As far as advertisers are concerned, pop-up blocking in Mozilla and Firefox is a blip on the radar, but any attempt by IE to do the same, because of its market share, will likely be broken within a week.
Besides, blocking pop-ups is one thing. Using the Adblock extention in Firefox to nuke banner and Flash ads on the side is something else, something I simply don't see IE doing (market pressures from advertisers and Macromedia would stop that if nothing else).
"They just saved a ton of money on their car insurance..."
Over who, though? NASA employees had been eligible to get insurance from Government Employee's Insurance COmpany long before said company opened their doors to the general public, so maybe their rates aren't as good as they imply...:)
"At a guess, the people who are being dictated to."
Was France in the wrong, then, for aiding us in our revolution? Even considering the tory position? Would it have been better if the French had not gotten involved, and let the situation fester until the people became so incensed that the American Revolution started to instead resemble the French or Russian Revolutions?
Was the US right not not get involved on behalf of Vietnam at the end of WWII, simply handing the territory back to French control instead of working to help the country maintain its independence?
Was it better for the US to not get involved in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?
Analogy time: Should you get involved in domestic abuse before or after a battered wife stabs her abusive husband to death?
The war in Iraq seems to be a relatively devisive issue within the Libertarian Party and movement. Your stance seems to be staunchly against the war. What are your plans, if any, to reach out to pro-war libertarians?
Because Japan is against the idea of nuclear weapons altogether for historical reasons and when the current Seoul government says they want to "engage" Kim Jong Il, that's what they have in mind. Also, in the case of Seoul, it's a matter of self-preservation (the North would most likely flatten Seoul first and ask questions later).
"An atheist is one who says there obviously isn't, but would be happy to be proven wrong."
And your problem is that you're missing your own use of the word "obvious." It's a sign of bias, a belief that the outcome has already been determined.
An agnostic doesn't think the word "obvious" applies, to either case.
As mentioned in my earlier post, the root cause for these organizations are oppresive governments that generally don't care what its people want. Consider the popular support bin Laden and his tactics have enjoyed in places like, say, Indonesia.
"The terrorists networks around the world need to be worked on"
And how exactly do you propose to do that without doing something about their popular support base? Simply "working on the networks" just cuts a few heads off of the hydra.
"Iraq was a poor country that wasn't more than a symbolic threat."
I'm sorry, did you actually read my post before you wrote this? Iraq wasn't a problem because of a direct threat to the US (real or perceived), nor was it a problem for any links to specific terrorist actions. Iraq was a problem in the way it did things like, say, gas its own people. The longer a situation like that festers, the more insurgents will start to think that it's OK to use the tactics of their oppressors. "If Baghdad gasses us, then we'll just gas Baghdad. And since the Palestinians seem so keen on Sadam, we'll gas them too. Maybe Syria while we're at it, since they're helping him circumvent the sanctions. We might even have some left over for Turkey..."
DPRK is a similar situation. Again, it doens't appear to have any direct ties to any terrorist network, but it has a role to play in the way it treats its own people. If the DPRK gets the bomb, they could threaten Seoul, Tokyo, Anchorage, etc. But the real problem is that if they keep putting their own people through hell, they'd be tempted to rise up against Pyongyang and use one of those nukes on Kim-friendly Beijing.
Remember how World War I started?
"The continuing terrorism, which has accellerated since 9/11, shows that overthrowing Saddam didn't do shit."
Because of its momentum. It's something that has built up over the last, oh, half-century. The overthrow of Hussein is part of the long-term solution to what is and will be a long-term problem.
"A people can only affect change if they decide to make that change."
But if you wait for that to happen you won't like their methodology. You could choose not to get involved when you hear your neighbor getting beaten by her husband, but will you willing to help her affect her own change and find her own independence after she's stabbed her husband 47 times?
"Is there some reason they'd be better than, say, B2 bombers?"
The flight path would be a pain in the ass. The bombers would likely have to take off from within the US (apart from the Navy, I don't think the US has a supply of nuclear warheads outside of the contiguous 48 any more) and Japan and ROK probably wouldn't allow overflight for something like this. Ballistic missiles don't go through anybody's airspace other than your own and your target's.
It could have been a submarine-launched cruise missile, but I think our stocks might still be depleted after Serbia/Afghanistan/Iraq.
"At the end of the war he was driving a truck back from Norway."
Which would mean his first chance to surrender would have been when he crossed the Finnish border into the Soviet Union. There was no bridge between Sweden and Denmark at the time (and if there were, it would have been bombed to hell). Which is moot, since...
"The Americans were at Penemunde (sp?) and he tried to surrender to them."
... Peenemünde is on an island. If nothing else, the US would have been very interested in his uber-amphibious truck.
Because the US could build smaller, lighter nuclear warheads than the Soviets. The Soviets had rockets large enough to throw Sputnik up because they had larger payloads to deal with.
"I thought the troops were there to keep the hoardes of dirty, malnourished North Korean refugees from fleeing North Korea to seek a better life in China."
No, that's what the North Korean troops on the border are for. They shoot to kill. The refugees caught in China and sent back across the border intact are the unlucky ones in comparison.
"One senior intelligence official noted that preparations the North knew could be detected by the United States might be a scare or a negotiating tactic by North Korea"
Which means that the "ho-hum" we're publicly seeing might simply be Washington's response. "Oh, that was supposed to be your bomb? It was kinda hard to tell. See, we thought you guys were working on nuclear weapons over there, and... well, shucks, we've seen bigger conventional explosions."
Nah. Minutemen have more than one warhead, and Russia (and maybe China) would have to be told "Don't worry, it's not you!" beforehand so that their analogs of NORAD don't get the wrong idea. Unless you were thinking that the US pulled an Osiraq...
"Did those 134,000 troops stop the Madrid or Bali bombings?"
Yes, we should have sent troops to Spain and Indonesia instead.
"Face it, Bush fucked up in going to Iraq, there are much worse threats facing us in this world."
Problem: Surprisingly large numbers of Islamic extremists are blowing people up.
Cause: Oppressive, brutal governments make these extremist groups and their actions seem attractive to the ordinary people living under them in comparison.
Solution: Promote democracy so that people don't feel they need to make bombs to bring about change.
Implementation: Use heavy diplomacy when possible. Consider the use of force only in situations where the risk to neighboring countries is still minimal.
What, do you really think everything will be fine and dandy just as soon as we catch that one guy hiding in south Asia? If anything, bin Laden is more a symptom of the problem than the actual cause.
What we're effectivley seeing here is what happened in France in the early Nineteenth Century and Russia in the early Twentieth: vicious, bloody popular uprisings against tyrannical governments, where the revolutionaries are just as sanguine as the governments they're overthrowing. The only difference is that, in our modern world, the revolutionaries and their methods can be exported around the world to also strike at others they perceive to be allied with the bourgeois elite.
Do you think it's mere coincidence that the bombings in Indonesia happened in the same country that brought us the whole East Timor mess?
"You'll note that nobody blinked an eye when we took the Taliban out."
Spoken like someone who doesn't remember the protests in Pakistan and New York(!) in October of 2001, among other places.
"South Korea (especially the younger generation) wants the US out. So,..."
I'm suspecting that a few anti-US protests have been over-reported, or at least given a little too much credence. The Doughnut Of Destruction has been making noise about taking troops out of ROK and moving them elsewhere for the long-term and suddenly the Roh government (of "Sunshine Policy" fame) has made noises to the tune of "Heyyy, guys! Let's not be so hasty about this, hm?"
"No conventional explosive creates that large a mushroom cloud..."
Well, you could probably do it with an oil refinery if DPRK had oil to refine at the moment. I could also see this as being a Really Bad Day at a coal yard with poor safety (who needs daisy-cutters when you have coal dust?), but they'd need coal for that as well.
It's possible for it to be an industrial accident, but the problem is that there isn't enough industry in the place right now to have such an accident.
"But now that they have working nukes... don't know whether we can trust Kim not to use them..."
If nothing else he'll use them as he's used the possibility of him having them for the past few years: blackmail the US for food and electricity. The big question however is who (else) he'll sell the technology to.
"Voting is pretty straight forward, you don't have to try to quantify things."
Yeah, issues smissues.
"If you don't want to vote for anyone.. then just don't tick anything. Let someone else make the decision for you."
Why bother with democracy, then?
Why is my opinion of "I don't want any of these candidates in my government" somehow worth less than yours?
How do you get government by consent of the governed when only those people who give their consent to the ballot are able to have any influence in it? You can't be said to give your consent if you are unable to withold it, and the people who don't vote because they can't stand any of the candidates are just as bound by results of the election as that minority that votes.
And I do mean "minority."
"Got nothing to do with preferential voting though."
From your link (when corrected):
A ranked ballot or preferential voting system is a type of voting system in which each voter casts their vote by ranking candidates in order of preference.
As I said in my post and tried to show in my analogy, preferential voting is flawed in the way that it only allows voters to state their preference with respect to the other options given. If the voter doesn't want any of the options given (their preference in absolute terms), they are still left with no true voice in their government by your mechanism.
"The electoral votes are tossed aside, and the newly elected House of Representatives gets to vote in a one-vote-per-state fashion to pick the new president."
Oh, things get far more interesting than just devolving to Congress in that case.
First off, unlike the EC, the House is stuck with choosing between the top three vote-winners, which if nothing else means that the third-party candidate is still in the running.
Secondly, if 2000 is any indiciation, the people will become very attentive of what happens in the Capitol when that vote is being taken. And while it might be tempting to vote along party lines, the congresscritters will have to keep an eye on how their district voted if they want to survive the next midterm (which will get a lot of attention after such a presidential election). If they're a Republican/Democrat, and their district voted Democrat/Republican in the presidential election...
Third, as you mentioned, each state gets one vote. But if a state's congresscritters can't agree on who to vote for and none of the three candidates gets a majority of a state's congresscritters, that state simply doesn't vote.
Now, as to the public attention the House will be getting, consider how many voters tend to vote against a particular candidate instead of for, if for no other reason than because of the perception that a third party could never win. But if a third-party candidate makes it to such an advanced stage, people will think twice about discounting the third-party candidate and may start talking up the third candidate to their congresscritter. "I voted for A, but I really would rather see C as president..."
And, of course, a similar batch of fun and games would be happening over in the Senate as they try to figure out who gets to be Vice President...
At any rate, the system does allow room for a candidate that only got, say, 5% of the electoral vote to actually make it through the House to become president. It'd be an ugly day or twelve in the House as they wring their hands about it and the odds may be low, but it's more than the zero chance they'd have if it all stopped with the 5%.
"but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?"
That was a Long Time Ago, and Pennsylvania (like the rest of the nation) has long since been overrun by the apathetic masses.
This is why the US needs a new frontier, as a safety valve for proponents of new/different ideas can go off and form their own, new states instead of having to take over an existing state.
"the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England,"
And they went to Massachusetts, not Pennsylvania. Wrong commonwealth. As others have already pointed out, Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers.
There is no single religion that British colonizers of what are now US states practiced when they came over. Puritans in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland... and then there were the colonies that were started without the pretext of religion, like Georgia.
The Heritage Trilogy by "Ian Douglas," along with the Legacy Trilogy he's curerntly working on. The first book (Semper Mars) starts in the middle of the Twenty-First Century in a world recognizable to the people of today. The author didn't take the usual cop-out of some great cataclysm that makes that future world completely different from the one we live in (i. e. nation-states as we know them haven't quite been eliminated) and tried to extend historical and current trends (social and technological) out to the near-future while still throwing in a few monkey wrenches (scientific proof that extraterrestrials visited earth in early pre-history) to keep the stories interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
"IE will soon be blocking popups."
Yes, but for how long?
As far as advertisers are concerned, pop-up blocking in Mozilla and Firefox is a blip on the radar, but any attempt by IE to do the same, because of its market share, will likely be broken within a week.
Besides, blocking pop-ups is one thing. Using the Adblock extention in Firefox to nuke banner and Flash ads on the side is something else, something I simply don't see IE doing (market pressures from advertisers and Macromedia would stop that if nothing else).
"They just saved a ton of money on their car insurance..."
:)
Over who, though? NASA employees had been eligible to get insurance from Government Employee's Insurance COmpany long before said company opened their doors to the general public, so maybe their rates aren't as good as they imply...
"At a guess, the people who are being dictated to."
Was France in the wrong, then, for aiding us in our revolution? Even considering the tory position? Would it have been better if the French had not gotten involved, and let the situation fester until the people became so incensed that the American Revolution started to instead resemble the French or Russian Revolutions?
Was the US right not not get involved on behalf of Vietnam at the end of WWII, simply handing the territory back to French control instead of working to help the country maintain its independence?
Was it better for the US to not get involved in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?
Analogy time: Should you get involved in domestic abuse before or after a battered wife stabs her abusive husband to death?
The war in Iraq seems to be a relatively devisive issue within the Libertarian Party and movement. Your stance seems to be staunchly against the war. What are your plans, if any, to reach out to pro-war libertarians?
Because Japan is against the idea of nuclear weapons altogether for historical reasons and when the current Seoul government says they want to "engage" Kim Jong Il, that's what they have in mind. Also, in the case of Seoul, it's a matter of self-preservation (the North would most likely flatten Seoul first and ask questions later).
"An atheist is one who says there obviously isn't, but would be happy to be proven wrong."
And your problem is that you're missing your own use of the word "obvious." It's a sign of bias, a belief that the outcome has already been determined.
An agnostic doesn't think the word "obvious" applies, to either case.
"I was talking about governments,"
As mentioned in my earlier post, the root cause for these organizations are oppresive governments that generally don't care what its people want. Consider the popular support bin Laden and his tactics have enjoyed in places like, say, Indonesia.
"The terrorists networks around the world need to be worked on"
And how exactly do you propose to do that without doing something about their popular support base? Simply "working on the networks" just cuts a few heads off of the hydra.
"Iraq was a poor country that wasn't more than a symbolic threat."
I'm sorry, did you actually read my post before you wrote this? Iraq wasn't a problem because of a direct threat to the US (real or perceived), nor was it a problem for any links to specific terrorist actions. Iraq was a problem in the way it did things like, say, gas its own people. The longer a situation like that festers, the more insurgents will start to think that it's OK to use the tactics of their oppressors. "If Baghdad gasses us, then we'll just gas Baghdad. And since the Palestinians seem so keen on Sadam, we'll gas them too. Maybe Syria while we're at it, since they're helping him circumvent the sanctions. We might even have some left over for Turkey..."
DPRK is a similar situation. Again, it doens't appear to have any direct ties to any terrorist network, but it has a role to play in the way it treats its own people. If the DPRK gets the bomb, they could threaten Seoul, Tokyo, Anchorage, etc. But the real problem is that if they keep putting their own people through hell, they'd be tempted to rise up against Pyongyang and use one of those nukes on Kim-friendly Beijing.
Remember how World War I started?
"The continuing terrorism, which has accellerated since 9/11, shows that overthrowing Saddam didn't do shit."
Because of its momentum. It's something that has built up over the last, oh, half-century. The overthrow of Hussein is part of the long-term solution to what is and will be a long-term problem.
"A people can only affect change if they decide to make that change."
But if you wait for that to happen you won't like their methodology. You could choose not to get involved when you hear your neighbor getting beaten by her husband, but will you willing to help her affect her own change and find her own independence after she's stabbed her husband 47 times?
"Is there some reason they'd be better than, say, B2 bombers?"
The flight path would be a pain in the ass. The bombers would likely have to take off from within the US (apart from the Navy, I don't think the US has a supply of nuclear warheads outside of the contiguous 48 any more) and Japan and ROK probably wouldn't allow overflight for something like this. Ballistic missiles don't go through anybody's airspace other than your own and your target's.
It could have been a submarine-launched cruise missile, but I think our stocks might still be depleted after Serbia/Afghanistan/Iraq.
Which would mean his first chance to surrender would have been when he crossed the Finnish border into the Soviet Union. There was no bridge between Sweden and Denmark at the time (and if there were, it would have been bombed to hell). Which is moot, since...
"The Americans were at Penemunde (sp?) and he tried to surrender to them."
... Peenemünde is on an island. If nothing else, the US would have been very interested in his uber-amphibious truck.
Because the US could build smaller, lighter nuclear warheads than the Soviets. The Soviets had rockets large enough to throw Sputnik up because they had larger payloads to deal with.
"The Sunshine Policy was under Kim Dae Jung,"
And what was Roh's platform again, specifically its stance on the Sunshine Policy?
Seriously, you'd think ROK would have been happier about a proposed pull-out of US troops...
"I thought the troops were there to keep the hoardes of dirty, malnourished North Korean refugees from fleeing North Korea to seek a better life in China."
No, that's what the North Korean troops on the border are for. They shoot to kill. The refugees caught in China and sent back across the border intact are the unlucky ones in comparison.
"They can be used to protect them, but are mostly there to overrun them if they get too stupid"
Um... IMO, DPRK passed the point of "too stupid" quite a few years back, possibly as far back as Kim Jong Il's confirmation as the new Dear Leader.
"One senior intelligence official noted that preparations the North knew could be detected by the United States might be a scare or a negotiating tactic by North Korea"
Which means that the "ho-hum" we're publicly seeing might simply be Washington's response. "Oh, that was supposed to be your bomb? It was kinda hard to tell. See, we thought you guys were working on nuclear weapons over there, and... well, shucks, we've seen bigger conventional explosions."
Nah. Minutemen have more than one warhead, and Russia (and maybe China) would have to be told "Don't worry, it's not you!" beforehand so that their analogs of NORAD don't get the wrong idea. Unless you were thinking that the US pulled an Osiraq...
"Did those 134,000 troops stop the Madrid or Bali bombings?"
Yes, we should have sent troops to Spain and Indonesia instead.
"Face it, Bush fucked up in going to Iraq, there are much worse threats facing us in this world."
Problem: Surprisingly large numbers of Islamic extremists are blowing people up.
Cause: Oppressive, brutal governments make these extremist groups and their actions seem attractive to the ordinary people living under them in comparison.
Solution: Promote democracy so that people don't feel they need to make bombs to bring about change.
Implementation: Use heavy diplomacy when possible. Consider the use of force only in situations where the risk to neighboring countries is still minimal.
What, do you really think everything will be fine and dandy just as soon as we catch that one guy hiding in south Asia? If anything, bin Laden is more a symptom of the problem than the actual cause.
What we're effectivley seeing here is what happened in France in the early Nineteenth Century and Russia in the early Twentieth: vicious, bloody popular uprisings against tyrannical governments, where the revolutionaries are just as sanguine as the governments they're overthrowing. The only difference is that, in our modern world, the revolutionaries and their methods can be exported around the world to also strike at others they perceive to be allied with the bourgeois elite.
Do you think it's mere coincidence that the bombings in Indonesia happened in the same country that brought us the whole East Timor mess?
"You'll note that nobody blinked an eye when we took the Taliban out."
Spoken like someone who doesn't remember the protests in Pakistan and New York(!) in October of 2001, among other places.
"South Korea (especially the younger generation) wants the US out. So, ..."
I'm suspecting that a few anti-US protests have been over-reported, or at least given a little too much credence. The Doughnut Of Destruction has been making noise about taking troops out of ROK and moving them elsewhere for the long-term and suddenly the Roh government (of "Sunshine Policy" fame) has made noises to the tune of "Heyyy, guys! Let's not be so hasty about this, hm?"
"No conventional explosive creates that large a mushroom cloud..."
Well, you could probably do it with an oil refinery if DPRK had oil to refine at the moment. I could also see this as being a Really Bad Day at a coal yard with poor safety (who needs daisy-cutters when you have coal dust?), but they'd need coal for that as well.
It's possible for it to be an industrial accident, but the problem is that there isn't enough industry in the place right now to have such an accident.
"But now that they have working nukes... don't know whether we can trust Kim not to use them..."
If nothing else he'll use them as he's used the possibility of him having them for the past few years: blackmail the US for food and electricity. The big question however is who (else) he'll sell the technology to.
"Yahoo! News is reporting a mushroom cloud over North Korea"
At least it wasn't over South Korea... yet...
Yeah, issues smissues.
"If you don't want to vote for anyone
Why bother with democracy, then?
Why is my opinion of "I don't want any of these candidates in my government" somehow worth less than yours?
How do you get government by consent of the governed when only those people who give their consent to the ballot are able to have any influence in it? You can't be said to give your consent if you are unable to withold it, and the people who don't vote because they can't stand any of the candidates are just as bound by results of the election as that minority that votes.
And I do mean "minority."
"Got nothing to do with preferential voting though."
From your link (when corrected):As I said in my post and tried to show in my analogy, preferential voting is flawed in the way that it only allows voters to state their preference with respect to the other options given. If the voter doesn't want any of the options given (their preference in absolute terms), they are still left with no true voice in their government by your mechanism.
"The electoral votes are tossed aside, and the newly elected House of Representatives gets to vote in a one-vote-per-state fashion to pick the new president."
Oh, things get far more interesting than just devolving to Congress in that case.
First off, unlike the EC, the House is stuck with choosing between the top three vote-winners, which if nothing else means that the third-party candidate is still in the running.
Secondly, if 2000 is any indiciation, the people will become very attentive of what happens in the Capitol when that vote is being taken. And while it might be tempting to vote along party lines, the congresscritters will have to keep an eye on how their district voted if they want to survive the next midterm (which will get a lot of attention after such a presidential election). If they're a Republican/Democrat, and their district voted Democrat/Republican in the presidential election...
Third, as you mentioned, each state gets one vote. But if a state's congresscritters can't agree on who to vote for and none of the three candidates gets a majority of a state's congresscritters, that state simply doesn't vote.
Now, as to the public attention the House will be getting, consider how many voters tend to vote against a particular candidate instead of for, if for no other reason than because of the perception that a third party could never win. But if a third-party candidate makes it to such an advanced stage, people will think twice about discounting the third-party candidate and may start talking up the third candidate to their congresscritter. "I voted for A, but I really would rather see C as president..."
And, of course, a similar batch of fun and games would be happening over in the Senate as they try to figure out who gets to be Vice President...
At any rate, the system does allow room for a candidate that only got, say, 5% of the electoral vote to actually make it through the House to become president. It'd be an ugly day or twelve in the House as they wring their hands about it and the odds may be low, but it's more than the zero chance they'd have if it all stopped with the 5%.
"but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?"
That was a Long Time Ago, and Pennsylvania (like the rest of the nation) has long since been overrun by the apathetic masses.
This is why the US needs a new frontier, as a safety valve for proponents of new/different ideas can go off and form their own, new states instead of having to take over an existing state.
"the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England,"
And they went to Massachusetts, not Pennsylvania. Wrong commonwealth. As others have already pointed out, Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers.
There is no single religion that British colonizers of what are now US states practiced when they came over. Puritans in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland... and then there were the colonies that were started without the pretext of religion, like Georgia.
"When you're 18 you're going to delete the photos of your first lay?"
Remember your audience. How many Slashdotters had their first lay before age 18? Or after age 18, for that matter?
The Heritage Trilogy by "Ian Douglas," along with the Legacy Trilogy he's curerntly working on. The first book (Semper Mars) starts in the middle of the Twenty-First Century in a world recognizable to the people of today. The author didn't take the usual cop-out of some great cataclysm that makes that future world completely different from the one we live in (i. e. nation-states as we know them haven't quite been eliminated) and tried to extend historical and current trends (social and technological) out to the near-future while still throwing in a few monkey wrenches (scientific proof that extraterrestrials visited earth in early pre-history) to keep the stories interesting.