Is Warner entitled to a share of the advertising proceeds of every magazine and newspaper that reviews a Madonna song, album, or concert? If not, they have no case against Google, and I seriously doubt the USSC would hear the case.
Nor was Happy Days exactly "crap" for its day. Some of it was, admittedly, but it also took on some tough themes and handled them well. M*A*S*H and All in the Family were, IMO, the only two consistently better shows of that era.
I had a similar conversation with RR tech support, except that I started with the information that Level3 had stopped speaking to Cogent, and asked what RR was doing to get my packets to Cogent. I was told that the issue was due to some "high-level restructuring" and would be resolved when that restructuring was complete.
At this point, I described the situation a little more fully, and explained calmly how inappropriate the term "restructuring" is. I was told, "They're working on it."
Ah, we're getting somewhere? "Okay. Who is doing what that qualifies as 'work'?"
[... long pause...] "What I have is, there's some high-level restructuring going on, and they're waiting for that resolution to be resolved."
So, RR is doing *nothing* and ignoring the problem, hoping it'll go away. Rather than, say, finding an alternate transit provider for the duration of this event.
"..."
"If you choose to believe that..."
How does that differ from what you said?
"What I have is, there's this high-level restructuring--"
Great. Suppose you had to take the bus to work, and had to transfer from a bus run by one company to a bus run by another company. Suppose the first bus company decided to end all of its routes a mile short of your transfer point. Would you stop going to work, or would you find another way to get there?
"I'm sorry, this problem is outside the RR network. We don't have any control over it."
RR's routing tables are outside the RR network? What an odd way to run a network.
"Well, there's this high-level--"
Do you have a supervisor there?
"Yes! Would you like to talk to him?"
(The tone of relief in his voice was quite poignant. It almost made me want to say, "No. No, I don't. I wouldn't want to get you in trouble.")
--- Intermission ---
(The supervisor promptly informed me that he was "the highest level of support on this issue." I've done his job before, and know exactly what that means, and how to make it not true. I know he feels pretty invulnerable, and in fact is *almost* entirely free of worry about recriminations for his treatment of customers. I also know exactly how to make those recriminations occur. It wouldn't be productive to tell him this, though, so I didn't bother.)
Hi. Level3 has stopped talking to Cogent. 90% of what I do on the internet goes through Cogent. What is RR doing to get my packets to Cogent?
"I see. Cogent is a website... ?"
(This is the level of knowledge regarded as appropriate for a *supervisor*... ?!)
Cogent is a network. Cogent could eat RR for lunch.... and so on. Until I extracted from him the email address for the people who care at the NDC. Which has a 2 to 3 day response time. Yippee.
On the bright side, it appears that someone upstream of RR (seems to be Verio from my tracerts) has decided to connect directly to Cogent instead of waiting for L3 to resume routing packets there. My digits are whole again.
It's also very popular for enabling teenage girls to find men willing to pay to have sex with them. You know the leading users of this will use it for pornography, right?
The leading users of everything technological use it for pornography. Why should this be any different?
There's no inconsistency. This move doesn't affect the relative positions of Windows and Linux in the server market at all. As others have noted, the ability to run a Passport server isn't going to cause a company with Linux servers to migrate to Windows. If Microsoft saw Linux as a threat, then they *might* see giving the ability to run Passport on Linux as dangerous and tending to encourage server operators to switch to Linux.
This particular move probably isn't about Linux. More likely it's about Passport.
Alright, what acid-induced hallucination gave this a mod of "informative?" It's a repetitive "I refuse to read and understand." I'm wavering between calling it a troll and calling it outright idiocy.
mvw, what part of "This is how fast state changes can happen" don't you understand? I don't care what gadget, technology, or design you use, THIS IS HOW FAST STATE CHANGES CAN HAPPEN. That's all the article says, and it's absolutely true, and it's a hard limit, and NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT A COMPLEX PROBLEM NEEDING A HIGH NUMBER OF STATE CHANGES. You made that up, or imagined it, or something.
I don't care how clever the computer builders are. They could all be so smart they make Einstein and Hawking together look like kindergarten primer material. THEY STILL CAN'T SUSPEND THE INHERENT LIMITS OF PHYSICAL PARTICLES
1. The article doesn't say anything about how much energy is used by the computer to perform its operations. This is an entirely different number from "the average energy of the system" which tells you how fast its state can be changing.
2. None of the energy in the system is actually used in the computations. You still have to supply that from somewhere else. That, however, is a practical limit rather than a theoretical one, and therefore presumably doesn't interest Dr. Lloyd. It's entirely consistent to say "here's how many things the computer can remember, and here's the rate it can change them at."
My further question (my house lost power while I was trying to say substantially the above earlier today -- must be a MS plot) is this: the license prohibits use in conjunction with tools that have or may have certain effects. It then makes the unsubstantiated claim that certain tools have or may have those effects. It lists those licenses, though, only as examples. It does not specifically state that "The Software may not be used or redistributed in conjunction with any software licensed under licenses x, y, z, . .."
So . . . would the Microsoft Reactionary End User License Agreement really hold up if they tried to enforce it against someone who compiled a driver with gcc? As the previous poster, IANAL, but I think the answer is no, given competent and determined opposition. I'd like to see it tried.
The real danger of the MR-EULA is long-term. They insinuate (in a possibly actionable manner, as the above poster points out) that the mentioned licenses do indeed have the effects claimed. If they keep putting this in licenses for several years, and it goes unchallenged, they create an "established fact" in the minds of consumers, developers, lawyers and judges -- or at least they can argue so.
Finally, with Mr. Eula, Microsoft has invented something more annoying and insidious than clippy.
It bothers me that laws are made at all concerning genetic research. It bothers me that there even exist people who refuse to try to understand anything. And it bothers me that our educational system in the U.S. is so weak that the average reader of newspapers is expected to have retained less than the first 20% of all that education.
That the laws are being passed by people who don't understand and won't try to understand is merely a symptom. Those people aren't elected by having a clue or making an effort to pass reasonable and useful laws, they are elected by convincing people to vote for them. The dumber those voters are, the easier it is for those people to keep getting re-elected while passing useless, misguided, or even harmful laws. This makes meaningful educational reform anywhere from unlikely to impossible under our current system.
Lest I seem to be pushing a program rather than commenting on an article, I admit that most people in any country aren't likely to be interested in or capable of understanding the details of advanced genetic theory. However, oversimplification to the point of inaccuracy is still inexcusable. Just because people wouldn't understand the truth, that doesn't make it acceptable to lie to them.
What? You mean we've got the chance to get rid of all of the Silicon Valley dot-commies with one good earthquake, and you're calling this a bad idea? Where's your sense of priority?
Soooo . . . if you maintain a really good website, and I present all of it as my content by putting URLs for your work into a frameset on my site, that's perfectly OK?
Perhaps your technical correction has merit but it's a semantic quibble that doesn't change the ethical or legal situation.
3) trojaned executables can be avoided by verifying PGP signatures
Unless the trojan was already in when the PGP signature was applied. If one is properly paranoid, one has to consider the case that the original supplier of the software may have had motives other than advertised.
In simple terms, PGP only verifies that you got what they wanted to give you, not that what they gave you was safe in any sense. It's just like the tamper-proof caps on Tylenol: they don't do a damned thing when someone inside the company slips the mickey in there.
What slashdot should be upset about is that they're serving that image from slashdot's server instead of their own. This could be a copyright violation, and is generally considered to be poor etiquette.
Hey, Adalger, I'm sorta curious how, based on the comments I made, you think you know all about me
I don't think I know all about you. I think you can afford to go five months without a job, because you said so.
You seem to think that just because someone works with technology, they're better than everyone else
Nope. Most of 'em think they are. That's pretty much the crux of this article.
I love in Northwest Ohio. We know all about your steel troubles, because our Jeep plant uses a lot of it. We're part of your problem, I guess, because we're laying off auto workers.
My point was not that you somehow don't earn your money because you work with technology. My point was that five months is way too long to be without a job and still think that you're a "working stiff." The rest of us start thinking McD's looks like a pretty darned good employer inside of a month.
Ummmmmm . . . you are calling me a dumbfuck for saying something you admit is correct? What a trivial sort of person you must be.
Now look at those scores. All of them are arrived at by statistics (except the purely subjective ones), and all of them fall in a range of 0.9 point. Most of them fall in a 0.5-point range. The top school has a score of 100. That means the difference between the highest and lowest of the tier 4 schools is less than 1% of the range. This means that the purely subjective criteria or the margin of error associated with the sampling technique may be the difference between the top and bottom of tier 4.
What it all boils down to is, that score is a statistic. If you treat it as an exact number you're a bigger idiot than anyone ever thought. But, if you insist, I'll slide you over from "troll" to "disproof-of-Darwin-stupid" on my little tracking board. Have a nice day, and please die at the end of it because you're using valuable oxygen needed by crackheads and pimps.
some of the things I heard frequently are "overqualified" and "this would not challenge you enough" and "you'll be bored here"
I've heard that in interviews, and gotten the job anyway. You won't get the job if you deny it or beg, but you will if you admit it and go on to say that you're not looking for cahllenging or interesting or fulfilling, you're looking for "pays the bills and leaves me maybe physically tired but still mentally alert enough to do what I like for intellectual stimulation on my own time." Hell, if all else fails, go back to college. There's plenty of government assistance out there, and even if you're forty or fifty, fast food managers see you as pretty much the same as all the other college kids they've got working for them.
We don't have sushi bars or weird ass geeks roaming the street
We don't? What part of Ohio are you from? I'm in Toledo, and one can find sushi in the mall here.
You really know when you're a geek when the Chinese waiter at the Chinese restaurant admires and envies your chopsticks. Happened to me over the weekend.
Hm. I put "Nuclear Reactor Operator" on my app and still got hired at Taco Bell. How? Told 'em I'd like to be around for a while and not have a job that takes a lot of exceptionally difficult thinking, so I could relax at work for a change.
The reason most of the fast food places won't hire people with experience and/or brains is not that they think you'll use the job as a stepping stone; rather, they think you'll be bored out of your skull. You won't have any job satisfaction, you'll be surly to the customers and condescending to your co-workers, you'll be insubordinate to management, and even if you do stick around you'll be hard to justify as a positive contribution to the company.
If you're up front and honest, and tell 'em "Sure, it's not my dream job, but it's better than nothing and it'll be a relief to not have all the responsibility on my shoulders for a while," chances are you could get hired in to McD's even with a Ph.D.
I actually did work at Applebee's with a waiter who had a Master's in P.R. and several years of experience to go with it. What he said was, he got tired of being paid to lie. That's what got him in.
Foodservice doesn't want brainless zombies exclusively. It makes do with them because it can. There are, though, opportunities for bright, talented, educated people who can take a realistic set of expectations and a good work ethic to the interview.
What points this out as a troll is, there is no such thing as "lowest ranked law school in the U.S." The bottom 50% are all lumped together as "fourth tier" by the body that ranks law schools. I know this because my local law school just recently graduated to third tier, which is above all fourth tier but below top 25%. First tier is the top 50 schools, and second tier is everything else above third tier.
This brought to you by James Audubon's Field Guide to North American Trolls.
Network Engineer/Senior Administrator is a working stiff?! Hell, no! The guy who cleans up the bathroom after you is a working stiff. The guy who keeps your pretty office building's pretty shrubs looking pretty is a working stiff. The guy who fixes your Saab is a working stiff. You, sir, are a techie in a suit. You may not actually wear a suit, but you've got a suit attitude.
It's taken you all of five months to find a new job? Well, boo-fucking-hoo. A working stiff would, quite literally, starve to death with no income for five months.
If you want to know what it's like to be a working stiff, try this on for size. The day they tell you you're laid off, you've got about two weeks to find a job before you start stocking up on the instant 25-cent-a-box macaroni and cheese and the ten-for-a-dollar Ramen Noodles. For variety you might pick up about eight cases of Campbell's if it goes on sale for a quarter a can.
You think you know how to run a company better than your CEO? Go start your own and see how long it survives. Then come here and see how sorry we don't feel for you.
The *US* hasn't even maintained the same form of government for 200 years. We've changed the standards of who can vote, and at what age, and even how they vote and what it means.
200 years ago, when you voted in the main election, you voted for an elector. You had no idea, and no control over, which candidate for president he'd actually vote for, or even who those candidates were. You just knew that you were voting for a man you trusted to make an informed choice that you would feel comfortable with if you had the time to get acquainted with the issues.
Now, the ignorant and uninformed masses still don't know enough to cast a meaningful vote, but by God, they feel entitled to! To relate back to an earlier poster, we wouldn't need a corrupt organization like the Supreme Court tinkering with elections that aren't in its jurisdiction if we acted like the republic we are. But nooooo, everybody thinks we live in a democracy.
Why, you ask, is the Supreme Court corrupt and sticking its nose where it don't belong, in my opinion? It's corrupt because of partisan politics. When the Constitution was written, it probably wasn't envisioned that the end result would be a battle between two different oligarchies to see which one would control the country for the next couple of years. The very existence of political parties is a slap in the face of all that the Constitution stands for. The Supreme Court has no business in Presidential elections because the electoral votes are cast by a state, and the Constitution specifically declares that a state may cast them in any way it likes.
The issue is one of states' rights, then. We all thought this issue was settled by the civil war: states have no rights if the federal government can take them away by force, and they can. This is just another reason that the second amendment is under constant erosion: in addition to keeping the people under the heel of the government, it keeps state governments under the heel of the federal. Congress knows that a well-regulated militia is a necessity to the security of a free state, so they make sure the states can only have small and ineffective militias.
How? Don't let the people own military-grade weapons. That makes the federal army approximately invincible. Make the very word "militia" say "crackpot" in everybody's mind by ridiculing freedom-loving (and scared) Americans every chance they get. If a group of people come too close to actually doing something to reclaim their freedom . . . can you say Waco? Ruby Ridge? I knew you could.
Now I'll shut up and wait for the ignorant and trollish to tell me "the civil war was about slavery and you're a crackpot gun-nut moron." No, just a student of history, and "I've got a bad feeling about this."
Slashdot Mirror
Governors are members of the executive branch of government; they do not produce legislation.
This is already true in civil law, and makes no sense in criminal law.
Is Warner entitled to a share of the advertising proceeds of every magazine and newspaper that reviews a Madonna song, album, or concert? If not, they have no case against Google, and I seriously doubt the USSC would hear the case.
Nor was Happy Days exactly "crap" for its day. Some of it was, admittedly, but it also took on some tough themes and handled them well. M*A*S*H and All in the Family were, IMO, the only two consistently better shows of that era.
I had a similar conversation with RR tech support, except that I started with the information that Level3 had stopped speaking to Cogent, and asked what RR was doing to get my packets to Cogent. I was told that the issue was due to some "high-level restructuring" and would be resolved when that restructuring was complete.
...] "What I have is, there's some high-level restructuring going on, and they're waiting for that resolution to be resolved."
..."
... ?"
... ?!)
... and so on. Until I extracted from him the email address for the people who care at the NDC. Which has a 2 to 3 day response time. Yippee.
At this point, I described the situation a little more fully, and explained calmly how inappropriate the term "restructuring" is. I was told, "They're working on it."
Ah, we're getting somewhere? "Okay. Who is doing what that qualifies as 'work'?"
[... long pause
So, RR is doing *nothing* and ignoring the problem, hoping it'll go away. Rather than, say, finding an alternate transit provider for the duration of this event.
"..."
"If you choose to believe that
How does that differ from what you said?
"What I have is, there's this high-level restructuring--"
Great. Suppose you had to take the bus to work, and had to transfer from a bus run by one company to a bus run by another company. Suppose the first bus company decided to end all of its routes a mile short of your transfer point. Would you stop going to work, or would you find another way to get there?
"I'm sorry, this problem is outside the RR network. We don't have any control over it."
RR's routing tables are outside the RR network? What an odd way to run a network.
"Well, there's this high-level--"
Do you have a supervisor there?
"Yes! Would you like to talk to him?"
(The tone of relief in his voice was quite poignant. It almost made me want to say, "No. No, I don't. I wouldn't want to get you in trouble.")
--- Intermission ---
(The supervisor promptly informed me that he was "the highest level of support on this issue." I've done his job before, and know exactly what that means, and how to make it not true. I know he feels pretty invulnerable, and in fact is *almost* entirely free of worry about recriminations for his treatment of customers. I also know exactly how to make those recriminations occur. It wouldn't be productive to tell him this, though, so I didn't bother.)
Hi. Level3 has stopped talking to Cogent. 90% of what I do on the internet goes through Cogent. What is RR doing to get my packets to Cogent?
"I see. Cogent is a website
(This is the level of knowledge regarded as appropriate for a *supervisor*
Cogent is a network. Cogent could eat RR for lunch.
On the bright side, it appears that someone upstream of RR (seems to be Verio from my tracerts) has decided to connect directly to Cogent instead of waiting for L3 to resume routing packets there. My digits are whole again.
The leading users of everything technological use it for pornography. Why should this be any different?
There's no inconsistency. This move doesn't affect the relative positions of Windows and Linux in the server market at all. As others have noted, the ability to run a Passport server isn't going to cause a company with Linux servers to migrate to Windows. If Microsoft saw Linux as a threat, then they *might* see giving the ability to run Passport on Linux as dangerous and tending to encourage server operators to switch to Linux.
This particular move probably isn't about Linux. More likely it's about Passport.
Alright, what acid-induced hallucination gave this a mod of "informative?" It's a repetitive "I refuse to read and understand." I'm wavering between calling it a troll and calling it outright idiocy.
mvw, what part of "This is how fast state changes can happen" don't you understand? I don't care what gadget, technology, or design you use, THIS IS HOW FAST STATE CHANGES CAN HAPPEN. That's all the article says, and it's absolutely true, and it's a hard limit, and NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT A COMPLEX PROBLEM NEEDING A HIGH NUMBER OF STATE CHANGES. You made that up, or imagined it, or something.
I don't care how clever the computer builders are. They could all be so smart they make Einstein and Hawking together look like kindergarten primer material. THEY STILL CAN'T SUSPEND THE INHERENT LIMITS OF PHYSICAL PARTICLES
Sheesh.
1. The article doesn't say anything about how much energy is used by the computer to perform its operations. This is an entirely different number from "the average energy of the system" which tells you how fast its state can be changing.
2. None of the energy in the system is actually used in the computations. You still have to supply that from somewhere else. That, however, is a practical limit rather than a theoretical one, and therefore presumably doesn't interest Dr. Lloyd. It's entirely consistent to say "here's how many things the computer can remember, and here's the rate it can change them at."
My further question (my house lost power while I was trying to say substantially the above earlier today -- must be a MS plot) is this: the license prohibits use in conjunction with tools that have or may have certain effects. It then makes the unsubstantiated claim that certain tools have or may have those effects. It lists those licenses, though, only as examples. It does not specifically state that "The Software may not be used or redistributed in conjunction with any software licensed under licenses x, y, z, . . ."
So . . . would the Microsoft Reactionary End User License Agreement really hold up if they tried to enforce it against someone who compiled a driver with gcc? As the previous poster, IANAL, but I think the answer is no, given competent and determined opposition. I'd like to see it tried.
The real danger of the MR-EULA is long-term. They insinuate (in a possibly actionable manner, as the above poster points out) that the mentioned licenses do indeed have the effects claimed. If they keep putting this in licenses for several years, and it goes unchallenged, they create an "established fact" in the minds of consumers, developers, lawyers and judges -- or at least they can argue so.
Finally, with Mr. Eula, Microsoft has invented something more annoying and insidious than clippy.
It bothers me that laws are made at all concerning genetic research. It bothers me that there even exist people who refuse to try to understand anything. And it bothers me that our educational system in the U.S. is so weak that the average reader of newspapers is expected to have retained less than the first 20% of all that education.
That the laws are being passed by people who don't understand and won't try to understand is merely a symptom. Those people aren't elected by having a clue or making an effort to pass reasonable and useful laws, they are elected by convincing people to vote for them. The dumber those voters are, the easier it is for those people to keep getting re-elected while passing useless, misguided, or even harmful laws. This makes meaningful educational reform anywhere from unlikely to impossible under our current system.
Lest I seem to be pushing a program rather than commenting on an article, I admit that most people in any country aren't likely to be interested in or capable of understanding the details of advanced genetic theory. However, oversimplification to the point of inaccuracy is still inexcusable. Just because people wouldn't understand the truth, that doesn't make it acceptable to lie to them.
What? You mean we've got the chance to get rid of all of the Silicon Valley dot-commies with one good earthquake, and you're calling this a bad idea? Where's your sense of priority?
Soooo . . . if you maintain a really good website, and I present all of it as my content by putting URLs for your work into a frameset on my site, that's perfectly OK?
Perhaps your technical correction has merit but it's a semantic quibble that doesn't change the ethical or legal situation.
Unless the trojan was already in when the PGP signature was applied. If one is properly paranoid, one has to consider the case that the original supplier of the software may have had motives other than advertised.
In simple terms, PGP only verifies that you got what they wanted to give you, not that what they gave you was safe in any sense. It's just like the tamper-proof caps on Tylenol: they don't do a damned thing when someone inside the company slips the mickey in there.
Nope. Not the very next thing. There's a couple of intermediate steps -- like the suspension of the electoral process.
What slashdot should be upset about is that they're serving that image from slashdot's server instead of their own. This could be a copyright violation, and is generally considered to be poor etiquette.
I don't think I know all about you. I think you can afford to go five months without a job, because you said so.
Nope. Most of 'em think they are. That's pretty much the crux of this article.
I love in Northwest Ohio. We know all about your steel troubles, because our Jeep plant uses a lot of it. We're part of your problem, I guess, because we're laying off auto workers.
My point was not that you somehow don't earn your money because you work with technology. My point was that five months is way too long to be without a job and still think that you're a "working stiff." The rest of us start thinking McD's looks like a pretty darned good employer inside of a month.
Ummmmmm . . . you are calling me a dumbfuck for saying something you admit is correct? What a trivial sort of person you must be.
Now look at those scores. All of them are arrived at by statistics (except the purely subjective ones), and all of them fall in a range of 0.9 point. Most of them fall in a 0.5-point range. The top school has a score of 100. That means the difference between the highest and lowest of the tier 4 schools is less than 1% of the range. This means that the purely subjective criteria or the margin of error associated with the sampling technique may be the difference between the top and bottom of tier 4.
What it all boils down to is, that score is a statistic. If you treat it as an exact number you're a bigger idiot than anyone ever thought. But, if you insist, I'll slide you over from "troll" to "disproof-of-Darwin-stupid" on my little tracking board. Have a nice day, and please die at the end of it because you're using valuable oxygen needed by crackheads and pimps.
I've heard that in interviews, and gotten the job anyway. You won't get the job if you deny it or beg, but you will if you admit it and go on to say that you're not looking for cahllenging or interesting or fulfilling, you're looking for "pays the bills and leaves me maybe physically tired but still mentally alert enough to do what I like for intellectual stimulation on my own time." Hell, if all else fails, go back to college. There's plenty of government assistance out there, and even if you're forty or fifty, fast food managers see you as pretty much the same as all the other college kids they've got working for them.
We don't? What part of Ohio are you from? I'm in Toledo, and one can find sushi in the mall here.
You really know when you're a geek when the Chinese waiter at the Chinese restaurant admires and envies your chopsticks. Happened to me over the weekend.
Hm. I put "Nuclear Reactor Operator" on my app and still got hired at Taco Bell. How? Told 'em I'd like to be around for a while and not have a job that takes a lot of exceptionally difficult thinking, so I could relax at work for a change.
The reason most of the fast food places won't hire people with experience and/or brains is not that they think you'll use the job as a stepping stone; rather, they think you'll be bored out of your skull. You won't have any job satisfaction, you'll be surly to the customers and condescending to your co-workers, you'll be insubordinate to management, and even if you do stick around you'll be hard to justify as a positive contribution to the company.
If you're up front and honest, and tell 'em "Sure, it's not my dream job, but it's better than nothing and it'll be a relief to not have all the responsibility on my shoulders for a while," chances are you could get hired in to McD's even with a Ph.D.
I actually did work at Applebee's with a waiter who had a Master's in P.R. and several years of experience to go with it. What he said was, he got tired of being paid to lie. That's what got him in.
Foodservice doesn't want brainless zombies exclusively. It makes do with them because it can. There are, though, opportunities for bright, talented, educated people who can take a realistic set of expectations and a good work ethic to the interview.
Why?! Where the fuck is there to drive?!
What points this out as a troll is, there is no such thing as "lowest ranked law school in the U.S." The bottom 50% are all lumped together as "fourth tier" by the body that ranks law schools. I know this because my local law school just recently graduated to third tier, which is above all fourth tier but below top 25%. First tier is the top 50 schools, and second tier is everything else above third tier.
This brought to you by James Audubon's Field Guide to North American Trolls.
My god, now I've seen everything.
Network Engineer/Senior Administrator is a working stiff?! Hell, no! The guy who cleans up the bathroom after you is a working stiff. The guy who keeps your pretty office building's pretty shrubs looking pretty is a working stiff. The guy who fixes your Saab is a working stiff. You, sir, are a techie in a suit. You may not actually wear a suit, but you've got a suit attitude.
It's taken you all of five months to find a new job? Well, boo-fucking-hoo. A working stiff would, quite literally, starve to death with no income for five months.
If you want to know what it's like to be a working stiff, try this on for size. The day they tell you you're laid off, you've got about two weeks to find a job before you start stocking up on the instant 25-cent-a-box macaroni and cheese and the ten-for-a-dollar Ramen Noodles. For variety you might pick up about eight cases of Campbell's if it goes on sale for a quarter a can.
You think you know how to run a company better than your CEO? Go start your own and see how long it survives. Then come here and see how sorry we don't feel for you.
The *US* hasn't even maintained the same form of government for 200 years. We've changed the standards of who can vote, and at what age, and even how they vote and what it means.
200 years ago, when you voted in the main election, you voted for an elector. You had no idea, and no control over, which candidate for president he'd actually vote for, or even who those candidates were. You just knew that you were voting for a man you trusted to make an informed choice that you would feel comfortable with if you had the time to get acquainted with the issues.
Now, the ignorant and uninformed masses still don't know enough to cast a meaningful vote, but by God, they feel entitled to! To relate back to an earlier poster, we wouldn't need a corrupt organization like the Supreme Court tinkering with elections that aren't in its jurisdiction if we acted like the republic we are. But nooooo, everybody thinks we live in a democracy.
Why, you ask, is the Supreme Court corrupt and sticking its nose where it don't belong, in my opinion? It's corrupt because of partisan politics. When the Constitution was written, it probably wasn't envisioned that the end result would be a battle between two different oligarchies to see which one would control the country for the next couple of years. The very existence of political parties is a slap in the face of all that the Constitution stands for. The Supreme Court has no business in Presidential elections because the electoral votes are cast by a state, and the Constitution specifically declares that a state may cast them in any way it likes.
The issue is one of states' rights, then. We all thought this issue was settled by the civil war: states have no rights if the federal government can take them away by force, and they can. This is just another reason that the second amendment is under constant erosion: in addition to keeping the people under the heel of the government, it keeps state governments under the heel of the federal. Congress knows that a well-regulated militia is a necessity to the security of a free state, so they make sure the states can only have small and ineffective militias.
How? Don't let the people own military-grade weapons. That makes the federal army approximately invincible. Make the very word "militia" say "crackpot" in everybody's mind by ridiculing freedom-loving (and scared) Americans every chance they get. If a group of people come too close to actually doing something to reclaim their freedom . . . can you say Waco? Ruby Ridge? I knew you could.
Now I'll shut up and wait for the ignorant and trollish to tell me "the civil war was about slavery and you're a crackpot gun-nut moron." No, just a student of history, and "I've got a bad feeling about this."