Oddly enough, I think I find the idea of mandatory parenting classes/standards more disturbing then mandatory contraception. I shutter to think what kind of standards boards might exist to decide what 'proper' parenting might be..
While I am personally against the idea, as well, I don't think you should close your mind off so quickly or you might have the blinds drawn on other meaningful course of action if a window of opportunity presents itself!
Better analogy: i put a shotgun and wire it to the door. If someone opens the door the shotgun is programmed to shot him in the face. Guess who's liable for that.
Even easier analogy: electric fence. There have been cases where a thief has sucesfully sued a home owner for getting shocked with one of those.
You're not gonna be satisfied until someone's bleeding, are you?
It's all fun and games until someone get's hurt, and then it's freakin' hilarious!
Back in the late '80s, my uncle gave me a first aid kit that came from a Mercedes Benz vehicle in Germany. All the basic necessities, plus a big stick of sidewalk chalk. His statement was that, given autobahn speeds, the chalk could come in more handy than the bandages.
If you have a high efficiency PFC, a UPS of the proper design is a must. A good PFC power supply only does its job properly when fed a reasonable approximation of a sine wave.
On-line (double conversion) UPS units output a sine wave at all times, but are inefficient and usually very expensive.
A stand-by UPS may or may not have a switching time fast enough for a PFC power supply, and will almost never supply a reasonable approximation of a sine wave when running on battery (I don't recall ever seeing a design that did, anyway). Cheap as chips, so to speak, but you buy a UPS to keep you running through a brown-out or black-out, and everything works just fine EXCEPT the computer you were trying to keep running. They will keep running non-PFC power supplies, though, no problem at all.
A line-interactive has close to the efficiency of stand-by UPS, but with the benefit of always having the inverter/converter always connected to the output, so the response time should never be slower than what a good PFC power supply requires, and depending on the converter logic can output a good sine wave approximation. Unfortunately, many UPS units output what might be generously referred to as a "stepped sine wave" which is frequently closer to a square wave than a sine wave, so your cheap as chips power supply computers keep running fine, but your nice, shiny PFC power supply computers shut down.
Unfortunately, I live in China where lots of line interactive units that output reasonable sine waves are made, but the only way to buy them appears to be quantity 500+. I have yet to find a unit sold at retail in Zhongguancun (Beijing), Taobao, or 360buy that gives a good sine wave output without being an on-line unit. And, no, APC units- stand-by or line-interactive- do not produce a good enough sine wave for my FSP AU-400 (80+ Gold, happily reliable on Beijing wall power now for almost a year after my OCZ 500 caught fire... twice, fun story!) to keep it from shutting down, though I respect that this power supply may be more finicky than most. Cyberpower makes a nice unit (eg CP1500PFCLCD), but I can't get a 220V unit imported to China for anything close to a reasonable price, and carrying a 110V unit back from the USA with me would require using an external transformer defeating much of the value of having a line-interactive.
I got asked today to go visit an HR person with my admin (not because I was in trouble, but my admin wanted my opinion on whether the HR person was being an intentionally underhanded, conniving, sneaky, power mad bitch or it was all in my admin's mind). Spent 15 minutes with them jabbering away at each other, and had no way to answer her question at the end. Not because I couldn't necessarily determine it for myself, but because the obviously dust caked CPU heat sink/fan obviously had a bad bearing and it was driving me up the freaking wall. It was all I could do not to shove them both out of the way, rip open the machine, and huff and puff until I had ripped the fan out to replace it (don't you carry a spare fan or two in your backpack- just in case? I keep a spare cheap ass optical with me for when I run across dinosaurs who have never had their ball mouse [stutter, jump, slam] replaced, too) and blew the dust out of the heat sink so the fan need to spin at 4 bajillion RPMs to keep the CPU from overheating.
Soju can be made with many things, just as vodka is. Some retain their taste more than others and can be found in strengths as high as any moonshine. I brought some back from one trip that was 60% ABV, found it completely undrinkable, but gave it to some Korean guys I knew who immediately became my bestest buddies until the alcohol ran out. I found it rather disturbing when I noticed that the alcohol was dissolving the Styrofoam cups they were drinking out of! To say the least, like with erguotou in China, at that level it is an acquired taste which few people that don't grow up with it will develop.
Modern day soju has commonly been made from sweet potatoes and then saccharin added to make it even sweeter (more than a few military personnel would find out antifreeze had been added to kick up the sweetness even higher, resulting in horrible headaches if they were lucky, blindness or death if they weren't). This makes it work very well in cocktails where the sweetness blends in. Koreans generally just mix it with fruit juice or lemonade if with someone who doesn't like the taste, or drink it straight with someone who does or when eating food, at least in my experience. For something with less of an overt taste and with no sweetness added, try Iichiko shochu from Japan- made from barley, served with a twist of lemon, quite nice and dry, so to speak, but significantly pricier than a similar amount of Jinro.
Soju also comes in a variety of strengths, with Jinro adding water to the 21 or 22% version mostly popular in Korea to bring it down to 19.5% or 20% (some places do allow higher, this was first done for California, IIRC) allowing it to be sold at beer and wine-only licensed establishments in the USA. The establishments love it because they can charge a premium for it as a call-brand, the customers can buy more because they don't get drunk as easily, and the soju is cheap (perhaps not compared to Gilbeys, granted, but a lot cheaper than Absolut or Finlandia).
I am not a beer drinker, but I do have a penchant for tequila (nothing with Cuervo in the name as a rule except for shots, in a plastic bottle, or mescal- basically start at El Jimador and work your way up). I used to carry one or two bottle of tequila with me on my frequent trips to Asia (PRC/Korea/Japan/HK/Taiwan/Singapore) so that when local coworkers would complain that I wouldn't drink with them (I would drink vodka when they were drinking beer, so I wasn't drinking with them- at least in Korea we would drink soju together, but my Japanese coworkers generally wouldn't drink shochu except with meals), I would pull out one (or both, if there were more than 4 of us) of the bottles and tell them this was the night that we would drink together.
They usually discovered before the end of the night that beer, even good beer, is just alcohol on training wheels;-). What amazed me was the women who would keep up with no problem while the men were headed off to the subway.
you can buy a decent laptop for the price of my first CD burner
I read that and what crossed my mind was no way, but then I remembered what I paid for my first CD burner and then I felt really old. That stupid external (6x read 2x write 1x rewrite or something like that) burner probably would still work if I had a machine with a parallel port and the drivers for it that would actually work on a modern machine.
Heh, I can't remember what I paid for my first CD burner, but my first hard drive cost me $2000 (after my 33% discount as an employee- we were royally screwing our industrial customers) for all 20 MB of 5.25" full-height SCSI noisy-as-hell goodness. But it probably wouldn't work post-Office Spacing.
Yes, good point. I remember we were told we were working towards and expected to get ABET certification beyond just our computer science designation (the head of my department was an evaluation team member for the CAC at the time, though obviously not for reviewing our program), but I never found out the result (though obviously it must have been negative). Doesn't matter all that much now, post-2005 my department no longer exists and most of the college of engineering along with it. Don't worry, Sandy-sufferers, FEMA learned so many best-practices as a result of Katrina that they will have you fixed up in a jiff... errr.... what??? Ummm, never mind.
I have a magic western passport and GPO card, it enables me to pass through Erez into Israel more-or-less at will. People in the West Bank can move a little, and even go abroad, but people born in Gaza - on the whole - don't have the ability to leave. 99.999% of them are born, live, and die in an area 1/10th the size of Rhode Island, but 150% the population. They have to grow their food, power their houses, teach their kids, and bury their dead in that slab of land.
Serious question here, not intentionally related to the topic at hand. 99.999% are born, live and die etc suggests that this is all because of Israel and the fact that people Palestinians can't travel freely into Israel proper. But when I look at a map, I see that the Gaza strip shares a border with Egypt. Why is Egypt not considered a bad actor here if free movement is the basis of discussion, too? Does Egypt not consider Palestinians acceptable for immigration?
Funny, the head of my department said my degree was in Software Engineering in 1988. Then I got a job doing computer engineering and didn't write a meaningful program (though I did fix a lot of programs for CS majors who didn't understand the underlying systems implementations well enough) again until about 1997, so perhaps you have a point.
I live outside the USA, I can not go to a USA emergency room for free care (or paid care, for that matter). Buying insurance in the USA that would cover me in China is cost prohibitive (effectively it is a 365 day travel policy at a cost roughly 10x the most expensive general policy insurance you might have encountered), my employer (not a USA company) doesn't provide me anything that the health care law in the USA recognizes as meaningful insurance. I am therefore subject to the non-insured tax unless I surrender my USA citizenship, as far as I can tell.
Texas, at least, is not threatening to arrest election monitors. It is threatening to arrest election monitors who don't follow Texas law regulating election monitors so that they can't effectively do their job because they are stuck 100ft away.
FTFY
You fixed nothing except to demonstrate you not only have no knowledge of Texas electioneering laws, you also have a complete unwillingness to learn enough to follow the discussion even at the level of a USA Today article. Texas law does permit election monitors within 100 feet as long as they follow all the regulations. One of the regulations is that the monitors must be from the area where the poll is. If the OSCE wants to have monitors who won't be in violation of the law, they can- just like any other group, find someone who lives in the area and sign them up to be a monitor.
Now, do I AGREE with that law? Well, I can say I believe I understand the history behind why it exists. Do I think that exceptions should be built into the law for this situation? Yes, but only by modifying the structure of the law to permit it, not by violating the law as written. Until the law gets changed (or overridden via treaty, which the agreement between the federal government and OSCE is not), follow the rules or get outside the 100 foot perimeter. If it is too difficult to follow the rules and you insist on being inside the 100 foot perimeter, plan to discuss your plight with the local magistrate.
I am actually aware that the U.N. and OSCE are separate entities, and conflating the two was inappropriate, but doesn't change the point. I will give a mea culpa, all the misinformed AC's can replace all instances of U.N. with OSCE, and state law will still trump a federal agreement (non-treaty obligation).
As I said before, I think international observers SHOULD be allowed in to observe elections at polling places across the country, and if I were in a position to vote for a law to permit it in Texas I would.
If the international observers are unable to go within 100 feet of a Texas polling place, though, following your suggestion I happen to know a poling place that will allow people (men, actually, women with a male escort) within about 6 feet of the poles- the Yellow Rose on North Lamar Avenue in Austin, TX will be happy receive them. I am sure the girls there won't even mind being tipped in Euros!
Texas supreme to international law? There is an apocryphal (probably) story about a British lord who visited a ranch out in Texas. Looking for the owner of the ranch, he walked up to one of the ranch hands and asked,"My dear chap, could you tell me where I could find your master?" The response was,"That man ain't been born yet."
What does that have to do with this situation? Nothing, I just love that story.
The agreement with the OSCE (what is the OECD? The Old English Commonwealth Dictionary?) is not a law, international or otherwise. The USA, and by extension, the states of the USA, are not bound to it by treaty. As such, I do consider the rule of law in Texas to be supreme to the rule of non-law that is the OSCE. And I consider the rules that permit them in other states to be supreme for them, as well. However, if you had actually read my posting instead of getting all knee jerk about it: "Now personally, I have no problems with international observers as long as the only thing they do is observe and don't interfere in any way, shape, or form. I think the USA should be setting a good example- demonstrating by example how to peacefully change government and prosecuting fully anyone attempting to interfere with that capability. But it is up to the federal government to persuade the states to achieve this, not to violate the Constitution and enforce it by fiat."
Oh, and by the way, I live in the province of Beijing, not Texas, though I was lucky enough to get to spend a lot of time in Texas during my life.
That point that you and the other ACs (or maybe the same AC) keep missing is that the AGREEMENT that the USA is a party to with the OSCE is NOT a TREATY. Until such time as it IS a treaty, state law trumps this agreement. Clear enough?
Then, reread what I wrote, AC. Specifically the part where I wrote: "If the US government believes that this is so important that state law should be subsumed, the executive branch should elevate the agreement to a treaty and get it passed through the Senate to be ratified so that the Supremacy Clause can take effect. Until then, state law trumps international hand waving 'agreements' at the state level within the USA."
Texas, at least, is not threatening to arrest election monitors. It is threatening to arrest election monitors who don't follow Texas law regulating election monitors. There are (for early voting) and will be (for election day) LOTS of election monitors in probably every voting location in Texas within the 100 foot limit: the only ones who would be arrested will be those not following the law, and certainly not before they receive a warning to follow the law (though anyone from the U.N. should probably consider themselves already warned). If the U.N. wants to monitor Texas elections, they can- just follow the law. If they don't know the law and can't be bothered to read it for themselves, I am sure they can find a lawyer who will be happy to advise them for a reasonable fee (but only one and his number is unlisted, the rest of them will charge outrageous fees commensurate with their belief that laws should be written so confusingly that only an ordained lawyer can decipher them).
Agreements between the US government and non-US entities are just that- agreements between them at that level. They do not affect the 50 states unless those states also sign on to the agreement or otherwise pass/change laws to achieve compliance with the agreement, particularly with regards to voting which is a state level activity- the federal government only has a say as to when the vote is made, not how (unless the how falls afoul of federal law that the Supremacy Clause is in effect for). If the US government believes that this is so important that state law should be subsumed, the executive branch should elevate the agreement to a treaty and get it passed through the Senate to be ratified so that the Supremacy Clause can take effect. Until then, state law trumps international hand waving 'agreements' at the state level within the USA.
Now personally, I have no problems with international observers as long as the only thing they do is observe and don't interfere in any way, shape, or form. I think the USA should be setting a good example- demonstrating by example how to peacefully change government and prosecuting fully anyone attempting to interfere with that capability. But it is up to the federal government to persuade the states to achieve this, not to violate the Constitution and enforce it by fiat.
True, but say the maximum capacity for the plane is 5. You can now fly for 6 units worth of distance with only 5 units of capacity. And, 10 is still better than 12.
If you can't figure out how to make 11 the best, you haven't worked hard enough.
I was teaching Huawei how to design in the PowerPC CPUs for their first switch designs in 1998, so your timing is about right. I was doing the same for Cisco starting around mid-1994. Their ice cream ping parties were great.
That's fine. The US House Committee is claiming that Huawei and ZTE receive billions from the Chinese government and are able to subsidize their products with that money so that they can be the lowest bidder to foreign countries. That's not entirely arbitrary as they're not claiming the same thing against Foxconn or Asus. If you want to say Monsanto receives government subsidiaries as tax credits or whatever, you're probably right but so does almost every other international company headquartered out of the United States. Want to place an embargo on the United States? Go right ahead, Iran and Cuba seem to be doing okay. Personally, I think the safety concerns against GM corn are enough to block it and I think they should continue along that line of reasoning -- what economic conspiracy do you have for keeping GM corn out?
Would it bother you too much if I pointed out that Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., actually, Foxconn is the trade name) and Asus are both Taiwanese companies, and the USA generally considers Taiwan to not be a part of China (at least for purposes of defense and business). Perhaps you meant Lenovo and... never mind, China doesn't have an ODM anywhere close to Foxconn.
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Oddly enough, I think I find the idea of mandatory parenting classes/standards more disturbing then mandatory contraception. I shutter to think what kind of standards boards might exist to decide what 'proper' parenting might be..
While I am personally against the idea, as well, I don't think you should close your mind off so quickly or you might have the blinds drawn on other meaningful course of action if a window of opportunity presents itself!
You read the article???
No wonder why you are hiding as an A.C.!
Better analogy: i put a shotgun and wire it to the door. If someone opens the door the shotgun is programmed to shot him in the face. Guess who's liable for that.
Even easier analogy: electric fence. There have been cases where a thief has sucesfully sued a home owner for getting shocked with one of those.
You're not gonna be satisfied until someone's bleeding, are you?
It's all fun and games until someone get's hurt, and then it's freakin' hilarious!
Back in the late '80s, my uncle gave me a first aid kit that came from a Mercedes Benz vehicle in Germany. All the basic necessities, plus a big stick of sidewalk chalk. His statement was that, given autobahn speeds, the chalk could come in more handy than the bandages.
If you have a high efficiency PFC, a UPS of the proper design is a must. A good PFC power supply only does its job properly when fed a reasonable approximation of a sine wave.
On-line (double conversion) UPS units output a sine wave at all times, but are inefficient and usually very expensive.
A stand-by UPS may or may not have a switching time fast enough for a PFC power supply, and will almost never supply a reasonable approximation of a sine wave when running on battery (I don't recall ever seeing a design that did, anyway). Cheap as chips, so to speak, but you buy a UPS to keep you running through a brown-out or black-out, and everything works just fine EXCEPT the computer you were trying to keep running. They will keep running non-PFC power supplies, though, no problem at all.
A line-interactive has close to the efficiency of stand-by UPS, but with the benefit of always having the inverter/converter always connected to the output, so the response time should never be slower than what a good PFC power supply requires, and depending on the converter logic can output a good sine wave approximation. Unfortunately, many UPS units output what might be generously referred to as a "stepped sine wave" which is frequently closer to a square wave than a sine wave, so your cheap as chips power supply computers keep running fine, but your nice, shiny PFC power supply computers shut down.
Unfortunately, I live in China where lots of line interactive units that output reasonable sine waves are made, but the only way to buy them appears to be quantity 500+. I have yet to find a unit sold at retail in Zhongguancun (Beijing), Taobao, or 360buy that gives a good sine wave output without being an on-line unit. And, no, APC units- stand-by or line-interactive- do not produce a good enough sine wave for my FSP AU-400 (80+ Gold, happily reliable on Beijing wall power now for almost a year after my OCZ 500 caught fire... twice, fun story!) to keep it from shutting down, though I respect that this power supply may be more finicky than most. Cyberpower makes a nice unit (eg CP1500PFCLCD), but I can't get a 220V unit imported to China for anything close to a reasonable price, and carrying a 110V unit back from the USA with me would require using an external transformer defeating much of the value of having a line-interactive.
I got asked today to go visit an HR person with my admin (not because I was in trouble, but my admin wanted my opinion on whether the HR person was being an intentionally underhanded, conniving, sneaky, power mad bitch or it was all in my admin's mind). Spent 15 minutes with them jabbering away at each other, and had no way to answer her question at the end. Not because I couldn't necessarily determine it for myself, but because the obviously dust caked CPU heat sink/fan obviously had a bad bearing and it was driving me up the freaking wall. It was all I could do not to shove them both out of the way, rip open the machine, and huff and puff until I had ripped the fan out to replace it (don't you carry a spare fan or two in your backpack- just in case? I keep a spare cheap ass optical with me for when I run across dinosaurs who have never had their ball mouse [stutter, jump, slam] replaced, too) and blew the dust out of the heat sink so the fan need to spin at 4 bajillion RPMs to keep the CPU from overheating.
I'm not Aspy, I am OCPD. Suck it.
Soju can be made with many things, just as vodka is. Some retain their taste more than others and can be found in strengths as high as any moonshine. I brought some back from one trip that was 60% ABV, found it completely undrinkable, but gave it to some Korean guys I knew who immediately became my bestest buddies until the alcohol ran out. I found it rather disturbing when I noticed that the alcohol was dissolving the Styrofoam cups they were drinking out of! To say the least, like with erguotou in China, at that level it is an acquired taste which few people that don't grow up with it will develop.
Modern day soju has commonly been made from sweet potatoes and then saccharin added to make it even sweeter (more than a few military personnel would find out antifreeze had been added to kick up the sweetness even higher, resulting in horrible headaches if they were lucky, blindness or death if they weren't). This makes it work very well in cocktails where the sweetness blends in. Koreans generally just mix it with fruit juice or lemonade if with someone who doesn't like the taste, or drink it straight with someone who does or when eating food, at least in my experience. For something with less of an overt taste and with no sweetness added, try Iichiko shochu from Japan- made from barley, served with a twist of lemon, quite nice and dry, so to speak, but significantly pricier than a similar amount of Jinro.
Soju also comes in a variety of strengths, with Jinro adding water to the 21 or 22% version mostly popular in Korea to bring it down to 19.5% or 20% (some places do allow higher, this was first done for California, IIRC) allowing it to be sold at beer and wine-only licensed establishments in the USA. The establishments love it because they can charge a premium for it as a call-brand, the customers can buy more because they don't get drunk as easily, and the soju is cheap (perhaps not compared to Gilbeys, granted, but a lot cheaper than Absolut or Finlandia).
I am not a beer drinker, but I do have a penchant for tequila (nothing with Cuervo in the name as a rule except for shots, in a plastic bottle, or mescal- basically start at El Jimador and work your way up). I used to carry one or two bottle of tequila with me on my frequent trips to Asia (PRC/Korea/Japan/HK/Taiwan/Singapore) so that when local coworkers would complain that I wouldn't drink with them (I would drink vodka when they were drinking beer, so I wasn't drinking with them- at least in Korea we would drink soju together, but my Japanese coworkers generally wouldn't drink shochu except with meals), I would pull out one (or both, if there were more than 4 of us) of the bottles and tell them this was the night that we would drink together.
They usually discovered before the end of the night that beer, even good beer, is just alcohol on training wheels ;-). What amazed me was the women who would keep up with no problem while the men were headed off to the subway.
Your mom's sailboat has a basement?
you can buy a decent laptop for the price of my first CD burner
I read that and what crossed my mind was no way, but then I remembered what I paid for my first CD burner and then I felt really old. That stupid external (6x read 2x write 1x rewrite or something like that) burner probably would still work if I had a machine with a parallel port and the drivers for it that would actually work on a modern machine.
Heh, I can't remember what I paid for my first CD burner, but my first hard drive cost me $2000 (after my 33% discount as an employee- we were royally screwing our industrial customers) for all 20 MB of 5.25" full-height SCSI noisy-as-hell goodness. But it probably wouldn't work post-Office Spacing.
Yes, good point. I remember we were told we were working towards and expected to get ABET certification beyond just our computer science designation (the head of my department was an evaluation team member for the CAC at the time, though obviously not for reviewing our program), but I never found out the result (though obviously it must have been negative). Doesn't matter all that much now, post-2005 my department no longer exists and most of the college of engineering along with it. Don't worry, Sandy-sufferers, FEMA learned so many best-practices as a result of Katrina that they will have you fixed up in a jiff... errr.... what??? Ummm, never mind.
I have a magic western passport and GPO card, it enables me to pass through Erez into Israel more-or-less at will. People in the West Bank can move a little, and even go abroad, but people born in Gaza - on the whole - don't have the ability to leave. 99.999% of them are born, live, and die in an area 1/10th the size of Rhode Island, but 150% the population. They have to grow their food, power their houses, teach their kids, and bury their dead in that slab of land.
Serious question here, not intentionally related to the topic at hand.
99.999% are born, live and die etc suggests that this is all because of Israel and the fact that people Palestinians can't travel freely into Israel proper. But when I look at a map, I see that the Gaza strip shares a border with Egypt. Why is Egypt not considered a bad actor here if free movement is the basis of discussion, too? Does Egypt not consider Palestinians acceptable for immigration?
Funny, the head of my department said my degree was in Software Engineering in 1988. Then I got a job doing computer engineering and didn't write a meaningful program (though I did fix a lot of programs for CS majors who didn't understand the underlying systems implementations well enough) again until about 1997, so perhaps you have a point.
I live outside the USA, I can not go to a USA emergency room for free care (or paid care, for that matter). Buying insurance in the USA that would cover me in China is cost prohibitive (effectively it is a 365 day travel policy at a cost roughly 10x the most expensive general policy insurance you might have encountered), my employer (not a USA company) doesn't provide me anything that the health care law in the USA recognizes as meaningful insurance. I am therefore subject to the non-insured tax unless I surrender my USA citizenship, as far as I can tell.
Exactly how does this make sense?
Texas, at least, is not threatening to arrest election monitors. It is threatening to arrest election monitors who don't follow Texas law regulating election monitors so that they can't effectively do their job because they are stuck 100ft away.
FTFY
You fixed nothing except to demonstrate you not only have no knowledge of Texas electioneering laws, you also have a complete unwillingness to learn enough to follow the discussion even at the level of a USA Today article. Texas law does permit election monitors within 100 feet as long as they follow all the regulations. One of the regulations is that the monitors must be from the area where the poll is. If the OSCE wants to have monitors who won't be in violation of the law, they can- just like any other group, find someone who lives in the area and sign them up to be a monitor.
Now, do I AGREE with that law? Well, I can say I believe I understand the history behind why it exists.
Do I think that exceptions should be built into the law for this situation? Yes, but only by modifying the structure of the law to permit it, not by violating the law as written. Until the law gets changed (or overridden via treaty, which the agreement between the federal government and OSCE is not), follow the rules or get outside the 100 foot perimeter. If it is too difficult to follow the rules and you insist on being inside the 100 foot perimeter, plan to discuss your plight with the local magistrate.
I am actually aware that the U.N. and OSCE are separate entities, and conflating the two was inappropriate, but doesn't change the point. I will give a mea culpa, all the misinformed AC's can replace all instances of U.N. with OSCE, and state law will still trump a federal agreement (non-treaty obligation).
As I said before, I think international observers SHOULD be allowed in to observe elections at polling places across the country, and if I were in a position to vote for a law to permit it in Texas I would.
If the international observers are unable to go within 100 feet of a Texas polling place, though, following your suggestion I happen to know a poling place that will allow people (men, actually, women with a male escort) within about 6 feet of the poles- the Yellow Rose on North Lamar Avenue in Austin, TX will be happy receive them. I am sure the girls there won't even mind being tipped in Euros!
When Syria and Texas are batting the same game, they are in the same ballpark.
America signed the treaty, and the treaty supersedes your state laws.
The only treaty signed was the one in your mind.
Texas supreme to international law?
There is an apocryphal (probably) story about a British lord who visited a ranch out in Texas. Looking for the owner of the ranch, he walked up to one of the ranch hands and asked,"My dear chap, could you tell me where I could find your master?" The response was,"That man ain't been born yet."
What does that have to do with this situation? Nothing, I just love that story.
The agreement with the OSCE (what is the OECD? The Old English Commonwealth Dictionary?) is not a law, international or otherwise. The USA, and by extension, the states of the USA, are not bound to it by treaty. As such, I do consider the rule of law in Texas to be supreme to the rule of non-law that is the OSCE. And I consider the rules that permit them in other states to be supreme for them, as well. However, if you had actually read my posting instead of getting all knee jerk about it:
"Now personally, I have no problems with international observers as long as the only thing they do is observe and don't interfere in any way, shape, or form. I think the USA should be setting a good example- demonstrating by example how to peacefully change government and prosecuting fully anyone attempting to interfere with that capability. But it is up to the federal government to persuade the states to achieve this, not to violate the Constitution and enforce it by fiat."
Oh, and by the way, I live in the province of Beijing, not Texas, though I was lucky enough to get to spend a lot of time in Texas during my life.
That point that you and the other ACs (or maybe the same AC) keep missing is that the AGREEMENT that the USA is a party to with the OSCE is NOT a TREATY. Until such time as it IS a treaty, state law trumps this agreement. Clear enough?
Then, reread what I wrote, AC. Specifically the part where I wrote:
"If the US government believes that this is so important that state law should be subsumed, the executive branch should elevate the agreement to a treaty and get it passed through the Senate to be ratified so that the Supremacy Clause can take effect. Until then, state law trumps international hand waving 'agreements' at the state level within the USA."
Texas, at least, is not threatening to arrest election monitors. It is threatening to arrest election monitors who don't follow Texas law regulating election monitors. There are (for early voting) and will be (for election day) LOTS of election monitors in probably every voting location in Texas within the 100 foot limit: the only ones who would be arrested will be those not following the law, and certainly not before they receive a warning to follow the law (though anyone from the U.N. should probably consider themselves already warned). If the U.N. wants to monitor Texas elections, they can- just follow the law. If they don't know the law and can't be bothered to read it for themselves, I am sure they can find a lawyer who will be happy to advise them for a reasonable fee (but only one and his number is unlisted, the rest of them will charge outrageous fees commensurate with their belief that laws should be written so confusingly that only an ordained lawyer can decipher them).
Agreements between the US government and non-US entities are just that- agreements between them at that level. They do not affect the 50 states unless those states also sign on to the agreement or otherwise pass/change laws to achieve compliance with the agreement, particularly with regards to voting which is a state level activity- the federal government only has a say as to when the vote is made, not how (unless the how falls afoul of federal law that the Supremacy Clause is in effect for). If the US government believes that this is so important that state law should be subsumed, the executive branch should elevate the agreement to a treaty and get it passed through the Senate to be ratified so that the Supremacy Clause can take effect. Until then, state law trumps international hand waving 'agreements' at the state level within the USA.
Now personally, I have no problems with international observers as long as the only thing they do is observe and don't interfere in any way, shape, or form. I think the USA should be setting a good example- demonstrating by example how to peacefully change government and prosecuting fully anyone attempting to interfere with that capability. But it is up to the federal government to persuade the states to achieve this, not to violate the Constitution and enforce it by fiat.
True, but say the maximum capacity for the plane is 5. You can now fly for 6 units worth of distance with only 5 units of capacity. And, 10 is still better than 12.
If you can't figure out how to make 11 the best, you haven't worked hard enough.
Bah, slip of the mouse and modded this redundant... Bye bye, wasted mod points, you had such a short and not so fruitful life...
I was teaching Huawei how to design in the PowerPC CPUs for their first switch designs in 1998, so your timing is about right. I was doing the same for Cisco starting around mid-1994. Their ice cream ping parties were great.
That's fine. The US House Committee is claiming that Huawei and ZTE receive billions from the Chinese government and are able to subsidize their products with that money so that they can be the lowest bidder to foreign countries. That's not entirely arbitrary as they're not claiming the same thing against Foxconn or Asus. If you want to say Monsanto receives government subsidiaries as tax credits or whatever, you're probably right but so does almost every other international company headquartered out of the United States. Want to place an embargo on the United States? Go right ahead, Iran and Cuba seem to be doing okay. Personally, I think the safety concerns against GM corn are enough to block it and I think they should continue along that line of reasoning -- what economic conspiracy do you have for keeping GM corn out?
Would it bother you too much if I pointed out that Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., actually, Foxconn is the trade name) and Asus are both Taiwanese companies, and the USA generally considers Taiwan to not be a part of China (at least for purposes of defense and business). Perhaps you meant Lenovo and ... never mind, China doesn't have an ODM anywhere close to Foxconn.
TL;DR. Trolling is a art.
Grammar Nazi trolling is more of a science, actually. Normal everyday trolling is more of AN art.