As part of various national movements to play this sim called Politics.gov which we appear to be trapped in, a number of people throughout the US are participating in an exercise to make sure that every vote is a useful vote.
Basically, the US has an Electoral College with winner-take-all spoils on a state by state basis, with the exception of Vermont (where they distribute the electoral college votes proportionally). So, to game the system, it behooves people to use wasted votes in Texas and other Bush states that Gore has no chance to win to take their votes and use them to vote for a presidential candidate from the Green Party (Ralph Nader) or another party (like Libertarians or Reform party). The reason is that if a third party can break the 5 percent vote threshold on a national basis, they qualify for federal matching funds in four years, and also qualify to appear on ballots as a major party for the next four years in that state.
So, groups like Greens For Gore have been established to help make sure that every vote counts.
Additionally, on the West Coast, we have a three hour time difference between when polls in the East close, especially states like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio which are in contention and will make or break the election. So a lot of us are having parties and using web sites to find out who's winning there. Then we'll go and use our votes wisely at 7pm ourtime, since our polls close at 8pm.
Plus, on the West Coast, most voters are absentee voters - we can mail in our ballots at post offices up to midnight on election day - so those with absentee ballots are waiting until 11pm to send convoys of ballot stuffers off to designated post offices (like SeaTac Airport) which are open till midnight.
Hey, you back east may not like it, but tough. And here on the tech-heavy west, the real center of the US, we know how to design, play, and win games, and politics is just a game.
Greens For Gore and upping the Green vote count
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
As part of various national movements to play this sim called Politics.gov which we appear to be trapped in, a number of people throughout the US are participating in an exercise to make sure that every vote is a useful vote.
Basically, the US has an Electoral College with winner-take-all spoils on a state by state basis, with the exception of Vermont (where they distribute the electoral college votes proportionally). So, to game the system, it behooves people to use wasted votes in Texas and other Bush states that Gore has no chance to win to take their votes and use them to vote for a presidential candidate from the Green Party (Ralph Nader) or another party (like Libertarians or Reform party). The reason is that if a third party can break the 5 percent vote threshold on a national basis, they qualify for federal matching funds in four years, and also qualify to appear on ballots as a major party for the next four years in that state.
So, groups like Greens For Gore have been established to help make sure that every vote counts.
Additionally, on the West Coast, we have a three hour time difference between when polls in the East close, especially states like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio which are in contention and will make or break the election. So a lot of us are having parties and using web sites to find out who's winning there. Then we'll go and use our votes wisely at 7pm ourtime, since our polls close at 8pm.
Plus, on the West Coast, most voters are absentee voters - we can mail in our ballots at post offices up to midnight on election day - so those with absentee ballots are waiting until 11pm to send convoys of ballot stuffers off to designated post offices (like SeaTac Airport) which are open till midnight.
Hey, you back east may not like it, but tough. And here on the tech-heavy west, the real center of the US, we know how to design, play, and win games, and politics is just a games.
They sent me an email when I complained and said they had locked it down due to being slashdotted, so the entire site wouldn't drop. Then they said it was fixed, so they unlocked it.
Old method: Invest all money in small store, use revenues and starting customers to advertise for new customers and buy more stores.
New method: Cash out of IPO early, take $13 million in stock to run for US Senate and turn it into cash. Six months after you left, stock is worth less than a million, but you've still got $12 million. Hi, Maria! (I'm just joshing her, glad she clued in to diversification)
There's a movement throughout the US, called Greens for Gore, mentioned in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, that's advising undecided Green Party members living in swing states to wait until near the end of Election Day before voting. "If the last minute exit or public opinion polls in your state show Gore or Bush clearly projected to win, then vote Nader. If it is too close or undecided at that point, then vote for Al Gore," the group's Web site says.
Naturally, they won't give a link to the web site, because that would encourage people to vote strategically to get Ralph Nader more than 5 percent of the national vote by voting for Nader in states where the vote is being won by Bush and Gore in states where it's close. But it just happens to be at this web site.
Take any random bacterium from any random environment, and chances are it's harmless to humans.
Sure, but actually, we have no way of knowing if it's harmful to humans until it's too late.
... most invertebrates don't have an adaptive immune system as vertebrates do
Again, to adapt the immune system, you have to become infected. If it's on the orders of Ebola, which just wiped out a few villages in Africa yesterday after one woman became infected (and they have no idea what animal/plant is the vector), it might be cold comfort to find out that we should have taken more precautions when we started messing with it.
AIDS is not a bacterium. It's a virus, which is an OBLIGATE parasite. And it's not a consequence of scientific research.
I know this. My point is that humans are not invulnerable and this minor blip in history of some 50-60 years where we had anti-bacterial agents shows that they develop immunities. And anti-bacterial agents have existed since time began - many are byproducts of molds and other naturally occurring biological processes.
I'm not saying Run For The Hills!, but I am saying don't fool yourself that we can't be wiped out in days by something we forgot to be cautious about.
Why the.... do people see the word "bacterium" and immediately think evil, disease, plague, and other bad things?
Oh, maybe just because some of us have read up on history and know that this brief period of wonder drugs is an abberation in human history, and that we as a species are particularly vulnerable to biological infection.
As an example, more than half of all people alive in Africa today are doomed to die of AIDS. So while you keep your head up in the clouds in your safe sterile environment, don't pretend that scientific research doesn't have consequences.
In news reports today, scientists in Richland, WA, were found dead of unknown causes. Recently they had revived 250 million year old bacteria in an amazing scientific discovery.
Clean room, what clean room?
Heck, let's just reintroduce something that makes cholera look tame - we're not absolutely sure that the dinosaurs died out from the meteorite, it could have been pathological organisms, after all...
Actually, the point is well-made. Just as with metric, where the US is the last country (literally, even Brunei switched over) not to use metric, for years we avoided using GDP in favor of GNP.
Well, as with metric, the whole world switched over to GDP and under GATT and WTO, we were forced to switch (yeah, Alan Greenspan!).
So, the question should be in terms of GDP, since GNP is not in practical usage in this country any more.
Seriously, guys, what's the point? That we can make models of things? Or that we can make popsicles?
I'd rather have a popsicle than a model any day. Besides, most models might as well be popsicles, since they're cold and frosty and get you all sticky when you lick them.
Well, since there's only cartoon violence, we'll see a dark shadowy figure with a large rubber mallet attacking a woman over and over in a dust cloud, quickly joined by another man, and then the dust will lift as we see them keel over and sprout flowers from their chests.
The good part is, their ghosts could come back to haunt OJ.
Has anyone managed to tie one of the gerbils to the rocket yet?
I say someone writes an Outlook virus that would have compressed copies of the DeCSS source code attached to the message. Like most other Outlook viruses that run without the user knowing, this one would as well, execept it put the DeCSS souce code on a area of the hard drive where the user would normally not look and rename it (say C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SKUZIDRV.SYS).
Now wouldn't it be a shame if we just happened to mention this idea over in the Phillipines and former Bulgaria?
As all sentient beings know, the primitive civilization of humans on earth ended when, in 2020, President Bush pulled out The Really Big Cable that connected all the world's information systems.
Without the Net, civilization rapidly crumbled, especially due to the use of Windows: Bubble Version 20, which presupposed that the Net didn't really need to route around damage.
Are you prepared to either get serious about the drug war, and execute all known drug pushers, including those who push tobacco, alcohol, and registered pharmaceuticals? Or will you continue to waste up to 50 percent of our national budgets (combined federal (including black budget which we're not supposed to know about), state, county, and local taxes) on a policy that you know doesn't work?
And, if you do intend to change it, would you go back to the two-thirds split of olden days, where two-thirds was for drug treatment and prevention of demand, and one-third was for restriction of supply?
Or, will you keep building more prisons and arresting and harassing those you regard as the underclass, which usually works out to those of African-American or Mexican heritage?
Hey, I'm just asking, since noone wants to deal with the real tax issues like the growing military-drug-industrial complex that saps our productivity and costs us more than our school systems.
The other thing most sims don't prepare you for is the fact that the other guy is shooting back.
Severe duh. Man, where's the whiz and gusts of air from the bullets, the tracer rounds screaming at your eyeballs, the panic inducement of trees spattering as they're hit, the noise, the fires, the confusion even when you're calm and the world has slowed to a crawl and you realize that you know exactly what you're doing and it's happening while you're almost floating above it all.
Until they come out with home theater games with this kind of thing, you're still going to have people who think they know what to do, but don't. The sickening feeling of realizing that that body is a dead person, or worse is wounded, and what you had to do with the whole equation. The friends and what is happening to them. The reality that it really doesn't matter if you call for help, because by the time it arrives it will be way too late, but you do it anyway.
But... sims can make young punks think they know all this stuff and buy a gun and it's sooo easy to pull that trigger and be the big man. And then it jams, it's heavy, you miss and lots of innocent people end up dead. That's NOT good.
Well, my cell phone, the Nokia 5160, is only the second highest radiation emitter, but I'm hoping my personal score is off the charts.
Why?
Simple, I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe, in the midst of Seattle. Not only do I have cool towers pumping out HDTV up on Queen Anne to deal with, I like to brunch on Capitol Hill, where we have even more. And I work blocks from KOMO/4 and KING/5 and take the bus past KCPQ/13, so I'm hoping I get my recommended daily dose of mutation-inducing raditation.
Hey, someone's got to spawn the next race of Net-optimized super beings, and I think I'm up for the job.
Actually, you are supposed to think, but there's reaction to ambush and offense attack. Very different. Our training was very focussed on 2-3 round bursts, since we didn't need the limiter the US marines and others use. Basically, after 2-3 rounds, you will drift off target.
You are supposed to think, but the objectification of your target is more of an American and Japanese concept. We knew it was real people, but that didn't make us any less effective. Of course, this is in Canada, whereas in the US, the training was quite different. The equipment in the US was always fantastic, though, and could make up for the difference.
My point is still that game violence might have a minor impact. Lowest impact - paper RPG or Magic cards. Moderate/low impact - computer game with simulated violence, run by keyboard or joystick. Moderate impact - computer game with force-feedback rifle, air blast as bullet whizzes by, that kind of thing. High impact - living in a gang area.
Slashdot Mirror
apparently there haven't been any submissions for .not to ICANN (not that anme, anyway). Any lawyers out there want to take up the charge?
IANAL, but I think the reason you saw no such submissions is it costs $50,000 to file for a TLD.
As part of various national movements to play this sim called Politics.gov which we appear to be trapped in, a number of people throughout the US are participating in an exercise to make sure that every vote is a useful vote.
Basically, the US has an Electoral College with winner-take-all spoils on a state by state basis, with the exception of Vermont (where they distribute the electoral college votes proportionally). So, to game the system, it behooves people to use wasted votes in Texas and other Bush states that Gore has no chance to win to take their votes and use them to vote for a presidential candidate from the Green Party (Ralph Nader) or another party (like Libertarians or Reform party). The reason is that if a third party can break the 5 percent vote threshold on a national basis, they qualify for federal matching funds in four years, and also qualify to appear on ballots as a major party for the next four years in that state.
So, groups like Greens For Gore have been established to help make sure that every vote counts.
Additionally, on the West Coast, we have a three hour time difference between when polls in the East close, especially states like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio which are in contention and will make or break the election. So a lot of us are having parties and using web sites to find out who's winning there. Then we'll go and use our votes wisely at 7pm ourtime, since our polls close at 8pm.
Plus, on the West Coast, most voters are absentee voters - we can mail in our ballots at post offices up to midnight on election day - so those with absentee ballots are waiting until 11pm to send convoys of ballot stuffers off to designated post offices (like SeaTac Airport) which are open till midnight.
Hey, you back east may not like it, but tough. And here on the tech-heavy west, the real center of the US, we know how to design, play, and win games, and politics is just a game.
As part of various national movements to play this sim called Politics.gov which we appear to be trapped in, a number of people throughout the US are participating in an exercise to make sure that every vote is a useful vote.
Basically, the US has an Electoral College with winner-take-all spoils on a state by state basis, with the exception of Vermont (where they distribute the electoral college votes proportionally). So, to game the system, it behooves people to use wasted votes in Texas and other Bush states that Gore has no chance to win to take their votes and use them to vote for a presidential candidate from the Green Party (Ralph Nader) or another party (like Libertarians or Reform party). The reason is that if a third party can break the 5 percent vote threshold on a national basis, they qualify for federal matching funds in four years, and also qualify to appear on ballots as a major party for the next four years in that state.
So, groups like Greens For Gore have been established to help make sure that every vote counts.
Additionally, on the West Coast, we have a three hour time difference between when polls in the East close, especially states like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio which are in contention and will make or break the election. So a lot of us are having parties and using web sites to find out who's winning there. Then we'll go and use our votes wisely at 7pm ourtime, since our polls close at 8pm.
Plus, on the West Coast, most voters are absentee voters - we can mail in our ballots at post offices up to midnight on election day - so those with absentee ballots are waiting until 11pm to send convoys of ballot stuffers off to designated post offices (like SeaTac Airport) which are open till midnight.
Hey, you back east may not like it, but tough. And here on the tech-heavy west, the real center of the US, we know how to design, play, and win games, and politics is just a games.
They sent me an email when I complained and said they had locked it down due to being slashdotted, so the entire site wouldn't drop. Then they said it was fixed, so they unlocked it.
Does it work now? It worked for me.
Here is the non-registration version of the story link.
OK?
You mean the non-registration URL of this link, right?
So sue him.
They just emailed me to say they think they fixed it. Apparently, we /.ed them ....
...
Oh well
Old method: Invest all money in small store, use revenues and starting customers to advertise for new customers and buy more stores.
New method: Cash out of IPO early, take $13 million in stock to run for US Senate and turn it into cash. Six months after you left, stock is worth less than a million, but you've still got $12 million. Hi, Maria! (I'm just joshing her, glad she clued in to diversification)
Maybe someone should send an email to the dweebs at editors@satirewire.com or site@satirewire.com to tell them how chmod 644 works ...
Note the website uses invisible gifs to track you on the web site, and is owned by efn.org and hosted by echozone.
There's a movement throughout the US, called Greens for Gore, mentioned in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, that's advising undecided Green Party members living in swing states to wait until near the end of Election Day before voting. "If the last minute exit or public opinion polls in your state show Gore or Bush clearly projected to win, then vote Nader. If it is too close or undecided at that point, then vote for Al Gore," the group's Web site says.
Naturally, they won't give a link to the web site, because that would encourage people to vote strategically to get Ralph Nader more than 5 percent of the national vote by voting for Nader in states where the vote is being won by Bush and Gore in states where it's close. But it just happens to be at this web site.
Let the sleeper awaken!
Take any random bacterium from any random environment, and chances are it's harmless to humans.
... most invertebrates don't have an adaptive immune system as vertebrates do
Sure, but actually, we have no way of knowing if it's harmful to humans until it's too late.
Again, to adapt the immune system, you have to become infected. If it's on the orders of Ebola, which just wiped out a few villages in Africa yesterday after one woman became infected (and they have no idea what animal/plant is the vector), it might be cold comfort to find out that we should have taken more precautions when we started messing with it.
AIDS is not a bacterium. It's a virus, which is an OBLIGATE parasite. And it's not a consequence of scientific research.
I know this. My point is that humans are not invulnerable and this minor blip in history of some 50-60 years where we had anti-bacterial agents shows that they develop immunities. And anti-bacterial agents have existed since time began - many are byproducts of molds and other naturally occurring biological processes.
I'm not saying Run For The Hills!, but I am saying don't fool yourself that we can't be wiped out in days by something we forgot to be cautious about.
Why the .... do people see the word "bacterium" and immediately think evil, disease, plague, and other bad things?
Oh, maybe just because some of us have read up on history and know that this brief period of wonder drugs is an abberation in human history, and that we as a species are particularly vulnerable to biological infection.
As an example, more than half of all people alive in Africa today are doomed to die of AIDS. So while you keep your head up in the clouds in your safe sterile environment, don't pretend that scientific research doesn't have consequences.
In news reports today, scientists in Richland, WA, were found dead of unknown causes. Recently they had revived 250 million year old bacteria in an amazing scientific discovery.
...
Clean room, what clean room?
Heck, let's just reintroduce something that makes cholera look tame - we're not absolutely sure that the dinosaurs died out from the meteorite, it could have been pathological organisms, after all
Actually, the point is well-made. Just as with metric, where the US is the last country (literally, even Brunei switched over) not to use metric, for years we avoided using GDP in favor of GNP.
Well, as with metric, the whole world switched over to GDP and under GATT and WTO, we were forced to switch (yeah, Alan Greenspan!).
So, the question should be in terms of GDP, since GNP is not in practical usage in this country any more.
Think about it - a network of Buckyball Transitor based Plastic computers that you could wear as a patterned jacket in a beowulf cluster!
Man, all you'd have to do to increase your computational resources would be to hang your jacket up in the closet!
Seriously, guys, what's the point? That we can make models of things? Or that we can make popsicles?
I'd rather have a popsicle than a model any day. Besides, most models might as well be popsicles, since they're cold and frosty and get you all sticky when you lick them.
Well, since there's only cartoon violence, we'll see a dark shadowy figure with a large rubber mallet attacking a woman over and over in a dust cloud, quickly joined by another man, and then the dust will lift as we see them keel over and sprout flowers from their chests.
The good part is, their ghosts could come back to haunt OJ.
Has anyone managed to tie one of the gerbils to the rocket yet?
I say someone writes an Outlook virus that would have compressed copies of the DeCSS source code attached to the message. Like most other Outlook viruses that run without the user knowing, this one would as well, execept it put the DeCSS souce code on a area of the hard drive where the user would normally not look and rename it (say C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SKUZIDRV.SYS).
Now wouldn't it be a shame if we just happened to mention this idea over in the Phillipines and former Bulgaria?
As all sentient beings know, the primitive civilization of humans on earth ended when, in 2020, President Bush pulled out The Really Big Cable that connected all the world's information systems.
Without the Net, civilization rapidly crumbled, especially due to the use of Windows: Bubble Version 20, which presupposed that the Net didn't really need to route around damage.
Noone really missed the humans, of course.
That "AP" at the beginning means it's an Associated Press story. It has nothing to do with CNN.
...
Oh, I thought that AP meant American Press. Just like CNN means Communist News Network and Reuters means We're Foreign And Veddy Proper.
And, even if it is AP, that means it could have been a reporter from Hoboken, NY, for all we know.
All the news that's fit to knit
Is this:
Are you prepared to either get serious about the drug war, and execute all known drug pushers, including those who push tobacco, alcohol, and registered pharmaceuticals? Or will you continue to waste up to 50 percent of our national budgets (combined federal (including black budget which we're not supposed to know about), state, county, and local taxes) on a policy that you know doesn't work?
And, if you do intend to change it, would you go back to the two-thirds split of olden days, where two-thirds was for drug treatment and prevention of demand, and one-third was for restriction of supply?
Or, will you keep building more prisons and arresting and harassing those you regard as the underclass, which usually works out to those of African-American or Mexican heritage?
Hey, I'm just asking, since noone wants to deal with the real tax issues like the growing military-drug-industrial complex that saps our productivity and costs us more than our school systems.
The other thing most sims don't prepare you for is the fact that the other guy is shooting back.
... sims can make young punks think they know all this stuff and buy a gun and it's sooo easy to pull that trigger and be the big man. And then it jams, it's heavy, you miss and lots of innocent people end up dead. That's NOT good.
Severe duh. Man, where's the whiz and gusts of air from the bullets, the tracer rounds screaming at your eyeballs, the panic inducement of trees spattering as they're hit, the noise, the fires, the confusion even when you're calm and the world has slowed to a crawl and you realize that you know exactly what you're doing and it's happening while you're almost floating above it all.
Until they come out with home theater games with this kind of thing, you're still going to have people who think they know what to do, but don't. The sickening feeling of realizing that that body is a dead person, or worse is wounded, and what you had to do with the whole equation. The friends and what is happening to them. The reality that it really doesn't matter if you call for help, because by the time it arrives it will be way too late, but you do it anyway.
But
Well, my cell phone, the Nokia 5160, is only the second highest radiation emitter, but I'm hoping my personal score is off the charts.
Why?
Simple, I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe, in the midst of Seattle. Not only do I have cool towers pumping out HDTV up on Queen Anne to deal with, I like to brunch on Capitol Hill, where we have even more. And I work blocks from KOMO/4 and KING/5 and take the bus past KCPQ/13, so I'm hoping I get my recommended daily dose of mutation-inducing raditation.
Hey, someone's got to spawn the next race of Net-optimized super beings, and I think I'm up for the job.
Actually, you are supposed to think, but there's reaction to ambush and offense attack. Very different. Our training was very focussed on 2-3 round bursts, since we didn't need the limiter the US marines and others use. Basically, after 2-3 rounds, you will drift off target.
You are supposed to think, but the objectification of your target is more of an American and Japanese concept. We knew it was real people, but that didn't make us any less effective. Of course, this is in Canada, whereas in the US, the training was quite different. The equipment in the US was always fantastic, though, and could make up for the difference.
My point is still that game violence might have a minor impact. Lowest impact - paper RPG or Magic cards. Moderate/low impact - computer game with simulated violence, run by keyboard or joystick. Moderate impact - computer game with force-feedback rifle, air blast as bullet whizzes by, that kind of thing. High impact - living in a gang area.