The problem is that Harry Reid has no balls. He gave the Republicans everything they asked for, and then they complained the bill was too long.
You want a small bill? How about this: let any business or individual buy into Medicare at a price set actuarially to reduce the program contribution to combined state and federal deficit by some fixed figure; let's say a half trillion dollars over the course of a decade. That's roughly the net effect of the current bill. Subsequently premiums would be set so that the net change in government debt over the coming decade would be 0. Three would be no change in regulation of private insurance. Private insurers would be free to shed their sick patients on the Medicare. To discourage this, higher co-payments would be required for patients priced out of their private insurance by being sick, but with hardship exceptions. Even so, private insurance would be free to dump their unprofitable patients on the government, rather than on health care providers' charity. They'd have to moderate that practice only to the degree a rational person might question the value of an insurance product that does not insure.
This bill is pretty much the Republican counter-proposal to Clinton's health plan. Does it include every idea that Republicans have dreamed up in the last year? No. But based on their track record they ought to be able to get the Democrats to sign on to many of those, too.
Slashdot is packed with the entitlement generation...
You mean, people born since 1935? Wow, that's a mind-bender.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Informative
People might think you're joking when you say "go to reading", but the CBO report is only 25 pages, and the tables are very compact sources of interesting information.
Here's an interesting fact I gleaned from Table 2. In 2010, 40 million people get their insurance through Medicaid, the government program to provide insurance to the poor. In 2019, despite broadening Medicaid eligibility, that number drops to 35 million.
At the same time the number of people getting *private* insurance goes from 150 to 162 million.
So *some* of the savings are due to something that looks very much like *privatizing* some of the services currently provided through Medicaid. On the other hand, the combined cost of Medicaid and CHIP jumps to 29 billion/year in 2014 and 98 billion/year in 2019. The total increase in outlays for Medicaid and CHIP in the next decade will be increased by 434 billion total.
Alarming, isn't it? But still this bill manages to cut the Federal deficit by 138 billion over the same period. Yet the net increases in program spending are actually quite small, more like 7 billion over the coming decade, most of which goes into bringing provider payments up to market rate. So how do we get from 7 billion to 434 billion?
What you need to know is that Medicaid and CHIP are jointly funded by states and the Federal government, and that under this legislation the Federal government share of Medicaid goes from 57% to 90%, and of CHIP from 70% to 93%. So the 434 billion represents a 427 billion dollar decrease in *state* deficits, not even counting the effect of a 12.5% reduction in case load.
The infamous sweetheart deals we've been hearing about (the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase) amount to something like 1/8 of a percent of this 427 billion. The Cornhusker Kickback has been removed in reconciliation, but Mary Landrieu successfully argued that the "Louisiana Purchase", a Medicaid subsidy that ends in 2016, was necessary to help the state complete its recovery from Katrina. This accounts for 300 million of the 427 billion, less than 1/10 of a percent.
So to recap, the bill reduces the Federal deficit by 138 billion, and state deficits by well over four hundred billion dollars.
What's funny is that the Viacom employees engaging in this amateur cloak-and-dagger stuff apparently thought Google* wouldn't be able to piece together the evidence. What were they thinking?
Drama is not a medium Tolkien wrote for, so we can expect The Hobbit, like the LotR film trilogy, to be largely paraphrase. The Hobbit film will be a different story set in the same world, more or less following the events of the novel.
That said,the vast world Tolkien created practically begs for more stories to be written in that setting. It's a shame that copyright prevents this. Little of what would be written would do it justice, but it's not like there's a lack of writing genius in the world. Neil Gaiman could do wonderful things with that world. It wouldn't be Tolkien of course, but it would definitely have echoes. Gaiman is one of the most unpretentiously erudite writers I can think of.
As impressive as the Silmarillion is as an exercise in world building, it lacks the narrative ingenuity and poetic diction of LotR and even the humble *Hobbit*. The sheer scale and grandeur of the stories almost overshadows the characters in them. It is the personal urgency of doing the right thing that drives the action of LotR, at the end of which we see the entire providential tapestry. The characters of the Silmarillion are largely trapped by fate in a doomed struggle with a foe far beyond their strength. It's extremely un-dramatic. There's hardly any dialog.
Not that this couldn't be shaped into drama, but you'd need a Shakespeare to do it justice. I like to imagine what he'd do with the Akallabêth.
Well, I read *The Hobbit* to my son when he was in 2nd grade. After I read the last word on the last page, the instant I set the book down he said, "Can we read *The Hobbit 2* next?"
Poor kid. That's just how I feel.
*The Hobbit* is greatly underestimated by even Tolkien fans, who pooh-pooh it because it's not LotR. The tone of the story is a bit condescending at first, something that Tolkien himself expressed dissatisfaction with in later years, but as in LotR there's a lot going on under the surface of *The Hobbit*. It's a story well worth serious study. Achieving that in story so readable and enjoyable on a superficial level is a tremendous achievement.
I think you're right. We don't want to fall into the etymological fallacy here, but I think it's true that the word has never quite lost its piggish associations. It carries the connotation of persistent, incurable grumbling.
You could make the same argument for a strategy which, as far as I know, we do not currently employ: assassination squads. If we were to put American citizens on a list of people to be killed by commandos in a night raid as they sit in their homes, that'd be a big deal. That's the big kill strategy. You find out where the target is living and you blow the house to bits from thousands of miles away from a practically undetectable weapons platform.
Now this would be a mere "slippery slope" argument, were not not for the fuzziness of the line between "criminal suspect" and "enemy combatant". If you believe certain people, say John Yoo, the president can do *anything* to *anyone* so long as in his judgment it is useful in a war effort. Now get really fuzzy about "war" is and where the "battlefield" is, and you've just made the case that the president can execute American citizens if in his sole judgment it is in the national interest.
"Of course", you may think, "no President would use that power for political ends. It's just a paranoid fantasy." Maybe so. But under this scenario, if we accept the notion that the President is free from Congressional or judicial restraint and regulation when acting in his capacity of Commander in Chief, there is no formal legal obstacle to the President murdering his political enemies if he sincerely believes they are enemies of the state.
Fortunately, I think that notion is constitutionally broken. The Constitution clearly recognizes the need for considerable presidential autonomy in war fighting, that is only within the limits Congress sets.
"Disgruntled" is a word with very interesting origins. On the surface, it is one of those words (like "non-chalant") that appears to be a compound suggesting a non existent opposite word (like "chalant")
The OED cites P.D. Wodehouse for "gruntled", but obviously Wodehouse was playing with the language here when he suggests that it means "satisfied". "Gruntle" is actually a word, but it is an obsolete one. It is not the opposite of "gruntle". "Gruntle"/"disgruntle" is a word pair more like "flammable"/"inflammable"; the "in-" prefix in "inflammable" is not the "in-" that means "not" ; it is the "in-" prefix that means "in, into or onto". The "in-" in "inflammable" is a cognate of the prefix "en-", as in "enraged".
"Dis-" in "disgruntled" is from a much rarer and erudite Latin sense of "dis", one that means "utterly". Both the "utterly" sense of "dis" and the "not"/"lack"/"opposite of" senses come from a Proto-Indo-European root mean "to separate".
So we should take "disgruntled" to mean "utterly gruntled", not "un-gruntled". So what is "gruntle" supposed to mean? Technically, "gruntle" is the frequentive form of "grunt". A "frequentive" verb is one that indicates a continual, incessant action. The word "gruntle" originally came into English meaning the incessant sounds made by an inconsolably upset pig. Later by metonymy it came also refer to the pig's snout (the part he gruntles with), and later the word was used to describe the faces of people in an unpleasant mood. There are not so many useful Latin prefixes for amplification, and "supergruntled" does not trip off the tongue, so "disgruntled" became the word for a person whose face expressed a very unpleasant mood.
I don't know if this counts as being "locked in the library", but my kids are 14 and 11 years old, and I still read to them every night. I started reading to them while they were in the womb -- not as an experiment, but because my wife and I read to each other. By the time they were in kindergarten, most of their favorite books were things like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels or P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. When my daughter's fourth grade class was assigned the task of picking a favorite poem to read, she already had a choice: Coleridge's *Rime of the Ancient Mariner* (although they didn't let her read the whole thing).
<litotes_alert>So, not surprisingly, my kids do OK in reading and language arts.</litotes_alert>
Now here's the point: my 11 year old son is a video game fanatic. He's the gaming consultant of his set. We often get calls on the weekend asking for a play date because one of his friends is stuck on some new game. I don't know how that happened, since neither of his parents are into gaming.
We aren't parents who put a great deal of credence in parenting theories and fads. For example, we don't push sex roles one way or the other. We would have happily let him play with the pink plastic toy kitchen Grandma bought his sister. He wasn't that interested, and we didn't fret about that, either. We're not fussed over whether he'll grow up manly enough, or *too* manly. We don't care, so long as he grows up happy. But from the time he could sit up in a stroller, he was crazy about trucks. Every time we passed a truck, he had to touch it. It was that way with video games.
One of the few parenting ideologies we had was anti-video game. We weren't going to have one in the house. But from the time that he knew video games existed, it was just like with the trucks. He was nuts about games. Most of his art work was about video games. When he was old enough to write, everything he wrote involved games. He asked us for books on gaming strategies and cheats and he studied them until he knew games he'd never even seen in minute detail.
So we said to ourselves, "What the hell. He's spending all this time obsessing about games, he might as well get to play them." We bought him a console and a portable. It's slightly terrifying the way he systematically takes apart each new game. It's a bit of a time waster, but it usually doesn't take him very long and then he has time for other things.
And guess what? He's doing fine in school. And he likes reading almost as much and demands to be read to every night.
It boils down to our one philosophy of parenting, which is that we can't insulate our kids from bad influences completely. What's more important is to expose kids to *good* influences. Armed with the knowledge and abilities gained from good influences, many influences that might be bad become useful experiences as well. Video games sharpen my son's problem solving skills, because he has *other* things in his life like reading and sports that complement them. If he didn't have those things, I might be worried about the impact of gaming on his development, but as large as they loom in his life, they're only part of it, along with friends, family and reading.
Well, it is sort of *like* a contract, but it is definitely *not* a contract in any reasonable sense of the word.
Is it possible to be a party to a contract without consenting? Well, did *you* vote for the Constitution? How about all the people who voted *against* ratification. Are they a party to the "contract"?
No. The Constitution is *a* constitution; not a contract. It is not a binding agreement between two parties, it is a specification for the structure, function, and limitations of government. We the people can use its terms to call the government to account, but that's a very different process than calling being party to a breach of contract suit. For one thing if it *were* like a contract suit, that suit would be adjudicated in a court *which is constituted by the Constitution*.
Well, more specifically we're talking the Interstate Commerce Clause. If states can externalize the cost of environmental destruction and reap all the tax revenue benefits, that's *precisely* the kind of thing the clause was intended to address.
I have a simpler conclusion... Most users are idiots!
You're only half right. It turns out that most users are *selfish* idiots.
I used to feel a little bad about hating users. I was afraid it might be arrogant to despise the people who, ultimately, justify my salary. But now I see they deserve whatever they get.
What they're talking about websites that are critical of human rights in Iran. Their contention is that all the bad news about Iran is a western psy-ops ploy.
Calling such sites "spy websites" is not an oxymoron by any means. Spying isn't just about getting information; it's about planting disinformation too.
The domains they are targeting mostly belong to one "KEYVAN RAFIEE", with a contact address in a small suburban condo building in Silver Spring MD. It is also the same address used for a small media production company. Some of the domains under that name have as contract address a private home in Woodland CA.
Overall, this not inconsistent with this Mr. Rafiee being a private human rights activist, nor with him being a frontman for a US intelligence operation.
That said, the most credible explanation is this is just disinformation on Iran's part. We've all seen the riots, which were definitely not staged. We've all heard the pronouncements of Mr. Ahmadinejad, which stink of propaganda. This does not mean *we* don't have our own propaganda, but it's clear that the Iranian government would try to portray any criticism as being from the CIA, especially given the CIA's unfortunate history in that country.
I was joking. I have offered small contributions to several projects.
Probably my biggest contribution has been bug reports. Being a developer myself, I can write a *killer* bug report. I reckon that if people are giving me free software, the least I can do is save them some time.
Recently I offered to write documentation for an open source product I use. This was a valuable offer; I'm not a tech writer, but I have considerable experience both as a developer and product manager, so I know what documentation needs to do.
The project (which will remain nameless) had had a pretty good quickstart several year ago, but they are hopelessly out of date. Not only are many of the features used in the quickstarts deprecated, a lot of them are unmaintained and don't work properly. On the other hand, the user guide is really, really bad. It's written from a coder's perspective. There's lots of handwaving philosophical discussion and patting themselves on the back about how brilliant the project's ideas are, but very little guide a to how to do any of the things the users were likely to want to do.
So I made an offer. I'd write a tutorial quickstart and HOWTO that would guide users through the basic mechanics of the system, then provide step by step examples that would teach the users not only how to do specific things, but also be indexed to concepts in the user guides.
The response was that they'd accept the documentation on two conditions. (1) I had to join their developer group, use their source control system (which I'd have to learn because it was not cvs, git, or svn) and submit any documentation as patches. (2) I had to subscribe to their developer mailing list.
It was silly. All they needed to do is say "yes, give it a shot and we'll tell you whether we like it or not," and a week later I'd have given them a key missing piece that none of them were willing to tackle themselves.
But we aren't talking about Linux. We're talking about OpenBSD, arguably the most security conscious operating system in common use today.
While it wouldn't be accurate to say OpenBSD never has any security holes, it is fair to say that remote exploits are exceedingly rare. Since 1996 there have only been two remote exploits in the default install of OpenBSD. While that is as much due to the fact the default install is more locked down than you're realistically going keep your system, that in itself is a reasonable stance to take if you have a belt-and-suspenders view of security.
If it were all just arrogance, they'd ship an OS with all kinds of stuff turned on that users will "almost always" want, claiming that their code review and API changes made that practice safe.
Let me explain the difference: The Democrats pretend this is good for you. The Republicans pretend what is good of their corporate masters is good for you.
Slashdot Mirror
How about iButton crypto cufflinks?
The problem is that Harry Reid has no balls. He gave the Republicans everything they asked for, and then they complained the bill was too long.
You want a small bill? How about this: let any business or individual buy into Medicare at a price set actuarially to reduce the program contribution to combined state and federal deficit by some fixed figure; let's say a half trillion dollars over the course of a decade. That's roughly the net effect of the current bill. Subsequently premiums would be set so that the net change in government debt over the coming decade would be 0. Three would be no change in regulation of private insurance. Private insurers would be free to shed their sick patients on the Medicare. To discourage this, higher co-payments would be required for patients priced out of their private insurance by being sick, but with hardship exceptions. Even so, private insurance would be free to dump their unprofitable patients on the government, rather than on health care providers' charity. They'd have to moderate that practice only to the degree a rational person might question the value of an insurance product that does not insure.
This bill is pretty much the Republican counter-proposal to Clinton's health plan. Does it include every idea that Republicans have dreamed up in the last year? No. But based on their track record they ought to be able to get the Democrats to sign on to many of those, too.
Slashdot is packed with the entitlement generation...
You mean, people born since 1935? Wow, that's a mind-bender.
People might think you're joking when you say "go to reading", but the CBO report is only 25 pages, and the tables are very compact sources of interesting information.
Here's an interesting fact I gleaned from Table 2. In 2010, 40 million people get their insurance through Medicaid, the government program to provide insurance to the poor. In 2019, despite broadening Medicaid eligibility, that number drops to 35 million.
At the same time the number of people getting *private* insurance goes from 150 to 162 million.
So *some* of the savings are due to something that looks very much like *privatizing* some of the services currently provided through Medicaid. On the other hand, the combined cost of Medicaid and CHIP jumps to 29 billion/year in 2014 and 98 billion/year in 2019. The total increase in outlays for Medicaid and CHIP in the next decade will be increased by 434 billion total.
Alarming, isn't it? But still this bill manages to cut the Federal deficit by 138 billion over the same period. Yet the net increases in program spending are actually quite small, more like 7 billion over the coming decade, most of which goes into bringing provider payments up to market rate. So how do we get from 7 billion to 434 billion?
What you need to know is that Medicaid and CHIP are jointly funded by states and the Federal government, and that under this legislation the Federal government share of Medicaid goes from 57% to 90%, and of CHIP from 70% to 93%. So the 434 billion represents a 427 billion dollar decrease in *state* deficits, not even counting the effect of a 12.5% reduction in case load.
The infamous sweetheart deals we've been hearing about (the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase) amount to something like 1/8 of a percent of this 427 billion. The Cornhusker Kickback has been removed in reconciliation, but Mary Landrieu successfully argued that the "Louisiana Purchase", a Medicaid subsidy that ends in 2016, was necessary to help the state complete its recovery from Katrina. This accounts for 300 million of the 427 billion, less than 1/10 of a percent.
So to recap, the bill reduces the Federal deficit by 138 billion, and state deficits by well over four hundred billion dollars.
What's funny is that the Viacom employees engaging in this amateur cloak-and-dagger stuff apparently thought Google* wouldn't be able to piece together the evidence. What were they thinking?
I'm agnostic on that.
Drama is not a medium Tolkien wrote for, so we can expect The Hobbit, like the LotR film trilogy, to be largely paraphrase. The Hobbit film will be a different story set in the same world, more or less following the events of the novel.
That said,the vast world Tolkien created practically begs for more stories to be written in that setting. It's a shame that copyright prevents this. Little of what would be written would do it justice, but it's not like there's a lack of writing genius in the world. Neil Gaiman could do wonderful things with that world. It wouldn't be Tolkien of course, but it would definitely have echoes. Gaiman is one of the most unpretentiously erudite writers I can think of.
I doubt it.
As impressive as the Silmarillion is as an exercise in world building, it lacks the narrative ingenuity and poetic diction of LotR and even the humble *Hobbit*. The sheer scale and grandeur of the stories almost overshadows the characters in them. It is the personal urgency of doing the right thing that drives the action of LotR, at the end of which we see the entire providential tapestry. The characters of the Silmarillion are largely trapped by fate in a doomed struggle with a foe far beyond their strength. It's extremely un-dramatic. There's hardly any dialog.
Not that this couldn't be shaped into drama, but you'd need a Shakespeare to do it justice. I like to imagine what he'd do with the Akallabêth.
That won't be a problem. They can digitally youthen them by a decade without washing over the nuances of their performances.
Well, I read *The Hobbit* to my son when he was in 2nd grade. After I read the last word on the last page, the instant I set the book down he said, "Can we read *The Hobbit 2* next?"
Poor kid. That's just how I feel.
*The Hobbit* is greatly underestimated by even Tolkien fans, who pooh-pooh it because it's not LotR. The tone of the story is a bit condescending at first, something that Tolkien himself expressed dissatisfaction with in later years, but as in LotR there's a lot going on under the surface of *The Hobbit*. It's a story well worth serious study. Achieving that in story so readable and enjoyable on a superficial level is a tremendous achievement.
I think you're right. We don't want to fall into the etymological fallacy here, but I think it's true that the word has never quite lost its piggish associations. It carries the connotation of persistent, incurable grumbling.
It's different because it's remote, stealthy war.
You could make the same argument for a strategy which, as far as I know, we do not currently employ: assassination squads. If we were to put American citizens on a list of people to be killed by commandos in a night raid as they sit in their homes, that'd be a big deal. That's the big kill strategy. You find out where the target is living and you blow the house to bits from thousands of miles away from a practically undetectable weapons platform.
Now this would be a mere "slippery slope" argument, were not not for the fuzziness of the line between "criminal suspect" and "enemy combatant". If you believe certain people, say John Yoo, the president can do *anything* to *anyone* so long as in his judgment it is useful in a war effort. Now get really fuzzy about "war" is and where the "battlefield" is, and you've just made the case that the president can execute American citizens if in his sole judgment it is in the national interest.
"Of course", you may think, "no President would use that power for political ends. It's just a paranoid fantasy." Maybe so. But under this scenario, if we accept the notion that the President is free from Congressional or judicial restraint and regulation when acting in his capacity of Commander in Chief, there is no formal legal obstacle to the President murdering his political enemies if he sincerely believes they are enemies of the state.
Fortunately, I think that notion is constitutionally broken. The Constitution clearly recognizes the need for considerable presidential autonomy in war fighting, that is only within the limits Congress sets.
"Disgruntled" is a word with very interesting origins. On the surface, it is one of those words (like "non-chalant") that appears to be a compound suggesting a non existent opposite word (like "chalant")
The OED cites P.D. Wodehouse for "gruntled", but obviously Wodehouse was playing with the language here when he suggests that it means "satisfied". "Gruntle" is actually a word, but it is an obsolete one. It is not the opposite of "gruntle". "Gruntle"/"disgruntle" is a word pair more like "flammable"/"inflammable"; the "in-" prefix in "inflammable" is not the "in-" that means "not" ; it is the "in-" prefix that means "in, into or onto". The "in-" in "inflammable" is a cognate of the prefix "en-", as in "enraged".
"Dis-" in "disgruntled" is from a much rarer and erudite Latin sense of "dis", one that means "utterly". Both the "utterly" sense of "dis" and the "not"/"lack"/"opposite of" senses come from a Proto-Indo-European root mean "to separate".
So we should take "disgruntled" to mean "utterly gruntled", not "un-gruntled". So what is "gruntle" supposed to mean? Technically, "gruntle" is the frequentive form of "grunt". A "frequentive" verb is one that indicates a continual, incessant action. The word "gruntle" originally came into English meaning the incessant sounds made by an inconsolably upset pig. Later by metonymy it came also refer to the pig's snout (the part he gruntles with), and later the word was used to describe the faces of people in an unpleasant mood. There are not so many useful Latin prefixes for amplification, and "supergruntled" does not trip off the tongue, so "disgruntled" became the word for a person whose face expressed a very unpleasant mood.
... and refuse to open the pod bay door for you.
I don't know if this counts as being "locked in the library", but my kids are 14 and 11 years old, and I still read to them every night. I started reading to them while they were in the womb -- not as an experiment, but because my wife and I read to each other. By the time they were in kindergarten, most of their favorite books were things like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels or P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. When my daughter's fourth grade class was assigned the task of picking a favorite poem to read, she already had a choice: Coleridge's *Rime of the Ancient Mariner* (although they didn't let her read the whole thing).
<litotes_alert>So, not surprisingly, my kids do OK in reading and language arts.</litotes_alert>
Now here's the point: my 11 year old son is a video game fanatic. He's the gaming consultant of his set. We often get calls on the weekend asking for a play date because one of his friends is stuck on some new game. I don't know how that happened, since neither of his parents are into gaming.
We aren't parents who put a great deal of credence in parenting theories and fads. For example, we don't push sex roles one way or the other. We would have happily let him play with the pink plastic toy kitchen Grandma bought his sister. He wasn't that interested, and we didn't fret about that, either. We're not fussed over whether he'll grow up manly enough, or *too* manly. We don't care, so long as he grows up happy. But from the time he could sit up in a stroller, he was crazy about trucks. Every time we passed a truck, he had to touch it. It was that way with video games.
One of the few parenting ideologies we had was anti-video game. We weren't going to have one in the house. But from the time that he knew video games existed, it was just like with the trucks. He was nuts about games. Most of his art work was about video games. When he was old enough to write, everything he wrote involved games. He asked us for books on gaming strategies and cheats and he studied them until he knew games he'd never even seen in minute detail.
So we said to ourselves, "What the hell. He's spending all this time obsessing about games, he might as well get to play them." We bought him a console and a portable. It's slightly terrifying the way he systematically takes apart each new game. It's a bit of a time waster, but it usually doesn't take him very long and then he has time for other things.
And guess what? He's doing fine in school. And he likes reading almost as much and demands to be read to every night.
It boils down to our one philosophy of parenting, which is that we can't insulate our kids from bad influences completely. What's more important is to expose kids to *good* influences. Armed with the knowledge and abilities gained from good influences, many influences that might be bad become useful experiences as well. Video games sharpen my son's problem solving skills, because he has *other* things in his life like reading and sports that complement them. If he didn't have those things, I might be worried about the impact of gaming on his development, but as large as they loom in his life, they're only part of it, along with friends, family and reading.
Well, it is sort of *like* a contract, but it is definitely *not* a contract in any reasonable sense of the word.
Is it possible to be a party to a contract without consenting? Well, did *you* vote for the Constitution? How about all the people who voted *against* ratification. Are they a party to the "contract"?
No. The Constitution is *a* constitution; not a contract. It is not a binding agreement between two parties, it is a specification for the structure, function, and limitations of government. We the people can use its terms to call the government to account, but that's a very different process than calling being party to a breach of contract suit. For one thing if it *were* like a contract suit, that suit would be adjudicated in a court *which is constituted by the Constitution*.
Well, more specifically we're talking the Interstate Commerce Clause. If states can externalize the cost of environmental destruction and reap all the tax revenue benefits, that's *precisely* the kind of thing the clause was intended to address.
I have a simpler conclusion... Most users are idiots!
You're only half right. It turns out that most users are *selfish* idiots.
I used to feel a little bad about hating users. I was afraid it might be arrogant to despise the people who, ultimately, justify my salary. But now I see they deserve whatever they get.
Er, if it were his *first* smartphone, how could it *not* be the best he'd ever owned?
What they're talking about websites that are critical of human rights in Iran. Their contention is that all the bad news about Iran is a western psy-ops ploy.
Calling such sites "spy websites" is not an oxymoron by any means. Spying isn't just about getting information; it's about planting disinformation too.
The domains they are targeting mostly belong to one "KEYVAN RAFIEE", with a contact address in a small suburban condo building in Silver Spring MD. It is also the same address used for a small media production company. Some of the domains under that name have as contract address a private home in Woodland CA.
Overall, this not inconsistent with this Mr. Rafiee being a private human rights activist, nor with him being a frontman for a US intelligence operation.
That said, the most credible explanation is this is just disinformation on Iran's part. We've all seen the riots, which were definitely not staged. We've all heard the pronouncements of Mr. Ahmadinejad, which stink of propaganda. This does not mean *we* don't have our own propaganda, but it's clear that the Iranian government would try to portray any criticism as being from the CIA, especially given the CIA's unfortunate history in that country.
I was joking. I have offered small contributions to several projects.
Probably my biggest contribution has been bug reports. Being a developer myself, I can write a *killer* bug report. I reckon that if people are giving me free software, the least I can do is save them some time.
Recently I offered to write documentation for an open source product I use. This was a valuable offer; I'm not a tech writer, but I have considerable experience both as a developer and product manager, so I know what documentation needs to do.
The project (which will remain nameless) had had a pretty good quickstart several year ago, but they are hopelessly out of date. Not only are many of the features used in the quickstarts deprecated, a lot of them are unmaintained and don't work properly. On the other hand, the user guide is really, really bad. It's written from a coder's perspective. There's lots of handwaving philosophical discussion and patting themselves on the back about how brilliant the project's ideas are, but very little guide a to how to do any of the things the users were likely to want to do.
So I made an offer. I'd write a tutorial quickstart and HOWTO that would guide users through the basic mechanics of the system, then provide step by step examples that would teach the users not only how to do specific things, but also be indexed to concepts in the user guides.
The response was that they'd accept the documentation on two conditions. (1) I had to join their developer group, use their source control system (which I'd have to learn because it was not cvs, git, or svn) and submit any documentation as patches. (2) I had to subscribe to their developer mailing list.
It was silly. All they needed to do is say "yes, give it a shot and we'll tell you whether we like it or not," and a week later I'd have given them a key missing piece that none of them were willing to tackle themselves.
But we aren't talking about Linux. We're talking about OpenBSD, arguably the most security conscious operating system in common use today.
While it wouldn't be accurate to say OpenBSD never has any security holes, it is fair to say that remote exploits are exceedingly rare. Since 1996 there have only been two remote exploits in the default install of OpenBSD. While that is as much due to the fact the default install is more locked down than you're realistically going keep your system, that in itself is a reasonable stance to take if you have a belt-and-suspenders view of security.
If it were all just arrogance, they'd ship an OS with all kinds of stuff turned on that users will "almost always" want, claiming that their code review and API changes made that practice safe.
contributing.
You must have had an interesting relationship.
Let me explain the difference: The Democrats pretend this is good for you. The Republicans pretend what is good of their corporate masters is good for you.