All in all, an excellent comment and rebuttal to the endless "But he voted for telecom immunity!" and "Both parties suck, vote 3rd party Presidents!" trolling.
On second thought, the telecom immunity provision and the general directions of both mainstream parties have been sore points for many commenters, and I shouldn't have called that "trolling." My apologies to anyone who is offended.
All in all, an excellent comment and rebuttal to the endless "But he voted for telecom immunity!" and "Both parties suck, vote 3rd party Presidents!" trolling.
I'll comment on a couple of points:
... Obama is black, I can imagine the KKK or some white supremacy group trying to off him ASAP.
Given his popularity (~half in the polls isn't too shabby), killing Obama would make him an instant martyr, as it happened with Lincoln, MLK, JFK, and RFK. I'm hoping that the KKK and other white-supremacist groups are either too disorganized and fractured to pull something like this off with the increased Secret Service protection, or that they've realized this historical fact. Given how police-state we've become, I wouldn't be surprised if they plan something like this and get nailed for carrying concealed firearms. That would be okay in the short run, but then there's Tom Payne's warning about not protecting your enemy from infringement of liberty.
RIAA, well that's the courts and congress. We need to fight it there.
True, and we're winning in the former, while the latter is a battle worth fighting. If lobbying is the only way to stop the media industry trolls, then we need the EFF or a likeminded affiliate to lobby Congress hard. That'll require money, however, and a dedicated stream of it.
Right, and the last two times we had a prominent 3rd-party candidate, they simply were portrayed as loons complaining about the Democrats and Republicans. It was easy to portray them as such, because that's pretty much all they seemed to talk about in debates and TV appearances. The problem was, that was the most interesting thing they could say, and when they got to their platforms, everyone yawned.
The best thing you can do to make real change and a difference is to take over your local government and work up. Get some friends and like minded people and start running for city council, judges, etc.... I think this should be prioritized over voting 3rd-party in a presidential race. You can't effectively organize and support a national campaign that can challenge the mainstream parties, unless you have significant electorates across the country. In 2008, Obama will simply out-organize you, while McCain will outspend you and use the right-wing media to destroy your reputation.
I know he's for "change." That's evidenced by getting a VP pick who's been involved in normal Washington politics for 35 years. That you say this without a single reference to Biden's voting or public service histories is very telling.
I know that not voting for him will "prove the US is racist", so failure to vote for him will obviously prove I'm racist regardless of how I feel about his stance on issues. I guess the US is already sexist because of our failure to get Hillary elected. This talking point is propagated by pundits who have more of an interest in reducing the contest to divisive issues like race or gender, rather than who's going to do a better job starting January.
I know he voted for telecom immunity. I know that many libertarians here and elsewhere will continue to claim this, even though he voted to rip the immunity out. He reluctantly voted for the unamended bill to get the restrictions on executive power, which IMO is much more important than nailing some cowardly telecoms. But what do I know, he's "just another politician" who doesn't care about me.
That demonstrates that Microsoft's constant efforts to stop piracy are as much security theater as the airport security checkpoints are. This hassles/scares the false positive (botched WGA?) and does nothing, in the end, to stop the determined pirate.
That will depend on how many web developers Microsoft can sweet-talk into a deal that includes the heavy use of EOT. ISO meets prescriptions-for-pens doctors.
But I agree that the impact will be negligible. They would have to make it a required IIS upgrade, and even then, it'll introduce enough problems that admins will avoid it like the plague.
Why, if that art department has the cash to shell out on frequent hardware upgrades for its computers, didn't they invest in a font server, or at least a decent font manager that doesn't load every single font in the C:\WINDOWS\FONTS folder? Assuming that graphics workstations are set up like ordinary desktop computers is the first major mistake of that department.
Remember Atari after the first video game market crash? "Oh, no, we're not doing games anymore, we're doing simulations." This, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons why business types scoff at computer games, because the very first successful market and company failed in the most spectacular way. Never mind that the next generation came along and made a killing, never mind that the industry learned all the valuable lessons from Atari and ended up gaining back all the lost ground, and then some. Never mind that none of the guys who want to sell games call them "simulations" anymore, unless maybe he's Will Wright or Sid Meier-- and their creations would be called "simulation games", anyway.
Even though electronic gaming is poised to overtake the film industry, some PHBs can't get their heads out of the early 1980s. That someone is 20 years late to the "simulation" stage says a lot about their marketers.
We might want to trawl through the USPTO pending patent database for that feature. Not that software patents are at all wise, of course, but we don't want to give Microsoft's legal department ammunition.
(Conspiracy theorist disclaimer: I don't have evidence, this is just conjecture from a guy whose idea of strategy is Starcraft.)
I'm guessing that the GOP was trying to time the coming housing/financial disaster for the POTUS after Bush. If a Democrat is elected, leave him with a stinking pile on the Oval Office desk as a White House-warming gift. If a Republican is elected, blame the Congressional Democrats for preventing the GOP from killing Social Security and Medicare, like they've wanted to ever since Johnson enacted them*.
If that's the case, they've horribly mis-timed the burst bubble, and they're as much evil as they are fiscally foolish. They essentially had their Ghost drop a nuke, just as their fleet was passing by.
* At first, they were sincere about this as conservatives, but now they're just pandering to conservative voters if they mention either program being in their crosshairs.
Yeah, because with a few corpse wagons and some spiders, ziggurats can defend themselves just fine against terrorists.... What were we talking about again?
Verizon didn't send the flyers, an ad agency did. All Verizon supplied them with was a list of cities they're deploying FIOS in, and zip codes don't necessarily indicate where they're going to lay fiber. So the ad agency tossed out a carpet-bombing's worth of fliers on the cities in question.
You would have a false advertising case, but all Verizon will say is, "Hey, we are building FIOS in your city."
I don't know if this is the case in your neck of the USA, but here in California, the telecoms split up the state into territories. Some are covered by Verizon, others by AT&T, etc. Apparently the general rule (which they, for some reason, keep hidden from prospective customers, not to mention the locations of the damned boundaries) is that each company does not invade a competitor's territory.
As an example, I can't get FIOS, no matter how much I beg the local Verizon office, because I'm in an AT&T territory. So it's U-Verse, cable, or wireless broadband for me, which is an exercise in deciding which pile of puke to eat.
Unreliable, but convenient, and that is sufficient for someone who wants to destroy another person's reputation, like a swiftboater.
Regarding 1 & 2, there is always some evidence in meatspace to refute or corroborate something on the 'Net. If the person's much too lazy or intellectually dishonest to find that concrete evidence, well, I don't think his word alone should be trusted.
Regarding employers, those who trawl the web looking for rumors aren't companies you would want to work for anyway. Real companies check references and the public record, which isn't always found online.
If I were the judge, I'd be tempted to release numerous false positives. The advantage is that after a couple of months, only the most fanatical of bloggers will try to uncover the real identities, while the rest will be rendered too disinterested to give a damn. The disadvantages are that I'll be accused of deception (and they'd be right) and unnecessary bias towards the accused, and the general public will be so disinterested in the courts that they'll practically ignore any ruling that comes out of them.
He was handy with a rocket launcher, was great base defence in CTF matches, and trash-talked like a motherfucker. Anyway, the point I'm trying to work my way around to is that this particular Judge is probably the most net-savvy online officer of the court you could ever meet. This Judge had a personal hand in the design and implementation of the in-court computer networks used in the NZ court system. Hell, this is a Judge who goes to LAN PARTIES.
Dude, now I really want to re-settle in NZ, though I'd rather meet the judge in a LAN party rather than a courtroom.
There was a rash of tire failures a year or so ago, traced to shitty Chinese manufacturing.
They tried to trace the crummy tires to the thousands of mini-factories and warehouses in China, but that became an exercise in futility, so they ended up dumping all the liability on the importer.
It seems the Feds did the exact same thing in this case, were stymied by corrupt Chinese officials and the labyrinth of facilities there, and dumped the blame on one man.
The real cover up is that the buildings weren't code to begin with, or rather David Rockefeller etc bent building codes to get them built. And Rudy had all the fuel stored in 7 against the advice of all the professionals.
Also known as Hanlon's Razor: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
I'll toss in another example: the NSA mass wiretapping scheme is probably much more of a conspiracy than 9/11. The spineless execs of the telecoms stayed quiet about the deal the Bush administration asked for months before 9/11, but all it took to blow the lid off of the conspiracy was the watchful eye and conscience of a single engineer: Mark Klein.
There wasn't much in there about file-sharing (which is the sort of "piracy" that the media *AA cartels care about), so Biden could just as easily be talking about large-scale bootleggers who duplicate CDs and DVDs en masse and sell them on the black market.
In fact, the important quote may be his focus OUTSIDE the USA:
As a founding member of the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus, Biden has helped the lead the fight against countries such as China, Russia, Mexico and India that need stronger copyright protections.
Granted, the USA and just about all Berne Convention signatories need to relax their copyright lockdown.
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All in all, an excellent comment and rebuttal to the endless "But he voted for telecom immunity!" and "Both parties suck, vote 3rd party Presidents!" trolling.
On second thought, the telecom immunity provision and the general directions of both mainstream parties have been sore points for many commenters, and I shouldn't have called that "trolling." My apologies to anyone who is offended.
All in all, an excellent comment and rebuttal to the endless "But he voted for telecom immunity!" and "Both parties suck, vote 3rd party Presidents!" trolling.
I'll comment on a couple of points:
Given his popularity (~half in the polls isn't too shabby), killing Obama would make him an instant martyr, as it happened with Lincoln, MLK, JFK, and RFK. I'm hoping that the KKK and other white-supremacist groups are either too disorganized and fractured to pull something like this off with the increased Secret Service protection, or that they've realized this historical fact. Given how police-state we've become, I wouldn't be surprised if they plan something like this and get nailed for carrying concealed firearms. That would be okay in the short run, but then there's Tom Payne's warning about not protecting your enemy from infringement of liberty.
True, and we're winning in the former, while the latter is a battle worth fighting. If lobbying is the only way to stop the media industry trolls, then we need the EFF or a likeminded affiliate to lobby Congress hard. That'll require money, however, and a dedicated stream of it.
Right, and the last two times we had a prominent 3rd-party candidate, they simply were portrayed as loons complaining about the Democrats and Republicans. It was easy to portray them as such, because that's pretty much all they seemed to talk about in debates and TV appearances. The problem was, that was the most interesting thing they could say, and when they got to their platforms, everyone yawned.
The best thing you can do to make real change and a difference is to take over your local government and work up. Get some friends and like minded people and start running for city council, judges, etc....
I think this should be prioritized over voting 3rd-party in a presidential race. You can't effectively organize and support a national campaign that can challenge the mainstream parties, unless you have significant electorates across the country. In 2008, Obama will simply out-organize you, while McCain will outspend you and use the right-wing media to destroy your reputation.
As the reply to this demonstrates, comparing software development to politics is an exercise in brain-spanking.
I know he's for "change." That's evidenced by getting a VP pick who's been involved in normal Washington politics for 35 years.
That you say this without a single reference to Biden's voting or public service histories is very telling.
I know that not voting for him will "prove the US is racist", so failure to vote for him will obviously prove I'm racist regardless of how I feel about his stance on issues. I guess the US is already sexist because of our failure to get Hillary elected.
This talking point is propagated by pundits who have more of an interest in reducing the contest to divisive issues like race or gender, rather than who's going to do a better job starting January.
I know he voted for telecom immunity.
I know that many libertarians here and elsewhere will continue to claim this, even though he voted to rip the immunity out. He reluctantly voted for the unamended bill to get the restrictions on executive power, which IMO is much more important than nailing some cowardly telecoms.
But what do I know, he's "just another politician" who doesn't care about me.
Dump a few gallons of water on your servers.
Oh, you wanted the servers to survive? That'll be $10000 per server.
That demonstrates that Microsoft's constant efforts to stop piracy are as much security theater as the airport security checkpoints are. This hassles/scares the false positive (botched WGA?) and does nothing, in the end, to stop the determined pirate.
Knowing their penchant for deceit, they'll include all the header data and protocol paddings in their calculations.
That will depend on how many web developers Microsoft can sweet-talk into a deal that includes the heavy use of EOT. ISO meets prescriptions-for-pens doctors.
But I agree that the impact will be negligible. They would have to make it a required IIS upgrade, and even then, it'll introduce enough problems that admins will avoid it like the plague.
Why, if that art department has the cash to shell out on frequent hardware upgrades for its computers, didn't they invest in a font server, or at least a decent font manager that doesn't load every single font in the C:\WINDOWS\FONTS folder? Assuming that graphics workstations are set up like ordinary desktop computers is the first major mistake of that department.
Remember Atari after the first video game market crash? "Oh, no, we're not doing games anymore, we're doing simulations." This, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons why business types scoff at computer games, because the very first successful market and company failed in the most spectacular way. Never mind that the next generation came along and made a killing, never mind that the industry learned all the valuable lessons from Atari and ended up gaining back all the lost ground, and then some. Never mind that none of the guys who want to sell games call them "simulations" anymore, unless maybe he's Will Wright or Sid Meier-- and their creations would be called "simulation games", anyway.
Even though electronic gaming is poised to overtake the film industry, some PHBs can't get their heads out of the early 1980s. That someone is 20 years late to the "simulation" stage says a lot about their marketers.
We might want to trawl through the USPTO pending patent database for that feature. Not that software patents are at all wise, of course, but we don't want to give Microsoft's legal department ammunition.
Suddenly, the silver-age Brainiac's demand for "a decent pair of pants"* takes on a new and more interesting meaning...
* Cartoon Network spoof mini-ad featuring Superman's villains.
(Conspiracy theorist disclaimer: I don't have evidence, this is just conjecture from a guy whose idea of strategy is Starcraft.)
I'm guessing that the GOP was trying to time the coming housing/financial disaster for the POTUS after Bush. If a Democrat is elected, leave him with a stinking pile on the Oval Office desk as a White House-warming gift. If a Republican is elected, blame the Congressional Democrats for preventing the GOP from killing Social Security and Medicare, like they've wanted to ever since Johnson enacted them*.
If that's the case, they've horribly mis-timed the burst bubble, and they're as much evil as they are fiscally foolish. They essentially had their Ghost drop a nuke, just as their fleet was passing by.
* At first, they were sincere about this as conservatives, but now they're just pandering to conservative voters if they mention either program being in their crosshairs.
Yeah, because with a few corpse wagons and some spiders, ziggurats can defend themselves just fine against terrorists. ... What were we talking about again?
Verizon didn't send the flyers, an ad agency did. All Verizon supplied them with was a list of cities they're deploying FIOS in, and zip codes don't necessarily indicate where they're going to lay fiber. So the ad agency tossed out a carpet-bombing's worth of fliers on the cities in question.
You would have a false advertising case, but all Verizon will say is, "Hey, we are building FIOS in your city."
I don't know if this is the case in your neck of the USA, but here in California, the telecoms split up the state into territories. Some are covered by Verizon, others by AT&T, etc. Apparently the general rule (which they, for some reason, keep hidden from prospective customers, not to mention the locations of the damned boundaries) is that each company does not invade a competitor's territory.
As an example, I can't get FIOS, no matter how much I beg the local Verizon office, because I'm in an AT&T territory. So it's U-Verse, cable, or wireless broadband for me, which is an exercise in deciding which pile of puke to eat.
Unreliable, but convenient, and that is sufficient for someone who wants to destroy another person's reputation, like a swiftboater.
Regarding 1 & 2, there is always some evidence in meatspace to refute or corroborate something on the 'Net. If the person's much too lazy or intellectually dishonest to find that concrete evidence, well, I don't think his word alone should be trusted.
Regarding employers, those who trawl the web looking for rumors aren't companies you would want to work for anyway. Real companies check references and the public record, which isn't always found online.
If I were the judge, I'd be tempted to release numerous false positives. The advantage is that after a couple of months, only the most fanatical of bloggers will try to uncover the real identities, while the rest will be rendered too disinterested to give a damn. The disadvantages are that I'll be accused of deception (and they'd be right) and unnecessary bias towards the accused, and the general public will be so disinterested in the courts that they'll practically ignore any ruling that comes out of them.
Dude, now I really want to re-settle in NZ, though I'd rather meet the judge in a LAN party rather than a courtroom.
There was a rash of tire failures a year or so ago, traced to shitty Chinese manufacturing.
They tried to trace the crummy tires to the thousands of mini-factories and warehouses in China, but that became an exercise in futility, so they ended up dumping all the liability on the importer.
It seems the Feds did the exact same thing in this case, were stymied by corrupt Chinese officials and the labyrinth of facilities there, and dumped the blame on one man.
Also known as Hanlon's Razor: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
I'll toss in another example: the NSA mass wiretapping scheme is probably much more of a conspiracy than 9/11. The spineless execs of the telecoms stayed quiet about the deal the Bush administration asked for months before 9/11, but all it took to blow the lid off of the conspiracy was the watchful eye and conscience of a single engineer: Mark Klein.
Those answers smell suspiciously like gasoline... I'll just breathe deeply until I feel nauseous.
There wasn't much in there about file-sharing (which is the sort of "piracy" that the media *AA cartels care about), so Biden could just as easily be talking about large-scale bootleggers who duplicate CDs and DVDs en masse and sell them on the black market.
In fact, the important quote may be his focus OUTSIDE the USA:
Granted, the USA and just about all Berne Convention signatories need to relax their copyright lockdown.