Or how about Canada's gun registry? That is a complete nightmare. Meant to cost $119 million it's ended up costing over $2 billion, and on top of that, it doesn't even work - supposedly they're trying to use, of all things, MS Access as the backend.
if someone is a handler for the mob, but has done nothing officially wrong by himself but has simply held known association with mob members to his own benefit, he's just as liable. it's similar to having knowledge of a felony and not coming forward, but on a larger scale.
That is a LOT! And that doesn't even include the spyware? I find that very difficult to believe.
The worst I've seen is approximately 3500 spyware on a 1Ghz Win2k machine with 512M ram. It was SLOW. Like 15+ minutes to boot, slow. It took a good 5 hours to "clean" with adaware, and even then I decided to reinstall anyway due to the system retaining a great deal of instability.
I'm confused: why would you turn on the fan while taking a shower? That streamlines the hot, moist air right out of your apartment.
Or are you talking about a rotary ceiling fan, not a bathroom ceiling fan - the kind that goes in the living room or kitchen?
Something that works really well: black blinds, and angling them properly during the day so the heat streams into the room. (In conjuction with a plastic sheet over the window area as well, of course.)
Granted I'm in SD, where it gets significantly colder in the winter.
I'm going to laugh when, in 30 years, they're finding in studies that the primary cause of the 200% increase in birth defects, cancer, and other deformation malodies is the result of this new concrete.
I was in a similar situation not too long ago. Take job A, which paid less in a smaller company, which had work I was more interested in; or take job B, which paid more in a larger beaurocratic corp. I took the better paying job.
And, it was a mistake. After the first couple initial months of employment there, I got bogged down by the tedium of being a cog, always working on essentially the same thing, and in a language I hated. I'd get off work and I would be utterly exhausted, despite having done precious little and having gotten enough sleep the night before - in essence, I got depressed. It got to the point where I'd do little more than go to work, eat and watch TV when getting home, and then go to sleep - only to repeat the next day.
The job A was available 8 months later, vacated by their new employee who, ironically, came to work for company B. So I quit and went to work for company A, and I couldn't have been happier - even if I made less (and had to put more towards the debt I created while working at company B - depression does some fucked up things to ones rationality), I was happier, and was able to spend more time doing things I enjoy (which didn't cost much), spend time with family, had more energy, etc. - in general, I was happy.
Short answer: because the United States is a lot larger with a much lower population density in most areas than Europe, Japan, and pretty much every other Westernized country in the world. I'm not kidding when I say there are many people who live in locations where the closest grocery store is 20 miles away or more.
The UK has 93,278 sq miles of land - slightly smaller than our state of Oregon - whereas the state I live in - South Dakota - has 77,121 square miles. It is only the 17th largest state of 50. The UK's population density is 649 people/mile, whereas South Dakota has a density of 9.95 people/mile. There's a big difference there, one which the lack of wealth distribution/state telco funding can't or won't make up for - meaning the economy just can't support or rationalize high speed out to the boondocks.
By the way: the Western world is not "the rest of the world". Most of the world is still on dialup.
No shit. It takes, what, half an hour to get informed? There is a wealth of information easily accessible to a technically inclined person these days - online. Inside of half an hour, you can read an opinion for and against each measure and amendment, review the voting record and stance of each politician, and sitll have time to take a piss.
Maybe more like an hour, but still. I bet most of the people who 'arent informed' still had time to watch a rerun of their favorite TV show some time in the last week.
This is just asinine. I think both the original conjectures - that the scandals were leaked 'just in time' for midterms, and that the Saddam trial was rigged to coincide with elections - are nonsense. Saddam's trial has been winding down for months now, and scandals always pop up right before elections because people are digging deeper.
Not entirely! Marriage - an institution between a man and a woman which produces offspring - is a cultural institution necessary for the longevity of a nation. Nations which do not produce offspring soon begin to cease producing anything, and as a result slowly fade from the pages of history.
Yes, yes, the idea isn't perfect, but I came up with it on the spot and didn't bother to revise it. The point was to illustrate the shortcomings of digital media, regardless of how durable the medium is.
And there are many of us who hope he damn well does it again. He's the most sensible politician out there right now. Pragmatic, you might say.
- Sees technology as beneficial when well employed. Fosters it as a result and doesn't push hindering legislation (eg internet tax). - Sees that guns don't cause crime, people do. Doesn't support gun bans or legislations which simply keep guns out of the hands of upstanding citizens. - Sees that there is a fundamental issue with immigration more essential than Mexicans simply coming here. Reconsiders the sanity of birthright citizenship. - He's observed that foreign financial/food/economic aid is often more harmful than helpful (both to us and them), and wants to do away with it. - And a bunch more.
Basically, he's a straight-up Jeffersonian Constitutionalist. So, if your politics are "left" - socialistic, crippled by misplaced white male guilt, and in support of the "the government is here to help" mentality - or "green" - want to benigate the national security and economic interests in favor of saving trees - you'll likely hate his guts.
Let's say we encode the wealth of human knowledge (or at least the important parts) on a series of silicone ceramic disks (shaped like a CD or what have you), which are then read by a simple (but small) mechanical device. They are encoded onto the disks using as simple a method as we can muster - let's say something like Morse code, but modified to take into account all UNICODE characters. Let's say they have a capacity of several hundred kilobytes. The simple mechanical device which reads them would act as a typewriter - you insert a piece of paper into it, crank a wheel, and it transliterates the disks into English.
These disks are stored (let's ignore the technical infeasability of this for a moment) in a hermatically sealed vault, able to withstand a 9.0 earthquake, amongst other things. It is burried deep into the side of a mountain.
The records themselves are stored in sequential order: that is, records such as ancestoral languages and records are stored in the front, near the entrance, and clearly marked as such. This goes all the way to the present, covering the history of the world up to modern thermodynamics, biology research, and what have you. The disks which show how to translate from one language to another are near the front as well, right by the oldest texts. Also stored in this tomb are several of the machines required to read the disks.
An eon passes, and an archeologist from some future industrialized culture finds the tomb. However, it has been looted at some point, and coincidentially the disk reader had some materials which made good tools, and only sparse and damaged parts of the readers were found. Say, a total of 7/8ths of a machine was able to be reconstructed, but they still were unable to get it to work. Many of the disks were also damaged, used as tools, knocked out of order, and generally left in a messy array. All but a couple hundred of the disks are found intact, however. But the order to properly read them is not known - even though each disk does not require another to be read (ie each is independent from the other, like volumes of an encyclopedia).
The only thing the parts of the machines provides for them is knowledge of what precisely the disks were: a recorded medium. Without the machine, they'd have had little clue, as there is nothing distinctive about the marks on the disks to demonstrate that they weren't simply part of a fabrication process.
Archeologists toil to try and figure out the meaning of the disks. They're able to determine that some form of encryption was employed and toil for years trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, they are unable to figure much more than the fact that there are multiple distinct groups of disks based on pattern, and despite massive support from their government, they're forced to give up.
As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.
Well, obviously we'd have to change the way we refer to time. Instead of saying "it's 11am here" (as it is currently for me, at US Central Standard adjusted forward 6 hours to match gmt) you'd say "I'm -6 GMT here" or maybe "11am minus 6" or something to that effect. Not only would it tell the same information but it would provide more.
But: I do agree that changing it is stupid. Daylight savings does have application - particularly to farmers, ranchers, etc. who by essence set their daily schedule to the light of the day. In many parts of the US that's not so much the case anymore (ie automated machinery can do the work for you while you sleep/fish/hunt/whatever), but it is in some respects still.
Not only that, but the concept of a day is still determined by one rotation of the sun. One rotation from point A is the same amount of time as one rotation from point B or X. There's nothing "special" about Greenwich which should give it preference (no, no, we should base it on Springfield, Missouri! that's the ticket!)
I see four potential causes for these kinds of things:
1) The Democrat voters really are stupid, whether it's hanging chads or touchscreens 2) It's a vast right wing conspiracy, and the dozens/hundreds of laymen coders at the voting macine companies have willingly sold out their country. 3) These machines are simply not up to the task (what, you mean you've not been irritated by an improperly configured touchscreen before that mis-records your touches? it's more often than not for me.) 4) The members media, intent on providing ammunition for the potential claim of "the Republicans stole the election!" both after the 7th as well as in 2008, are only reporting the cases of Democrats having problems. (I didn't know a single conservative/Republican journalism major in college, but quite a few liberals. In a very conservative state. I don't think that's a fluke.)
I didn't get to the original article yet, but now I'm pissed that I read this far down the thread before I found out it was Alex Jones, certifiable nutcase, who was providing the information.
That said, most of the time I'm unable to muster any logically convincing rebuttal for what he's said, unfortunately. What he says isn't something people want to accept, but it seems difficult not to.
... or they saw a change happening in Congress and maybe the White House in a couple years, and thought, "hmm, our people could greatly utilize these laws in the quest for furthering political correctness".
I think it's more that the Democrats (the party as a whole, not the individual candidates) are seeing how the Patriot Act will be beneficial to them, as a party, come post-election (2006 and 2008). And the Military Commission Act.
I suspect that they expect (and hope) that Democrats get into power next month, and then maybe again in 2008 in the White House, and that "their side" would then be able to abuse the previously-complained-about parts of the Patriot Act. They probably see Bush and his administration as a lame duck at this point.
Did those history pamphlets you read also talk about how it wasn't the most violent male, but the richest and/or most socially well off male that had more ability to marry a "good" (rich, beautiful, etc.) wife? Did they mention that, in the strictest sense, women were not "property", as they couldn't be sold off or divorced, and that the man was as equally shackled to the woman as the woman was to the man? Did they mention that it was indeed a social contract, but one which was mutually beneficial and necessary for survival?
It may also come as a surprise to you that in colonial America, and even up until the religious reformations of the mid-1800s, women were not only treated better and with more esteem than they have been throughout the entire 1900s, but they were on equal economic standing with men in many regards (with females taking many of the tradescrafts which are traditionally thought of as "male" - gunsmith, blacksmith, etc - hell, the most prominent colonial gunsmiths were women).
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Or how about Canada's gun registry? That is a complete nightmare. Meant to cost $119 million it's ended up costing over $2 billion, and on top of that, it doesn't even work - supposedly they're trying to use, of all things, MS Access as the backend.
buddy, that's just the way liberals think. No two ways about it, really.
don't be rediculous!
if someone is a handler for the mob, but has done nothing officially wrong by himself but has simply held known association with mob members to his own benefit, he's just as liable. it's similar to having knowledge of a felony and not coming forward, but on a larger scale.
That is a LOT! And that doesn't even include the spyware? I find that very difficult to believe.
The worst I've seen is approximately 3500 spyware on a 1Ghz Win2k machine with 512M ram. It was SLOW. Like 15+ minutes to boot, slow. It took a good 5 hours to "clean" with adaware, and even then I decided to reinstall anyway due to the system retaining a great deal of instability.
I'm confused: why would you turn on the fan while taking a shower? That streamlines the hot, moist air right out of your apartment.
Or are you talking about a rotary ceiling fan, not a bathroom ceiling fan - the kind that goes in the living room or kitchen?
Something that works really well: black blinds, and angling them properly during the day so the heat streams into the room. (In conjuction with a plastic sheet over the window area as well, of course.)
Granted I'm in SD, where it gets significantly colder in the winter.
I'm going to laugh when, in 30 years, they're finding in studies that the primary cause of the 200% increase in birth defects, cancer, and other deformation malodies is the result of this new concrete.
I was in a similar situation not too long ago. Take job A, which paid less in a smaller company, which had work I was more interested in; or take job B, which paid more in a larger beaurocratic corp. I took the better paying job.
And, it was a mistake. After the first couple initial months of employment there, I got bogged down by the tedium of being a cog, always working on essentially the same thing, and in a language I hated. I'd get off work and I would be utterly exhausted, despite having done precious little and having gotten enough sleep the night before - in essence, I got depressed. It got to the point where I'd do little more than go to work, eat and watch TV when getting home, and then go to sleep - only to repeat the next day.
The job A was available 8 months later, vacated by their new employee who, ironically, came to work for company B. So I quit and went to work for company A, and I couldn't have been happier - even if I made less (and had to put more towards the debt I created while working at company B - depression does some fucked up things to ones rationality), I was happier, and was able to spend more time doing things I enjoy (which didn't cost much), spend time with family, had more energy, etc. - in general, I was happy.
YMMV.
Short answer: because the United States is a lot larger with a much lower population density in most areas than Europe, Japan, and pretty much every other Westernized country in the world. I'm not kidding when I say there are many people who live in locations where the closest grocery store is 20 miles away or more.
The UK has 93,278 sq miles of land - slightly smaller than our state of Oregon - whereas the state I live in - South Dakota - has 77,121 square miles. It is only the 17th largest state of 50. The UK's population density is 649 people/mile, whereas South Dakota has a density of 9.95 people/mile. There's a big difference there, one which the lack of wealth distribution/state telco funding can't or won't make up for - meaning the economy just can't support or rationalize high speed out to the boondocks.
By the way: the Western world is not "the rest of the world". Most of the world is still on dialup.
No shit. It takes, what, half an hour to get informed? There is a wealth of information easily accessible to a technically inclined person these days - online. Inside of half an hour, you can read an opinion for and against each measure and amendment, review the voting record and stance of each politician, and sitll have time to take a piss.
Maybe more like an hour, but still. I bet most of the people who 'arent informed' still had time to watch a rerun of their favorite TV show some time in the last week.
Mod parent up!
This is just asinine. I think both the original conjectures - that the scandals were leaked 'just in time' for midterms, and that the Saddam trial was rigged to coincide with elections - are nonsense. Saddam's trial has been winding down for months now, and scandals always pop up right before elections because people are digging deeper.
It's common sense.
Not entirely! Marriage - an institution between a man and a woman which produces offspring - is a cultural institution necessary for the longevity of a nation. Nations which do not produce offspring soon begin to cease producing anything, and as a result slowly fade from the pages of history.
No, he supports warrantless internet monitoring or something like it.
You're right. That's why I said he was a Jeffersonian.
Yes, yes, the idea isn't perfect, but I came up with it on the spot and didn't bother to revise it. The point was to illustrate the shortcomings of digital media, regardless of how durable the medium is.
And there are many of us who hope he damn well does it again. He's the most sensible politician out there right now. Pragmatic, you might say.
- Sees technology as beneficial when well employed. Fosters it as a result and doesn't push hindering legislation (eg internet tax).
- Sees that guns don't cause crime, people do. Doesn't support gun bans or legislations which simply keep guns out of the hands of upstanding citizens.
- Sees that there is a fundamental issue with immigration more essential than Mexicans simply coming here. Reconsiders the sanity of birthright citizenship.
- He's observed that foreign financial/food/economic aid is often more harmful than helpful (both to us and them), and wants to do away with it.
- And a bunch more.
Basically, he's a straight-up Jeffersonian Constitutionalist. So, if your politics are "left" - socialistic, crippled by misplaced white male guilt, and in support of the "the government is here to help" mentality - or "green" - want to benigate the national security and economic interests in favor of saving trees - you'll likely hate his guts.
Diebold doesn't really have any competetors.
Precisely!
Let's say we encode the wealth of human knowledge (or at least the important parts) on a series of silicone ceramic disks (shaped like a CD or what have you), which are then read by a simple (but small) mechanical device. They are encoded onto the disks using as simple a method as we can muster - let's say something like Morse code, but modified to take into account all UNICODE characters. Let's say they have a capacity of several hundred kilobytes. The simple mechanical device which reads them would act as a typewriter - you insert a piece of paper into it, crank a wheel, and it transliterates the disks into English.
These disks are stored (let's ignore the technical infeasability of this for a moment) in a hermatically sealed vault, able to withstand a 9.0 earthquake, amongst other things. It is burried deep into the side of a mountain.
The records themselves are stored in sequential order: that is, records such as ancestoral languages and records are stored in the front, near the entrance, and clearly marked as such. This goes all the way to the present, covering the history of the world up to modern thermodynamics, biology research, and what have you. The disks which show how to translate from one language to another are near the front as well, right by the oldest texts. Also stored in this tomb are several of the machines required to read the disks.
An eon passes, and an archeologist from some future industrialized culture finds the tomb. However, it has been looted at some point, and coincidentially the disk reader had some materials which made good tools, and only sparse and damaged parts of the readers were found. Say, a total of 7/8ths of a machine was able to be reconstructed, but they still were unable to get it to work. Many of the disks were also damaged, used as tools, knocked out of order, and generally left in a messy array. All but a couple hundred of the disks are found intact, however. But the order to properly read them is not known - even though each disk does not require another to be read (ie each is independent from the other, like volumes of an encyclopedia).
The only thing the parts of the machines provides for them is knowledge of what precisely the disks were: a recorded medium. Without the machine, they'd have had little clue, as there is nothing distinctive about the marks on the disks to demonstrate that they weren't simply part of a fabrication process.
Archeologists toil to try and figure out the meaning of the disks. They're able to determine that some form of encryption was employed and toil for years trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, they are unable to figure much more than the fact that there are multiple distinct groups of disks based on pattern, and despite massive support from their government, they're forced to give up.
As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.
Well, obviously we'd have to change the way we refer to time. Instead of saying "it's 11am here" (as it is currently for me, at US Central Standard adjusted forward 6 hours to match gmt) you'd say "I'm -6 GMT here" or maybe "11am minus 6" or something to that effect. Not only would it tell the same information but it would provide more.
But: I do agree that changing it is stupid. Daylight savings does have application - particularly to farmers, ranchers, etc. who by essence set their daily schedule to the light of the day. In many parts of the US that's not so much the case anymore (ie automated machinery can do the work for you while you sleep/fish/hunt/whatever), but it is in some respects still.
Not only that, but the concept of a day is still determined by one rotation of the sun. One rotation from point A is the same amount of time as one rotation from point B or X. There's nothing "special" about Greenwich which should give it preference (no, no, we should base it on Springfield, Missouri! that's the ticket!)
Uh, no, the issue was whether he had them at all, now whether or not he were attempting to acquire more. This is a foregone conclusion.
I see four potential causes for these kinds of things:
1) The Democrat voters really are stupid, whether it's hanging chads or touchscreens
2) It's a vast right wing conspiracy, and the dozens/hundreds of laymen coders at the voting macine companies have willingly sold out their country.
3) These machines are simply not up to the task (what, you mean you've not been irritated by an improperly configured touchscreen before that mis-records your touches? it's more often than not for me.)
4) The members media, intent on providing ammunition for the potential claim of "the Republicans stole the election!" both after the 7th as well as in 2008, are only reporting the cases of Democrats having problems. (I didn't know a single conservative/Republican journalism major in college, but quite a few liberals. In a very conservative state. I don't think that's a fluke.)
God damn it.
I didn't get to the original article yet, but now I'm pissed that I read this far down the thread before I found out it was Alex Jones, certifiable nutcase, who was providing the information.
That said, most of the time I'm unable to muster any logically convincing rebuttal for what he's said, unfortunately. What he says isn't something people want to accept, but it seems difficult not to.
... or they saw a change happening in Congress and maybe the White House in a couple years, and thought, "hmm, our people could greatly utilize these laws in the quest for furthering political correctness".
I think it's more that the Democrats (the party as a whole, not the individual candidates) are seeing how the Patriot Act will be beneficial to them, as a party, come post-election (2006 and 2008). And the Military Commission Act.
I suspect that they expect (and hope) that Democrats get into power next month, and then maybe again in 2008 in the White House, and that "their side" would then be able to abuse the previously-complained-about parts of the Patriot Act. They probably see Bush and his administration as a lame duck at this point.
Did those history pamphlets you read also talk about how it wasn't the most violent male, but the richest and/or most socially well off male that had more ability to marry a "good" (rich, beautiful, etc.) wife? Did they mention that, in the strictest sense, women were not "property", as they couldn't be sold off or divorced, and that the man was as equally shackled to the woman as the woman was to the man? Did they mention that it was indeed a social contract, but one which was mutually beneficial and necessary for survival?
It may also come as a surprise to you that in colonial America, and even up until the religious reformations of the mid-1800s, women were not only treated better and with more esteem than they have been throughout the entire 1900s, but they were on equal economic standing with men in many regards (with females taking many of the tradescrafts which are traditionally thought of as "male" - gunsmith, blacksmith, etc - hell, the most prominent colonial gunsmiths were women).