Ron Paul claims that the United States Federal Government is doing things that it Constitutionally is not allowed to do.
Until he becomes the Supreme Court, it's just an opinion. The Constitution says what the Supreme Court says it says -- if Mr. Paul cannot convince the Justices that his point of view is correct, it's simply one citizen's opinion. As a member of Congress he certainly has standing to file the suit.
When did the US Supreme Court cease to become part of the US Federal Government? Anyway a consitution which can be overruled by part of the entity it applies to is something of an oxymoron...
Just for the record: if Ron were to file that suit, and actually succeed, you can expect that the Congress would have a Constitutional Amendment to rectify the problem passed with record speed.
Wouldn't they first need to pass an ammendment to ammend the ammendment procedure?
Free beer for every kilowatt-hour, Energy crisis solved.
"Screw ethanol, we're green the hops way! Take that corn industry!"
Maybe you could have they wash tortias down with their beer. Of course the real issue with the "corn industry" is it isn't necessary to make fuel ethanol from perfectly good food. Far more sensible would be to either use a a waste product or a plant which grows as a weed on non agricultural land.
GPS monitoring is to be able to FIND them at all times, for tests. They're already supposed to be available for testing at any time, so this is to reduce the number of excuses when someone isn't where they were supposed to be.
What's the point, given that a missed drug test is considered a "fail"...
Because, as someone else noted earlier in the discussion, performance-enhancing drugs and technologies aren't 100% conducive to the athlete's continued health.
The same applies to quite a bit of athletics and athletics training.
The fact is that there's a simple way to have the best of both worlds. Just have every voting machine/terminal produce a paper copy; the physical ballot. That way, if things get called into question, you can physically recount.
Having a machine print a completed ballot makes "ballot stuffing" slighly easier. Since it removes the possibility of forensic analysis showing if several ballot papers have been filled out by the same person.
Well, it is a bit more complex than that. We ARE a democratic republic. Our representatives (unfortunately) passed the Patriot Act...not by a vote of the people. That was a Federal thing. The thing is, the US is NOT just one country, but consists of 50 states.
The US isn't the only federal republic. It certainly isn't the only country with multiple levels of government.
We're more like the EU now is...each state (supposedly, but, that's another thread) is like its own country, and representatives from each state goes to the Federal govt.
A very big difference between the US and the EU is that there are no pan-EU political parties even if there were they'd only be standing as MEPs. Whereas in the US it appears to be a case of Democrat or Republican at virtually all levels (and very unlikely for these parties not to be on a ballot.)
Pen and paper voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results.
Whilst you might not be able to tell if the people were paid it is quite simple to ensure it dosn't matter. You simply have scruitineers to check. There is only a problem if the count is being carried out in secret by people who are not accountable for their actions. If you want a technical solution as well then these are known as "television cameras".
It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to rig paper ballots because you have to attack every single precinct. You have to make multiple attacks at different weak points to successfully tamper with the ballots while destroying physical evidence of the alterations.
Thus requiring a conspiracy involving a large number of people. The more people involved the more likely it is that one will make a "mistake" or will blow the whistle. That is before you even consider that rigging an election is likely to need people to conspire when doing so is directly against their own self interests.
I could, incidentally, happily stop voting for judges, which I think is pointless.
At best, at worst it's a bad idea. Because it can encourage judges to voice opinions on political issues. The thing is that more voting does not always equate to more "democracy".
As for your math, I don't disagree with it, but I'm not sure where you'll find that many volunteers who are willing to do that type of drudgery.
It dosn't appear to be a problem elsewhere in the world. If it's really that difficult select random people using the mechanism in place for getting people to serve on juries in criminal trials.
Correct--Each voter cast one vote (for their MP) multiplied by 13.5 million voters= 13.5 million votes to count.
2004 US election: State of Ohio, Franklin County. Each voter had 57 choices mulitplied by 560,000 voters= 31,920,000 votes to count.
With a fair proportion of these you have months to count them. If time really is a factor if you put each vote on a separate physical ballot paper counts can be done in parallel.
The Russian rockets only have similar demonstrated reliability to the shuttle.
But have a lot better safety record. Only 4 vs 14 crew fatalities, with Soyuz having been flying longer.
The smart thing to do would be to launch capsules on the EELVs (Atlas 5 or Delta 4), but that has severe political problems (basically, a lot of people would be out of work).
There's also the problem of the US having abandoned manned capsules over 30 years ago.
Well, I have ancient servers running on ancient Linux variants as well, just for showing off to Windows users. But it doesn't mean they are suitable for mission critical data.
But your "ancient servers" probably don't date from the 1970's. Even your oldest server is probably more recent than the newest shuttle.
Given that they only let you watch downloaded programmes on your computer anyway it doesn't make much difference to me whether they're stored locally or streamed.
Streamed requires that you have sufficent bandwidth thoughout the whole time you are watching. As there often being problems with web based "players" being somewhat primative in terms of features.
Anyway, the premise that the drug war is "failed" seems ludicrous. How much does it cost to grow and manufacture a kilogram of cocaine? Maybe $10? And how much does it sell for on the street? A bit over $40,000? If it were legal, there sure as hell wouldn't be a 400000% markup, and when coke got so cheap and available that every frat party had Scarface-style piles of the stuff lying around, drug abuse would be a LOT more widespread.
One problem is that prohibition actually encourages such abuses as "binging".
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
Add "copyrights" to the list. Since there are several cases showing how little the "entertainments" industry cares about other people's copyrights.
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music.
Unless someone can get the changes sneaked past. e.g. something tacked onto the end on an anti-terrorism bill:)
While I believe some drugs should be legal (Cannabis, Heroin, LSD, etc) I think some should still stay illegal and be completely eradicated like cocaine which can cause major problems within a society.
Totally eradicating a drug is virtually impossible. There's also the problem that drug prohibition cause a lot of major problems to society.
I'm hard-pressed to think of even ONE person who just sits and watches all the ads. Everyone I know either:
1) channel-surfs until the ads are over (or they find something better to watch)
It's possible for every channel to have an "ad break" at the same time. It's even possible for the same ad to be running more or less in sync on multiple channels.
Apart from the legal end, I'm not seeing any advantage to streaming off the official site versus downloading the entire season off a torrent and watching it when and where I please.
If you want to see how it could be done then you could do a lot worst than checking out "The Chaser's War on Everything".
The entertainment industry needs to realize that they only have one advantage, they distribute first.
Which is something they can't currently get right. "They" may distribute first in one place, by broadcast, but the "pirates" distribute first to most of the planet.
"Transmit" unencumbered official versions of shows from network
websites with all of the add still intact just as if you had
captured it yourself with MythTV or MCE.
Most lazy people won't bother to remove the ads.
Unless you are quite careful which advertisers you use most people are likely to remove the ads (one way or another) since they will be advertising products/services which they couldn't buy even if they wanted to. The vast majority of advertising (even by global companies) is quite geo-specific. e.g. the "Mythbusters Uncut" website insists on presenting a US specific ad (from a fairly small set) before playing each video segment.
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Ron Paul claims that the United States Federal Government is doing things that it Constitutionally is not allowed to do.
Until he becomes the Supreme Court, it's just an opinion. The Constitution says what the Supreme Court says it says -- if Mr. Paul cannot convince the Justices that his point of view is correct, it's simply one citizen's opinion. As a member of Congress he certainly has standing to file the suit.
When did the US Supreme Court cease to become part of the US Federal Government? Anyway a consitution which can be overruled by part of the entity it applies to is something of an oxymoron...
Just for the record: if Ron were to file that suit, and actually succeed, you can expect that the Congress would have a Constitutional Amendment to rectify the problem passed with record speed.
Wouldn't they first need to pass an ammendment to ammend the ammendment procedure?
Free beer for every kilowatt-hour, Energy crisis solved.
"Screw ethanol, we're green the hops way! Take that corn industry!"
Maybe you could have they wash tortias down with their beer.
Of course the real issue with the "corn industry" is it isn't necessary to make fuel ethanol from perfectly good food. Far more sensible would be to either use a a waste product or a plant which grows as a weed on non agricultural land.
GPS monitoring is to be able to FIND them at all times, for tests. They're already supposed to be available for testing at any time, so this is to reduce the number of excuses when someone isn't where they were supposed to be.
What's the point, given that a missed drug test is considered a "fail"...
Because, as someone else noted earlier in the discussion, performance-enhancing drugs and technologies aren't 100% conducive to the athlete's continued health.
The same applies to quite a bit of athletics and athletics training.
Now with 10 times the explosive power.
How long before laptop batteries get classified as "munitions"?
The fact is that there's a simple way to have the best of both worlds. Just have every voting machine/terminal produce a paper copy; the physical ballot. That way, if things get called into question, you can physically recount.
Having a machine print a completed ballot makes "ballot stuffing" slighly easier. Since it removes the possibility of forensic analysis showing if several ballot papers have been filled out by the same person.
Well, it is a bit more complex than that. We ARE a democratic republic. Our representatives (unfortunately) passed the Patriot Act...not by a vote of the people. That was a Federal thing. The thing is, the US is NOT just one country, but consists of 50 states.
The US isn't the only federal republic. It certainly isn't the only country with multiple levels of government.
We're more like the EU now is...each state (supposedly, but, that's another thread) is like its own country, and representatives from each state goes to the Federal govt.
A very big difference between the US and the EU is that there are no pan-EU political parties even if there were they'd only be standing as MEPs. Whereas in the US it appears to be a case of Democrat or Republican at virtually all levels (and very unlikely for these parties not to be on a ballot.)
The problem in the US is a) fear-mongering by companies making electronic voting equipment and b) overly-complex ballots.
Possibly a bigger problem is people closely connected to either the candidates (or their political parties) being involved in running elections.
Pen and paper voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results.
Whilst you might not be able to tell if the people were paid it is quite simple to ensure it dosn't matter. You simply have scruitineers to check. There is only a problem if the count is being carried out in secret by people who are not accountable for their actions.
If you want a technical solution as well then these are known as "television cameras".
It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to rig paper ballots because you have to attack every single precinct. You have to make multiple attacks at different weak points to successfully tamper with the ballots while destroying physical evidence of the alterations.
Thus requiring a conspiracy involving a large number of people. The more people involved the more likely it is that one will make a "mistake" or will blow the whistle. That is before you even consider that rigging an election is likely to need people to conspire when doing so is directly against their own self interests.
I could, incidentally, happily stop voting for judges, which I think is pointless.
At best, at worst it's a bad idea. Because it can encourage judges to voice opinions on political issues.
The thing is that more voting does not always equate to more "democracy".
As for your math, I don't disagree with it, but I'm not sure where you'll find that many volunteers who are willing to do that type of drudgery.
It dosn't appear to be a problem elsewhere in the world. If it's really that difficult select random people using the mechanism in place for getting people to serve on juries in criminal trials.
Correct--Each voter cast one vote (for their MP) multiplied by 13.5 million voters= 13.5 million votes to count.
2004 US election: State of Ohio, Franklin County. Each voter had 57 choices mulitplied by 560,000 voters= 31,920,000 votes to count.
With a fair proportion of these you have months to count them. If time really is a factor if you put each vote on a separate physical ballot paper counts can be done in parallel.
The Russian rockets only have similar demonstrated reliability to the shuttle.
But have a lot better safety record. Only 4 vs 14 crew fatalities, with Soyuz having been flying longer.
The smart thing to do would be to launch capsules on the EELVs (Atlas 5 or Delta 4), but that has severe political problems (basically, a lot of people would be out of work).
There's also the problem of the US having abandoned manned capsules over 30 years ago.
Well, I have ancient servers running on ancient Linux variants as well, just for showing off to Windows users. But it doesn't mean they are suitable for mission critical data.
But your "ancient servers" probably don't date from the 1970's. Even your oldest server is probably more recent than the newest shuttle.
Given that they only let you watch downloaded programmes on your computer anyway it doesn't make much difference to me whether they're stored locally or streamed.
Streamed requires that you have sufficent bandwidth thoughout the whole time you are watching. As there often being problems with web based "players" being somewhat primative in terms of features.
If you are really that desperate to protect your precious from the Evil consumers then get it on iTunes and be done with it.
Or even accept that trying to use "DRM" is rather daft after you have broadcast it.
I am sick of having to go to random websites and having to use the half-assed players you guys think are acceptable.
It really disn't make any sense if these are harder to use than the "pirate option".
Anyway, the premise that the drug war is "failed" seems ludicrous. How much does it cost to grow and manufacture a kilogram of cocaine? Maybe $10? And how much does it sell for on the street? A bit over $40,000? If it were legal, there sure as hell wouldn't be a 400000% markup, and when coke got so cheap and available that every frat party had Scarface-style piles of the stuff lying around, drug abuse would be a LOT more widespread.
One problem is that prohibition actually encourages such abuses as "binging".
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
:)
Add "copyrights" to the list. Since there are several cases showing how little the "entertainments" industry cares about other people's copyrights.
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music.
Unless someone can get the changes sneaked past. e.g. something tacked onto the end on an anti-terrorism bill
While I believe some drugs should be legal (Cannabis, Heroin, LSD, etc) I think some should still stay illegal and be completely eradicated like cocaine which can cause major problems within a society.
Totally eradicating a drug is virtually impossible. There's also the problem that drug prohibition cause a lot of major problems to society.
The worst part about this business is not that Facebook tells your friends. It's that Blockbuster tells Facebook in the first place.
The worst part for Blockbuster, you mean. Since this is where they are breaking the law in question.
I'm hard-pressed to think of even ONE person who just sits and watches all the ads. Everyone I know either:
1) channel-surfs until the ads are over (or they find something better to watch)
It's possible for every channel to have an "ad break" at the same time. It's even possible for the same ad to be running more or less in sync on multiple channels.
Apart from the legal end, I'm not seeing any advantage to streaming off the official site versus downloading the entire season off a torrent and watching it when and where I please.
If you want to see how it could be done then you could do a lot worst than checking out "The Chaser's War on Everything".
The entertainment industry needs to realize that they only have one advantage, they distribute first.
Which is something they can't currently get right. "They" may distribute first in one place, by broadcast, but the "pirates" distribute first to most of the planet.
"Transmit" unencumbered official versions of shows from network websites with all of the add still intact just as if you had captured it yourself with MythTV or MCE.
Most lazy people won't bother to remove the ads.
Unless you are quite careful which advertisers you use most people are likely to remove the ads (one way or another) since they will be advertising products/services which they couldn't buy even if they wanted to. The vast majority of advertising (even by global companies) is quite geo-specific.
e.g. the "Mythbusters Uncut" website insists on presenting a US specific ad (from a fairly small set) before playing each video segment.