The mob mentality defense has people disclaiming responsibility for their actions because they got "caught up in the moment" and "everyone else is doing it." Kind of like peer pressure.
Corporations lead to a similar responsibility disclaiming mentality. "I'm just trying to maximize shareholder revenue." People check their morality at the front desk and avoid responsibility for their actions because they're just trying to make other people money.
That's why businesses owned by one person(or a small handful of people) are superior. They are responsible to themselves. They can't blame some amorphus blob of shareholders for their actions. As a result, they'll stick to their ethics.
Now, sometimes, those ethics are still pretty lacking, but I'm willing to bet conscience will come into play with sole proprieterships more often than corporations.
Evil could spawn anywhere he could put a critter out of our "line-of-sight". Unfortunately, even one or two little critters could block line of sight for a big critter.
From the rulebook, "Exception: For purposes of spawning new invaders, other invader figures do not block a marine's line of sight."
So that may be the source of some of your problems.
About 13-14 years ago, when Bush was proposing an anti-flag burning ammendment, ran a Sunday cartoon with an American flag and a warning that under the ammendment, it would be illegal for people to throw out or destroy the cartoon.
considering how many died fighting for the ideals it represents
That's not really a reason for anything. Lots of people have died in large numbers for really stupid things. The fact that so many people died fighting for it doesn't make it any more or less valid. It's irrelevant.
In practice the past four years, the Bush White House has assumed a much larger control of how his party governs itself in the House and Senate than previous presidents. Republicans are expected to support the President no matter what and independence is punished. Bush has had unprecedented say in, for example, who chairs the various committees. Note how quickly the wrath of the right came down upon Judiciary chair-to-be Arlen Specter when he said Bush shouldn't expect to get a rubber-stamp on his nominees.
Compare to this to Clinton's exercise in cat herding his first two years in office with a Democratic controlled House and Senate.
Information like that can't be copyrighted. That's why you can download something like the Lahman baseball database for free.
What's at issue is names and likenesses. There's nothing stopping Sega from producing a football game that plays identically and uses real stats but it would have to have differently named teams and players.
I don't think anyone would consider it reasonable for Boeing to give Microsoft "exclusive rights" to simulate their aircraft.
They probably could, actually. You'd probably be able to get away with simulating a very similar craft, but you couldn't call it by its name or identify it as a Boeing craft.
The last couple years of his administration, Clinton realized that terrorism, especially the threat from Bin Laden, was going to be the main problem for the US in the future. Meanwhile, at the time, Republicans claimed Clinton was just trying to "distract" from the Lewinsky scandal and that he was "paying too much attention" to Bin Laden.
There were several programs he put into place that Bush discontinued when he came into office. For example, Clinton stationed ships close to Afghanistan so that a missile strike could nail OBL within minutes. (the training camp strike in 1998 missed OBL by about 15 minutes, IIRC) Bush removed the ships. There was also a training program to have a Pakistani team go into Afghanistan to get OBL. Bush discontinued the program.
Clinton didn't do *enough* to combat terrorism but at least he realized it was a problem. Bush didn't do *anything*. Hell, he did worse than nothing because he dismantled existing efforts.
I worked for AT&T Wireless when they were breaking off from AT&T proper. One of things that needed to be done was to replace all of the AT&T employee ID numbers with new AWS employee ID numbers.
It. Took. For. Ever.
All sorts of disconnected systems keyed to that AT&T ID # that needed to be updated and changed and the change need to happen in one fell swoop and nothing could fail.
Put their cards to great use while I was travelling around Europe. Calling home or calling friends/family in other countries, connections were always great and they were pretty cheap considering how versatile the card was. (no connection fees, no maintenance fee, access numbers in dozens of countries, could call everywhere at a relatively low rate)
have seen malpractice insurance rates increase at a *faster* rate than those without tort reform.
"Tort reform" (as the GOP intends it) isn't a new idea. It's been tried before. It doesn't work. It failed. So why would it be a good idea on the national level?
Governments exist to enrich society. Corporations exist to enrich their shareholders. If society benefits in the latter case, it's a fortunate side effect. But time and time again, we've seen which side corps will pick when the chips are down.
That's why corporations spend their money researching (and marketing) a wide variety of *treatments* and governments spend their time researching *cures*.
I won't claim that government always succeeds at enriching society, but at least they generally make the effort and are somewhat accountable. Corporations are only about looking out for their shareholders and don't give a shit about anyone else, even their own employees.
In fact, I would challenge you to name two others!
Dept of Defense and Dept of Education.
And before you say "The FDA", I would point out the recent scandals. For further evidence, there was a very good special on PBS that showed that the FDA was aware that certain drugs caused heart problems - and they still approved them!
Because corporations and Randiots like yourself have been pressuring entities like the FDA or the SEC to stop interfering with corporations' shareholder-given right to sell poison to unsuspecting customers. Now that you've got politicians in office who have been happily defanging regulatory agencies, you have the gall to complain that they're not doing enough to interfere. Which is it? Do you want regulatory oversight or not?
accountability is much more direct in a private company or investment.
Maybe if the company is owned by handful of people. There's only accountability in a corporation if they don't make money; no one gets held accountable if they kill people.
The government does not have an incentive to create wealth - the government has an incentive to please as many people as possible, and offend as few as possible.
And this is a bad thing how? I'll take that over the countless numbers of corporations who have decided to fuck everyone else over to improve their profit margin by.1%
so what happens now? Just keep recounting until the Democrat wins? And what then? Why not recount one more time? Where do you draw the line?
The line's drawn in the law. The machine recount was automatic because of the close margin. (A manual recount would've been done if the margin were 100 votes closer initially)
Now that a winner has finally be certified. A manual recount can be requested. Once/If it's done, that's it.
This it how it works: Gregoire can request a manual recount of certain or all counties, but she has to put down a deposit of 25 cents for each vote to pay for the recount. That would be roughly $700,000 for every vote in the state. If it changes the margin, she gets the deposit back and the state pays for the recount. If not, the money is gone.
Obviously, $700,000 is a lot. But she can request a recount just in certain counties and put down a smaller deposit. If the count there is enough to change the results, the state initiates and pays for a statewide recount. If it doesn't change the outcome, she loses her deposit.
Either way, that'll be the end of the matter. Our state election laws are pretty well laid out. Given the tight margin and given that some counties somehow came back with *fewer* votes in the machine recount than the original count, I don't see how anyone can argue that a manual recount shouldn't be done.
Well, there is a difference, on the *law* recognizes: it's the difference between a recount affirming the result, and overturning it. The law treats those two outcomes differently, as Vance said.
What result? Until the machine recount was finished last week, there was no result. No winner was certified.
In the Kennedy/Nixon election, Richard Nixon lost the vote under extremely suspect circumstances. He made the deliberate decision not to pursue because of the harm it would do to the nation.
Republicans persued (fruitless) recounts in about a dozen different states and dragged (fruitless) investigations in Illinois out for a year.
Nixon presented a public front of not challenging for the "good of the nation"(which you've obviously swallowed hook, line and sinker) but did everything in his power to challenge the results behind the scenes.
The wife replacing the husband in the middle of the race was probably illegal under Missouir law
She didn't replace him on the ballot. Ashcroft lost to a dead man. The (Republican I think) Governor just made it known that if Mel Carnahan won, he'd appoint Jean Carnahan in his place, which he did.
the Republican decided not to pursue the matter
What would he persue exactly?
I know they wouldn't, because they Didn't. Six years ago Tom Daschle won his senate seat by less than 500 votes, most of which were extremely suspect. His Republican challenger refused to drag the results out, saying that it would do more harm than good.
You're thinking of Thune's loss to Johnson and he *did* drag investigations out with allegations of massive fraud. And guess what? Nothing turned up.
And who can forget Bob Dornan who dragged out investigations of his narrow loss to Loretta Sanchez in 1996 for two years? Again, Republican alleged massive vote fraud and nothing materialized. And then Dornan got his ass smacked by Sanchez in 1998.
Basically, here's the pattern: Republicans lose narrowly. They allege massive vote fraud when it doesn't exist so as to taint the victory of their opponent. They publicly say they're taking the high road and not persuing any legal options. They privately persue any and all legal options. They come up empty.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is getting into robotic war machine business?
The mob mentality defense has people disclaiming responsibility for their actions because they got "caught up in the moment" and "everyone else is doing it." Kind of like peer pressure.
Corporations lead to a similar responsibility disclaiming mentality. "I'm just trying to maximize shareholder revenue." People check their morality at the front desk and avoid responsibility for their actions because they're just trying to make other people money.
That's why businesses owned by one person(or a small handful of people) are superior. They are responsible to themselves. They can't blame some amorphus blob of shareholders for their actions. As a result, they'll stick to their ethics.
Now, sometimes, those ethics are still pretty lacking, but I'm willing to bet conscience will come into play with sole proprieterships more often than corporations.
The crooks didn't get away with all the money. $70,000 was frozen in the receiving bank account.
BoA has basically done jackshit to help him get the money out of the frozen account.
if not all of it.
It's a representative republic.
Evil could spawn anywhere he could put a critter out of our "line-of-sight". Unfortunately, even one or two little critters could block line of sight for a big critter.
From the rulebook, "Exception: For purposes of spawning new invaders, other invader figures do not block a marine's line of sight."
So that may be the source of some of your problems.
About 13-14 years ago, when Bush was proposing an anti-flag burning ammendment, ran a Sunday cartoon with an American flag and a warning that under the ammendment, it would be illegal for people to throw out or destroy the cartoon.
The flag represents the freedom to burn it.
considering how many died fighting for the ideals it represents
That's not really a reason for anything. Lots of people have died in large numbers for really stupid things. The fact that so many people died fighting for it doesn't make it any more or less valid. It's irrelevant.
In practice the past four years, the Bush White House has assumed a much larger control of how his party governs itself in the House and Senate than previous presidents. Republicans are expected to support the President no matter what and independence is punished. Bush has had unprecedented say in, for example, who chairs the various committees. Note how quickly the wrath of the right came down upon Judiciary chair-to-be Arlen Specter when he said Bush shouldn't expect to get a rubber-stamp on his nominees.
Compare to this to Clinton's exercise in cat herding his first two years in office with a Democratic controlled House and Senate.
The temporal cold war arc was more or less abandonned at the end of the second season and tied up at the beginning of this season.
Information like that can't be copyrighted. That's why you can download something like the Lahman baseball database for free.
What's at issue is names and likenesses. There's nothing stopping Sega from producing a football game that plays identically and uses real stats but it would have to have differently named teams and players.
I don't think anyone would consider it reasonable for Boeing to give Microsoft "exclusive rights" to simulate their aircraft.
They probably could, actually. You'd probably be able to get away with simulating a very similar craft, but you couldn't call it by its name or identify it as a Boeing craft.
The last couple years of his administration, Clinton realized that terrorism, especially the threat from Bin Laden, was going to be the main problem for the US in the future. Meanwhile, at the time, Republicans claimed Clinton was just trying to "distract" from the Lewinsky scandal and that he was "paying too much attention" to Bin Laden.
There were several programs he put into place that Bush discontinued when he came into office. For example, Clinton stationed ships close to Afghanistan so that a missile strike could nail OBL within minutes. (the training camp strike in 1998 missed OBL by about 15 minutes, IIRC) Bush removed the ships. There was also a training program to have a Pakistani team go into Afghanistan to get OBL. Bush discontinued the program.
Clinton didn't do *enough* to combat terrorism but at least he realized it was a problem. Bush didn't do *anything*. Hell, he did worse than nothing because he dismantled existing efforts.
between leaving your job to travel for several months(which I've also done) and leaving your job so you can go wait in line for several months.
He was a bittorrent freeloader so he's only responsible for uploading 0.013 copies. That's... what? 83 bucks? I think he'll be fine.
I worked for AT&T Wireless when they were breaking off from AT&T proper. One of things that needed to be done was to replace all of the AT&T employee ID numbers with new AWS employee ID numbers.
It. Took. For. Ever.
All sorts of disconnected systems keyed to that AT&T ID # that needed to be updated and changed and the change need to happen in one fell swoop and nothing could fail.
I'm betting a university setup is even worse.
Oprah did a story about mad cow disease and then stated she wasn't going to eat beef anymore out of concern for it. Where's the slander?
The US beef industry was just pissed off at the bad publicity they were getting.
Doesn't the US prohibit direct calls to Cuba? They usually have to be rerouted through a country that *will* let you call Cuba.
Cuba has a lot of problems because of Castro, but some of them are because of our(the US) dumbass foreign policy.
Put their cards to great use while I was travelling around Europe. Calling home or calling friends/family in other countries, connections were always great and they were pretty cheap considering how versatile the card was. (no connection fees, no maintenance fee, access numbers in dozens of countries, could call everywhere at a relatively low rate)
He'd invade Syria in retaliation for Russia taking over the ISS.
have seen malpractice insurance rates increase at a *faster* rate than those without tort reform.
"Tort reform" (as the GOP intends it) isn't a new idea. It's been tried before. It doesn't work. It failed. So why would it be a good idea on the national level?
Governments exist to enrich society. Corporations exist to enrich their shareholders. If society benefits in the latter case, it's a fortunate side effect. But time and time again, we've seen which side corps will pick when the chips are down.
.1%
That's why corporations spend their money researching (and marketing) a wide variety of *treatments* and governments spend their time researching *cures*.
I won't claim that government always succeeds at enriching society, but at least they generally make the effort and are somewhat accountable. Corporations are only about looking out for their shareholders and don't give a shit about anyone else, even their own employees.
In fact, I would challenge you to name two others!
Dept of Defense and Dept of Education.
And before you say "The FDA", I would point out the recent scandals. For further evidence, there was a very good special on PBS that showed that the FDA was aware that certain drugs caused heart problems - and they still approved them!
Because corporations and Randiots like yourself have been pressuring entities like the FDA or the SEC to stop interfering with corporations' shareholder-given right to sell poison to unsuspecting customers. Now that you've got politicians in office who have been happily defanging regulatory agencies, you have the gall to complain that they're not doing enough to interfere. Which is it? Do you want regulatory oversight or not?
accountability is much more direct in a private company or investment.
Maybe if the company is owned by handful of people. There's only accountability in a corporation if they don't make money; no one gets held accountable if they kill people.
The government does not have an incentive to create wealth - the government has an incentive to please as many people as possible, and offend as few as possible.
And this is a bad thing how? I'll take that over the countless numbers of corporations who have decided to fuck everyone else over to improve their profit margin by
so what happens now? Just keep recounting until the Democrat wins? And what then? Why not recount one more time? Where do you draw the line?
The line's drawn in the law. The machine recount was automatic because of the close margin. (A manual recount would've been done if the margin were 100 votes closer initially)
Now that a winner has finally be certified. A manual recount can be requested. Once/If it's done, that's it.
This it how it works:
Gregoire can request a manual recount of certain or all counties, but she has to put down a deposit of 25 cents for each vote to pay for the recount. That would be roughly $700,000 for every vote in the state. If it changes the margin, she gets the deposit back and the state pays for the recount. If not, the money is gone.
Obviously, $700,000 is a lot. But she can request a recount just in certain counties and put down a smaller deposit. If the count there is enough to change the results, the state initiates and pays for a statewide recount. If it doesn't change the outcome, she loses her deposit.
Either way, that'll be the end of the matter. Our state election laws are pretty well laid out. Given the tight margin and given that some counties somehow came back with *fewer* votes in the machine recount than the original count, I don't see how anyone can argue that a manual recount shouldn't be done.
Well, there is a difference, on the *law* recognizes: it's the difference between a recount affirming the result, and overturning it. The law treats those two outcomes differently, as Vance said.
What result? Until the machine recount was finished last week, there was no result. No winner was certified.
In the Kennedy/Nixon election, Richard Nixon lost the vote under extremely suspect circumstances. He made the deliberate decision not to pursue because of the harm it would do to the nation.
Republicans persued (fruitless) recounts in about a dozen different states and dragged (fruitless) investigations in Illinois out for a year.
Nixon presented a public front of not challenging for the "good of the nation"(which you've obviously swallowed hook, line and sinker) but did everything in his power to challenge the results behind the scenes.
The wife replacing the husband in the middle of the race was probably illegal under Missouir law
She didn't replace him on the ballot. Ashcroft lost to a dead man. The (Republican I think) Governor just made it known that if Mel Carnahan won, he'd appoint Jean Carnahan in his place, which he did.
the Republican decided not to pursue the matter
What would he persue exactly?
I know they wouldn't, because they Didn't. Six years ago Tom Daschle won his senate seat by less than 500 votes, most of which were extremely suspect. His Republican challenger refused to drag the results out, saying that it would do more harm than good.
You're thinking of Thune's loss to Johnson and he *did* drag investigations out with allegations of massive fraud. And guess what? Nothing turned up.
And who can forget Bob Dornan who dragged out investigations of his narrow loss to Loretta Sanchez in 1996 for two years? Again, Republican alleged massive vote fraud and nothing materialized. And then Dornan got his ass smacked by Sanchez in 1998.
Basically, here's the pattern:
Republicans lose narrowly.
They allege massive vote fraud when it doesn't exist so as to taint the victory of their opponent.
They publicly say they're taking the high road and not persuing any legal options.
They privately persue any and all legal options.
They come up empty.
What do you think the Triple XBox was?