Only 7 (now 8) comments and they're already slashdotted. Way to go, guys.
Its like that cult who used to sell instructions on how to make your own UFO for $1000. Sure you can build something that you can call a NOC for $2000. But it won't be capable of running anything of importance. A slashdotting is pretty low on the scale of DDoS attacks.
A NOC is in large part a stage set. The purpose is to impress the customer. You are not going to be able to convince anyone that you are protecting important information without a very high degree of physical security. These turkeys don't even have a card access badge scanner. Most real NOCs go for multi-tier construction and biometric access controls.
There has been something of a retro trend amongst VCs, doing stuff for cheap is fashionable these days. I don't recommend the approach, having aquired companies who went that route. One was using $500 PCs when the cheapest you could get a production one for was $1500. Even though the PCs were 'only' for class use they were a false economy, they were slow and prone to break down. Pretty soon there was a frankenmachine effect, the machines were patched and repaired so often no two machines had the same configuration so you could not flash install an O/S. Great way to impress folk paying $800 per day for training.
I'd steer clear of these NOC folk, particularly if they wear black Nike sneakers or invite you to the local dinner for chicken pot pie (lets see who gets the obscure reference).
Ever thought about actually dicussing the topic? Would it be too crazy to actually talk about the capture and its effects on Iraq?
The effects are about as much as toppling Saddam's statue, almost none. Saddam was not comming back anyway. But US troops are no nearer to being able to withdraw without a new Saddam returning.
Its not so long ago that the US, Gulf states and the UK were supplying Saddam with weapons to fight the war he started against Iran.
One question that I don't expect an answer to is when will the turkeys running slashdot realise that their most popular stories these days are on politics?
Soldiers aren't robots and have minds of their own so not all of them will always agree with American foreign policy. But I'll bet more of them agree with us being in Iraq than agreed with us being in Somalia, and I'll bet the percentage of soldiers that agree with their mission is higher than the percentage of liberals in the U.S. that agree with the mission.
Point of fact here is that Bush mkI ordered the troops into Somalia, not Clinton. At the time the mission was pretty popular because it was seen as being widely supported by the locals. By the time people realized that it was an ill considered intervention in a civil war the helicopter had been shot down.
And, yes, it's probably going to score Bush a boost in the polls.
There is only one poll that counts, and defeating Saddam the first time round did not seem to do Bush mkI any good.
Your logic is severely flawed. By your train of thoughts here, shouldn't we retire all our police officers?
The purpose of a police officer is to uphold the rule of law. What we are seeing today in Iraq is the rule of power, not law. The Bush administration decided that it was above the rule of law.
As a matter of historical fact the US has consistently talked about the virtues of democracy while supporting any tyrant that happens to be convenient at the time. Iran actually had a democracy until the CIA decided that it was expedient to eliminate it and impose the shah as military dictator.
In this particular case there is every sign that Chalablai, the pentagon's favored replacement for Saddam is every bit as bad. He has already embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from the bank he ran in Jordan.
How dare you cast a shadow over this monumentous occation?
You sound just like John Ashcroft.
It is those like you who try to silence dissent with threats who cast the shaddows here.
Actually, the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in the Majority (Bolshevik) and Minority (Menshevik) factions didn't take place until after the first Russian revolution.
Well for starters the Bolshevick faction was actually the minority faction, they just called themselves the majority.
The first revolution in 1905 failed, the split in the party was final in 1912, before the first world war started.
The Mensheviks believed that Russia was not yet ready for the Glorious Socialist Revolution, though that's not even why they first split. It was an argument over who should be allowed in the party.
It was an argument over whether the party should be a party of the people or a party of the elite who supported Lenin.
It was the masses who deposed the Tsar, Lenin then deposed the masses. Substitute the US for masses and that is probably what just happened in Iraq.
A tremendous victory? Why? Do you think Iraqi resistance will stop because of this?
Did the Russian Revolution end with the capture of the Tzar?
The administration sees everything through the lens of their own preconceptions. They thought that the invasion would be greated with flowers from grateful Iraqis. They thought that it would be a cake walk. They even held the victory parade and declared 'Mission Accomplished' with Saddam still on the loose.
There is no shortage of would be Saddam replacements. The pentagon choice Chalabai is a thug with criminal convictions for BCCI scale embezlement in Jordan. There are plenty of jumped up clerics looking to become the next Ayatolah.
In the Russian revolution Lenin allowed the middle of the road Menchevick faction to do the hard work of overthrowing the Tzar. Then with the Tzar out of the way he replaced the Menchvicks with a second revolution.
There are a bunch of would be Ayatolahs waiting for the US to do their dirty work for them. All they need to do now is persuade the US to go home. Unfortunately the event that is cited most often in the arabic chat rooms is Reagan's decision to cut and run from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing.
Think about it: do you know anybody in the Moral Majority? No. The 'Moral Majority' faded away. Even Doctor Evil himself, John Ashcroft, doesn't shove his religion at people the way people trump it up.
The Moral Majority turned into the Christian Coalition. At this point it is not unusual for 70% of the board of a state republican party in the south to have come from the Christian Coalition.
The thing that has changed is that MM and CC are no longer able to bring out voters the way they once did. Having got their place in the party the apparachicks are less willing to work for it the way they once did.
Curious fact is that the Democrats regularly outpoll Republicans amongst Christians. The big divide is between the evangelicals who believe that the moral of the parable of the good samaritan is 'love thy neighbor' and the fundamentalists who claim the point Christ was making was the samaritan had the money to be able to afford to help.
Like Charlie Chaplan refused to use films with sound, and didn't think it was an appropriate art form.)
Not true. Chaplin made hundreds of films with sound - he started United Artists. Chaplin believed that his tramp character could not make the transition, that the first movie the tramp spoke in would be his last.
Chaplin was completely right as it turned out, the tramp spoke in the Great Dictator to denounce Hitler. Chaplin knew at the time it would be the end of the tramp as a movie icon but beleived that denouncing Hitler was more important.
If people take a look at Ansel Adam's books or his longstanding association with Land (Polaroid) it is obvious he would be looking at ways to exploit digital cameras if he was alive today.
As for objections to Adam's environmentalism. In his day the issues were very different. Saving the wilderness was considered the main issue of the day. Concern over fuel efficiency was much less important than saving Yosemite from being turned into a reservoir. Adams made his first visits with a mule to carry the cameras.
Ok- so you claim that these 450,000 people (90% of 500k) don't believe Bush was legitimately elected. Even though that is impossible to prove, lets assume it is true. There were over 105 million votes cast for President in 2000.
The candidate who gained the most votes was Gore. Clear majorities of Americans have called for the votes in Florida to be counted in polls as did four out of nine members of the supreme court. It is hardly an obscure or illegitimate belief.
Blanket dismissals and ad-hominem attacks by anonymous cowards do not change the fact that a lot of people believe this. If Diebold's CEO had spoken to some Democrats he would have understood just how seriously some people consider the threat of compromise of the election system.
I think that members of the NRA are often kooks, but that does not mean that I would not take their paranoid delusions into account if I was in the business of selling gun locks.
Yes, Jeb Bush plotted to STEAL the Florida vote, and he disenfranchised the Florida voters. This is why the voters hated him so much that they voted him out in a landslide in the last Gubernatorial election in that state.
The malpractice of Bush and Harriss is extensively documented.
My original claim was a substantial number of people believe George W. Bush was not legitimately elected. There are 500,000 individual donors to the Dean campaign and about 90% of them hold that view. In the wider public there are millions who believe that the Florida count should have taken place.
That substantial numbers of people hold these beliefs is a fact that only the most partisan would dispute. whether or not the belief is true is acctually irrelevant to the issue of Diebold's problems.
Maybe because there wasn't any grand conspiracy to begin with...
I seriously doubt that there was a grand conspiracy. The problem with the Diebold scandal was that the company simply did not understand the standard they would be held to or why they would be held to it.
If Diebold was really up to no good their CEO would not have been blabbing about it in GOP fundraising letters. The GOP is arrogant but they are not that stupid. Of course one does wonder about the sense of a CEO who makes that type of statement when a very large proportion of the population believe that the 2000 Presidential election was rigged by the GOP.
Diebold needs to have a change in attitude, to understand the issues from the point of view of the security community. I do not believe that there is anything intrinsically broken here that cannot be fixed. We can add security and audit trails to address these issues, the starting point is we need them to ask.
It is in nobody's interest to have uncertainty here. What Diebold needs to do is assemble a technical review panel of network security specialists with international reputations, listen to and implement the recommendations.
This is a reputation issue, there are technical means Diebold can use to improve their reputation.
If the UN claimed governance of the airwaves, wouldn't the FCC simply laugh?
No, the US has ceeded the cross-border allocation of frequencies to the ITU before the UN was established and the ITU has since been incorporated into the UN.
I spoke to Esther Dyson about the conference at lunch today, her version was nothing happened and that the best result that was going to happen...
Actually, the interest in shorting SCOX is very high these days (21%, whatever that means). Investors are expecting it to crash.
The short interest is the number of shares sold short. When stated as a percentage it is either of the total number of shares outstanding or the number of shares that are typically in play - the float.
Last I looked SCOX looked like it was a pretty dangerous short. The problem is that every one of those shares sold short must some day be bought back (unless SCOX goes under). To keep the short open you have to be able to borrow the shares.
What often happens with completely worthless companies is the short interest balloons, there is some temporary news item and an uptick in price, shorts are forced to buy shares to cover, price rises further, positive feedback kicks in. Its called a short squeeze.
In short, the relative security of 802.11[bg] is a red herring. They don't give a crap about that, and they won't change their mind if the security in their standard gets busted tomorrow.
If you are looking for an excuse for a non-tarrif trade barrier China picked a pretty good one here. The IEEE group that designed WEP was originally a closed US only cabal taking its security advice from the US NSA.
The 'standard' will be required for all WiFi gear sold in China, to gain access you have to have a license from one of 11 Chinese companies and the appropriate rake back paid to the party apparachiks.
Compare this to the US where to sell a television you are required to license certain technology (V-Chip, HDTV patents) held by US companies.
The US recently imposed tarrifs on textiles from China. They are almost certainly as illegal as the steel tarifs and the motivation is the same. China has probably observed that Bush was forced to back down after the EU threatened retaliation against US companies who made donnations to the Bush election fund and have large numbers of employees in key states
I'd be happy to have a Cuba style trade embargo in place with China till they have something aproaching free speach and many of the other provisions of the much abused US Bill of Rights.
China has rather more ecconomic leverage than the US. If China stops buying US bonds (they are the largest government purchaser) the US budget deficit and trade deficit would quickly reach crisis point.
The US budget deficit will be $500 billion this year. The major causes are the tax cuts and the sharply increased spending, particularly the Iraq war, the farm bill, Medicare. This administration has done practically nothing to restrain pork spending. The only difference being the pork is more heavily tipped to corporate welfare than social. The Medicare prescriptions bill has a $30 billion subsidy to the drugs companies. Even if the administration realized their goal of eliminating all discretionary spending on social programs in the federal budget there would be a large deficit.
The looting is not just threatening the ecconomic welfare of the US, it is threatening the security of the US.
>Says he who spent today clearing two feet of white stuff from the paths by hand today after the rubber band in the damn snowblower broke.
You insensitive clod, I live in Florida.
They have lots of mountains that could be hollowed out to make ideal bad-guy secret lairs.
Nah, this is just the latest idea in snow removal.
Says he who spent today clearing two feet of white stuff from the paths by hand today after the rubber band in the damn snowblower broke.
Its a pity they don't have snow down in Texas. Just think Dubya would have woken up thinking 'hey it must be Christmas', then spend the next five minutes looking for his nose spoon until he finaly remembered he had given it up.
Yeah, we need that laser driven snow clearing. Far fewer moving parts.
I think someone needs to persuade the folk doing the 9/11 memorial to look at lasers. At the moment they are proposing designs with 3000 odd lightbulbs. Chances of that being maintainable are zero. A much better way to do the same job is to shine a laser at a holographic plate. That way you could do names and even have different colors for different groups, the ones in the planes, the firefighters etc.
I live in Somverille, Massachusetts where paper ballots and optical scanners have been used for years. The systems is backed up by experienced poll workers. I've never heard of any problem, let alone a serious problem, with this system as it is implemented in my city.
You forget that here in Massachusetts, cradle of the revolution all the congressmen, both senators, a clear majority of the state house and practically all the statewide officials are Democrats and the only reason that Republicans seem to get elected seems to be people prefer to have someone to serve as a counterweight to one party government.
The point is not what the outcome of elections are when they are practically a formality. Nobody expects Massachusetts to be voting for Bush next November. The only reason political ads run on the Massachusetts TV stations is that people in New Hampshire watch the stations.
I think the concern over Diebold is misplaced. Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix. Diebold management might be solidly Republican but there is no way they could trust their engineers to join them in a criminal conspiracy. Its just too many people.
Its not like the situation in Florida where Katherine Harris was reportedly involved with the office manager of Choicepoint, the company who now admits it rigged the infamous 'scrub lists' used to keep legitimate black voters of the rolls on the grounds their names were similar to (four characters matched) those of convicted fellons (many of whom were still serving time and thus not merely ineligible to vote, incapable of doing so unless the Florida authorities sent out a postal ballot). See my sig for details on the Florida scandal.
The way that the vote is rigged in every country is you keep the wrong voters from the polls. In the US that means keeping black voters at home if you are Republican. You make it hard to register, you make the polling stations inconvenient for blacks and easy to get to for whites. At one time the KKK would appear at polling stations dressed in their pillow cases etc. Today there are 'poll watchers' who tend to challenge the credentials of black voters, or be assigned to the polls in black areas.
Then there was a whole different set of tricks used by Mayor Daley in Chicago. Basically the scheme there was they used a machine, a highly organized political group which would vote for people so they didn't have to. 'Vote early vote often'. That is why Nixon tried to have the Illinois ballot challenged in the 1960, only his problem was that the rural vote had also been fixed for his side... Actually although the 60 election was very close in the popular vote the electoral college was a much wider spread.
Yet another way of rigging the result was the way the Republicans stole the 1876 election. Of course this was before the parties switched over and the Democrats became the progressive party and the party of Lincoln became the party of pandering to diehard seggregationists. So you could call this one either way. The fix here wa to have the Supreme court throw out the ballots for enough sothern states to keep Tilden out of office. In the end the South got the best of the deal, in return for keeping quiet the Democrats agreed to end the 'reconstruction' penalties on the South. Part of which being allowing the south to start establishing the institutions of seggregation.
"Pulchritude" ?
God, what a HORRID-sounding word to use to mean "attractive"!!!
It is the scientific term. The units of pulchitrude are the Helen. One Helen being a face that launches a thousand ships, a milli Helen being a face that launches only one ship, a micro Helen is a face that launches a small proportion of a canoe.
my (and other people's) DNA is probably all over Linux. Ewwww! Gross! TMI, Linus!
I'm glad I never get invited to Linux parties with all this DNA exchange. Or maybe I would be if I thought the folk there exchanging the DNA would meet my standards for pulchitrude or gender (preferably both). Actually come to think I did get invited to the Linux geek cruise this year but had so much on I coldn't do it.
One wonders what a geek orgy would be like, the ancient greeks solved the gender ratio issue by hiring 'flute girls', I guess in the geek version you would have to log onto a porn site and watch them by cybercast. One wonders if philosophy undergrads would be more interesting if Socrates had not sent the flute girls away in 'The Symposium', or maybe nobody would have been in a state to write it up afterwards.
I suppose it would be acceptable to hire the flute girls via hotjobs or a web site specializing in that type of service if they existed.
So it is ok to gerrymander as long as it is done by Democrats? Did you ever consider that the Democrats was democratic for so long BECAUSE of gerrymandering? The state as a whole certainly does not reflect the current districting. This is fact, and the Supreme Court has previously ruled that this type of gerrymandering is illegal.
That is not what was happening. The GOP share of the house representatives was in line with their vote in that election. DeLay thought that if the districts were reorganized then people who had been voting for their democrat representative who had been shifted to another district might vote for a Republican.
Actually, if you read other less biased sources than this one, you will see there is an entirely different side to the Texas redistricting story. New district lines were not created after the last census due to partisan disagreements between the politacal parties in Texas. A judge arbitrated the existing boundaries.
You miss out one little detail, the judge had thrown out the map previously because it flunked the civil rights issue. So much for your 'less biased sources'.
I don't quite remember the numbers (read too lazy to look up) but the Texas legislature had PREVIOUSLY been gerrymandered to benefit the Democrats to the extreme that they now have a 3-4 congressional seat advantage, despite the fact that the state consistently votes overwhelmingly Republican.
That is not the result of gerrymandering, it is the result of incumbency. Texas has been Democratic for decades. The recent GOP advances came in the wake of a long tenure by Democrats. DeLay and cronies are upset that voters do not want to trade their existing democrats in for republicans to do his bidding.
Given the corrupt way the bill was forced through - changing the rules to fit the deed there is no moral reason the courts should defer to the legislature on this one.
Not hardly. The Democratic losses over the last half decade aren't a 'fluke' that can be overturned by a little election trickery. It's a historical trend, and it's not changing anytime soon.
Half a decade? That is five years, barely an election cycle. Methinks you are smoking something good, either that or Rush let you have some of his stash now he is on the waggon.
Electoral losses are most usually overturned by a depressed ecconomy, (Bush 1) a political scandal (Nixon/Ford) or a bungled war (LBJ's resignation). In this case we have all three, and no, one quarter does not win an election. We have had several false dawns in this recovery and the salient point is the fact that employment is not recovering, manufacturing is still depressed.
The demographic trends show Texas and Florida moving strongly towards the democrats over the next couple of decades. Do the math on the electoral college. I think that is why DeLay and co have given up on the long term and are just out to loot everything they can while they have the opportunity.
Slashdot Mirror
Its like that cult who used to sell instructions on how to make your own UFO for $1000. Sure you can build something that you can call a NOC for $2000. But it won't be capable of running anything of importance. A slashdotting is pretty low on the scale of DDoS attacks.
A NOC is in large part a stage set. The purpose is to impress the customer. You are not going to be able to convince anyone that you are protecting important information without a very high degree of physical security. These turkeys don't even have a card access badge scanner. Most real NOCs go for multi-tier construction and biometric access controls.
There has been something of a retro trend amongst VCs, doing stuff for cheap is fashionable these days. I don't recommend the approach, having aquired companies who went that route. One was using $500 PCs when the cheapest you could get a production one for was $1500. Even though the PCs were 'only' for class use they were a false economy, they were slow and prone to break down. Pretty soon there was a frankenmachine effect, the machines were patched and repaired so often no two machines had the same configuration so you could not flash install an O/S. Great way to impress folk paying $800 per day for training.
I'd steer clear of these NOC folk, particularly if they wear black Nike sneakers or invite you to the local dinner for chicken pot pie (lets see who gets the obscure reference).
The effects are about as much as toppling Saddam's statue, almost none. Saddam was not comming back anyway. But US troops are no nearer to being able to withdraw without a new Saddam returning.
Its not so long ago that the US, Gulf states and the UK were supplying Saddam with weapons to fight the war he started against Iran.
One question that I don't expect an answer to is when will the turkeys running slashdot realise that their most popular stories these days are on politics?
Point of fact here is that Bush mkI ordered the troops into Somalia, not Clinton. At the time the mission was pretty popular because it was seen as being widely supported by the locals. By the time people realized that it was an ill considered intervention in a civil war the helicopter had been shot down.
And, yes, it's probably going to score Bush a boost in the polls.
There is only one poll that counts, and defeating Saddam the first time round did not seem to do Bush mkI any good.
The purpose of a police officer is to uphold the rule of law. What we are seeing today in Iraq is the rule of power, not law. The Bush administration decided that it was above the rule of law.
As a matter of historical fact the US has consistently talked about the virtues of democracy while supporting any tyrant that happens to be convenient at the time. Iran actually had a democracy until the CIA decided that it was expedient to eliminate it and impose the shah as military dictator.
In this particular case there is every sign that Chalablai, the pentagon's favored replacement for Saddam is every bit as bad. He has already embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from the bank he ran in Jordan.
How dare you cast a shadow over this monumentous occation?
You sound just like John Ashcroft.
It is those like you who try to silence dissent with threats who cast the shaddows here.
Well for starters the Bolshevick faction was actually the minority faction, they just called themselves the majority.
The first revolution in 1905 failed, the split in the party was final in 1912, before the first world war started.
The Mensheviks believed that Russia was not yet ready for the Glorious Socialist Revolution, though that's not even why they first split. It was an argument over who should be allowed in the party.
It was an argument over whether the party should be a party of the people or a party of the elite who supported Lenin.
It was the masses who deposed the Tsar, Lenin then deposed the masses. Substitute the US for masses and that is probably what just happened in Iraq.
Did the Russian Revolution end with the capture of the Tzar?
The administration sees everything through the lens of their own preconceptions. They thought that the invasion would be greated with flowers from grateful Iraqis. They thought that it would be a cake walk. They even held the victory parade and declared 'Mission Accomplished' with Saddam still on the loose.
There is no shortage of would be Saddam replacements. The pentagon choice Chalabai is a thug with criminal convictions for BCCI scale embezlement in Jordan. There are plenty of jumped up clerics looking to become the next Ayatolah.
In the Russian revolution Lenin allowed the middle of the road Menchevick faction to do the hard work of overthrowing the Tzar. Then with the Tzar out of the way he replaced the Menchvicks with a second revolution.
There are a bunch of would be Ayatolahs waiting for the US to do their dirty work for them. All they need to do now is persuade the US to go home. Unfortunately the event that is cited most often in the arabic chat rooms is Reagan's decision to cut and run from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing.
The Moral Majority turned into the Christian Coalition. At this point it is not unusual for 70% of the board of a state republican party in the south to have come from the Christian Coalition.
The thing that has changed is that MM and CC are no longer able to bring out voters the way they once did. Having got their place in the party the apparachicks are less willing to work for it the way they once did.
Curious fact is that the Democrats regularly outpoll Republicans amongst Christians. The big divide is between the evangelicals who believe that the moral of the parable of the good samaritan is 'love thy neighbor' and the fundamentalists who claim the point Christ was making was the samaritan had the money to be able to afford to help.
Not true. Chaplin made hundreds of films with sound - he started United Artists. Chaplin believed that his tramp character could not make the transition, that the first movie the tramp spoke in would be his last.
Chaplin was completely right as it turned out, the tramp spoke in the Great Dictator to denounce Hitler. Chaplin knew at the time it would be the end of the tramp as a movie icon but beleived that denouncing Hitler was more important.
If people take a look at Ansel Adam's books or his longstanding association with Land (Polaroid) it is obvious he would be looking at ways to exploit digital cameras if he was alive today.
As for objections to Adam's environmentalism. In his day the issues were very different. Saving the wilderness was considered the main issue of the day. Concern over fuel efficiency was much less important than saving Yosemite from being turned into a reservoir. Adams made his first visits with a mule to carry the cameras.
The candidate who gained the most votes was Gore. Clear majorities of Americans have called for the votes in Florida to be counted in polls as did four out of nine members of the supreme court. It is hardly an obscure or illegitimate belief.
Blanket dismissals and ad-hominem attacks by anonymous cowards do not change the fact that a lot of people believe this. If Diebold's CEO had spoken to some Democrats he would have understood just how seriously some people consider the threat of compromise of the election system.
I think that members of the NRA are often kooks, but that does not mean that I would not take their paranoid delusions into account if I was in the business of selling gun locks.
The malpractice of Bush and Harriss is extensively documented.
My original claim was a substantial number of people believe George W. Bush was not legitimately elected. There are 500,000 individual donors to the Dean campaign and about 90% of them hold that view. In the wider public there are millions who believe that the Florida count should have taken place.
That substantial numbers of people hold these beliefs is a fact that only the most partisan would dispute. whether or not the belief is true is acctually irrelevant to the issue of Diebold's problems.
I seriously doubt that there was a grand conspiracy. The problem with the Diebold scandal was that the company simply did not understand the standard they would be held to or why they would be held to it.
If Diebold was really up to no good their CEO would not have been blabbing about it in GOP fundraising letters. The GOP is arrogant but they are not that stupid. Of course one does wonder about the sense of a CEO who makes that type of statement when a very large proportion of the population believe that the 2000 Presidential election was rigged by the GOP.
Diebold needs to have a change in attitude, to understand the issues from the point of view of the security community. I do not believe that there is anything intrinsically broken here that cannot be fixed. We can add security and audit trails to address these issues, the starting point is we need them to ask.
It is in nobody's interest to have uncertainty here. What Diebold needs to do is assemble a technical review panel of network security specialists with international reputations, listen to and implement the recommendations.
This is a reputation issue, there are technical means Diebold can use to improve their reputation.
Michael Moore is a blowhard, the left wing equivalent of Rush Lumbago.
No, the US has ceeded the cross-border allocation of frequencies to the ITU before the UN was established and the ITU has since been incorporated into the UN.
I spoke to Esther Dyson about the conference at lunch today, her version was nothing happened and that the best result that was going to happen...
The short interest is the number of shares sold short. When stated as a percentage it is either of the total number of shares outstanding or the number of shares that are typically in play - the float.
Last I looked SCOX looked like it was a pretty dangerous short. The problem is that every one of those shares sold short must some day be bought back (unless SCOX goes under). To keep the short open you have to be able to borrow the shares.
What often happens with completely worthless companies is the short interest balloons, there is some temporary news item and an uptick in price, shorts are forced to buy shares to cover, price rises further, positive feedback kicks in. Its called a short squeeze.
If you are looking for an excuse for a non-tarrif trade barrier China picked a pretty good one here. The IEEE group that designed WEP was originally a closed US only cabal taking its security advice from the US NSA.
The 'standard' will be required for all WiFi gear sold in China, to gain access you have to have a license from one of 11 Chinese companies and the appropriate rake back paid to the party apparachiks.
Compare this to the US where to sell a television you are required to license certain technology (V-Chip, HDTV patents) held by US companies.
The US recently imposed tarrifs on textiles from China. They are almost certainly as illegal as the steel tarifs and the motivation is the same. China has probably observed that Bush was forced to back down after the EU threatened retaliation against US companies who made donnations to the Bush election fund and have large numbers of employees in key states
China has rather more ecconomic leverage than the US. If China stops buying US bonds (they are the largest government purchaser) the US budget deficit and trade deficit would quickly reach crisis point.
The US budget deficit will be $500 billion this year. The major causes are the tax cuts and the sharply increased spending, particularly the Iraq war, the farm bill, Medicare. This administration has done practically nothing to restrain pork spending. The only difference being the pork is more heavily tipped to corporate welfare than social. The Medicare prescriptions bill has a $30 billion subsidy to the drugs companies. Even if the administration realized their goal of eliminating all discretionary spending on social programs in the federal budget there would be a large deficit.
The looting is not just threatening the ecconomic welfare of the US, it is threatening the security of the US.
Yeah, but Reagan is no longer President.
Mind you say what you like about Reagan, he is a lot smarter than Dubya.
You insensitive clod, I live in Florida.
Knee deep in chads still eh?
Nah, this is just the latest idea in snow removal.
Says he who spent today clearing two feet of white stuff from the paths by hand today after the rubber band in the damn snowblower broke.
Its a pity they don't have snow down in Texas. Just think Dubya would have woken up thinking 'hey it must be Christmas', then spend the next five minutes looking for his nose spoon until he finaly remembered he had given it up.
Yeah, we need that laser driven snow clearing. Far fewer moving parts.
I think someone needs to persuade the folk doing the 9/11 memorial to look at lasers. At the moment they are proposing designs with 3000 odd lightbulbs. Chances of that being maintainable are zero. A much better way to do the same job is to shine a laser at a holographic plate. That way you could do names and even have different colors for different groups, the ones in the planes, the firefighters etc.
You forget that here in Massachusetts, cradle of the revolution all the congressmen, both senators, a clear majority of the state house and practically all the statewide officials are Democrats and the only reason that Republicans seem to get elected seems to be people prefer to have someone to serve as a counterweight to one party government.
The point is not what the outcome of elections are when they are practically a formality. Nobody expects Massachusetts to be voting for Bush next November. The only reason political ads run on the Massachusetts TV stations is that people in New Hampshire watch the stations.
I think the concern over Diebold is misplaced. Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix. Diebold management might be solidly Republican but there is no way they could trust their engineers to join them in a criminal conspiracy. Its just too many people.
Its not like the situation in Florida where Katherine Harris was reportedly involved with the office manager of Choicepoint, the company who now admits it rigged the infamous 'scrub lists' used to keep legitimate black voters of the rolls on the grounds their names were similar to (four characters matched) those of convicted fellons (many of whom were still serving time and thus not merely ineligible to vote, incapable of doing so unless the Florida authorities sent out a postal ballot). See my sig for details on the Florida scandal.
The way that the vote is rigged in every country is you keep the wrong voters from the polls. In the US that means keeping black voters at home if you are Republican. You make it hard to register, you make the polling stations inconvenient for blacks and easy to get to for whites. At one time the KKK would appear at polling stations dressed in their pillow cases etc. Today there are 'poll watchers' who tend to challenge the credentials of black voters, or be assigned to the polls in black areas.
Then there was a whole different set of tricks used by Mayor Daley in Chicago. Basically the scheme there was they used a machine, a highly organized political group which would vote for people so they didn't have to. 'Vote early vote often'. That is why Nixon tried to have the Illinois ballot challenged in the 1960, only his problem was that the rural vote had also been fixed for his side... Actually although the 60 election was very close in the popular vote the electoral college was a much wider spread.
Yet another way of rigging the result was the way the Republicans stole the 1876 election. Of course this was before the parties switched over and the Democrats became the progressive party and the party of Lincoln became the party of pandering to diehard seggregationists. So you could call this one either way. The fix here wa to have the Supreme court throw out the ballots for enough sothern states to keep Tilden out of office. In the end the South got the best of the deal, in return for keeping quiet the Democrats agreed to end the 'reconstruction' penalties on the South. Part of which being allowing the south to start establishing the institutions of seggregation.
It is the scientific term. The units of pulchitrude are the Helen. One Helen being a face that launches a thousand ships, a milli Helen being a face that launches only one ship, a micro Helen is a face that launches a small proportion of a canoe.
Ewwww! Gross! TMI, Linus!
I'm glad I never get invited to Linux parties with all this DNA exchange. Or maybe I would be if I thought the folk there exchanging the DNA would meet my standards for pulchitrude or gender (preferably both). Actually come to think I did get invited to the Linux geek cruise this year but had so much on I coldn't do it.
One wonders what a geek orgy would be like, the ancient greeks solved the gender ratio issue by hiring 'flute girls', I guess in the geek version you would have to log onto a porn site and watch them by cybercast. One wonders if philosophy undergrads would be more interesting if Socrates had not sent the flute girls away in 'The Symposium', or maybe nobody would have been in a state to write it up afterwards.
I suppose it would be acceptable to hire the flute girls via hotjobs or a web site specializing in that type of service if they existed.
That is not what was happening. The GOP share of the house representatives was in line with their vote in that election. DeLay thought that if the districts were reorganized then people who had been voting for their democrat representative who had been shifted to another district might vote for a Republican.
You miss out one little detail, the judge had thrown out the map previously because it flunked the civil rights issue. So much for your 'less biased sources'.
I don't quite remember the numbers (read too lazy to look up) but the Texas legislature had PREVIOUSLY been gerrymandered to benefit the Democrats to the extreme that they now have a 3-4 congressional seat advantage, despite the fact that the state consistently votes overwhelmingly Republican.
That is not the result of gerrymandering, it is the result of incumbency. Texas has been Democratic for decades. The recent GOP advances came in the wake of a long tenure by Democrats. DeLay and cronies are upset that voters do not want to trade their existing democrats in for republicans to do his bidding.
Given the corrupt way the bill was forced through - changing the rules to fit the deed there is no moral reason the courts should defer to the legislature on this one.
Half a decade? That is five years, barely an election cycle. Methinks you are smoking something good, either that or Rush let you have some of his stash now he is on the waggon.
Electoral losses are most usually overturned by a depressed ecconomy, (Bush 1) a political scandal (Nixon/Ford) or a bungled war (LBJ's resignation). In this case we have all three, and no, one quarter does not win an election. We have had several false dawns in this recovery and the salient point is the fact that employment is not recovering, manufacturing is still depressed.
The demographic trends show Texas and Florida moving strongly towards the democrats over the next couple of decades. Do the math on the electoral college. I think that is why DeLay and co have given up on the long term and are just out to loot everything they can while they have the opportunity.