confidential...how do you determine which votes are legitimate and which votes aren't? On top of that, electronic vote machines add another layer of complexity. It would seem the best one could hope for would be spotting irregular trends between voter turnout/registration and the number of votes cast.
As opposed to Dean, the DNC chair, who comes off like an asshole? That aside, Miller may not be your ideal politician, but I'm guessing his constituents like him, which really is the only thing that's important. If he represents their interests, he's doing a good job.
Give 'em to me, I'm all ears. My original point was that I've heard lots of anecdotal evidence about the election, and very little concrete evidence. I'm not sure it's even possible to gather concrete evidence either way given how our election system works. From my personal experience, Bush won because the large, undecided center of the political spectrum decided he wasn't as bad a Kerry. It's not scientific, but given how our election system operates, tell me what is.
Five Democratic campaign staffers - including the sons of a congresswoman and a former city official - were ordered Tuesday to stand trial for allegedly vandalizing Republican get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day.
They were working on behalf of the Democratic party as campaign staffers, so it wasn't just some loon; though, I doubt Kerry (or anyone with seniority in the party) came down and commanded them to slash tires.
That being said, this isn't representative of the Democratic Party, and frankly I hate it when people cite examples such as this as proof that a party is corrupt. Individuals do stupid/bad things, but in general neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly heinous.
Actually, I was referring to some of the same day registration irregularities that many of the right wing blogs points out, along with other oddities that made for a more interesting study in voter fraud than Ohio. Do I think fraud happened in either Ohio or Wisconsin? Eh, I dunno, I certainly haven't seen anything I would call conclusive. I do think that the fact that Ohio was so carefully scrutinized and Wisconsin was practically ignored, even though the margins and evidence were much more glaring in Wisconsin, says something about our national press and politics.
Anybody can join the Democratic party. It doesn't mean they belong there.
You seem to have a very "last 10 years" outlook on what the Democratic Party stands for. Zell Miller fit in there quite well when he joined. In this case, I think the party's attitude may have changed out from under him.
The way the Republicans won or "won" (depending on what you believe), was by energizing their base.
I hear this a lot, but I have yet to see concrete evidence (if that's even possible) of it. From word of mouth, most people I talk to voted for the lesser of two evils...i.e., they didn't like either candidate all that much, but they disliked Bush less than Kerry. Sad state of affairs, but that's been my experience. The bases, while obviously important for fundraising and establishing a group of people who will get the word out, are still a vast minority of the voting population.
Let's tie this back to the topic at hand. I'm having trouble opening the xls files from that site, but do the voting anomalies show that all the machines were rigged towards Bush? I remember huge stinks being raised about Ohio during the 2004 election (even though almost ANY voting anomaly would still have given Ohio to Bush), but the watchdogs were oddly silent about states like Wisconsin which had very thin Kerry margins and some significant irregularities. Are you assuming that votes were rigged only in one direction?
Actually, I think we can decidedly group them in the "Chaotic Evil" alignment. They really had no respect for law, were seflish above all else and didn't seem to care who they hurt.
You joke, but this is a great cost saver to college kids, though I would advise you *ask* your neighbors if you can pitch in to cut their broadband cost and yours. My neighbors suck off of my excess bandwidth; I don't really care, but we're also good friends and they asked me about it first.
On the one hand they're perfectly willing to kill people to free other people from mere political problems (at best), but unwilling to kill embryos to free a hell of a lot more people from diseases.
It's not that difficult of an argument to make...people who die in wars, especially the current one, made a decision to join a group (the Armed Forces) where they knew that there was a very good chance of dying. Even during Vietname when there was a draft, by living in this country you're bound to its laws, including the one involving Selective Service registration.
Embryos don't make a choice. Compare embryonic research with picking random test subjects out of the adult American population, without their consent, to pick apart and kill in the name of research and you'd have a better comparison.
Not that I necessarily agree, but I also don't think it's too hard to see where they're coming from. If they consider embryos to be life, or the potential for it, it would amount to murder. Decidedly different from volunteering to carry a gun and be shot at. Legally, I think the definition of what constitutes life is up in the air, which is causing most of these problems. Lay down a precise definition (btw, good luck with that) and then we can just argue the definition instead of the practice.
Tapping converstions on your own stinks of communism and evil dictatorships.
Actually, wouldn't that be tapping conversations and then using the information to illegally arrest, incarcerate and put the subject to death stinks of communism and evil dictatorships? I think you'd be hard pressed to find any Democracy, including this one throughout its short history, that wasn't guilty of unilaterally surveilling a portion of its population, whether directly or as part of a foreign operation. The indicator would seem to be what does the government use that information for.
Why take the chance? Some people are privy too, or spend lots of time looking for, interesting information. One of the wonderful things about the web is that for any piece of information you're looking for, someone out there is probabably obsessively collecting stuff about it. Thanks to Google, you can usually find it pretty quick, considering the amount of "stuff" out there.
Not like this is terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but I'd rather not take the chance of missing something interesting on the off change someone might benefit from it.
In the same vein, why not cross check links? If two stories provide identical links, the person who has submitted more recently gets moved below the other. That way, if only one person provides a really interesting story, it still appears.
The only reasons to submit stories are to share information with other people.
Fine, fine, altruists we all are. However, if someone should happen to have information that they feel like sharing, other people appreciate that sharing and the sharer happens to benefit from it...so what? I don't see the problem here, and I fail to see where the abuse you mention poses a problem. Good content is the goal, all else would seem to be periphery to me.
If you can't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community.
I think more appropriate would be "If you won't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community." I really see no reason to forego gain for yourself "just because."
Sorta ironic...all of our machines here at the SEC building I work at have McAffee virus scan installed. Not having it updated to the most recent virus lists is something that's gotten me kicked off the network at least 3 times.
Why would you need to? It's the same auction house in all three cities.
I've been playing a human warlock and a night-elf warrior, so I've only needed to go to Ironforge to auction with my lvl 1 dwarf. Ironforge has been sucking because of all the lag associated with the auction house, but at least it's only been in Ironforge. However, with auction houses in Stormwind and Darnassus now, I assume that those cities will become more crowded, taking the load off of Ironforge and redistributing it so that ALL capitol cities are more laggy instead of Ironforge being unbearbly so.
I think it's a moot point though. Having been on for a few hours last night, both Ironforge and Stormwind were managable, so the patch may have indeed helped out.
Didn't realize until last night that the Blizzard downloader used P2P to grab the patch, good geek points there. Took me about an hour to fully assemble the 76Mb patch file, but it was great afterwards...never seen the server that empty. Ironforge was clearly less laggy, even on my beefless laptop. However, Stormwind was noticably MORE laggy, so we'll see how that affects game play in the days to come. While I hated having to go into Ironforge during peak hours, at least I could auction during non-peak hours...if I can't get around Stormwind/Darnassus on a day-to-day basis, that's going to suck.
Biggest addition, other than revamping the Priest talents (btw...check your talents when you log in, I noticed they refunded all priest's talent points because they completely redid the tree), had to be the Soul Shard bags. Along with that new tailoring recipe, it was fun to watch how the world economy dynamically shifted. Normally I can sell (been playing for only a couple of weeks, take with appropriate grain of salt) light leather stacks for between 20s and 50s depending on the market that day...last night I was selling stacks for 1-2g, and they were selling by the time I closed the auction window.
--trb
Re:Waste of money unless your taxes are simple
on
Best Tax Programs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm actually reading a great book on taxes and tax evasion that discusses the AMT...Perfectly Legal, by David Cay Johnston (ISBN 1591840694). Very interesting reading about it...according to him, by 2010 even blue collar workers stand a pretty good chance of being caught under the the AMT.
The simple fact is that most people don't really need tax software. It's not that hard to do by hand.
Absolutely the truth, and anyone using a tax program should meticulously scour the resulting generated forms and make sure you *understand* what the amounts being entered in all the boxes mean. The IRS won't question the program you used if they find a discrepancy, they'll come after *you*.
That being said, I loved using TurboTax last year; it was my first year with a mortgage, and it was very easy to just enter numbers, change them around, then have TT spit out the forms for me to mail in.
I think we may both be right. Not sure which actually killed him, my impression was the blow to the crotch.
"Ender asks Bonzo not to hurt him in order to provoke an attack, and Bonzo jumps at him. Ender avoids the attack and hits Bonzo in the face with the top of his head. He has injured Bonzo and knows he might be able to walk away, but he does not want to have to fight the battle again. Ender realizes he must make Bonzo fear him enough never to fight him again. He knocks Bonzo to the ground and kicks him in the crotch, but Bonzo is motionless, and does not even respond."
There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
"Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire" featured a kid getting killed and had mildly disturbing scenes involving that ghost chick checking out Harry's package and Voldemort attempting to kill Harry, yet it only received a PG-13. Episode III featured a pretty gruesome scene with Anakin's skin being burned off, and it only received a PG-13. Frankly, someone under the age of 13 probably isn't going to understand some of the dynamics of EG anyhow, so I really don't think they'll have a problem fitting in two scenes of mild carnage. I've never understood why people think Ender's Game is a kids book; some of the social dynamics in it would be difficult for many teenagers to grasp.
They'll obviously have to change the book, considering the kids spend part of the time walking around battle school naked, they're 5-10 years old and Ender kills Bonzo with a kick to the groin while wrestling naked in the shower. *THAT* stuff won't fly for a PG-13 rating.
Tom's is great if you want to comparison shop, but if you're not interested in reading performance charts and umpteen comparisons, I usually head over to Arstechnica's system guide, where they have the God Box, Hot Rod and Budget Box systems. I've built two systems based off their recommendations, and all the parts they've recommended that I've used have been great.
I call PC bullshit. Look up the definition of racism/racist. If you think the reviewer was being intolerant or showing some air of moral superiority, I think you're mental. He was clearly making a comparison to what was one of the biggest games in console history, in terms that, while somewhat subtle, would lead the reader to unquestionably know what he was talking about. Calling this racist is just trying to start a conflict where one doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on now...most Americans don't know the wording of and powers granted in the PATRIOT Act; you're trying to tell me people in other countries have parsed it and decided that we're hypocrites based on its passage? I sincerely doubt it. Our economic and military position has much more bearing on a foreigner's outlook.
--trb
The votes are confidential...how do you determine which votes are legitimate and which votes aren't? On top of that, electronic vote machines add another layer of complexity. It would seem the best one could hope for would be spotting irregular trends between voter turnout/registration and the number of votes cast.
--trb
As opposed to Dean, the DNC chair, who comes off like an asshole? That aside, Miller may not be your ideal politician, but I'm guessing his constituents like him, which really is the only thing that's important. If he represents their interests, he's doing a good job.
--trb
There are indeed methods more exact than yours.
Give 'em to me, I'm all ears. My original point was that I've heard lots of anecdotal evidence about the election, and very little concrete evidence. I'm not sure it's even possible to gather concrete evidence either way given how our election system works. From my personal experience, Bush won because the large, undecided center of the political spectrum decided he wasn't as bad a Kerry. It's not scientific, but given how our election system operates, tell me what is.
--trb
Here:
Five Democratic campaign staffers - including the sons of a congresswoman and a former city official - were ordered Tuesday to stand trial for allegedly vandalizing Republican get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day.
They were working on behalf of the Democratic party as campaign staffers, so it wasn't just some loon; though, I doubt Kerry (or anyone with seniority in the party) came down and commanded them to slash tires.
That being said, this isn't representative of the Democratic Party, and frankly I hate it when people cite examples such as this as proof that a party is corrupt. Individuals do stupid/bad things, but in general neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly heinous.
--trb
Actually, I was referring to some of the same day registration irregularities that many of the right wing blogs points out, along with other oddities that made for a more interesting study in voter fraud than Ohio. Do I think fraud happened in either Ohio or Wisconsin? Eh, I dunno, I certainly haven't seen anything I would call conclusive. I do think that the fact that Ohio was so carefully scrutinized and Wisconsin was practically ignored, even though the margins and evidence were much more glaring in Wisconsin, says something about our national press and politics.
--trb
Anybody can join the Democratic party. It doesn't mean they belong there.
You seem to have a very "last 10 years" outlook on what the Democratic Party stands for. Zell Miller fit in there quite well when he joined. In this case, I think the party's attitude may have changed out from under him.
--trb
The way the Republicans won or "won" (depending on what you believe), was by energizing their base.
I hear this a lot, but I have yet to see concrete evidence (if that's even possible) of it. From word of mouth, most people I talk to voted for the lesser of two evils...i.e., they didn't like either candidate all that much, but they disliked Bush less than Kerry. Sad state of affairs, but that's been my experience. The bases, while obviously important for fundraising and establishing a group of people who will get the word out, are still a vast minority of the voting population.
--trb
Bush stole the election fair and square.
Let's tie this back to the topic at hand. I'm having trouble opening the xls files from that site, but do the voting anomalies show that all the machines were rigged towards Bush? I remember huge stinks being raised about Ohio during the 2004 election (even though almost ANY voting anomaly would still have given Ohio to Bush), but the watchdogs were oddly silent about states like Wisconsin which had very thin Kerry margins and some significant irregularities. Are you assuming that votes were rigged only in one direction?
--trb
Actually, I think we can decidedly group them in the "Chaotic Evil" alignment. They really had no respect for law, were seflish above all else and didn't seem to care who they hurt.
--trb
You joke, but this is a great cost saver to college kids, though I would advise you *ask* your neighbors if you can pitch in to cut their broadband cost and yours. My neighbors suck off of my excess bandwidth; I don't really care, but we're also good friends and they asked me about it first.
--trb
On the one hand they're perfectly willing to kill people to free other people from mere political problems (at best), but unwilling to kill embryos to free a hell of a lot more people from diseases.
It's not that difficult of an argument to make...people who die in wars, especially the current one, made a decision to join a group (the Armed Forces) where they knew that there was a very good chance of dying. Even during Vietname when there was a draft, by living in this country you're bound to its laws, including the one involving Selective Service registration.
Embryos don't make a choice. Compare embryonic research with picking random test subjects out of the adult American population, without their consent, to pick apart and kill in the name of research and you'd have a better comparison.
Not that I necessarily agree, but I also don't think it's too hard to see where they're coming from. If they consider embryos to be life, or the potential for it, it would amount to murder. Decidedly different from volunteering to carry a gun and be shot at. Legally, I think the definition of what constitutes life is up in the air, which is causing most of these problems. Lay down a precise definition (btw, good luck with that) and then we can just argue the definition instead of the practice.
--trb
Tapping converstions on your own stinks of communism and evil dictatorships.
Actually, wouldn't that be tapping conversations and then using the information to illegally arrest, incarcerate and put the subject to death stinks of communism and evil dictatorships? I think you'd be hard pressed to find any Democracy, including this one throughout its short history, that wasn't guilty of unilaterally surveilling a portion of its population, whether directly or as part of a foreign operation. The indicator would seem to be what does the government use that information for.
--trb
Why take the chance? Some people are privy too, or spend lots of time looking for, interesting information. One of the wonderful things about the web is that for any piece of information you're looking for, someone out there is probabably obsessively collecting stuff about it. Thanks to Google, you can usually find it pretty quick, considering the amount of "stuff" out there.
Not like this is terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but I'd rather not take the chance of missing something interesting on the off change someone might benefit from it.
--trb
Excuse me if this is repititious.
In the same vein, why not cross check links? If two stories provide identical links, the person who has submitted more recently gets moved below the other. That way, if only one person provides a really interesting story, it still appears.
--trb
The only reasons to submit stories are to share information with other people.
Fine, fine, altruists we all are. However, if someone should happen to have information that they feel like sharing, other people appreciate that sharing and the sharer happens to benefit from it...so what? I don't see the problem here, and I fail to see where the abuse you mention poses a problem. Good content is the goal, all else would seem to be periphery to me.
If you can't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community.
I think more appropriate would be "If you won't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community." I really see no reason to forego gain for yourself "just because."
--trb
Sorta ironic...all of our machines here at the SEC building I work at have McAffee virus scan installed. Not having it updated to the most recent virus lists is something that's gotten me kicked off the network at least 3 times.
--trb
Why would you need to? It's the same auction house in all three cities.
I've been playing a human warlock and a night-elf warrior, so I've only needed to go to Ironforge to auction with my lvl 1 dwarf. Ironforge has been sucking because of all the lag associated with the auction house, but at least it's only been in Ironforge. However, with auction houses in Stormwind and Darnassus now, I assume that those cities will become more crowded, taking the load off of Ironforge and redistributing it so that ALL capitol cities are more laggy instead of Ironforge being unbearbly so.
I think it's a moot point though. Having been on for a few hours last night, both Ironforge and Stormwind were managable, so the patch may have indeed helped out.
Heres a hint: Those are PALADINS.
doh...you are correct. My mistake.
--trb
Didn't realize until last night that the Blizzard downloader used P2P to grab the patch, good geek points there. Took me about an hour to fully assemble the 76Mb patch file, but it was great afterwards...never seen the server that empty. Ironforge was clearly less laggy, even on my beefless laptop. However, Stormwind was noticably MORE laggy, so we'll see how that affects game play in the days to come. While I hated having to go into Ironforge during peak hours, at least I could auction during non-peak hours...if I can't get around Stormwind/Darnassus on a day-to-day basis, that's going to suck.
Biggest addition, other than revamping the Priest talents (btw...check your talents when you log in, I noticed they refunded all priest's talent points because they completely redid the tree), had to be the Soul Shard bags. Along with that new tailoring recipe, it was fun to watch how the world economy dynamically shifted. Normally I can sell (been playing for only a couple of weeks, take with appropriate grain of salt) light leather stacks for between 20s and 50s depending on the market that day...last night I was selling stacks for 1-2g, and they were selling by the time I closed the auction window.
--trb
I'm actually reading a great book on taxes and tax evasion that discusses the AMT...Perfectly Legal, by David Cay Johnston (ISBN 1591840694). Very interesting reading about it...according to him, by 2010 even blue collar workers stand a pretty good chance of being caught under the the AMT.
--trb
The simple fact is that most people don't really need tax software. It's not that hard to do by hand.
Absolutely the truth, and anyone using a tax program should meticulously scour the resulting generated forms and make sure you *understand* what the amounts being entered in all the boxes mean. The IRS won't question the program you used if they find a discrepancy, they'll come after *you*.
That being said, I loved using TurboTax last year; it was my first year with a mortgage, and it was very easy to just enter numbers, change them around, then have TT spit out the forms for me to mail in.
--trb
I think we may both be right. Not sure which actually killed him, my impression was the blow to the crotch.
"Ender asks Bonzo not to hurt him in order to provoke an attack, and Bonzo jumps at him. Ender avoids the attack and hits Bonzo in the face with the top of his head. He has injured Bonzo and knows he might be able to walk away, but he does not want to have to fight the battle again. Ender realizes he must make Bonzo fear him enough never to fight him again. He knocks Bonzo to the ground and kicks him in the crotch, but Bonzo is motionless, and does not even respond."
--trb
There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
"Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire" featured a kid getting killed and had mildly disturbing scenes involving that ghost chick checking out Harry's package and Voldemort attempting to kill Harry, yet it only received a PG-13. Episode III featured a pretty gruesome scene with Anakin's skin being burned off, and it only received a PG-13. Frankly, someone under the age of 13 probably isn't going to understand some of the dynamics of EG anyhow, so I really don't think they'll have a problem fitting in two scenes of mild carnage. I've never understood why people think Ender's Game is a kids book; some of the social dynamics in it would be difficult for many teenagers to grasp.
They'll obviously have to change the book, considering the kids spend part of the time walking around battle school naked, they're 5-10 years old and Ender kills Bonzo with a kick to the groin while wrestling naked in the shower. *THAT* stuff won't fly for a PG-13 rating.
--trb
Tom's is great if you want to comparison shop, but if you're not interested in reading performance charts and umpteen comparisons, I usually head over to Arstechnica's system guide, where they have the God Box, Hot Rod and Budget Box systems. I've built two systems based off their recommendations, and all the parts they've recommended that I've used have been great.
--trb
I call PC bullshit. Look up the definition of racism/racist. If you think the reviewer was being intolerant or showing some air of moral superiority, I think you're mental. He was clearly making a comparison to what was one of the biggest games in console history, in terms that, while somewhat subtle, would lead the reader to unquestionably know what he was talking about. Calling this racist is just trying to start a conflict where one doesn't exist.
--trb