As I am reading it this really isn't a 3D technology at all, it's more like three normal planes of circuitry stacked on top of each other.
Oh! So it's like that Mach 3 razor with the three parallel blades.
Re:I hope Slashdot makes it into the "silver packa
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
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· Score: 1
Watching fox news, reading free republic and listening to Rush? LOL! I guess my sarcasm has been getting too subtle for a lot of people lately.
I hope Slashdot makes it into the "silver package"
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
No offense, but I'm not going to shell out an extra $50 or so each month for some "gold package" that lets me talk to you guys and read the lefty political blogs.
Allow me to be the voice of reason here. If you think the poor guys trying to escape to a better life have computers and internet access you might want to think again;)
The refugees themselves obviously aren't going to be carrying computers across the river. They're going to be in the unventilated trailer in the back. The guy driving the truck they're in would be the one with the laptop and the cellphone and the air conditioning. Unloading the trailer near unwatched cameras would be a premium service offered by the driver to the people in back. That way if they don't pay extra he can drop them off in front of busy cameras and get repeat business.
I think it would be unwise to offer surveillance statistics to website visitors. Not that this isn't a stupid idea already.
I work at a big stupid company that has a site license for Rational Clearcase, a totally retarded product we are forced to use by upper management. Fortunately, SAV 10 is incompatible with the Clearcase Windows client- it diagnoses it as malware and attempts to remove the "infection". So we cannot upgrade from SAV 9. When they were doing the automated rollouts a few days ago, we had to send our machine names to the CC administrator to prevent the upgrade process from installing SAV 10 on our machines.
So now we don't have to worry about this security hole, which means we can finally say that something good came out of using Rational Clearcase.
Is Slashdot going to be in the "Silver" package? If I have to order the "Gold" package to get Slashdot then it's been nice talking to you guys but I'm not paying that much!
American foriegn lanquage skills are notably crappy. Most of our farsi translators are of questionable use in counter insurgency.
According to a recent State Department IG report, Radio Sawa, our pop music and news station aimed at young Arab audiences, has very little influence since parents tell their kids not to listen to it- "because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar."
If the disposable cell phones in Iraq were just made to emit an inaudible but intense ultrasonic ring at random times when not in use, they wouldn't be as convenient as they currently are for setting up remote trigger mechanisms in IEDs.
Old people are so cute when they talk about the Internet- they still think it has the same distributed network topology as it did last century. Yes, the Internet routes around damage. But this isn't going to be the Internet anymore, pal. They're talking about running heart monitors on this thing. You can't do that on the Internet as designed- you have to fuck it up and turn it into something else that doesn't behave like the Internet at all. If you don't like it you're free to take your servers and RFCs elsewhere and form your own network using no corporate fiber resources of any kind. But you shouldn't have to do it. Through corporate subsidies, your tax money has partially gone into creating this Internet, and it's about to be lost in a massive giveaway with no public discussion at all. In fact, so far the only corporate contribution to the debate has been a carefully crafted astroturf campaign that tries to confuse everybody about who is on which side of the issue. The astroturf campaign's tag line is "don't regulate the Internet"- in other words, don't reintroduce net neutrality via statute, now that a regulatory agency has destroyed it as a corporate favor to the telecommunications industry with unknown long-term repurcussions.
Nowadays the telcos control all the backbones and are in a good position to turn this whole thing into a pay-per-view monstrosity. The Bush FCC issued a horrible decision a year or two ago that would basically make this legal, by removing enforcement of the rules regarding net neutrality that have been governing the development of the Internet for decades. (Rules that you are taking for granted in your post.) The Supreme Court affirmed the legality of the FCC decision. What will be the effects? No one knows. The telcos haven't acted on it yet. They have announced ambitious business plans to convert the Internet into something resembling cable TV. But since fucking up the Internet apparently involves a huge capital outlay, they will only do it if they have a guarantee that the net neutrality rules will stay gone. Otherwise they might enounter regulatory resistance as they start to screw it up and millions of people start complaining.
So that's why we have a bill winding through Congress right now that will provide this guarantee to the telcommunications industry, banning the net neutrality rule forever, and leaving them free to fuck with the Internet as it exists without exposure to regulatory risk. It's going to be their little plaything to do with as they wish- the public subsidies that went into it for decades nonwithstanding. That's why you're hearing about this all of a sudden. This isn't something that "can just be routed around"- the way routing is done is about to change.
Jeff Goldblum is my favorite movie psychic, not scientist. Although I would like to hire his Independence Day character to be in charge of our Mac installers at work.
As far as movie scientists are concerned, I always liked that group of scientists in Brainstorm (which I haven't seen in a long time). I've worked in real labs of several different sorts, and those guys still look like the real deal. Unlike most Hollywood "science" movies, which force their scientist characters into Frankenstein-inspired cliches, there were a few common mistakes that Brainstorm avoided with its scientist characters:
- No one scientist who works in isolation. This was a team of at least 3 scientists, like you'd find in real life. The two team leads who were the primary researchers shared credit equally as far as the film was concerned. The project was their baby. - No "mad" scientist. Although one of them was played by Christopher Walken. Louise Fletcher's character I think was better written. She was the one who smoked if I'm remembering correctly. Movie scientists are usually too smart to smoke. They've done research or something and found that it's bad for you. - Intense personal relationships. Walken's character was having marital problems. That's very strange for a movie scientist, who usually remains single to avoid confusing audiences who do not view scientists are normal human beings. (If he has any family members at all, their purpose in the script is to be props- they will be in close proximity to a volcano or bomb or something, so as to establish that the amoral movie scientist has "something to care about".) Not only does this guy use his machine to rejuvenate his marriage and make things better between him and his wife, people in the lab immediately discover the new technology's potential for porn. Good call on that one! - Problems with upper management. They had a boss who was trying to militarize their whole project, and IIRC they had to cooperate to keep their funding. Most "movie scientists" either require no visible source of funding, or can just rely on their own personal wealth to buy all the Jacob's ladders and other mad-looking items they need for their lab. (Or they have the scientist running an entire company, like Eldon Tyrell. As a CEO scientist, Tyrell naturally has plenty of time to spend with local city policemen as they give Voight-Kampff tests to his employees.) As far as militarization of scientific work is concerned, most movie scientists are amoral and don't care. In the movies, scientists are completely amoral unless they are saving the world that day- and they're probably only doing it because their wife or kid is too close to a volcano or bomb.
Having said all that, I have to admit that in general the characters in Brainstorm are not very well developed because the movie is trying too hard to impress you with its technology. In 1983 it looked pretty impressive- these people had a system where you could dial in over an acoustic modem and have a tape robot play terabits of personal experience directly into your head! As far as text went, their terminal software looked like the setup I had in 1983. But even for 1983 they made reasonable guesses. I always remember that scene where they finally demo the technology and have some sort of hub with a dozen ribbon cables coming out of it connected to everyone's heads.
Another kind of problem I worked on was this. We had to do lots of calculations, and we did them on Marchant calculating machines. By the way, just to give you an idea of what Los Alamos was like: We had these Marchant computers -- hand calculators with numbers. You push them, and they multiply, divide, add, and so on, but not easy like they do now. They were mechanical gadgets, failing often, and they had to be sent back to the factory to be repaired. Pretty soon you were running out of machines. A few of us started to take the covers off (We weren't supposed to. The rules read: "You take the covers off, we cannot be responsible. ..") So we took the covers off and we got a nice series of lessons on how to fix them, and we got better and better at it as we got more and more elaborate repairs. When we got something too complicated, we sent it back to the factory, but we'd do the easy ones and kept the things going. I ended up doing all the computers and there was a guy in the machine shop who took care of typewriters.
Anyway, we decided that the big problem -- which was to figure out exactly what happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out exactly how much energy was released and so on -- required much more calculating than we were capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley Frankel realized that it could possibly be done on IBM machines. The IBM company had machines for business purposes, adding machines called tabulators for listing sums, and a multiplier that you put cards in and it would take two numbers from a card and multiply them. There were also collators and sorters and so on.
So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these machines in a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle. Everybody who does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking about, but this was kind of a new thing then -- mass production with machines. We had done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go one step across, doing everything yourself. But this was different -- where you go first to the adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so on. So Frankel designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM company, because we realized it was a good way of solving our problems.
We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do -- multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program, but we didn't have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was the adder. This one cubed -- all she did was cube a number on an index card and send it to the next girl.
We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
Of course nowadays they'd just solve this problem by hiring 3X as many girls overseas and running the entire operation remotely on shifts via fiber optic cable.
This woman motorcycled through Chernobyl not to recently. In many parts radiation levels were safe enough for her to travel around. As I recall she carried a geiger counter, but didn't wear a radiation suit. She didn't venture around the epicenter of disaster, but she took a lot of rad photos, and saw wild life.
Those pictures turned out to be a hoax. The story was covered here.
My wife and I recently went on a tour of the Nevada Test Site when we were in Las Vegas several weeks ago. These tours are arranged by the Department of Energy which outsources them to a private firm. Essentially you ride around on a bus in the Nevada Test Site all day and get a really cool tour of the blast sites, the craters, the house, the rails, etc. Unfortunately the tour does not allow cameras. As for us, we figured we have no plans to ever have any kids anyway and so we signed up for the waiting list. We got in on a cancellation and ended up on a bus full of senior citizens with our tour guide, Ernie, with decades of experience in the atomic testing program. Ernie tended to downplay the safety implications of the testing done on the site. Well, he did mention the leaks and accidents but his voice dropped really low whenever he talked about them... he used the phrase "well, I make no bones about it". Whenever Ernie's voice dropped, you could look out the window and the bus would be passing a fenced area along the side of the road with big scary RADIOACTIVE signs at regular intervals fighting to stay visible above the grass. Ernie was a trip. If you are interested in a tour of the Nevada Test Site go soon while Ernie is still alive to be your tour guide.
Instead, we pay those taxes in the form of higher costs of goods and services. Or, if we're employees of that company, we pay it in the form of lower salaries and benefits than what we'd have if corporations weren't taxed as they are. Or, if we're shareholders, we pay for it in the form of lower share value, lower dividends, or both. But make no mistake about it: companies do not pay taxes in the real sense of the word. We do.
The same logic easily supports the notion that individuals should not pay tax either. If I didn't have to pay taxes, I would have more money to buy shit from corporations, for example.
In your date formats, include the year. I never know which of two articles is the dupe unless I pull out a calendar to see what year has the article date falling on a Monday/Thursday/whatever.
Hitler lost the war by micromanaging his army into the ground. But he had blind faith that technology would save him, and he always talked about the "fantastic new weapons" (jet engines, etc.) he was expecting from his scientists to save the war. Blind faith in technology is no substitute for a well run army.
But we must not compare any contemporary politician to Hitler- that wouldn't be "responsible".
Yes, very much so. He's been particularly active aginst the global warming crowd. His latest novel, State of Fear, is essentially a criticism of how our society has essentially shut down all scientific debate on global warming, and how it's just the latest "sky is falling" theory to emerge to scare the general population.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it. GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS afterwards shares portions of his raw datasets only with people who have not demonstrated themselves to be full of shit and willing to abuse statistics. GALLANT sends fiction writer Michael Crichton to the Senate to accuse GOOFUS of hiding something.
I keep a copy of the 217 page Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 handy for this kind of thing. When I get a credit card offer, I print out a polite letter explaining that I must decline the card because of a lack of bankruptcy protection, and that I am including a copy of the legislation in case they have any questions. I cram it all into the business reply envelope. Unfortunately I have to print double sided or 4 sheets to a page but that envelope gets crammed pretty good- nice and heavy.
I met a guy with an even better idea. He has a home equity line of credit (HELOC). When a stupid credit card offer comes offering 0% interest, he pulls a couple grand out of the HELOC. Then he applies for the card and does a balance transfer from the new CC account to the HELOC. (Credit cards are too smart to just send you wads of cash when you apply, but they will give you the money if it's to pay another creditor- that's why he uses the HELOC, as an account to shift balances around.) If he gets the card and the transfer goes through, he puts the money in a CD earning 4.5% that matures when the card's introductory period expires.
um... we also weren't allowed to have any pork products etc sent to us by friends and relatives back home.
WTF does that have to do with anything? Are you suggesting a systematic bias against domestic pork producers? Has the military become infiltrated by cattlemen from the beef industry intent on making soldiers lose their taste for pork? Because that would be the parallel argument, which is ridiculous, so I think you don't understand the problem with introducing political partisanship into a public institution which is nominally and legally supposed to refrain from partisan activity.
You're probably thinking along the lines of what "comforts" a soldier is allowed to have. But there are good practical reasons for banning pork over there. The natives don't like it. (If the U.S. were invaded by some foreign army, there would be some meats that we wouldn't appreciate being sent here either.) Hell, they shouldn't be allowing people to send cartoons to soldiers there simply because it might spark a riot. Those are practical impositions that originate from people outside our democracy and which just have to be dealt with like anything else in life. But there is no way you can pass this off as even remotely similar. The Iraqis are forcing us to firewall Al Franken but let Rush Limbaugh through? What is the practical consideration being met here?
The original breakup took place in a different political climate, when wrong ideas were popular. Now that right ideas are popular, we must systematically unravel anything that was accomplished back then.
Slashdot Mirror
As I am reading it this really isn't a 3D technology at all, it's more like three normal planes of circuitry stacked on top of each other.
Oh! So it's like that Mach 3 razor with the three parallel blades.
Watching fox news, reading free republic and listening to Rush? LOL! I guess my sarcasm has been getting too subtle for a lot of people lately.
No offense, but I'm not going to shell out an extra $50 or so each month for some "gold package" that lets me talk to you guys and read the lefty political blogs.
I don't even think this is a real "Sun" we have here. I'd say it was a "yellow dwarf".
Allow me to be the voice of reason here. If you think the poor guys trying to escape to a better life have computers and internet access you might want to think again ;)
The refugees themselves obviously aren't going to be carrying computers across the river. They're going to be in the unventilated trailer in the back. The guy driving the truck they're in would be the one with the laptop and the cellphone and the air conditioning. Unloading the trailer near unwatched cameras would be a premium service offered by the driver to the people in back. That way if they don't pay extra he can drop them off in front of busy cameras and get repeat business.
I think it would be unwise to offer surveillance statistics to website visitors. Not that this isn't a stupid idea already.
I work at a big stupid company that has a site license for Rational Clearcase, a totally retarded product we are forced to use by upper management. Fortunately, SAV 10 is incompatible with the Clearcase Windows client- it diagnoses it as malware and attempts to remove the "infection". So we cannot upgrade from SAV 9. When they were doing the automated rollouts a few days ago, we had to send our machine names to the CC administrator to prevent the upgrade process from installing SAV 10 on our machines.
So now we don't have to worry about this security hole, which means we can finally say that something good came out of using Rational Clearcase.
Is Slashdot going to be in the "Silver" package? If I have to order the "Gold" package to get Slashdot then it's been nice talking to you guys but I'm not paying that much!
American foriegn lanquage skills are notably crappy. Most of our farsi translators are of questionable use in counter insurgency.
According to a recent State Department IG report, Radio Sawa, our pop music and news station aimed at young Arab audiences, has very little influence since parents tell their kids not to listen to it- "because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar."
If the disposable cell phones in Iraq were just made to emit an inaudible but intense ultrasonic ring at random times when not in use, they wouldn't be as convenient as they currently are for setting up remote trigger mechanisms in IEDs.
Old people are so cute when they talk about the Internet- they still think it has the same distributed network topology as it did last century. Yes, the Internet routes around damage. But this isn't going to be the Internet anymore, pal. They're talking about running heart monitors on this thing. You can't do that on the Internet as designed- you have to fuck it up and turn it into something else that doesn't behave like the Internet at all. If you don't like it you're free to take your servers and RFCs elsewhere and form your own network using no corporate fiber resources of any kind. But you shouldn't have to do it. Through corporate subsidies, your tax money has partially gone into creating this Internet, and it's about to be lost in a massive giveaway with no public discussion at all. In fact, so far the only corporate contribution to the debate has been a carefully crafted astroturf campaign that tries to confuse everybody about who is on which side of the issue. The astroturf campaign's tag line is "don't regulate the Internet"- in other words, don't reintroduce net neutrality via statute, now that a regulatory agency has destroyed it as a corporate favor to the telecommunications industry with unknown long-term repurcussions.
Nowadays the telcos control all the backbones and are in a good position to turn this whole thing into a pay-per-view monstrosity. The Bush FCC issued a horrible decision a year or two ago that would basically make this legal, by removing enforcement of the rules regarding net neutrality that have been governing the development of the Internet for decades. (Rules that you are taking for granted in your post.) The Supreme Court affirmed the legality of the FCC decision. What will be the effects? No one knows. The telcos haven't acted on it yet. They have announced ambitious business plans to convert the Internet into something resembling cable TV. But since fucking up the Internet apparently involves a huge capital outlay, they will only do it if they have a guarantee that the net neutrality rules will stay gone. Otherwise they might enounter regulatory resistance as they start to screw it up and millions of people start complaining.
So that's why we have a bill winding through Congress right now that will provide this guarantee to the telcommunications industry, banning the net neutrality rule forever, and leaving them free to fuck with the Internet as it exists without exposure to regulatory risk. It's going to be their little plaything to do with as they wish- the public subsidies that went into it for decades nonwithstanding. That's why you're hearing about this all of a sudden. This isn't something that "can just be routed around"- the way routing is done is about to change.
Jeff Goldblum is my favorite movie psychic, not scientist. Although I would like to hire his Independence Day character to be in charge of our Mac installers at work.
As far as movie scientists are concerned, I always liked that group of scientists in Brainstorm (which I haven't seen in a long time). I've worked in real labs of several different sorts, and those guys still look like the real deal. Unlike most Hollywood "science" movies, which force their scientist characters into Frankenstein-inspired cliches, there were a few common mistakes that Brainstorm avoided with its scientist characters:
- No one scientist who works in isolation. This was a team of at least 3 scientists, like you'd find in real life. The two team leads who were the primary researchers shared credit equally as far as the film was concerned. The project was their baby.
- No "mad" scientist. Although one of them was played by Christopher Walken. Louise Fletcher's character I think was better written. She was the one who smoked if I'm remembering correctly. Movie scientists are usually too smart to smoke. They've done research or something and found that it's bad for you.
- Intense personal relationships. Walken's character was having marital problems. That's very strange for a movie scientist, who usually remains single to avoid confusing audiences who do not view scientists are normal human beings. (If he has any family members at all, their purpose in the script is to be props- they will be in close proximity to a volcano or bomb or something, so as to establish that the amoral movie scientist has "something to care about".) Not only does this guy use his machine to rejuvenate his marriage and make things better between him and his wife, people in the lab immediately discover the new technology's potential for porn. Good call on that one!
- Problems with upper management. They had a boss who was trying to militarize their whole project, and IIRC they had to cooperate to keep their funding. Most "movie scientists" either require no visible source of funding, or can just rely on their own personal wealth to buy all the Jacob's ladders and other mad-looking items they need for their lab. (Or they have the scientist running an entire company, like Eldon Tyrell. As a CEO scientist, Tyrell naturally has plenty of time to spend with local city policemen as they give Voight-Kampff tests to his employees.) As far as militarization of scientific work is concerned, most movie scientists are amoral and don't care. In the movies, scientists are completely amoral unless they are saving the world that day- and they're probably only doing it because their wife or kid is too close to a volcano or bomb.
Having said all that, I have to admit that in general the characters in Brainstorm are not very well developed because the movie is trying too hard to impress you with its technology. In 1983 it looked pretty impressive- these people had a system where you could dial in over an acoustic modem and have a tape robot play terabits of personal experience directly into your head! As far as text went, their terminal software looked like the setup I had in 1983. But even for 1983 they made reasonable guesses. I always remember that scene where they finally demo the technology and have some sort of hub with a dozen ribbon cables coming out of it connected to everyone's heads.
Oh, there's a nice unbiased source.
Well then what's wrong with a biased source?
Being "unbiased" doesn't automatically make you credible. In fact it can cost you your credibility.
Don't be silly. Vint's name is where "serfing the Internet" comes from.
This woman motorcycled through Chernobyl not to recently. In many parts radiation levels were safe enough for her to travel around. As I recall she carried a geiger counter, but didn't wear a radiation suit. She didn't venture around the epicenter of disaster, but she took a lot of rad photos, and saw wild life.
Those pictures turned out to be a hoax. The story was covered here.
My wife and I recently went on a tour of the Nevada Test Site when we were in Las Vegas several weeks ago. These tours are arranged by the Department of Energy which outsources them to a private firm. Essentially you ride around on a bus in the Nevada Test Site all day and get a really cool tour of the blast sites, the craters, the house, the rails, etc. Unfortunately the tour does not allow cameras. As for us, we figured we have no plans to ever have any kids anyway and so we signed up for the waiting list. We got in on a cancellation and ended up on a bus full of senior citizens with our tour guide, Ernie, with decades of experience in the atomic testing program. Ernie tended to downplay the safety implications of the testing done on the site. Well, he did mention the leaks and accidents but his voice dropped really low whenever he talked about them... he used the phrase "well, I make no bones about it". Whenever Ernie's voice dropped, you could look out the window and the bus would be passing a fenced area along the side of the road with big scary RADIOACTIVE signs at regular intervals fighting to stay visible above the grass. Ernie was a trip. If you are interested in a tour of the Nevada Test Site go soon while Ernie is still alive to be your tour guide.
Instead, we pay those taxes in the form of higher costs of goods and services. Or, if we're employees of that company, we pay it in the form of lower salaries and benefits than what we'd have if corporations weren't taxed as they are. Or, if we're shareholders, we pay for it in the form of lower share value, lower dividends, or both. But make no mistake about it: companies do not pay taxes in the real sense of the word. We do.
The same logic easily supports the notion that individuals should not pay tax either. If I didn't have to pay taxes, I would have more money to buy shit from corporations, for example.
In your date formats, include the year. I never know which of two articles is the dupe unless I pull out a calendar to see what year has the article date falling on a Monday/Thursday/whatever.
Hitler lost the war by micromanaging his army into the ground. But he had blind faith that technology would save him, and he always talked about the "fantastic new weapons" (jet engines, etc.) he was expecting from his scientists to save the war. Blind faith in technology is no substitute for a well run army.
But we must not compare any contemporary politician to Hitler- that wouldn't be "responsible".
I'm interested. If you think there were no weapons of mass destruction why do you suppose Saddam kept stalling the UN inspectors over all those years?
Because he accused UNSCOM of being a front for an American spy operation. Which it turned out they were.
Crazy internet lefties cry wolf at new campaign legislation. President Bush's FEC does the sensible thing. Who would have guessed? (Not Slashdot)
And not a trace of gratitude in your post to those "crazy Internet lefties" either.
All your closed proceedings are belong to us!
Yes, very much so. He's been particularly active aginst the global warming crowd. His latest novel, State of Fear, is essentially a criticism of how our society has essentially shut down all scientific debate on global warming, and how it's just the latest "sky is falling" theory to emerge to scare the general population.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS afterwards shares portions of his raw datasets only with people who have not demonstrated themselves to be full of shit and willing to abuse statistics.
GALLANT sends fiction writer Michael Crichton to the Senate to accuse GOOFUS of hiding something.
I keep a copy of the 217 page Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 handy for this kind of thing. When I get a credit card offer, I print out a polite letter explaining that I must decline the card because of a lack of bankruptcy protection, and that I am including a copy of the legislation in case they have any questions. I cram it all into the business reply envelope. Unfortunately I have to print double sided or 4 sheets to a page but that envelope gets crammed pretty good- nice and heavy.
I met a guy with an even better idea. He has a home equity line of credit (HELOC). When a stupid credit card offer comes offering 0% interest, he pulls a couple grand out of the HELOC. Then he applies for the card and does a balance transfer from the new CC account to the HELOC. (Credit cards are too smart to just send you wads of cash when you apply, but they will give you the money if it's to pay another creditor- that's why he uses the HELOC, as an account to shift balances around.) If he gets the card and the transfer goes through, he puts the money in a CD earning 4.5% that matures when the card's introductory period expires.
um... we also weren't allowed to have any pork products etc sent to us by friends and relatives back home.
WTF does that have to do with anything? Are you suggesting a systematic bias against domestic pork producers? Has the military become infiltrated by cattlemen from the beef industry intent on making soldiers lose their taste for pork? Because that would be the parallel argument, which is ridiculous, so I think you don't understand the problem with introducing political partisanship into a public institution which is nominally and legally supposed to refrain from partisan activity.
You're probably thinking along the lines of what "comforts" a soldier is allowed to have. But there are good practical reasons for banning pork over there. The natives don't like it. (If the U.S. were invaded by some foreign army, there would be some meats that we wouldn't appreciate being sent here either.) Hell, they shouldn't be allowing people to send cartoons to soldiers there simply because it might spark a riot. Those are practical impositions that originate from people outside our democracy and which just have to be dealt with like anything else in life. But there is no way you can pass this off as even remotely similar. The Iraqis are forcing us to firewall Al Franken but let Rush Limbaugh through? What is the practical consideration being met here?
The original breakup took place in a different political climate, when wrong ideas were popular. Now that right ideas are popular, we must systematically unravel anything that was accomplished back then.