He showed McCain's 2008 concession speech: boos from the republican crowd. He then showed Kerry's 2004 concession speech: no boos from the democratic crowd. Notice how it's the right always claiming that the other side is just as bad as they are. Authoritarians: it's not bad/illegal when WE do it!
I wanted to vote for McCain (I'm a small business owner)
That would have been a mistake. Unless your business is insanely profitable, you would've gained nothing from McCain. His health insurance plan, for instance, would have been a disaster for everyone but insurance companies. In general, conservative policies are only good for big business and the investor class. We've had the same BS with Sarkozy here; he claims he's pro-business, but his fiscal measures only profited the wealthiest. And most small business owners aren't that rich. In particular, just like McCain's plan, he targeted income tax; if your small biz is incorporated, as it should be (mine is!), this makes no difference at all to the business itself. It only matters when you've made so much money that you are going to pay yourself. And if you don't want to pay that income tax, just invest that surplus money into expanding the business. Corollary: with decreasing income tax, it becomes more attractive for the small biz owner to just take more of the profits, instead of investing and hiring.
- They were there for less than two years - They are not in charge of the executive; by definition the legislative's impact is less imediate than the executive's - Repugs fillibustered (or threatened to) almost everything the democrats tried to pass in the Senate - Bush vetoed almost anything the democrats passed
Nazi-douchebag Sarkozy had his government use "emergency" procedure to pass it, so it will only be discussed once in each chamber. Of course, just the mere fact that they claimed it to be an emergency is yet another proof that those assholes are just doing Vivendi's bidding.
All those objections have been raised. I know personally the people at the main advocacy group opposing this nonsense, and from what they tell me, they are in complete in denial. They are impervious to the technical arguments. The entertainment industry feeds them their talking points, and that's good enough for them. But the technical aspect is just a part of the whole problem; constitutionnally, it's on grounds just as weak. And the European Parliament, backed by the Commission, has shot it down premptively. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
The NHS is underfunded, but it's not inefficient, by far. Compared to the US system, it's awesome,... in that respect. Of course I'm implying that you mean inefficient when you write inefficient. In physics, it's defined as
efficiency = useful_output / input
Usually input is the raw energy, such as the chemical energy in the gasoline, and the useful_output is the energy you can actually put to use. IIRC a typical gasoline engine is at 0.20 efficiency while a combined cycle gas turbine can reach 0.70.
BTW a heating system (not heat pump) can be seen as having 0 efficiency or 100%, or NaN.
For health care costs, all depends on what you mean exactly. You could define the useful output as the money that gets in the pocket of health professionals and pharmaceutical companies, and the input as the premiums and out of pocket expenses.
With that definition, having no insurance at all is 100% efficient: you pay exactly what gets to the doc/pharmacy. But obviously you probably don't want that. The private US system is at 0.70 efficiency basically, with 30% going to advertising, buying out congresscritters, CEO yachts & country club memberships, suing customers and armies of claims-denying call center drones. Public systems, including the NHS but also Medic(aid|are), are at about 97% efficiency.
That's not the end of the story, obviously. Some advantages can be argued for a private system; such as a more rational allocation of ressource, better handling of fraud and such. (The truth is, the more a health insurance market is regulated, the less the insurers get to waste money on useless advertising and such. ) But that's not part of the efficiency equation.
If one person eats too much, doesn't exercise enough, and gets fat, well, you've got a lazy fatso. But when you have millions of people getting obese, well, right wingers can call them all lazy fatsos, but that's missing a pattern. You can blame them, individually, but you can't blame them all at once. It doesn't make any sense. And it's just pointless. Let's have a computer analogy. Say you write this nifty program, and people start using it. And one user's complaining that your program reformatted his hard drive. He might just be completely retarded. But when the second and third users complain of reformatted hard drive... something else's gotta be wrong. And that doesn't preclude any of those users from being a moron.
Their product doesn't seem to run on Linux. There is better, cheaper F/OSS software to do the same thing though; Ubuntu and FC9 already include a whole disk encryption option at install. (It's better because it's much less likely to have an NSA back door, although obviously never completely certain). As for performance, when I tried it (luks encryption) on a desktop machine, it wasn't noticeable; but I wasn't moving hundreds of gigs around. The question now is what are they trying to protect. Encrypting laptops is sensible, and in fact, given how easy & cheap it now is, it's rather stupid not to do it. On desktop PCs, it's not that clear. Whole disk encryption will only protect you against someone with physical access to the machine turned off. It certainly won't protect you against trojans or browser based vulnerabilities. So the question is, do random strangers roam your offices? And encrypting servers/clusters? That's just silly; unless you expect the men in black to storm in your building.
1. Most of the "rich" being targeted aren't CEOs. 300 million US Citizens, assume 200 million are tax payers? The richest 5% of them are 10 million people and their children... Their are ONLY 500 Fortune 500 CEOs, and ONLY 500 S&P 500 CEOs.
None of the ultra-wealthy Wall Street and London traders who put us in the fucking mess we're in were technically CEOs; but, thanks to submissive right wing morons like yourself, they will be able to enjoy most of their ill-acquired wealth tax-free while the taxpayers are footing the bill for their Ponzi schemes.
Consider this: from the 40's to the mid 60s, the top income tax rate in the US and most western European countries was above 80%; and yet that was the time when those economies grew the faster.
The rich doesn't care about your jobs. They will happily give it to enslaved kids in a remote country if it can buy them another yacht. They are not your friends. It's cute of you to think of their welfare; they certainly don't give a fuck about yours.
Yeah I don't give a frak about the wealthy. The only thing is: It's the wealthy who give me my job. If we tax them too hard, especially the corporations, then they won't have any money left-over to give the rest of us jobs
Well enjoy your scraps.
Not everybody shares your submissive tendencies, thankfully.
I saw a documentary a while back about that; the card makers used crappy paper stock to make the ballots. They disregarded their own QA people's warning, and shipped cards that wouldn't tear off neatly as they used to. Nice blaming the victim once again.
Because touch screen voting machines are completely useless. Pen+paper is just as good, with less risk of failure and more accountability. Or even just paper as we do around here.
Poor interface design isn't the issue. People who are computer illiterate expect computers to respond just like mechanical systems (e.g.: push the button and it instantly responds) and when things don't instantly provide tactile/audible/visual feedback that it "clicked" they will start spamming the button repeatedly.
Look son, I'm a computer professional, and I would do just that: spam the damn fucking thing until it fucking breaks. Because, btw, that's how I treat my own software.
And think for a second. On one hand, you have ONE piece of machinery; and on the other you have MILLIONS of user.
Which is it: millions of user who happen to be stupid enough and get it wrong all at the same time; OR one piece of poorly designed crapware? There's plenty of crap software out there, why shouldn't this be one of them?
Let's transpose the situation. Imagine there was a car which was involved in twice as many accidents as other similar cars. Would you say that this particular type of car's drivers just happen to be clumsy?
Think about that for a second. And stop blaming the victim. Making good software is hard. But the makers of those P.O.S. are payed handsomely for the detritus they produce, and they're no better than good ole' pen and paper, and in fact probably worse.
But there's one thing I learned in 12 years of using the internet, it's that arguing with gun freaks is like arguing with jeesus freaks, anti-vax freaks or creationist freaks.
Anyway, here's my argument:
4th > 2nd
And:
4th is dead (heck of a job, Georgie!)
If you think your toys are going to be of any help against gov't abuse, well I have a bridge in Wacco, TX. to sell you.
A matte screen reflect some of the directed light no matter what the angle, so you lose contrast in every case. With a glossy screen, the light is reflected only at certain angles, and unless you're at the wrong angle, the contrast is much better.
They didn't write 2.10^2 because most people wouldn't get it, but that's probably what they meant and what Col. Korn assumed they meant. Had they written "201", "199", or "EXACTLY 200 hours," which they haven't, then that would have been, indeed, 3 significant digits.
Here's how voting works in France: You're given one enveloppe. You go in the voting booth where you put the ballot of the candidate of your choice in the enveloppe. You then go to the ballot box, which is a clear acrylic box with a lever-activated trap linked to a mechanical counter. You drop the ballot and the officer says "a vote." Counting is public, and done by volunteer voters. At the end of the day, the number on the counter is compared to the number of enveloppes delivered. First public check. Enveloppes are divided in stacks of 100, which are given to a table of four volunteers. One volunteer opens the enveloppe, another one reads the ballot aloud, the two other persons write down each count on a piece of paper. Invalid ballots are put in a special stack, and each volunteer signs the enveloppe to acknowledge the invalidity. At the end of the 100 stack, every volunteer at the table signs each piece of paper. Another stack is delivered until all votes are counted. This mean that each vote, individually, takes quite some time to be counted; but the process is highly parallelizable. Just add more counting tables. Results are obtained within an hour or two. Clearly this can't be used as is for complex elections, with a number of ballot initiatives and so on. But it's VERY reliable and resistant to tampering.
"Good question, but this is Russia we're talking about." ?? Someone care to enlighten me what that was about?
To give you an example, I have a client who had bought servers last year and put them in a datacenter in Moscow. Eventually the project they were intended for didn't work out, so they tried to ship them back to their HQ in western Europe. The bribes requested to get it past the customs were so high that they gave up on that. Selling them on the local market looked like it was going to be a PITA, for both logistical and accounting reasons, so the servers are rotting away.
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He showed McCain's 2008 concession speech: boos from the republican crowd.
He then showed Kerry's 2004 concession speech: no boos from the democratic crowd.
Notice how it's the right always claiming that the other side is just as bad as they are. Authoritarians: it's not bad/illegal when WE do it!
I wanted to vote for McCain (I'm a small business owner)
That would have been a mistake. Unless your business is insanely profitable, you would've gained nothing from McCain. His health insurance plan, for instance, would have been a disaster for everyone but insurance companies. In general, conservative policies are only good for big business and the investor class.
We've had the same BS with Sarkozy here; he claims he's pro-business, but his fiscal measures only profited the wealthiest. And most small business owners aren't that rich. In particular, just like McCain's plan, he targeted income tax; if your small biz is incorporated, as it should be (mine is!), this makes no difference at all to the business itself. It only matters when you've made so much money that you are going to pay yourself.
And if you don't want to pay that income tax, just invest that surplus money into expanding the business. Corollary: with decreasing income tax, it becomes more attractive for the small biz owner to just take more of the profits, instead of investing and hiring.
They're bad; but the Bush team has been consistently evil.
Also, :
- They were there for less than two years
- They are not in charge of the executive; by definition the legislative's impact is less imediate than the executive's
- Repugs fillibustered (or threatened to) almost everything the democrats tried to pass in the Senate
- Bush vetoed almost anything the democrats passed
Nazi-douchebag Sarkozy had his government use "emergency" procedure to pass it, so it will only be discussed once in each chamber.
Of course, just the mere fact that they claimed it to be an emergency is yet another proof that those assholes are just doing Vivendi's bidding.
All those objections have been raised. I know personally the people at the main advocacy group opposing this nonsense, and from what they tell me, they are in complete in denial. They are impervious to the technical arguments. The entertainment industry feeds them their talking points, and that's good enough for them.
But the technical aspect is just a part of the whole problem; constitutionnally, it's on grounds just as weak. And the European Parliament, backed by the Commission, has shot it down premptively.
It doesn't make any fucking sense.
The NHS is underfunded, but it's not inefficient, by far. Compared to the US system, it's awesome, ... in that respect.
Of course I'm implying that you mean inefficient when you write inefficient. In physics, it's defined as
efficiency = useful_output / input
Usually input is the raw energy, such as the chemical energy in the gasoline, and the useful_output is the energy you can actually put to use. IIRC a typical gasoline engine is at 0.20 efficiency while a combined cycle gas turbine can reach 0.70.
BTW a heating system (not heat pump) can be seen as having 0 efficiency or 100%, or NaN.
For health care costs, all depends on what you mean exactly. You could define the useful output as the money that gets in the pocket of health professionals and pharmaceutical companies, and the input as the premiums and out of pocket expenses.
With that definition, having no insurance at all is 100% efficient: you pay exactly what gets to the doc/pharmacy. But obviously you probably don't want that. The private US system is at 0.70 efficiency basically, with 30% going to advertising, buying out congresscritters, CEO yachts & country club memberships, suing customers and armies of claims-denying call center drones. Public systems, including the NHS but also Medic(aid|are), are at about 97% efficiency.
That's not the end of the story, obviously. Some advantages can be argued for a private system; such as a more rational allocation of ressource, better handling of fraud and such. (The truth is, the more a health insurance market is regulated, the less the insurers get to waste money on useless advertising and such. ) But that's not part of the efficiency equation.
If one person eats too much, doesn't exercise enough, and gets fat, well, you've got a lazy fatso. ... something else's gotta be wrong. And that doesn't preclude any of those users from being a moron.
But when you have millions of people getting obese, well, right wingers can call them all lazy fatsos, but that's missing a pattern. You can blame them, individually, but you can't blame them all at once. It doesn't make any sense. And it's just pointless.
Let's have a computer analogy. Say you write this nifty program, and people start using it. And one user's complaining that your program reformatted his hard drive. He might just be completely retarded. But when the second and third users complain of reformatted hard drive
Their product doesn't seem to run on Linux.
There is better, cheaper F/OSS software to do the same thing though; Ubuntu and FC9 already include a whole disk encryption option at install. (It's better because it's much less likely to have an NSA back door, although obviously never completely certain).
As for performance, when I tried it (luks encryption) on a desktop machine, it wasn't noticeable; but I wasn't moving hundreds of gigs around.
The question now is what are they trying to protect. Encrypting laptops is sensible, and in fact, given how easy & cheap it now is, it's rather stupid not to do it. On desktop PCs, it's not that clear. Whole disk encryption will only protect you against someone with physical access to the machine turned off. It certainly won't protect you against trojans or browser based vulnerabilities. So the question is, do random strangers roam your offices?
And encrypting servers/clusters? That's just silly; unless you expect the men in black to storm in your building.
1. Most of the "rich" being targeted aren't CEOs. 300 million US Citizens, assume 200 million are tax payers? The richest 5% of them are 10 million people and their children... Their are ONLY 500 Fortune 500 CEOs, and ONLY 500 S&P 500 CEOs.
None of the ultra-wealthy Wall Street and London traders who put us in the fucking mess we're in were technically CEOs; but, thanks to submissive right wing morons like yourself, they will be able to enjoy most of their ill-acquired wealth tax-free while the taxpayers are footing the bill for their Ponzi schemes.
Consider this: from the 40's to the mid 60s, the top income tax rate in the US and most western European countries was above 80%; and yet that was the time when those economies grew the faster.
The rich doesn't care about your jobs. They will happily give it to enslaved kids in a remote country if it can buy them another yacht. They are not your friends. It's cute of you to think of their welfare; they certainly don't give a fuck about yours.
Yeah I don't give a frak about the wealthy. The only thing is: It's the wealthy who give me my job. If we tax them too hard, especially the corporations, then they won't have any money left-over to give the rest of us jobs
Well enjoy your scraps.
Not everybody shares your submissive tendencies, thankfully.
I saw a documentary a while back about that; the card makers used crappy paper stock to make the ballots. They disregarded their own QA people's warning, and shipped cards that wouldn't tear off neatly as they used to.
Nice blaming the victim once again.
Because touch screen voting machines are completely useless. Pen+paper is just as good, with less risk of failure and more accountability. Or even just paper as we do around here.
Poor interface design isn't the issue. People who are computer illiterate expect computers to respond just like mechanical systems (e.g.: push the button and it instantly responds) and when things don't instantly provide tactile/audible/visual feedback that it "clicked" they will start spamming the button repeatedly.
Look son, I'm a computer professional, and I would do just that: spam the damn fucking thing until it fucking breaks. Because, btw, that's how I treat my own software.
And think for a second. On one hand, you have ONE piece of machinery; and on the other you have MILLIONS of user.
Which is it: millions of user who happen to be stupid enough and get it wrong all at the same time; OR one piece of poorly designed crapware? There's plenty of crap software out there, why shouldn't this be one of them?
Let's transpose the situation. Imagine there was a car which was involved in twice as many accidents as other similar cars. Would you say that this particular type of car's drivers just happen to be clumsy?
Think about that for a second. And stop blaming the victim. Making good software is hard. But the makers of those P.O.S. are payed handsomely for the detritus they produce, and they're no better than good ole' pen and paper, and in fact probably worse.
Goedel has proven that there are some statements that are not provable as either true or false. Doesn't mean that everything is unprovable, obviously.
WMD did exist. Talk about old rhetoric.
You should tell W. before he leaves office. Last we checked, he was still looking for them under his desk.
Opposing Bush is good, isn't it?
Or are you one of those 23% inbred fucktarded asswipes who still believe he's not an abject failure and a war criminal?
I'm worried about the nutjobs.
But there's one thing I learned in 12 years of using the internet, it's that arguing with gun freaks is like arguing with jeesus freaks, anti-vax freaks or creationist freaks.
Anyway, here's my argument:
4th > 2nd
And:
4th is dead (heck of a job, Georgie!)
If you think your toys are going to be of any help against gov't abuse, well I have a bridge in Wacco, TX. to sell you.
A matte screen reflect some of the directed light no matter what the angle, so you lose contrast in every case. With a glossy screen, the light is reflected only at certain angles, and unless you're at the wrong angle, the contrast is much better.
They didn't write 2.10^2 because most people wouldn't get it, but that's probably what they meant and what Col. Korn assumed they meant.
Had they written "201", "199", or "EXACTLY 200 hours," which they haven't, then that would have been, indeed, 3 significant digits.
Your sample size of 1 is clearly sufficient to establish a pattern.
But seriously, you'd be amazed at the amount of FUCKTARDED nonsense "enterprises" do in the name of "security." (Need I mention TSA?)
This means that not only are we living in a simulation, but we're being run on a digital computer.
Here's how voting works in France:
You're given one enveloppe. You go in the voting booth where you put the ballot of the candidate of your choice in the enveloppe. You then go to the ballot box, which is a clear acrylic box with a lever-activated trap linked to a mechanical counter. You drop the ballot and the officer says "a vote."
Counting is public, and done by volunteer voters. At the end of the day, the number on the counter is compared to the number of enveloppes delivered. First public check. Enveloppes are divided in stacks of 100, which are given to a table of four volunteers. One volunteer opens the enveloppe, another one reads the ballot aloud, the two other persons write down each count on a piece of paper. Invalid ballots are put in a special stack, and each volunteer signs the enveloppe to acknowledge the invalidity. At the end of the 100 stack, every volunteer at the table signs each piece of paper. Another stack is delivered until all votes are counted.
This mean that each vote, individually, takes quite some time to be counted; but the process is highly parallelizable. Just add more counting tables. Results are obtained within an hour or two.
Clearly this can't be used as is for complex elections, with a number of ballot initiatives and so on. But it's VERY reliable and resistant to tampering.
"Good question, but this is Russia we're talking about." ?? Someone care to enlighten me what that was about?
To give you an example, I have a client who had bought servers last year and put them in a datacenter in Moscow. Eventually the project they were intended for didn't work out, so they tried to ship them back to their HQ in western Europe. The bribes requested to get it past the customs were so high that they gave up on that. Selling them on the local market looked like it was going to be a PITA, for both logistical and accounting reasons, so the servers are rotting away.