You do realize that morality and ethics exist outside of the spectrum of religion, right?
If I can access bank accounts and drain funds away to another account, do I cross an ethical line?
If I can steal supplies from work for my personal use at home, do I cross an ethical line?
If I can sell my dad's used diabetic needles to junkies instead of throwing them away, do I cross an ethical line?
If I can walk out into my back yard, cross over into a neighbor's property and hunt without his permission, do I cross an ethical line?
If I throw away food that someone else could have eaten, do I cross an ethical line?
If I kill more animals than I can eat before the meat rots, do I cross an ethical line?
If I own a 1000 acres of woods and I decide to burn them all down, do I cross an ethical line?
If I drive a hummer to the grocery store 500 feet away to get a quart of milk, do I cross an ethical line?
There are lots of ethical questions regarding embryonic stem cells that don't involve religion. For example, is it ethical to create extra embryos that I know I won't need so I can sell them/use them for research? At what point do we cross the threshold of duplicating embryos and cloning people? Is it ethical to force people getting paid minimum wage to pay for general scientific research (especially when adult stem cells are showing results NOW but embryonic ones aren't) or would it be better to do it through private donations and other capitalism?
You know, just because we are capable of doing something doesn't always mean that it's a good idea. There's nothing wrong with questioning where we're going and if we are doing the right thing, especially at the beginning of something new versus finally asking those questions after getting halfway through it or finished with it.
It's kind of hard to have faith in democracy under such conditions...
For someone who went off on a rant about something you perceive to be wrong and the idiocy of other people on subjective subjects, the least you could do is get the fact right that the US is not, never has been, and hopefully never will be, a democracy. We're a republic... precisely so there are people who stop to think about the big picture instead of letting popular opinion rule and squash 49% of peoples' rights.
I think that, game addiction is not a real addiction.
It's not the game itself that I was addicted to. I REALLY hated EQ itself - it was designed to be a time sink, there are tons of problems in the mechanics, balance and implementation of the game, and more often than not, it brought the worst out of people. What I was addicted to was the social interactions with my friends in the game and how that made me feel. Similarly, someone who goes out to the clubs every weekend usually doesn't do it because they're addicted to alcohol (if it was the alcohol they are after, they can drink a larger quantity for a cheaper price at home), it's the social environment that they feel they need. That said, my main alt was a necro that I soloed to 65 with something like 75 AAs during times where I wanted to or felt the need to play but didn't want to be around people.
One question I wanted to ask you is, why didnt you bothered to know the people in there?, like going out and meet somewhere?
I did meet several people from the game. First, and most obviously, was my girlfriend. Five of us from my general area also met up this past spring. Largely, there are two reasons why our guild didn't meet up more, we were spread out from NY to MD to WA to CA to TX to Russia to South Korea to Australia to you name it... We were the largest and most progressed non-mandatory guild on our server so we picked up people who were interested from pretty nearly everywhere in the world. In addition to that, meeting up in real life took time away from the game and the social environment it provided. Besides, have you ever met MMORPG junkies? Most of the pics alone will make slashdotters look like movie stars.
Before Everquest existed, I 'was somebody' online - ran a guild on a MUD (although not as big as yours), and eventually even ended up running the MUD itself. There were definitely some stretches where I'd often spend 16 hours a day on the computer.
I had over 200 days played on just my main character over the course of the 927 days that I played. I had a further 60ish days played on my main alt, 120ish on my bazaar mule (of which, I was probably present for at least 50% of) and another 20 or so on my other toons. That's approximately 340 days played out of 927. Roughly 37% of my life devoted to a game on a consistent basis, roughly as much time as a 9-5 worker puts in. Factor in another 33% of my time sleeping (give or take 8 hours a day). I work approximately 30 hours a week and that's another 18% or so of my time, leaving 12% of my time to doing other stuff (daily life activities, reading, going out with friends, etc).
People need to understand what an addiction really is. If you are COMPELLED to do something so much that it interferes with your ability to pay your rent, feed yourself, or maintain relationships that are important to you, that's an addiction. If it consumes all of your free time, that's just recreation. And I think it's a tragedy to try and label someone an 'addict' just because of their prefered form of recreation.
I couldn't go downstairs to clean without bringing my laptop with me so I could keep an eye on the game. I'd cut trips off early so I could check in on the game. I scheduled my work, visiting friends, etc around the game. The game utterly dominated every facet of my life. The only reason why I never called in to work for the game was because I controlled the activity of both - I was the leader of the guild and the manager of my workplace (nobody to answer to but the owners).
About a year and a half before I quit, my best friend quit playing EQ. During that time, I think I saw him about five times and talked to him on the phone, via IM, etc maybe twice per week. I mostly lost touch with all of my other friends, both online and off, since they didn't play EQ and I couldn't control the times they wanted to spend with me (thus interfering with EQ time or the work that I scheduled around EQ time). I stopped doing almost every other activity I enjoy (wood working, tabletop gaming, learning the guitar, programming, etc) and frequently only did the minimum of what was required of the stuff that I didn't necessarily enjoy (mowing, balancing my checkbook, fixing the inevitable problems you encounter when you own a house, etc).
I couldn't be away from EQ for more than a couple hours without "twitching" as most EQ junkies call it. First thing I did when I woke up was check in on the guild, whether if it was when I was supposed to get up or if it was in the middle of the night. I may not have gotten as bad as some people do, probably because of the necessity of caring for my father, but my life revolved around EQ for a solid two years... and that was despite throwing up, getting physically stressed out, etc over the need to quit about a year into playing.
Why did it not 'mean' anything in real life?
Are the people on the other end of those guildies not real people?
Did they not enjoy your company/help/etc?
Perhaps they needed a connection with someone as much as you did?
Seems like you could be affecting real life, possibly more lives than otherwise.
That's the exact line of reasoning I used to justify what I was doing. That EQ wasn't simply a game, that it meant much more than that, especially given that my gf and I would use it as our form of dating between cross country flights. I would help my friends through hard times in their personal lives and likewise, they would help me.
What would be real life then?
Anything past eating,pooping,sleeping ? (and sleeping doesn't even FEEL all that real;)
Bowling with friends is more 'real' than questing with guildmates somehow?
I was the most important person in my guild for a couple years... not only was I the guild leader and raid leader, I ran the website, took care of all the DKP, etc. Every time someone took a few months off and came back, I was the person they remembered. If I wasn't in game (though it often sit there running 24/7 with me being able to see the monitor in case someone wanted to talk), I was fielding IMs from up to 10 different guildies at a time...
I still have 34 guildies in my friends list. I talk to two regularly and have been contacted by another 8 or so since I left. In the end, I wasn't really much of a part of their life. That's out of a couple hundred people, many of whom I knew on a first name basis. I may not see a lot of my old real life friends anymore, but we still occassionally bump into each other and we'll chat, have lunch or whatever. The vast majority of my EQ "friends", I'll probably never talk to again simply because EQ ceased, at least for me, but real life doesn't.
Also... the relative anonymity made people act in ways they never would in real life or pretend to be someone they weren't (beyond the roleplaying inherent in the game). Greed was rewarded. Stabbing your friends in the back was rewarded. Using people was rewarded... People would use other people as stepping stones to get a better piece of gear, access to a zone they didn't have, etc and then once they got what they wanted, would leave you high and dry. Yeah, same thing happens in real life, but in EQ, it happens to a much, much larger degree.
Eight years ago, my father had a brain aneurysm and stroke and I am his sole caregiver. I was 21 when it happened. I've mostly been stuck at home taking care of him for my entire 20s while I watched friends finish school, get married, have kids, etc. Between the area where I live and the limited ability I have to go out to enjoy life with my friends, I really started losing touch with society and became depressed.
In 2003, my best friend bought EQ at the urging of one of his co-workers. After two months of him nagging me incessantly to try it, against my better judgement, I did. Everything started out fine, him and I would log on for 2-3 hours a night to play together and that was it. About two months into it, him and I were asked to become officers in our guild. At the point you become an officer, you suddenly feel a whole lot more responsibility and you feel like you're important - everyone in your guild counts on you. Not long after, I became our raid leader and, given the absence of the guild leader for a long period of time, people began to see me as the guild leader as well. Eight months in, I was tagged with the guild leadership officially. I now had seven officers and in the neighborhood of 120 guild members counting on me to be there. By now, I wasn't playing 2-3 hours a day, I was playing 8-12 hours a day. It wasn't reality, but it felt real enough - I was important to people and interacting with "society." Along the way, I met a girl from the other side of the US and we had a fairly turbulent relationship(mostly due to her being bipolar), but we were in love and planned to get married. I knew that EQ was taking up my entire life, but my girlfriend was there and that's how we spent time together from 3k miles apart and I was the engine the drove hundreds of cogs. At our peak, we had 1039 tagged toons.
This spring, my relationship of two years ended with her and at the same time, the officers staged a coup as the pressures from EQ's death throes were mounting (yeah, EQ is dying, netcraft, server consolidations and mmogchart confirm it). About a month after I left the girl and my guild, I realized that I no longer had a reason to play and I simply logged off one night never to return again. That was three months ago last weekend.
For me, it wasn't a game I was addicted to, it was all the social interaction, feeling important and spending time with my gf. After years of being depressed, it was nice to be somebody even if it didn't mean anything in real life. After the way things ended, my biggest regret is that the things that helped me break that addiction didn't happen earlier. Oddly enough, despite becoming "nothing" again, I haven't been depressed and I find myself enjoying the mundane things in life that I neglected for 2.5 years. I still frequently think about EQ and some of the fun times I had in it, but I have no urge to play it anymore... and I deliberately avoid anything that might suck me into a similar situation again. In the meantime, I'm trying to rebuild my life even though I feel that I'm fighting an uphill struggle now at 29.
Our brains are an electro-chemical system and I would argue that the stimuli that make you feel important and good about yourself can be just as addicting as putting that cigarette up to your lips, especially when you and the rest of the world appear to have given up on each other. At 21, when you still have pretty much everything going for you and life hasn't completely knocked every one of your plans for the future out of whack, it's pretty easy to think idealistically about how everyone should be able to feel/be/do exactly like you.
The government very clearly saw what happens when you have a well educated youth during the 60's. The fact that public education has been on the decline since those days is no accident.
Who do you think taught the last couple generations? Perhaps these "well educated youth" suffer from a bit of hubris and decided they knew better than everyone else so they introduced new teaching methods which they thought would be better and those methods have failed. Nah, educated people would never claim that they have a new solution then admit a failure of their own making when it doesn't work out, lets just immediately jump to a nationwide conspiracy. Who's fault is it this week, the Free Masons or the Illuminati?
# You test the hypothesis: "If this is normal, why are they rising more in the recent period than in the previous one? Ergo, this doesn't seem to be normal."
# You revise the hypothesis: "This is abnormal fluctuation, caused by human intervention."
# You reexamine the data: "The rate seems to be increasing more since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Pollution increased at that time."
define "period". Is a period 200 years? 2,000? 200,000? Is a 200 year period a large enough sample to draw conclusive evidence that it isn't normal fluctuation in a planet that is billions of years old? Was it human pollution that warmed the earth during the last ice age? Are there non-human factors which can cause climate change and if so, why immediately theorize that it must be human activity that is doing it? Because the sample period is so small? Because our we have an inflated sense of self-importance?
Lets sample the temperature of the ground around a volcano for two weeks. On day 7, the villagers surrounding dig a well. On day 9, suddenly the volcano erupts and the ground temperature goes up exponentially as the magma flows over it. The volcano was perfectly fine until those pesky humans dug that well. Why, seeing as everything was fine up until digging that well, the hole the villagers put in the ground was obviously responsible for a change in the geological pressure, causing the volcano to erupt.
Is the earth warmer today than it was 100 years ago? Sure, I'll make the assumption that the scientists are right and it is. Does a one degree fluctuation in 100 years matter? Certainly if you only consider those 100 years. How does a one degree fluctuation in 100 years compare to a larger scale such as the last 10,000 years, 100,000 years, 1,000,000 years? How fast did the temperature change when the glaciers of the last ice age retreated? Was man responsible for that? Obviously, they weren't, so what caused it to happen? Could those same principles be affecting climate today?
When you already have the result you're looking for, it's easy to overlook other factors in science. We know that natural planetary activity outside of human activity causes climate change. Are our models good enough to predict pre-civilization climate change? If not, why immediately jump to the conclusion that it is human activity which is causing climate change today unless that is the conclusion you're looking for?
People pointed to the scientist in this article being paid by Exxon and thus couldn't be trusted. Where do the scientists who are on the "humans are responsible for climate change" get their funding? Government grants, environmental cause groups, etc... How do they ensure they get the grants? By being as alarmist as possible so that it seems like money needs to be thrown at the problem to find a solution now. "Exxon funds science which promotes the policies they want" is no different than "Greenpeace funds science which promotes the policies they want." In the former case, they do it to remove pressure for them to change their business practices to increase profitability and in the latter case, they do it so they can get more people to donate to their coffers, increase their exposure, etc. Why should one side be attacked for their funding source and not the other?
There is very little impartiality or pure study from what I see in the climatology universe. Everyone finds the evidence to support the conclusion of the view they already hold, just like when when Gartner publishes a dstudy they did on behalf of MS. One side chooses the exact variables they want to control and the other side goes "the study is invalid because you deliberately picked the variables that would provide the result you wanted." That doesn't mean there isn't some truth in the study but it does mean that not enough was taken into consideration for it to be the general case. Ergo, yes, human activity MAY have some part in global warming bu
and the excuse for them to not be able to wash dishes after working there for 9 months or not being able to open cans after I repeatedly show them how to use a manual can opener? The simplest solution is to fire them and get someone who can do it or learn how, right? Good luck, a large number of the kids today just can't do it and those who are capable of doing it tend to want to work someplace less demanding.
Teachers today don't teach kids how to learn and adapt, they don't even teach them how to do basic things like subtraction. It's pretty sad.
Is it at all suprising that people are less interested in science and teaching when a man like Bush is in charge?
I graduated 11 years ago and Bill Clinton didn't inspire me to do anything with science either. The reason why you got modded down, I'm sure, is simply because you just had to throw a Bush attack into something he isn't remotely responsible for. Science and math education have been sliding for years before he even thought about running for President.
The way science and math are taught these days aren't conducive to learning science and math, much less making kids inspired enough to seriously considering a future with them. More cool stuff in science class, make sure the kids get the basics at an early age in math and then do fun stuff as they get older with it.
In 6th grade, we spent the whole year working on the biology of whales, learning how an ecosystem worked, etc and that culminated in a weekend fieldtrip for anyone who got a passing grade to the Atlantic Ocean three states away to go on a whale watch. THAT was fun and we all learned a lot that year. The same year, we took a few days and built our own model rockets, launched them and used a protractor with plumb string from a fixed distance to measure how high they went (we didn't even know what trig was yet but we were already having a blast using it to see who's rocket went the highest). We also learned how to develop (black and white) film, made our own prints and did all kinds of great stuff that year without even knowing that we were learning about math and science until we look back on it.
I guess I'll have to thank Reagan and Bush41 for their inspiring leadership in 1988 instead of the very talented teachers who creatively taught us by making it interesting.
I graduated from high school (full AP/honors classes) in 1995 in the top 10% of my class at one of the (then) better public high schools in NY State outside of NYC. My sister was 7 years younger than me so I had a pretty good grasp at what was happening with the students younger than me. For the past 10 years, I've also managed a family restaurant in the same town so I've been able to see exactly what the outcome is.
By the time my sister started school, the teachers I had began to retire and a new wave fresh out of college were brought in. With them, they brought all these great new ideas on how to teach. In elementary school, I remember doing weekly tests on arithmetic tables, going up to the chalkboard to do math in front of the class, various scientific "experiments" (watching plants grow over a course of a semester and measuring it's change in height), etc. My sister never did any of that stuff. They did math in groups to "promote teamwork" and that resulted in the one or two strongest people in each group doing all of the work while everyone else goofed around and never really learned anything.
My freshman year of high school, I experienced my first wave of the changes. While the government mandates special education be provided for the learning disabled kids, it didn't mandate anything for the more advanced kids. The school had just built a new addition which meant diverting budget funds away from education and into repayment of bonds. They've since built 2 more additions when they would have been much better served by simply building an entirely new school since a new school would have cost approximately half of what they've spent expanding the current one three times (the entire expense being about 5 times the full yearly budget). All because they expected a large influx of kids coming up based on demographic changes (about 15% more than my class). Well, sure enough, this year's senior class has about 20% more students than mine (120 vs 145) and starting next year, the classes shrink again. The problem could have been solved by using the rooms more efficiently (at any given time, a large number of classrooms are empty with just a teacher sitting in them during one of their 40% of the work day break periods), but why do that when you can throw money at the problem?
The school budget for next year just went up for election... $1.2 million increase on a $28 million budget. If you pass it, you're looking at a $29.2 million budget and if you turn it down, you're looking at a $29.2 million contingency budget. It's the same budget whether it passes or fails. Looking at the numbers, they want to spend more money on two new buses ($220k) than they will spend on new books ($165k) for the entire district (K-12). Teacher salaries make up the lion share of the budget followed by teacher benefits and building maintenance/bond payments. The school mailed letters to everyone in the district during the winter bragging about how they were going to save electricity by reducing light usage and turning down the heat (because cold students learn better?). Why, it would save thousands of dollars!
Anyway, before I ramble on too long about all the problems between the "new and improved" teaching methods which promote self esteem and teaming instead of learning and how they squander millions on building new additions and remodeling sports fields every few years, lets look at the results. Remember how I said I managed a restaurant? Well, back ten years ago, people new how to make change in their heads, new general problem solving that they might encounter (what do I do when a fire starts on the grill), etc. These days, kids (we're talking 16-20, including people with diplomas and one who was valedictorian from my school a few years ago) just flat can't make change without using a calculator, don't know what to do when they encounter minor problems (some don't even know how to open cans without an electric can opener while others can't figure out how to refill hand towels in the bathroom), they don't even know how t
then so is any speech made against the President on the House or Senate floor, or any Congressional override of a Presidental veto.
The rantings of one member of Congress is just that, a person excercising their freedom of speech. The consensus of Congress to convict and punish a specific citizen (or group of citizens) who is not a Congressional office holder is a Bill of Atainder. Censure proclaims someone guilty of a crime (real or imaginary) and prescribes a formal punishment (public denouncement of said person).
Defenders of presidential `censure' argue that it does not really punish and therefore cannot be a Bill of Attainder. In determining whether a law is punitive within the context of the prohibition of Bills of Attainder, courts look to what are understood as the motivational, functional, and historical tests: (1) whether the legislature intended the law to be punitive; (2) whether the law reasonably can be said to further non-punitive legislative purposes; and (3) whether the punishment was traditionally judged to be prohibited by the Bill of Attainder clause. See In re McMullen, 989 F.2d 603, 607 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 114 S. Ct. 301 (1993).
The motivational test is clearly implicated here. As the Congressional Research Service has noted, any argument that censure provisions were not intended to be punitive would `face the task of overcoming express statements by individual Members concerning the appropriate `punishment' in this particular case.' Censure of the President by Congress, Jack Maskell, Legislative Attorney, American Law Division, CRS Report for Congress, September 29, 1998, at 9. Indeed, the record is replete with such references. As Representative Pease stated during consideration of the joint resolution of censure:
It seems to me, after all this discussion of what exactly is a resolution of censure regarding the President, there is still no agreement. It is either an action to punish the President or it is an action that doesn't punish the President. If it is an action to punish the President, it is a bill of attainder and unconstitutional. If it is a resolution that does not punish the President, it is meaningless. For that reason, though I have the greatest respect for those who have offered it, I cannot support the resolution.
Congress gets it's power to censure from the following clause:
Article 1, Section 5:
Clause 2: Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.
Censure is a formal reprimand by one of the chambers of Congress on a member of that chamber.
The Constitution clearly defines the separation of powers of the bodies of government and the only form of reprimanding the President or Vice-President that the Congress has is impeachment. If they were to censure the President, it would be one of two things 1) an Unconstitutional power the Congress has over the President which directly defies the written power of Congress to punish, via public shaming*, the President or 2) a direct bill of attainder.
Article 1, Section 9:
Clause 3: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Public shaming, such as scarlet letters, stockades, and perp walks, is most definitely a long standing traditional punishment.
Actually, if two states file for impeachment, the Congress has to start proceedings.
It's this thing called the Constitution: learn it, love it.
The states have absolutely no power of impeachment, only the House of Representatives can initiate impeachment and the Senate tries the case. Also please note, for those who have discussed it after Russ Feingold wanted to censure Bush, that the sole punishment by Congress is removal and banning from office.
Article 1, Section 2:
Clause 5: The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.
Article 1, Section 3:
Clause 6: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
Clause 7: Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
Q. What procedures does the House of Representatives follow in the impeachment process?
A. While the Constitution outlines the basic process for impeachment, the specific procedures are determined by the internal rules of the House of Representatives and the Senate. To begin, the House of Representatives refers the investigation to its Judiciary Committee, which reviews the evidence and may conduct hearings. It determines whether an official impeachment inquiry is warranted and, if so, asks the House for permission to proceed. An official investigation follows, with the Committee deciding whether to offer articles of impeachment to the full House. The House then votes separately on each of the articles, with a simple majority needed to impeach the official. Articles of impeachment approved by the House are then presented to the Secretary of the U.S. Senate for trial.
In the same vein, the backflagging changes since December have turned the game into the old sports "free agent" system. These days, too many people will sell out their friends who are working through the lesser gods to go loot an item in PoTime and instantly, they're flagged for time. Similarly, there are backflags in place for elemental planes, Qvic, and even the current end zone (Anguish).
Nobody needs to earn progression anymore, it's a matter of being the right class with the right level and you can skip right to the loot zones. The guilds who are in those loot zones and need new players shouldn't be offered instant free replacements for burning their people out on mandatory 30 or 40 hour raid schedules. Similarly, those players need to come from somewhere... the mid-tier raiding guilds are losing a lot of experienced players because they'er inundated with incessant begging to leave their friends for the uber loots.
It's only a matter of time until there aren't any midlevel raiders to recruit... that will leave the game with an ever dwindling amount of hardcore raiders and truly casual people who play to chat, solo, etc.
It's not that they're almost the same (argue as you will about that one), but that the turnover of even a couple of seats in the House and/or Senate can potentially have a drastic effect what policy comes out of Congres
So... are they almost the same or are they drastically different?
I find that the more extreme you are in a certain viewpoint, the more the two look alike. If they're going to do drastically different things (often both by serving the loudest people in their respective party), they can't be exactly alike. The problem for these people is the major party they more closely identify with won't go to the extremes that they want them to thus, they appear to be the same because the degree of difference between the two parties is insignificant compared to their extremist view.
talk about ad hominem. I must have missed when we went from debating something into just providing a platform for you to make unsubstantiated allegations. If that's all you want to do, consider the debate over.
BTW, the DNC called - they want their 2000 talking points back. Ann Richards may claim copyright infringement from even earlier
The SCOTUS made a decision to make the question of the legitimacy of the presidency the least detrimental. I remember seeing reports about people eating the chads during the recount. Punch cards are easily manipulated using nothing but bare hands. As for what you think... you also didn't answer whether Clinton should have been impeached for violating the rule of law for committing perjury. Does the rule of law, the basis of your argument, matter or not?
You're already insisting that the 04 election isn't going to elect a legitimate republican huh? Apparently if your guy doesn't win, it's automatically a conspiracy. Hey, guess what, I planted Monica Lewinsky in the White House (such was my part in the vast right wing conspiracy(VRWC)). Everyone has a political opinion whether they're a bum, an assembly line worker, a CEO or a politician. Apparently you think a PHB is either only capable of ordering all of his programmers (who are also all members of the VRWC) to deliberately write fraudulent software and still manages to completely covering it up or else he doesn't employ anyone and wrote the software himself. (For the record, I don't like the Diebold machines either). Further, it is up to the individual state legislatures and local election boards to pick their equipment, not GWB or "his" federal government.
Yes, the last 3 years were the result of the polices laid down during the Clinton administration. Remember, the illegal actions Enron, Global Crossings, etc commited happened during Clinton's years. Alan Greenspan warned way back in 1998 that the market was reaching unretainable levels and people still foolishly pumped more money into stocks. When the bubble finally burst, the 2000 election hadn't occured. After the bubble burst, people's entire life savings were destroyed as dotcoms dotbombed. The market lost all liquidity and it needed to be recreated from somewhere - that somewhere was taxcuts. Federal revenues have continued to grow with the tax cuts (it's spending which has increased) despite taking in far less capital gains due to lowered market exhuberance. You can't have jobs if nobody has the capital to create them and you don't gain capital by giving it to the government. Those people making $200k are going to do something with that money... if it's spent, a job is created to make a product and if it's invested, a job is created by someone taking a risk with it. Nobody in that bracket is sticking their money under their mattress. BTW, JFK was a huge proponent of the tax cuts of the early 60s for the same reason.
I openly admit pure disgust for everything that the Clintons are. I think they're the most corrupt people to ever live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I also admit that they're some of the most shrewd and brilliant politicians of the 20th century. I put nothing beyond them. Isn't it odd that Bill is consulting several candidates instead of just one he favors right now?
Your contempt for Bush and republicans is just as obvious as my hatred for the Clintons. I admit it right up front and I admit it biases what I say. Despite my loathing of them and the fact that he only got 38% of the vote when Perot torpeded GHWB, I never was in denial about hiim being the President. Clinton turned down Sudan when they offered him Osama in 1998 (who was responsible for the 1993 world trade center bombing). He didn't do anything to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons but did turn the cheek for them. He did allow the transfer of missile tech to China which now enables them to nuke anywhere in the US with weapons technology which they stole while he blindly looked the other way so he could have coffee for illegal foreign campaign donations from that same country.
Europe already hated us because they're no longer the seat of the world's power (well, except for the countries who appreciated out hard stand against the soviets - you know, the people who had to live under their tyrannical rule). Lots of Asia has similarly hated us. Most of South/Central America seems to be practicall
Would you or would you not have bitched the minute Congress installed Bush as the President? Your "selected" line would be true at that point. What happens if we couldn't conclusively solve it, given the recount totals changed every time the ballots were touched? Do we hold another nationwide election right away, completely ignoring the results of the first one? Do we wait 4 years until the next scheduled election while you cry the whole time about having a Congressionally selected President?
Were you in favor of Ken Starr going after Bill Clinton, given that he was simply following the rule of law (live by the law, die by the law)? Do you believe he should have been impeached for committing perjury otherwise establishing that Presidents are above the law the rest of us are subjected to? Further, can we immediately eliminate welfare, SSI, etc because they're Unconstitutional even though FDR got a court to declare them so after threatening to increase the number of judges and install his puppets so it would be whether they thought it was Constitutional or not?
If GWB wins in 2004, will you call him a legimate President or not? You neglected to reply to that question. The economy started tanking in March of 2000 - while Clinton was still in office. Remember the dems complaining that GWB was trying to talk down the economy because it had already fallen so much that year? Macroeconomics takes years to play out - the setup for those loss of jobs happened under Clintons watch... As for what the world thinks of us, Europe has been envious and jealous of us for decades and with the fall of the Evil Empire, they've finally decided it's safe to spit in our face. There was plenty of anti-US sentiment before GWB took office. In fact, you may remember a day during Clintons first year in office where the same building came under attack and Clinton rolled over, just like the terrorists expected him to. I respect Clark and Kerry deeply for their service, but being a soldier doesn't automatically qualify you to be a President. Kerry has repeatedly wiped his ass with large portions of the Constitution when it convenienced him and Clark is too wishy-washy to be electable (he's changed his mind 6 times on whether we should have gone into Iraq since the beginning of September, there are videos of him endorsing GWB since he became president, etc). Someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes of all of these candidates... someone who doesn't want a democratic president in 2004 because they want an open White House in 2008. I'll let you figure it out
That's entirely my point... the guy is the President, accept it and move on. I'm a registered republican but there's still plenty of things I disagree with my party about. It just happens that our election system gravitates toward having two major parties and the republican party is the one I most closely agree with (in reality, I most closely identify with the Constitution Party (even though, gasp, I'm an atheist)). Bush wasn't even my candidate until the last minute smear campaign the weekend before the election (my primary vote would have been for Alan Keyes but I wanted to make sure McCain didn't win my state so I voted for GWB... then my meaningless presidential vote (because in NY, the democrat almost always wins despite pretty much everywhere but NYC being republican) was originally going to Howard Phillips)
What do I disagree with GWB on? Off the top of my head, Microsoft, putting troops on our borders, naturalization of illegals, free trade, his dept of education reform (I want it completely abolished), his SSI reform (even more individual control for pensioning), I'd cut back federal medical coverage, I'd veto the Congressional raises especially because all the other government employee wages are tied to them, etc.
Given the recounts, GWB wou;d have been the president... or are you still in denial about that? If Gore really cared about what was best for his country, he wouldn't have brought the lawsuit to begin with (GWB's lawsuit was a response to the Gore lawsuit). GWB did not bring recount lawsuits in other states because, unlike Gore, he didn't have some type of fanatical self-entitlement to the Presidency. GWB wasn't selected and you'd be bitching even more if he was put in as a "seatwarmer" because then he would have been selected. In addition to (probably) calling for an end to the electoral college, you'd probably be calling for a new amendment against the Congress installing a president.
Do me a favor... keep dwelling on the past so that we republicans can steamroll your candidate next time. The left thinks the problem with the 2000 election was that they weren't far enough to the left - problem was they were already too far to the left. Not a single one of the nine democratic challengers have a shot at unseating Bush. Give me Dean or Clark, especially, and I'm gonna have a field day watching all but their most ardent supporters vote for GWB. Of course, when GWB stomps whoever it is, it's going to be because he has the benefit of "an incumbancy of an illegitmate presidency" so he still won't be the legitimate president, right?
which would have been a completely political decision... Given that both the house and the senate were controlled by republicans at that point, a republican would be appointed president. But who would that have been, GWB probably, given he was the republican nominee... and as soon as he would have been swore in as the interim president, all of your type would have been whining about how the republicans in Congress "selected the President against the wishes of the popular vote" and how it would give an "unfair legitimacy to the presidency" given that most people would accept him as the de facto president.
Nah... that wouldn't cause an even bigger reaction from the left, casting more doubt on the legitimacy of our government, etc would it? You'd be crying even more about how once GWB was in office, he manipulated the vote like Jeb did in florida, right? Break out the tin foil hats everyone.
If a consistent standard is used statewide, GWB's margin widens despite what standard you use... and you still fail to address the irregularities in other states that GWB could have sued over if he was as egomaniacal as Gore
...and who would the VP elect be? The VP gets the same electoral college votes as the President by law under most states (and that position was dependent upon Florida as well).
The recount had to be stopped at some point for the continuity of our government. You can't have endless recounts until the guy you want eventually wins. Again, had the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a statewide recount, instead of a selective recount, be done, it WOULD have been finished by the deadline. Further, focusing entirely on Florida throws out the questionable stuff elsewhere (democratic judge in Missouri ordering the polls in heavily democratic St Louis remain open for an extra two hours, democrats in South Dakota bribing bums with cigarettes for a democratic vote in the election, the mess in New Mexico, etc). Again, if Gore won his home state, Florida would never have been an issue... and if the Florida Supreme Court ordered a complete recount instead of a half-assed, favor Gore recount, it would have stood. Accept that your guys lost and that you should, as one of the current big democratic party websites says, move on.
The SCOTUS ruled that you must recount ALL of the votes in the state according to the same standards, not just a select batch which were likely to favor one candidate. Had the Florida Supreme Court ordered a complete recount from the beginning, there wouldn't have been a whole lot the SCOTUS could do. The recount was ordered to be stopped because it couldn't be completed (a FULL recount, that is, not a selective one) in the timeframe that existed (there is a Constitutional amendment (20) stating that the new president needs to be in place on Jan 20).
They didn't ignore states rights, presidential elections fall under the purview of the Constitution and the representative body of each state (as they're elected by the people, not appointed, and thus capable of being held responsible). The Florida Supreme Court made a bad decision which was overturned - the SCOTUS does this all the time, nothign new. State law cannot overrule federal law - allowing a select group of votes to be recounted, but not others, is a violation of equal protection rights. Finally, the SCOTUS didn't declare GWB the winner, the finalized vote tallies in Florida and the Florida legislature, as is their duty, did.
wait for 2.6.1... Linus has repeatedly stated that all he cares about being buildable and stable for 2.6.0 is x86. He's been pretty irked by the people maintaining trees for other architectures which have gone ages without merging suddenly wanting to get the patches in at the last minute, especially if it means changing more than just the arch specific files.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that morality and ethics exist outside of the spectrum of religion, right?
If I can access bank accounts and drain funds away to another account, do I cross an ethical line?
If I can steal supplies from work for my personal use at home, do I cross an ethical line?
If I can sell my dad's used diabetic needles to junkies instead of throwing them away, do I cross an ethical line?
If I can walk out into my back yard, cross over into a neighbor's property and hunt without his permission, do I cross an ethical line?
If I throw away food that someone else could have eaten, do I cross an ethical line?
If I kill more animals than I can eat before the meat rots, do I cross an ethical line?
If I own a 1000 acres of woods and I decide to burn them all down, do I cross an ethical line?
If I drive a hummer to the grocery store 500 feet away to get a quart of milk, do I cross an ethical line?
There are lots of ethical questions regarding embryonic stem cells that don't involve religion. For example, is it ethical to create extra embryos that I know I won't need so I can sell them/use them for research? At what point do we cross the threshold of duplicating embryos and cloning people? Is it ethical to force people getting paid minimum wage to pay for general scientific research (especially when adult stem cells are showing results NOW but embryonic ones aren't) or would it be better to do it through private donations and other capitalism?
You know, just because we are capable of doing something doesn't always mean that it's a good idea. There's nothing wrong with questioning where we're going and if we are doing the right thing, especially at the beginning of something new versus finally asking those questions after getting halfway through it or finished with it.
It's kind of hard to have faith in democracy under such conditions...
For someone who went off on a rant about something you perceive to be wrong and the idiocy of other people on subjective subjects, the least you could do is get the fact right that the US is not, never has been, and hopefully never will be, a democracy. We're a republic... precisely so there are people who stop to think about the big picture instead of letting popular opinion rule and squash 49% of peoples' rights.
I think that, game addiction is not a real addiction.
It's not the game itself that I was addicted to. I REALLY hated EQ itself - it was designed to be a time sink, there are tons of problems in the mechanics, balance and implementation of the game, and more often than not, it brought the worst out of people. What I was addicted to was the social interactions with my friends in the game and how that made me feel. Similarly, someone who goes out to the clubs every weekend usually doesn't do it because they're addicted to alcohol (if it was the alcohol they are after, they can drink a larger quantity for a cheaper price at home), it's the social environment that they feel they need. That said, my main alt was a necro that I soloed to 65 with something like 75 AAs during times where I wanted to or felt the need to play but didn't want to be around people.
One question I wanted to ask you is, why didnt you bothered to know the people in there?, like going out and meet somewhere?
I did meet several people from the game. First, and most obviously, was my girlfriend. Five of us from my general area also met up this past spring. Largely, there are two reasons why our guild didn't meet up more, we were spread out from NY to MD to WA to CA to TX to Russia to South Korea to Australia to you name it... We were the largest and most progressed non-mandatory guild on our server so we picked up people who were interested from pretty nearly everywhere in the world. In addition to that, meeting up in real life took time away from the game and the social environment it provided. Besides, have you ever met MMORPG junkies? Most of the pics alone will make slashdotters look like movie stars.
Before Everquest existed, I 'was somebody' online - ran a guild on a MUD (although not as big as yours), and eventually even ended up running the MUD itself. There were definitely some stretches where I'd often spend 16 hours a day on the computer.
I had over 200 days played on just my main character over the course of the 927 days that I played. I had a further 60ish days played on my main alt, 120ish on my bazaar mule (of which, I was probably present for at least 50% of) and another 20 or so on my other toons. That's approximately 340 days played out of 927. Roughly 37% of my life devoted to a game on a consistent basis, roughly as much time as a 9-5 worker puts in. Factor in another 33% of my time sleeping (give or take 8 hours a day). I work approximately 30 hours a week and that's another 18% or so of my time, leaving 12% of my time to doing other stuff (daily life activities, reading, going out with friends, etc).
People need to understand what an addiction really is. If you are COMPELLED to do something so much that it interferes with your ability to pay your rent, feed yourself, or maintain relationships that are important to you, that's an addiction. If it consumes all of your free time, that's just recreation. And I think it's a tragedy to try and label someone an 'addict' just because of their prefered form of recreation.
I couldn't go downstairs to clean without bringing my laptop with me so I could keep an eye on the game. I'd cut trips off early so I could check in on the game. I scheduled my work, visiting friends, etc around the game. The game utterly dominated every facet of my life. The only reason why I never called in to work for the game was because I controlled the activity of both - I was the leader of the guild and the manager of my workplace (nobody to answer to but the owners).
About a year and a half before I quit, my best friend quit playing EQ. During that time, I think I saw him about five times and talked to him on the phone, via IM, etc maybe twice per week. I mostly lost touch with all of my other friends, both online and off, since they didn't play EQ and I couldn't control the times they wanted to spend with me (thus interfering with EQ time or the work that I scheduled around EQ time). I stopped doing almost every other activity I enjoy (wood working, tabletop gaming, learning the guitar, programming, etc) and frequently only did the minimum of what was required of the stuff that I didn't necessarily enjoy (mowing, balancing my checkbook, fixing the inevitable problems you encounter when you own a house, etc).
I couldn't be away from EQ for more than a couple hours without "twitching" as most EQ junkies call it. First thing I did when I woke up was check in on the guild, whether if it was when I was supposed to get up or if it was in the middle of the night. I may not have gotten as bad as some people do, probably because of the necessity of caring for my father, but my life revolved around EQ for a solid two years... and that was despite throwing up, getting physically stressed out, etc over the need to quit about a year into playing.
Why did it not 'mean' anything in real life?
;)
Are the people on the other end of those guildies not real people?
Did they not enjoy your company/help/etc?
Perhaps they needed a connection with someone as much as you did?
Seems like you could be affecting real life, possibly more lives than otherwise.
That's the exact line of reasoning I used to justify what I was doing. That EQ wasn't simply a game, that it meant much more than that, especially given that my gf and I would use it as our form of dating between cross country flights. I would help my friends through hard times in their personal lives and likewise, they would help me.
What would be real life then?
Anything past eating,pooping,sleeping ? (and sleeping doesn't even FEEL all that real
Bowling with friends is more 'real' than questing with guildmates somehow?
I was the most important person in my guild for a couple years... not only was I the guild leader and raid leader, I ran the website, took care of all the DKP, etc. Every time someone took a few months off and came back, I was the person they remembered. If I wasn't in game (though it often sit there running 24/7 with me being able to see the monitor in case someone wanted to talk), I was fielding IMs from up to 10 different guildies at a time...
I still have 34 guildies in my friends list. I talk to two regularly and have been contacted by another 8 or so since I left. In the end, I wasn't really much of a part of their life. That's out of a couple hundred people, many of whom I knew on a first name basis. I may not see a lot of my old real life friends anymore, but we still occassionally bump into each other and we'll chat, have lunch or whatever. The vast majority of my EQ "friends", I'll probably never talk to again simply because EQ ceased, at least for me, but real life doesn't.
Also... the relative anonymity made people act in ways they never would in real life or pretend to be someone they weren't (beyond the roleplaying inherent in the game). Greed was rewarded. Stabbing your friends in the back was rewarded. Using people was rewarded... People would use other people as stepping stones to get a better piece of gear, access to a zone they didn't have, etc and then once they got what they wanted, would leave you high and dry. Yeah, same thing happens in real life, but in EQ, it happens to a much, much larger degree.
Eight years ago, my father had a brain aneurysm and stroke and I am his sole caregiver. I was 21 when it happened. I've mostly been stuck at home taking care of him for my entire 20s while I watched friends finish school, get married, have kids, etc. Between the area where I live and the limited ability I have to go out to enjoy life with my friends, I really started losing touch with society and became depressed.
In 2003, my best friend bought EQ at the urging of one of his co-workers. After two months of him nagging me incessantly to try it, against my better judgement, I did. Everything started out fine, him and I would log on for 2-3 hours a night to play together and that was it. About two months into it, him and I were asked to become officers in our guild. At the point you become an officer, you suddenly feel a whole lot more responsibility and you feel like you're important - everyone in your guild counts on you. Not long after, I became our raid leader and, given the absence of the guild leader for a long period of time, people began to see me as the guild leader as well. Eight months in, I was tagged with the guild leadership officially. I now had seven officers and in the neighborhood of 120 guild members counting on me to be there. By now, I wasn't playing 2-3 hours a day, I was playing 8-12 hours a day. It wasn't reality, but it felt real enough - I was important to people and interacting with "society." Along the way, I met a girl from the other side of the US and we had a fairly turbulent relationship(mostly due to her being bipolar), but we were in love and planned to get married. I knew that EQ was taking up my entire life, but my girlfriend was there and that's how we spent time together from 3k miles apart and I was the engine the drove hundreds of cogs. At our peak, we had 1039 tagged toons.
This spring, my relationship of two years ended with her and at the same time, the officers staged a coup as the pressures from EQ's death throes were mounting (yeah, EQ is dying, netcraft, server consolidations and mmogchart confirm it). About a month after I left the girl and my guild, I realized that I no longer had a reason to play and I simply logged off one night never to return again. That was three months ago last weekend.
For me, it wasn't a game I was addicted to, it was all the social interaction, feeling important and spending time with my gf. After years of being depressed, it was nice to be somebody even if it didn't mean anything in real life. After the way things ended, my biggest regret is that the things that helped me break that addiction didn't happen earlier. Oddly enough, despite becoming "nothing" again, I haven't been depressed and I find myself enjoying the mundane things in life that I neglected for 2.5 years. I still frequently think about EQ and some of the fun times I had in it, but I have no urge to play it anymore... and I deliberately avoid anything that might suck me into a similar situation again. In the meantime, I'm trying to rebuild my life even though I feel that I'm fighting an uphill struggle now at 29.
Our brains are an electro-chemical system and I would argue that the stimuli that make you feel important and good about yourself can be just as addicting as putting that cigarette up to your lips, especially when you and the rest of the world appear to have given up on each other. At 21, when you still have pretty much everything going for you and life hasn't completely knocked every one of your plans for the future out of whack, it's pretty easy to think idealistically about how everyone should be able to feel/be/do exactly like you.
The government very clearly saw what happens when you have a well educated youth during the 60's. The fact that public education has been on the decline since those days is no accident.
Who do you think taught the last couple generations? Perhaps these "well educated youth" suffer from a bit of hubris and decided they knew better than everyone else so they introduced new teaching methods which they thought would be better and those methods have failed. Nah, educated people would never claim that they have a new solution then admit a failure of their own making when it doesn't work out, lets just immediately jump to a nationwide conspiracy. Who's fault is it this week, the Free Masons or the Illuminati?
# You revise the hypothesis: "This is abnormal fluctuation, caused by human intervention."
# You reexamine the data: "The rate seems to be increasing more since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Pollution increased at that time."
define "period". Is a period 200 years? 2,000? 200,000? Is a 200 year period a large enough sample to draw conclusive evidence that it isn't normal fluctuation in a planet that is billions of years old? Was it human pollution that warmed the earth during the last ice age? Are there non-human factors which can cause climate change and if so, why immediately theorize that it must be human activity that is doing it? Because the sample period is so small? Because our we have an inflated sense of self-importance?
Lets sample the temperature of the ground around a volcano for two weeks. On day 7, the villagers surrounding dig a well. On day 9, suddenly the volcano erupts and the ground temperature goes up exponentially as the magma flows over it. The volcano was perfectly fine until those pesky humans dug that well. Why, seeing as everything was fine up until digging that well, the hole the villagers put in the ground was obviously responsible for a change in the geological pressure, causing the volcano to erupt.
Is the earth warmer today than it was 100 years ago? Sure, I'll make the assumption that the scientists are right and it is. Does a one degree fluctuation in 100 years matter? Certainly if you only consider those 100 years. How does a one degree fluctuation in 100 years compare to a larger scale such as the last 10,000 years, 100,000 years, 1,000,000 years? How fast did the temperature change when the glaciers of the last ice age retreated? Was man responsible for that? Obviously, they weren't, so what caused it to happen? Could those same principles be affecting climate today?
When you already have the result you're looking for, it's easy to overlook other factors in science. We know that natural planetary activity outside of human activity causes climate change. Are our models good enough to predict pre-civilization climate change? If not, why immediately jump to the conclusion that it is human activity which is causing climate change today unless that is the conclusion you're looking for?
People pointed to the scientist in this article being paid by Exxon and thus couldn't be trusted. Where do the scientists who are on the "humans are responsible for climate change" get their funding? Government grants, environmental cause groups, etc... How do they ensure they get the grants? By being as alarmist as possible so that it seems like money needs to be thrown at the problem to find a solution now. "Exxon funds science which promotes the policies they want" is no different than "Greenpeace funds science which promotes the policies they want." In the former case, they do it to remove pressure for them to change their business practices to increase profitability and in the latter case, they do it so they can get more people to donate to their coffers, increase their exposure, etc. Why should one side be attacked for their funding source and not the other?
There is very little impartiality or pure study from what I see in the climatology universe. Everyone finds the evidence to support the conclusion of the view they already hold, just like when when Gartner publishes a dstudy they did on behalf of MS. One side chooses the exact variables they want to control and the other side goes "the study is invalid because you deliberately picked the variables that would provide the result you wanted." That doesn't mean there isn't some truth in the study but it does mean that not enough was taken into consideration for it to be the general case. Ergo, yes, human activity MAY have some part in global warming bu
Teachers today don't teach kids how to learn and adapt, they don't even teach them how to do basic things like subtraction. It's pretty sad.
I graduated 11 years ago and Bill Clinton didn't inspire me to do anything with science either. The reason why you got modded down, I'm sure, is simply because you just had to throw a Bush attack into something he isn't remotely responsible for. Science and math education have been sliding for years before he even thought about running for President.
The way science and math are taught these days aren't conducive to learning science and math, much less making kids inspired enough to seriously considering a future with them. More cool stuff in science class, make sure the kids get the basics at an early age in math and then do fun stuff as they get older with it.
In 6th grade, we spent the whole year working on the biology of whales, learning how an ecosystem worked, etc and that culminated in a weekend fieldtrip for anyone who got a passing grade to the Atlantic Ocean three states away to go on a whale watch. THAT was fun and we all learned a lot that year. The same year, we took a few days and built our own model rockets, launched them and used a protractor with plumb string from a fixed distance to measure how high they went (we didn't even know what trig was yet but we were already having a blast using it to see who's rocket went the highest). We also learned how to develop (black and white) film, made our own prints and did all kinds of great stuff that year without even knowing that we were learning about math and science until we look back on it.
I guess I'll have to thank Reagan and Bush41 for their inspiring leadership in 1988 instead of the very talented teachers who creatively taught us by making it interesting.
By the time my sister started school, the teachers I had began to retire and a new wave fresh out of college were brought in. With them, they brought all these great new ideas on how to teach. In elementary school, I remember doing weekly tests on arithmetic tables, going up to the chalkboard to do math in front of the class, various scientific "experiments" (watching plants grow over a course of a semester and measuring it's change in height), etc. My sister never did any of that stuff. They did math in groups to "promote teamwork" and that resulted in the one or two strongest people in each group doing all of the work while everyone else goofed around and never really learned anything.
My freshman year of high school, I experienced my first wave of the changes. While the government mandates special education be provided for the learning disabled kids, it didn't mandate anything for the more advanced kids. The school had just built a new addition which meant diverting budget funds away from education and into repayment of bonds. They've since built 2 more additions when they would have been much better served by simply building an entirely new school since a new school would have cost approximately half of what they've spent expanding the current one three times (the entire expense being about 5 times the full yearly budget). All because they expected a large influx of kids coming up based on demographic changes (about 15% more than my class). Well, sure enough, this year's senior class has about 20% more students than mine (120 vs 145) and starting next year, the classes shrink again. The problem could have been solved by using the rooms more efficiently (at any given time, a large number of classrooms are empty with just a teacher sitting in them during one of their 40% of the work day break periods), but why do that when you can throw money at the problem?
The school budget for next year just went up for election... $1.2 million increase on a $28 million budget. If you pass it, you're looking at a $29.2 million budget and if you turn it down, you're looking at a $29.2 million contingency budget. It's the same budget whether it passes or fails. Looking at the numbers, they want to spend more money on two new buses ($220k) than they will spend on new books ($165k) for the entire district (K-12). Teacher salaries make up the lion share of the budget followed by teacher benefits and building maintenance/bond payments. The school mailed letters to everyone in the district during the winter bragging about how they were going to save electricity by reducing light usage and turning down the heat (because cold students learn better?). Why, it would save thousands of dollars!
Anyway, before I ramble on too long about all the problems between the "new and improved" teaching methods which promote self esteem and teaming instead of learning and how they squander millions on building new additions and remodeling sports fields every few years, lets look at the results. Remember how I said I managed a restaurant? Well, back ten years ago, people new how to make change in their heads, new general problem solving that they might encounter (what do I do when a fire starts on the grill), etc. These days, kids (we're talking 16-20, including people with diplomas and one who was valedictorian from my school a few years ago) just flat can't make change without using a calculator, don't know what to do when they encounter minor problems (some don't even know how to open cans without an electric can opener while others can't figure out how to refill hand towels in the bathroom), they don't even know how t
The rantings of one member of Congress is just that, a person excercising their freedom of speech. The consensus of Congress to convict and punish a specific citizen (or group of citizens) who is not a Congressional office holder is a Bill of Atainder. Censure proclaims someone guilty of a crime (real or imaginary) and prescribes a formal punishment (public denouncement of said person).
From the Report on Impeachment of President Clinton, Article VI, Section A:
Defenders of presidential `censure' argue that it does not really punish and therefore cannot be a Bill of Attainder. In determining whether a law is punitive within the context of the prohibition of Bills of Attainder, courts look to what are understood as the motivational, functional, and historical tests: (1) whether the legislature intended the law to be punitive; (2) whether the law reasonably can be said to further non-punitive legislative purposes; and (3) whether the punishment was traditionally judged to be prohibited by the Bill of Attainder clause. See In re McMullen, 989 F.2d 603, 607 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 114 S. Ct. 301 (1993).
The motivational test is clearly implicated here. As the Congressional Research Service has noted, any argument that censure provisions were not intended to be punitive would `face the task of overcoming express statements by individual Members concerning the appropriate `punishment' in this particular case.' Censure of the President by Congress, Jack Maskell, Legislative Attorney, American Law Division, CRS Report for Congress, September 29, 1998, at 9. Indeed, the record is replete with such references. As Representative Pease stated during consideration of the joint resolution of censure:
It seems to me, after all this discussion of what exactly is a resolution of censure regarding the President, there is still no agreement. It is either an action to punish the President or it is an action that doesn't punish the President. If it is an action to punish the President, it is a bill of attainder and unconstitutional. If it is a resolution that does not punish the President, it is meaningless. For that reason, though I have the greatest respect for those who have offered it, I cannot support the resolution.
Article 1, Section 5:
Clause 2: Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.
Censure is a formal reprimand by one of the chambers of Congress on a member of that chamber.
The Constitution clearly defines the separation of powers of the bodies of government and the only form of reprimanding the President or Vice-President that the Congress has is impeachment. If they were to censure the President, it would be one of two things 1) an Unconstitutional power the Congress has over the President which directly defies the written power of Congress to punish, via public shaming*, the President or 2) a direct bill of attainder.
Article 1, Section 9:
Clause 3: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Public shaming, such as scarlet letters, stockades, and perp walks, is most definitely a long standing traditional punishment.
See the Report on Impeachment of President Clinton, Article VI for more info on Presidential censure
From http://www.house.gov/house/Constitution/Constituti on.html
Article 1, Section 2:
Clause 5: The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.
Article 1, Section 3:
Clause 6: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
Clause 7: Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
From the American Bar Association website http://www.abanet.org/publiced/impeach2.html
Q. What procedures does the House of Representatives follow in the impeachment process?
A. While the Constitution outlines the basic process for impeachment, the specific procedures are determined by the internal rules of the House of Representatives and the Senate. To begin, the House of Representatives refers the investigation to its Judiciary Committee, which reviews the evidence and may conduct hearings. It determines whether an official impeachment inquiry is warranted and, if so, asks the House for permission to proceed. An official investigation follows, with the Committee deciding whether to offer articles of impeachment to the full House. The House then votes separately on each of the articles, with a simple majority needed to impeach the official. Articles of impeachment approved by the House are then presented to the Secretary of the U.S. Senate for trial.
Nobody needs to earn progression anymore, it's a matter of being the right class with the right level and you can skip right to the loot zones. The guilds who are in those loot zones and need new players shouldn't be offered instant free replacements for burning their people out on mandatory 30 or 40 hour raid schedules. Similarly, those players need to come from somewhere... the mid-tier raiding guilds are losing a lot of experienced players because they'er inundated with incessant begging to leave their friends for the uber loots.
It's only a matter of time until there aren't any midlevel raiders to recruit... that will leave the game with an ever dwindling amount of hardcore raiders and truly casual people who play to chat, solo, etc.
So... are they almost the same or are they drastically different?
I find that the more extreme you are in a certain viewpoint, the more the two look alike. If they're going to do drastically different things (often both by serving the loudest people in their respective party), they can't be exactly alike. The problem for these people is the major party they more closely identify with won't go to the extremes that they want them to thus, they appear to be the same because the degree of difference between the two parties is insignificant compared to their extremist view.
but on the application under availability (by a high school graduate)
sunday: eny
monday: eny
tuesday: eny
wednesday: eny
thursday: eny
friday: eny
saturday: nun
sunday: nun
BTW, the DNC called - they want their 2000 talking points back. Ann Richards may claim copyright infringement from even earlier
You're already insisting that the 04 election isn't going to elect a legitimate republican huh? Apparently if your guy doesn't win, it's automatically a conspiracy. Hey, guess what, I planted Monica Lewinsky in the White House (such was my part in the vast right wing conspiracy(VRWC)). Everyone has a political opinion whether they're a bum, an assembly line worker, a CEO or a politician. Apparently you think a PHB is either only capable of ordering all of his programmers (who are also all members of the VRWC) to deliberately write fraudulent software and still manages to completely covering it up or else he doesn't employ anyone and wrote the software himself. (For the record, I don't like the Diebold machines either). Further, it is up to the individual state legislatures and local election boards to pick their equipment, not GWB or "his" federal government.
Yes, the last 3 years were the result of the polices laid down during the Clinton administration. Remember, the illegal actions Enron, Global Crossings, etc commited happened during Clinton's years. Alan Greenspan warned way back in 1998 that the market was reaching unretainable levels and people still foolishly pumped more money into stocks. When the bubble finally burst, the 2000 election hadn't occured. After the bubble burst, people's entire life savings were destroyed as dotcoms dotbombed. The market lost all liquidity and it needed to be recreated from somewhere - that somewhere was taxcuts. Federal revenues have continued to grow with the tax cuts (it's spending which has increased) despite taking in far less capital gains due to lowered market exhuberance. You can't have jobs if nobody has the capital to create them and you don't gain capital by giving it to the government. Those people making $200k are going to do something with that money... if it's spent, a job is created to make a product and if it's invested, a job is created by someone taking a risk with it. Nobody in that bracket is sticking their money under their mattress. BTW, JFK was a huge proponent of the tax cuts of the early 60s for the same reason.
I openly admit pure disgust for everything that the Clintons are. I think they're the most corrupt people to ever live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I also admit that they're some of the most shrewd and brilliant politicians of the 20th century. I put nothing beyond them. Isn't it odd that Bill is consulting several candidates instead of just one he favors right now?
Your contempt for Bush and republicans is just as obvious as my hatred for the Clintons. I admit it right up front and I admit it biases what I say. Despite my loathing of them and the fact that he only got 38% of the vote when Perot torpeded GHWB, I never was in denial about hiim being the President. Clinton turned down Sudan when they offered him Osama in 1998 (who was responsible for the 1993 world trade center bombing). He didn't do anything to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons but did turn the cheek for them. He did allow the transfer of missile tech to China which now enables them to nuke anywhere in the US with weapons technology which they stole while he blindly looked the other way so he could have coffee for illegal foreign campaign donations from that same country.
Europe already hated us because they're no longer the seat of the world's power (well, except for the countries who appreciated out hard stand against the soviets - you know, the people who had to live under their tyrannical rule). Lots of Asia has similarly hated us. Most of South/Central America seems to be practicall
Were you in favor of Ken Starr going after Bill Clinton, given that he was simply following the rule of law (live by the law, die by the law)? Do you believe he should have been impeached for committing perjury otherwise establishing that Presidents are above the law the rest of us are subjected to? Further, can we immediately eliminate welfare, SSI, etc because they're Unconstitutional even though FDR got a court to declare them so after threatening to increase the number of judges and install his puppets so it would be whether they thought it was Constitutional or not?
If GWB wins in 2004, will you call him a legimate President or not? You neglected to reply to that question. The economy started tanking in March of 2000 - while Clinton was still in office. Remember the dems complaining that GWB was trying to talk down the economy because it had already fallen so much that year? Macroeconomics takes years to play out - the setup for those loss of jobs happened under Clintons watch... As for what the world thinks of us, Europe has been envious and jealous of us for decades and with the fall of the Evil Empire, they've finally decided it's safe to spit in our face. There was plenty of anti-US sentiment before GWB took office. In fact, you may remember a day during Clintons first year in office where the same building came under attack and Clinton rolled over, just like the terrorists expected him to. I respect Clark and Kerry deeply for their service, but being a soldier doesn't automatically qualify you to be a President. Kerry has repeatedly wiped his ass with large portions of the Constitution when it convenienced him and Clark is too wishy-washy to be electable (he's changed his mind 6 times on whether we should have gone into Iraq since the beginning of September, there are videos of him endorsing GWB since he became president, etc). Someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes of all of these candidates... someone who doesn't want a democratic president in 2004 because they want an open White House in 2008. I'll let you figure it out
What do I disagree with GWB on? Off the top of my head, Microsoft, putting troops on our borders, naturalization of illegals, free trade, his dept of education reform (I want it completely abolished), his SSI reform (even more individual control for pensioning), I'd cut back federal medical coverage, I'd veto the Congressional raises especially because all the other government employee wages are tied to them, etc.
Do me a favor... keep dwelling on the past so that we republicans can steamroll your candidate next time. The left thinks the problem with the 2000 election was that they weren't far enough to the left - problem was they were already too far to the left. Not a single one of the nine democratic challengers have a shot at unseating Bush. Give me Dean or Clark, especially, and I'm gonna have a field day watching all but their most ardent supporters vote for GWB. Of course, when GWB stomps whoever it is, it's going to be because he has the benefit of "an incumbancy of an illegitmate presidency" so he still won't be the legitimate president, right?
Nah... that wouldn't cause an even bigger reaction from the left, casting more doubt on the legitimacy of our government, etc would it? You'd be crying even more about how once GWB was in office, he manipulated the vote like Jeb did in florida, right? Break out the tin foil hats everyone.
If a consistent standard is used statewide, GWB's margin widens despite what standard you use... and you still fail to address the irregularities in other states that GWB could have sued over if he was as egomaniacal as Gore
The recount had to be stopped at some point for the continuity of our government. You can't have endless recounts until the guy you want eventually wins. Again, had the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a statewide recount, instead of a selective recount, be done, it WOULD have been finished by the deadline. Further, focusing entirely on Florida throws out the questionable stuff elsewhere (democratic judge in Missouri ordering the polls in heavily democratic St Louis remain open for an extra two hours, democrats in South Dakota bribing bums with cigarettes for a democratic vote in the election, the mess in New Mexico, etc). Again, if Gore won his home state, Florida would never have been an issue... and if the Florida Supreme Court ordered a complete recount instead of a half-assed, favor Gore recount, it would have stood. Accept that your guys lost and that you should, as one of the current big democratic party websites says, move on.
They didn't ignore states rights, presidential elections fall under the purview of the Constitution and the representative body of each state (as they're elected by the people, not appointed, and thus capable of being held responsible). The Florida Supreme Court made a bad decision which was overturned - the SCOTUS does this all the time, nothign new. State law cannot overrule federal law - allowing a select group of votes to be recounted, but not others, is a violation of equal protection rights. Finally, the SCOTUS didn't declare GWB the winner, the finalized vote tallies in Florida and the Florida legislature, as is their duty, did.
wait for 2.6.1... Linus has repeatedly stated that all he cares about being buildable and stable for 2.6.0 is x86. He's been pretty irked by the people maintaining trees for other architectures which have gone ages without merging suddenly wanting to get the patches in at the last minute, especially if it means changing more than just the arch specific files.