The neocons' power base is not that small, especially in financial terms, since it consists of 'Corporate America'.
No, the "neo-cons" does not consist of "Corporate America". I know it's a hot buzz-word these days but "neoconservative" has a meaning beyond "people who's politics I disagree with". There is a perfectly good term for "Corporate America": "Corporate America". "Neoconservative" are something entirely different. Very few neoconservatives are known for their corporate ties. They are almost entirely academics and intellectuals that cycle between various univeristies, think tanks and mid-level government positions. There are sympathetic businessmen that fund their think tanks and foundations but that makes them no more synonomous with "Corporate America" than Moveon.org is for being funded by George Soros.
Neo-conservative traditionally refers to a particular group of formerly hard-left intellectualls that gradually moved to the right in their thinking from the early-60's to the mid-80's. Most were members of the Socialist or Communist parties. They grew disillusioned with communism: "Mugged by reality" as Irving Kristol (the classic example of a "neo-conservative" and the one who popularized the term) put it. They moved steadily rightward with various detours into Trotskyism, Schatmannism, the Social Democrats USA, Anti-communist Trade Unions and the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party.
It's a much more fascinating bit of history than the bland over-use of the term would suggest. It may also be a bit more instructive about their actual motivations and the potential dangers of the thinking than simplistic caricatures of *other* political movements misleadingly applied to people that are NOTHING like the caricature. In many ways they are still liberals (as any Paleo-con will quickly point out) They are *idealists* they still have the same utopian zeal that they brought to the Fourth Socialist International. *THAT* is what the danger is, NOT the venal corruption you are accusing them of. Sincerity and idealism are good things, but these guys have often gotten things very wrong in their zeal to bring about the liberal democratic world order they invision... getting things wrong on the scale that these guys are trying to operate is a very dangerous thing.
To the degree that there is any truth to what you are saying you are getting the situation exactly backwards. Evangelicals are ~30% of the population of the country. Religious conservatism is a large and powerful political block with significant political clout.
Neo-Conservatives (strictly speaking) are a very small group of like-minded intellectuals with no political power base. They have *influence* through their ideas and the force of their arguments, but no *power*. The religious right as a political movement has the power in many places to get you elected or not. The neo-cons can argue to those with power (including but not certainly not exclusively the religious right) that you should or should not get elected.
It's also worth noting that the political/intellectual movement most ardently opposed to the neo-conservatives is also closely aligned to the religious right. The title "paleo-conservative" was coined in self-conscious opposition to the neo-conservatives and Paleo-cons like Pat Buchannan while relatively weak politically have their strongest following within the religious right.
I remember thinking at the time that there would be a lot of this 20/20 hindsight critique. I knew that various elements of the plot were sure to have been known by government at the time and there would by a hue and cry that "we should have put it together" and "something could have been done". Sure enough government did know some things, and in some circles the hue and cry has been raised.
Certainly we should analyze our failures. But much of the critique is just so unrealistic (and in many cases crassly political). Various investigations with the huge advantage of knowing exactly who and what to look for have taken months and even years to find all the needles in the government haystack, the stuff we "knew" and "should have put together". The critics can safely ignore the 99.999% of intelligence out there that was irrelevant and misleading and easily identify those few bits that after the fact are "obvious" and "should have been acted on". Even this stuff we "knew" and "should have acted on" I'll bet we were less certain about "knowing" than the "fact" that Hussein had WMD... and we all know how that worked out.
Even much of the stuff that has been uncoverred after the fact that "should have been put together" have been contradictory: guys in the cell looking into getting licenses to transport hazardous materials, or looking into crop dusting airplanes. One had once inquired in some forum what it would take to sink an aircraft carrier. In the same time span how many other people were reported to the FBI for "acting suspicious"? How urgently do we follow up on every vague suspicion coming in about arab males looking into perfectly legal jobs? Or asking questions that could be idle curiosity? If we did take these suspicions as urgent what do we do? Harrass these guys (and the tens of thousands of other people that have been reported to the FBI or local police for "acting funny"? Where do you increase security? Small airports, Hazmat transportation and naval bases servicing aircraft carriers?
No, it sucked. More than a few fonts and it was painfully slow. More than a few hundred and it was completely useless (a few thousand fonts and you'll be waiting a looooooooooong time for the application to even launch)
The problem is that currently the checks on judicial power are not being exercised.
Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 put the appellate power of the court (the power Judicial Review comes from) squarely under the thumb of congress. Congress can not only regulate the appellate function of the court it can provide EXEMPTIONS(!)
I think the court has managed to be enshrined in such an aura of ultimate authority on constitutional matters that people wouldn't even believe that Congress is given a carte-blanche power to over-rule the court. Unfortunately with that check on judicial power taken off the table the court is essentially completely unchecked...
And, I'm sorry. the current unchecked state of their power DOES in fact show up as usurpation of both legislative and executive powers at all levels of government. For instance: In specific school desegregation cases courts have taken over executive power to the point of dictating precise tax rates and structures and precisely how the subsequent funds are spent. Who knew that the Federal constitution dictated the tax rate of Kansas City? Apparently though it does.
The courts don't of course "write laws" but they do rule on them through the lens of broad, general principles (platitudes really) rather than through anything in the specific text of the constitution. The problem is that vague principles leave decisions entirely up to the discretion of the person making that judgment. That is why vague laws are stricken down by the courts... the leave too much to the discretion of the executive. Well, the courts are subject to the same perfectly human temptation when interpreting a vague directive. It's even worse with the courts because they were the ones that conjured the vague directive out of the specifics of the constitutional text in the first place. The courts don't have the check on themselves in this regard that the legislature has in the courts.
Given (by themselves) very broad principles that touch just about every possible issue, and are even likely to conflict with one another in many cases the judges have no reason to ever let a law they personally disagree with stand. It's very easy for their personal judgments about privacy, liberty, property, separation-of-powers and all the other words that appear in constitutional platitudes dictate decisions. A judge bound by a constitution should often find themselves in the position of saying of a law: "stupid and wrong but (sadly) constitutional" or even "Great law, but (sadly) unconstitutional". Our judges no longer seem capable of such restraint. The vagueness of the principles we find in "penumbras" and other loopholes mean never having to.
For the past ~40 years this dynamic has benefited liberals who have won policy victories in courts that they couldn't win at the ballot box. But there is no reason to think that this trend will continue and good reason to think that a tide is already turning NOT to the judicial restraint of strict constructionism but to a "conservative" version of the same creative interpretation using the exact same loopholes. Witness Bush v. Gore. The ends clearly dictated the "interpretation" of the constitution in that case rather than any consistent application of principle (never mind that quaint anachronism: the written constitution). But in that regard it was no worse than most influential court cases of the last 50 years, the only difference was whose ox was getting gored (sorry for the pun).
I think with the switch of just one supreme court justice we will find a new liberal appreciation for "strict constructionism" just as Republican domination of the federal government has led to the new liberal attitude towards states-rights.
in other words, you have freedom of speech as long as you don't discuss politics?
Which was the whole point of free speech in the first place. Ironic isn't it.
I'm not that old and I remember when the argument was: "If we regulate porn we might inadvertently trample someone's right to political free speech". Porn and other forms of expression people found questionable were defended not for their own sakes but by fears of a "slippery slope". Now they go straight for the central principle behind free speech protections, and start regulating the criticism of our leaders... and hardly a peep of protest... maybe we were all too distracted looking at porn to notice our fundamental constitutional rights flipped on their heads.
But it is. The advantage of RFID is that you don't have to swipe anything, be in line-of-sight or even get (too) close. Those are the "hoops" that the RFID is all about avoiding. The measures they are taking are just crippling RFID to make it equivalent to all sorts of technologies we already have that don't have the risk of being intended read at a distance.
The genesis of RFID had to do with automation. Instead of making a *really* smart robot that can identify & figure out the physical objects it has to interact with - make the objects just a little smart so they can TELL the robot about themselves. Having to get really close and open a book is back to making having to make the system smart again (in this case you need a human to do this for the system - just the thing RFID is supposed to eliminate).
State Department contractors are looking to include some shielding, such as metal fibers in the passport cover, to keep the chips from being read when the passport is closed.
They are also, supposedly "designed only to be readable from 8 centimeters (about 3 inches) away when the passport is open."
My question at that point is: why not use another technology? The whole point of RFID is that it is readable from a distance without jumping through any hoops. If TFA is correct they are negating the whole point of RFID and fighting it's inherent nature to do so. It seems that some kind of optical technology would be perfectly suited to do exactly what they want to do with RFID.
You're missing their strategy. That iPod ad *IS* a mac ad... or more correctly: the resulting iPod sales are.
Until very recently most people wouldn't even consider a Mac. BUT those same people WILL buy iPods. Apple is betting that satisfied iPod customers will become more willing to buy Macintosh computers. This is the so-called "halo effect".
And it's working! Morgan Stanley estimates that 20%(!) of Windows using iPod buyers also end up buying a Mac at some point in the future. iPod ads are a "two-fer" for Apple. They sell iPods, and for every 5 iPods they eventually sell a Mac too. Supposedly they are on track to nearly double their market-share in this manner.
The greater willingness of the general consumer to consider an iPod and thier subsequent increase in willingness to buy a Mac may even mean that airing an iPod commercial is more effective at selling Mac computers than running a Macintosh ad would be.
Re:Top 5 : What's Next At Apple
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What's Next At Apple
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· Score: 4, Insightful
3. Continuing victory of Form Over Function
This is just so stunningly wrong. The secret of Apples success is that they are devoted to the proposition that Form FOLLOWS function.
Whether form is considered or not by the person producing it technology products HAVE form. By NOT thinking about it at all most tech companies produce forms that don't relate well to function, get in the way or hide function. Certainly they don't produce forms that enhance function in any way. Ironically by ignoring form altogether they produce products that put "form over function"
On the few occasions that they consider form at all they think of it as something decorative, divorced from function and just make things worse.
An example: Look at Microsoft's approach to icons compared to Apple's. Apple popularized the GUI, and the use of icons. They thought about function first and then thought about forms to access those functions. They used icons where it made sense. I'm convinced that Microsoft looked at that success and without understanding it AT ALL decided to emulate it. But to Microsoft it boiled down to: "icons are pretty" and "I hear they make computers easier". As a result of that "thinking" they made EVERYTHING an icon. Rows upon rows of completely meaningless icons that don't help anything and make finding the function you seek an exercise in frustration. THAT is form over function, people just fail to recognize it as such because it manages to be UGLY as well.
Because the mechanism by which the DNA blueprint is actually used to create proteins (in a mechanism that itself uses proteins) is *spectacularly* complex.
"IBM estimates that the folding model for a 300-residue protein will encompass more than one billion forces acting over one trillion time steps. Even for Blue Gene, modeling such a folding process is expected to take about a year of around-the-clock processing."
Your understanding of the revolutionary is a sad commentary on the educational system that apparently failed you. The issue was NOT over the ability for the government to make such decisions (conscription, taxation et al) but over doing so WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
So, in response to this and other outrages the (representative) colonial governments sent their CONCRIPTED militias and "forced them to kill other people".
I'll grant you that the Federal Government did not directly conscript soldiers (despite General Washington's pleas). That power was reserved to the colonial governments, which did in fact use it. Those conscripts were then sent off to join the army - a "back door draft" if you will. I'll also grant that conscripts were generally allowed to hire a replacement, making actual service in effect voluntary... for those that could afford it (a bit more than half)
This country was NOT founded upon the principle that citizens have no responsibilities that can be imposed upon them by government. But, on the principle that the government that imposes such requirement must be representative of, and accountable to, those being imposed upon.
And yet there was a ruling that cities cannot keep their building codes "secret" by selling them for large sums of money only to selected contractors.
And yet building codes aren't security procedures that benefit from being kept secret from those trying to bypass them.
Just because its a "regulation" doesn't make keeping it secret any less despicable on behalf of our government.
No... because it is outlining security procedures is what makes keeping it secret less despicable on behalf of our government.
If it's "ok" to have secret laws (don't kid yourself calling them regulations... if you must obey, it's a law)
YOU have no obligation to obey these regulations. They are laws for Airlines. YOU are not REQUIRED to do ANYTHING by this law. You can get in no trouble, you can suffer no penalties. There is nothing YOU can do to violate this law. That said there is admittedly one aspect of these regulations that does have an effect on you: The Airline is required as part of their own security policy to ask for your photo ID... As a private concern the airline is also free to ask you to stand on your head and whistle dixie as a condition of boarding.
(don't kid yourself calling them regulations... if you must obey, it's a law)
Don't worry I'm not kidding myself... I was clearing up the parent posters real or pretended ignorance talking about legislative acts when he (should) know full well that agencies (enabled by legislation) promulgate regulations with the power of law.
...but what happened to the security-through-obscurity mantra here
I never bought that mantra... it is a simplistic bumper sticker sentiment. Obscurity is often a valid *component* of security. Obscurity is a contributing but not sufficient component of security. Telling someone who is attempting to subvert your security exactly what procedures you have in place to prevent them from doing so is simple stupidity. Only someone who has elevated a simplistic slogan from an unrelated debate into an article of religious faith equally valid in every sphere would fail to see that. Gilmore is a "true believer" his faith is immune to logic or reason. His ideology driven obsession with one threat (from government) utterly blinds him to other threats (from terrorists).
Government encroachment of our rights is a legitimate danger. But paranoia fueled shrillness about reasonable precautions makes Gilmore a useless guardian of our liberties. Nobody listens to car alarms anymore because they go off for no real reason. Activists like John Gilmore are the same thing.
No he's right and John Gilmore is just being an ass.
The "federal law" is in fact an FAA regulation. Federal law allows the FAA to keep regulations concerning the details of security precautions secret. I hope the valid reasons for this would be obvious.
It is very clear from the FAA's letter that the situation is more complex than a single line in a regulation saying "passengers must provide a photo ID" that the FAA could excerpt to show Gilmore. Quite likely the photo ID requirement is part of an internal airline policy designed to meet a whole host of FAA regulations, some very precise, some general and vague. The airlines' internal policy is probably subject to federal review and approval. Think of it as something like the combination of zoning and building safety laws that apply to construction in a city.
So, what is *techincally* the internal policy of the airline is probably at least partly written by lawyers to conform to a bunch of regulation... the airline is a little loose in it's language and says it's required by "federal law" (which to their thinking, it is). The government on the other hand doesn't have a neat, single line of legislation saying "passengers must present a photo ID" but some lines about that (with certain proviso's, exceptions, procedures to take in the event that an airline chooses not to require photo ID's etc. etc.) a whole mass of regulation that leads the airline to simply cut the gordian knot and flatly require photo ID's without exception. The FAA doesn't have a nice neat one line to show Gilmore and doesn't want to release the whole mess because to do so would provide those trying to circumvent security procedure too many details.
In the end requiring a photo ID is a reasonable request. I'm happy that Gilmore is riding a bus instead... his brand of pedantic blindly ideological asshattery should have inconvenient consequences.
The REAL problem with political blogging is many-fold. The first is that they do not attempt anything like a NPOV in selecting stories.
True... but this is a problem with ANY news source. People have points of view and this comes out even whey they attempt(!) to be neutral. The multiplicity of news sources & commentary from many points of view is a positive development in this regard. True, many readers limit their sources to those they agree with, but by and large even stories that contradict their assumptions tend to bleed into those sources because their ideological opponents have the same ability to publish and popularize their views. It is effectively impossible for stories to be buried anymore. "The truth will out" is more true today (and much quicker) than when there were only a handful of news sources.
Another thing that is REALLY wrong with blogs is that they are at best tertiary sources of information.
Directly linked to the secondary sources we had before in the news media, and pretty often linked to primary sources as well.
The more interesting blogs to me are those by actual experts in whatever field they are blogging on, the people that otherwise would have been quoted briefly (often innacurately) in a news article. Or blogs by actual witnesses to events in the news (i.e. iraqi blogs, soldiers blogs) These people have the same problems of bias compounded by being passionate participants but that is typical of *primary* sources, which these blogs are. Views and opinions of participants which in a news article would be reduced to a one line summary (or caricature) are given in full.
...That is to say, most political idealogs believe in the incompetence of everyone but their side
You think this is limited to political ideologues? It is implicit in having an opinion, any opinion, that you believe any and all contrary opinions are wrong. Now how you react to those contrary opinions can be respectful, can be open-minded or can be dismissive or insulting. Bloggers are individuals, some are obnoxious in their opinions some are open-minded and participate in intelligent debate. This librarian is an example of someone who is somewhat obnoxious in his opinions - "the absurd idea.." The breezily presentation of his opinions as something "everybody knows" (i.e. Google's "notoriously inefficient search engine.") when in fact "everybody" knows no such thing. It's a tactic to shut down debate and "win" without actually having to present evidence supporting your contention. He's very dismissive of his opponents "I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts." without providing any evidence to support this view. Contrary to his contention many of the most popularly read bloggers are academics themselves, Glen Reynolds for instance is a professor of constitutional law. He may write Instapundit in the casual manner typical of blogs but I suspect he does plenty of "sustained reading of complex texts" probably more so than Michael Gorman (have you ever read books on constitutional law? The field is pretty damn close to the the sine qua non of "complex texts").
This rant is better written that the average blog post but as logical argumentation and respectful debate it is down there with the worst. Professionals are by necessity threatened by the democratization and commoditization of their professions, that is all this rant amounts to.
Sorry... I didn't really complete my thought. The choice for developers between Microsoft and WHAT-WG would be a no brainer... or at least that is what WHAT-WG is hoping. The WHAT-WG solution despite it's (significant) technical disadvantages would be available to 100% of users the moment it is finalized. The Microsoft solution will only work for people running Longhorn. Right now that really is a no brainer, Since adoption of new technology isn't instantaneous it will continue to be a "no brainer" for a while after longhorn is actually (finally) on the market. By the time the number of longhorn users makes Microsoft's solution more attractive there will likely be a "Web Forms 3.0" addressing at least some of the failings of the first implementation.
I also think it's likely that the open standard solutions aren't in direct competition with each other. The politics of the situation at the W3C will probably lead to a combination of the two approaches. Evolutionary progress now does not preclude adoption of the revolutionary approach when it's ready. The evolutionary stop-gap may even smooth the path to the revolutionary solution when it's ready. Actually I suspect that the conflict between the two camps at the W3C is being exaggerated for the purposes of a "good story". Thw WHAT-WG site claims that Web Forms 2.0 and XForms are complementary rather than competing.
No, You didn't get it straight. Microsoft is pursuing their own proprietary solution completely separate from these two competing standards.
The fight at the W3C is over the open standard Microsoft will be ignoring and/or attempting to crush. One side (tech purists?) is advocating a completely new, technically elegant revolutionary new standard. The other side (Microsoft competitors) is worried that this totally new miracle standard, despite it's technical advantages will be crushed in the marketplace by the proprietary Microsoft "standard". They believe it will be crushed for two reasons: 1) It will take a long time to implement and then for users to adopt and Microsoft will beat it to the market with their solution and 2) It will never be supported by dominant web browser. The alternative they advocate an "evolutionary" refinement of existing standards that can actually be implemented with existing browsers using javascript. It beats Microsoft to the market, it's already supported by everybody including Microsoft(!) it's a no-brainer for web application developers trying to decide which technology to use.
I'm going to assume you realize that plenty of low income workers might have trouble funding retirement with non-existent savings.
I am going to assume you realize that part of the reason those savings are non-existent is because money is being taken out of their paychecks and "saved" for them by the government. If that same money were still set aside but they could *really* save/invest it rather than sent into the maw of the federal government they would have/could in the future get a MUCH better return on their money.
I'm completely unable to explain why my father-in-law with a $10 million estate gets a check every month.
Simple really. Social security was sold to the voters as a kind of government guaranteed retirement savings account - NOT as welfare or a scheme of wealth transfer. For an entire lifetime they were told that the money taken out of every paycheck was being invested for them by government. That payments then when they were young, and not making very much would entitle them to a retirement benefit later. It's has all been a big lie of course... Social security is a Ponzi scheme, there never was an "investment" the money going in was spent the moment it was received. Like any other Ponzi scheme it's doomed to collapse. unless there is a fundamental reform.
The current Democratic leadership just wants to punt. Due to marginal reforms over the last decade the inevitable collapse has been pushed off another 40 years. They'll mostly all be dead then so there is no problem. I'll leave it to a 25 year old who will retire that year to respond to *that* line of "reasoning".
There are however two serious responses. One is to admit that Social Security is welfare... purely a transfer payment and not a retirement account by adding means-testing (your idea). The other is to add an actual retirement account to the system (President Bush's idea).
Actually, It's not fake and originally it wasn't bad... It's from Cicero. It's been used by printers and designers since the 1500's when some printer grabbed a coupe of pieces of already set type from a completed project (apparently "The Extremes of Good and Evil" by Cicero) to quickly mock-up some text for another project and kept using the same bit of text over and over for that purpose - trimming out letters or adding them in to fit the copy to the space. Thus perfectly good latin "...dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." became "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,"
Actually designers usually call it "greeking" or sometimes "lorem ipsum" I suppose "greek" is from "It's all greek to me." Traditionally they use a corrupted fragment of latin poetry (from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero) starting with the phrase "Lorem ipsum dolor." Printers and designers have been using that same text since the 1500's when a printer took that fragment of already set type from one project to quickly mocked up text for another project.
The reason for using "greeking" is that the designer usually knows about how much text will eventually go there but doesn't have it yet. You need some sample text to use as a design element. If you use real text that people understand they spend their time reading it rather than critiquing the design itself.
Does this give you any faith in the system? I sure as hell don't want to blame a side as much as I want to say the american voting system just isn't good enough to deal with the fact that our nation is split 50/50.
Not really. It's not that the system is particularly bad... it's just that even the best of systems will have some small margin of error, and that the margin of victory in this election (and Florida 2000) are within that margin of error. At such a small margin of victory the decision comes down to random chance not "the will of the people."
The best thing to do would be to have iron-clad rules before hand & simply follow them... The problem is that with fierce partisans on either side the rules will be challenged on any and every basis by whichever side loses and our courts are only too willing to step in to split hairs over grand principles of "fairness" applied to.001% of a vote that probably had a.2% rate of error and/or fraud. By opening the whole can of worms in the court they cause the very problem they are trying to avoid: a failure of trust in the system and it's results.
The result is that now people don't trust elections whose outcomes are NOT in serious dispute... where the margin of victory well exceeds any errors or likely fraud. Look at the obsession with Ohio with a close but clear 2.1% margin of victory. I'm sure if the shoe were on the other foot we'd be hearing from Republicans about machine politics in Philadelphia. (PA was decided by 2.3%) or allegations of fraud by Democratic 527's in Wisconsin. (A truly close race decided by 0.4% ).
I have real concerns about the possibility of fraud by both newfangled digital means and old-fashioned ballot box stuffing/dead people voting kind. But margins of victory in the hundreds of thousands are not seriously disputable and it's "win at any cost" lawsuits and the overheated rhetoric of activist lawyers that make them appear so. For all their public protestations of devotion to high principles these lawsuits are doing real persistent damage to the practice of democracy in our country.
I have a BBEdit t-shirt picked up at a mid-90's Macworld that begs to differ.
BBEdit It doesn't suck®
Of course that is when they were using it as a registered trademark for their corporation... I'm sure it was used among Apple engineers and Mac software developers informally for years prior to it's becoming such a catch phrase that the marketing department picked it up to register it as a trademark.
Because Apple's business model revolves around producing hit products (a lot like Jobs other business). A big part of making a product a "big hit" rather than "just another product" is how it's initial launch is managed. Jobs method is surprise... a big announcement of a major new cool product THAT NO ONE EXPECTED introduced with the understated trademark phrase "Oh, just one more thing..." A leak ruins the surprise (or even turns it into a negative if the real product doesn't live up to the leaked details). It damages the enthusiasm and buzz around a new product that Apple needs to create in order to turn a nice product into "the cool new thing" everybody is talking about and just HAS to have.
Contractors have been sued (in 2002), employees have lost their jobs (a webmaster in 2003), and relationships with major vendors have been seriously damaged (ATI in 2000) on account of leaks.
Sacking a VP would be a big deal but it would be in character. Motorola announcing a Motorola branded phone that can play iTunes songs is not a leak and not about an Apple product. A leak about an Apple branded(!) phone *IS*.
Then again this could be calculated misdirection to protect some other product and heighten the surprise. This is something Apple appears to have done before - prior to the launch of the iPod there were tons of rumors about all sorts of products, none of them MP3 players. I suspect that Jobs, like Churchill, believes the truth is so important it must be protected by a vanguard of lies.
There is an interesting correlation between presidents and their respective turnover rates that should also be taken into account.
Could you explain this statement? The only correlation that I see is that recent Presidents have higher number of resignations than those in the past, but that doesn't seem to be your meaning. This change over time probably reflects a changing political culture with the addition of a few cabinet posts as a contributing factor (Eisenhower had 10 Cabinet Secretaries, GWB has 15 in addition to another 6 "cabinet level" positions).
The Bush administration thus far has been notable in it's very low turnover in the Cabinet. In his first term only 2 cabinet positions changed hands, historically quite low. This is probably due to a desire for continuity and a sense of urgency after 9/11. The result is that some cabinet members that would have resigned earlier are taking the changeover as an opportunity to get out.
Another factor in this spate of changes is that W. is impatient to press his political advantage coming out of the election. Unlike most second term presidents who are content to rest on their laurels Bush actually has a farily aggressive policy agenda for his second term and feels the need to hit the ground running. People like Powell that wanted to hang around for a 6 months or more to tie up loose ends are being pushed to get out to clear the decks for their successors. Bush's perception is that he has two years to accomplish anything. After the 2006 midterm elections he will be a true lame duck with no leverage. He wants the team he will be playing with for those two vital years in place immediately... no hanging around unless you intend to stay on through '06. Resign now and do it quickly so approval of the full slate of nominees can be the incoming congresses first order of business.
Your conflation of labor and fascism is nonsense: the fascist/communist conflicts that almost destroyed the world from 1940s Eurasia has echoed in geopolitics ever since.
Ah.. you did read the second half... but are too confused by the word "corporate" and too simplistic in your conflation of communism with labor and capitalism with fascism to understand it. Yes Fascism was corporatist but "Corporatism" as understood in that era did NOT mean "rule by for-profit business corporations" as it is used now. It was based on Syndicalism (rule by labor unions) which in italy used the Fasces as their symbol since the literal meaning of Fascio is "union". Mussolini joined the local Fascio of the Syndicalist party the Fasci d'azione rivoluzionaria internazionalista in 1914. He formed his own offshoot the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919 which moved to advocating "mixed syndicates" which included not only labor unions but also the employers & management and thus became "corporatist" as the term was understood at the time. Corporatism refers to collaborative government by class cooperation (as opposed to Marxist "class struggle") through "corporations" bodies where corporate decisions were made by both labor and capital corporately. The 22 "corporations" that the Fascists set up to control industrial and economic policy and that were represented in the Fascist Parliament had equal representation by business owners & management on one hand and the labor unions on the other with government bureaucracies actually making the bulk of the decisions. The Fascists did not formally nationalize all industry as socialists would but government exerted total control through comprehensive regulation setting prices, wages, and other terms of employment, production, and distribution. Big businessmen wielded influence (as did their union counterparts as well as government officials most of all) but small businesses, farmers, professionals where de-facto employees of the state.
In American political terms I'll leave it to you to figure out which domestic party most resembles the Fascist conception of governments economic role: comprehensive business regulation, joint trade-union/employer decision making, wage and price controls etc. Hint: Roosevelt EXPLICITLY stated that he drew inspiration from Italy to deal with the crisis of the great depression. FDR modeled many of his policies on Italian examples. For his part Mussolini highly praised the New Deal. History and and the expansionist nationalist component of Fascism made Mussolini and FDR enemies but on economics and domestic policy the two men and their parties saw eye to eye.
Leftists are embarrassed by the common roots they share with Fascism and their common statist assumptions about the role of government. They recast the fascist domestic policy as capitalist and try to conflate it's European authoritarian, collectivist neo-feudalist conservatism with America's liberal, capitalist, individualist conservatism. They point to the violence of the conflict between fascism and socialism to prove their point that the two are opposite poles when in fact fascism is socialism's near relative abutting it on the political spectrum. The mutual violence I think is better explained in the fact that the heretic is always hated and feared far more than the unbeliever. It is their near agreement on so many things that makes their disagreement on a few vital points so violent. It also explains why historically all who deviated slightly from the communist party line were (rightly) condemned as "fascists" - the theoretical differences between the two ideologies are fairly minor, and their practical differences non-existent.
Slashdot Mirror
The neocons' power base is not that small, especially in financial terms, since it consists of 'Corporate America'.
No, the "neo-cons" does not consist of "Corporate America". I know it's a hot buzz-word these days but "neoconservative" has a meaning beyond "people who's politics I disagree with". There is a perfectly good term for "Corporate America": "Corporate America". "Neoconservative" are something entirely different. Very few neoconservatives are known for their corporate ties. They are almost entirely academics and intellectuals that cycle between various univeristies, think tanks and mid-level government positions. There are sympathetic businessmen that fund their think tanks and foundations but that makes them no more synonomous with "Corporate America" than Moveon.org is for being funded by George Soros.
Neo-conservative traditionally refers to a particular group of formerly hard-left intellectualls that gradually moved to the right in their thinking from the early-60's to the mid-80's. Most were members of the Socialist or Communist parties. They grew disillusioned with communism: "Mugged by reality" as Irving Kristol (the classic example of a "neo-conservative" and the one who popularized the term) put it. They moved steadily rightward with various detours into Trotskyism, Schatmannism, the Social Democrats USA, Anti-communist Trade Unions and the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party.
It's a much more fascinating bit of history than the bland over-use of the term would suggest. It may also be a bit more instructive about their actual motivations and the potential dangers of the thinking than simplistic caricatures of *other* political movements misleadingly applied to people that are NOTHING like the caricature. In many ways they are still liberals (as any Paleo-con will quickly point out) They are *idealists* they still have the same utopian zeal that they brought to the Fourth Socialist International. *THAT* is what the danger is, NOT the venal corruption you are accusing them of. Sincerity and idealism are good things, but these guys have often gotten things very wrong in their zeal to bring about the liberal democratic world order they invision... getting things wrong on the scale that these guys are trying to operate is a very dangerous thing.
To the degree that there is any truth to what you are saying you are getting the situation exactly backwards. Evangelicals are ~30% of the population of the country. Religious conservatism is a large and powerful political block with significant political clout.
Neo-Conservatives (strictly speaking) are a very small group of like-minded intellectuals with no political power base. They have *influence* through their ideas and the force of their arguments, but no *power*. The religious right as a political movement has the power in many places to get you elected or not. The neo-cons can argue to those with power (including but not certainly not exclusively the religious right) that you should or should not get elected.
It's also worth noting that the political/intellectual movement most ardently opposed to the neo-conservatives is also closely aligned to the religious right. The title "paleo-conservative" was coined in self-conscious opposition to the neo-conservatives and Paleo-cons like Pat Buchannan while relatively weak politically have their strongest following within the religious right.
I remember thinking at the time that there would be a lot of this 20/20 hindsight critique. I knew that various elements of the plot were sure to have been known by government at the time and there would by a hue and cry that "we should have put it together" and "something could have been done". Sure enough government did know some things, and in some circles the hue and cry has been raised.
Certainly we should analyze our failures. But much of the critique is just so unrealistic (and in many cases crassly political). Various investigations with the huge advantage of knowing exactly who and what to look for have taken months and even years to find all the needles in the government haystack, the stuff we "knew" and "should have put together". The critics can safely ignore the 99.999% of intelligence out there that was irrelevant and misleading and easily identify those few bits that after the fact are "obvious" and "should have been acted on". Even this stuff we "knew" and "should have acted on" I'll bet we were less certain about "knowing" than the "fact" that Hussein had WMD... and we all know how that worked out.
Even much of the stuff that has been uncoverred after the fact that "should have been put together" have been contradictory: guys in the cell looking into getting licenses to transport hazardous materials, or looking into crop dusting airplanes. One had once inquired in some forum what it would take to sink an aircraft carrier. In the same time span how many other people were reported to the FBI for "acting suspicious"? How urgently do we follow up on every vague suspicion coming in about arab males looking into perfectly legal jobs? Or asking questions that could be idle curiosity? If we did take these suspicions as urgent what do we do? Harrass these guys (and the tens of thousands of other people that have been reported to the FBI or local police for "acting funny"? Where do you increase security? Small airports, Hazmat transportation and naval bases servicing aircraft carriers?
...and functioned decently well.
No, it sucked. More than a few fonts and it was painfully slow. More than a few hundred and it was completely useless (a few thousand fonts and you'll be waiting a looooooooooong time for the application to even launch)
The problem is that currently the checks on judicial power are not being exercised.
Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 put the appellate power of the court (the power Judicial Review comes from) squarely under the thumb of congress. Congress can not only regulate the appellate function of the court it can provide EXEMPTIONS(!)
I think the court has managed to be enshrined in such an aura of ultimate authority on constitutional matters that people wouldn't even believe that Congress is given a carte-blanche power to over-rule the court. Unfortunately with that check on judicial power taken off the table the court is essentially completely unchecked...
And, I'm sorry. the current unchecked state of their power DOES in fact show up as usurpation of both legislative and executive powers at all levels of government. For instance: In specific school desegregation cases courts have taken over executive power to the point of dictating precise tax rates and structures and precisely how the subsequent funds are spent. Who knew that the Federal constitution dictated the tax rate of Kansas City? Apparently though it does.
The courts don't of course "write laws" but they do rule on them through the lens of broad, general principles (platitudes really) rather than through anything in the specific text of the constitution. The problem is that vague principles leave decisions entirely up to the discretion of the person making that judgment. That is why vague laws are stricken down by the courts... the leave too much to the discretion of the executive. Well, the courts are subject to the same perfectly human temptation when interpreting a vague directive. It's even worse with the courts because they were the ones that conjured the vague directive out of the specifics of the constitutional text in the first place. The courts don't have the check on themselves in this regard that the legislature has in the courts.
Given (by themselves) very broad principles that touch just about every possible issue, and are even likely to conflict with one another in many cases the judges have no reason to ever let a law they personally disagree with stand. It's very easy for their personal judgments about privacy, liberty, property, separation-of-powers and all the other words that appear in constitutional platitudes dictate decisions. A judge bound by a constitution should often find themselves in the position of saying of a law: "stupid and wrong but (sadly) constitutional" or even "Great law, but (sadly) unconstitutional". Our judges no longer seem capable of such restraint. The vagueness of the principles we find in "penumbras" and other loopholes mean never having to.
For the past ~40 years this dynamic has benefited liberals who have won policy victories in courts that they couldn't win at the ballot box. But there is no reason to think that this trend will continue and good reason to think that a tide is already turning NOT to the judicial restraint of strict constructionism but to a "conservative" version of the same creative interpretation using the exact same loopholes. Witness Bush v. Gore. The ends clearly dictated the "interpretation" of the constitution in that case rather than any consistent application of principle (never mind that quaint anachronism: the written constitution). But in that regard it was no worse than most influential court cases of the last 50 years, the only difference was whose ox was getting gored (sorry for the pun).
I think with the switch of just one supreme court justice we will find a new liberal appreciation for "strict constructionism" just as Republican domination of the federal government has led to the new liberal attitude towards states-rights.
in other words, you have freedom of speech as long as you don't discuss politics?
Which was the whole point of free speech in the first place. Ironic isn't it.
I'm not that old and I remember when the argument was: "If we regulate porn we might inadvertently trample someone's right to political free speech". Porn and other forms of expression people found questionable were defended not for their own sakes but by fears of a "slippery slope". Now they go straight for the central principle behind free speech protections, and start regulating the criticism of our leaders... and hardly a peep of protest... maybe we were all too distracted looking at porn to notice our fundamental constitutional rights flipped on their heads.
But it is. The advantage of RFID is that you don't have to swipe anything, be in line-of-sight or even get (too) close. Those are the "hoops" that the RFID is all about avoiding. The measures they are taking are just crippling RFID to make it equivalent to all sorts of technologies we already have that don't have the risk of being intended read at a distance.
The genesis of RFID had to do with automation. Instead of making a *really* smart robot that can identify & figure out the physical objects it has to interact with - make the objects just a little smart so they can TELL the robot about themselves. Having to get really close and open a book is back to making having to make the system smart again (in this case you need a human to do this for the system - just the thing RFID is supposed to eliminate).
My question at that point is: why not use another technology? The whole point of RFID is that it is readable from a distance without jumping through any hoops. If TFA is correct they are negating the whole point of RFID and fighting it's inherent nature to do so. It seems that some kind of optical technology would be perfectly suited to do exactly what they want to do with RFID.
You're missing their strategy. That iPod ad *IS* a mac ad... or more correctly: the resulting iPod sales are.
Until very recently most people wouldn't even consider a Mac. BUT those same people WILL buy iPods. Apple is betting that satisfied iPod customers will become more willing to buy Macintosh computers. This is the so-called "halo effect".
And it's working! Morgan Stanley estimates that 20%(!) of Windows using iPod buyers also end up buying a Mac at some point in the future. iPod ads are a "two-fer" for Apple. They sell iPods, and for every 5 iPods they eventually sell a Mac too. Supposedly they are on track to nearly double their market-share in this manner.
The greater willingness of the general consumer to consider an iPod and thier subsequent increase in willingness to buy a Mac may even mean that airing an iPod commercial is more effective at selling Mac computers than running a Macintosh ad would be.
3. Continuing victory of Form Over Function
This is just so stunningly wrong. The secret of Apples success is that they are devoted to the proposition that Form FOLLOWS function.
Whether form is considered or not by the person producing it technology products HAVE form. By NOT thinking about it at all most tech companies produce forms that don't relate well to function, get in the way or hide function. Certainly they don't produce forms that enhance function in any way. Ironically by ignoring form altogether they produce products that put "form over function"
On the few occasions that they consider form at all they think of it as something decorative, divorced from function and just make things worse.
An example: Look at Microsoft's approach to icons compared to Apple's. Apple popularized the GUI, and the use of icons. They thought about function first and then thought about forms to access those functions. They used icons where it made sense. I'm convinced that Microsoft looked at that success and without understanding it AT ALL decided to emulate it. But to Microsoft it boiled down to: "icons are pretty" and "I hear they make computers easier". As a result of that "thinking" they made EVERYTHING an icon. Rows upon rows of completely meaningless icons that don't help anything and make finding the function you seek an exercise in frustration. THAT is form over function, people just fail to recognize it as such because it manages to be UGLY as well.
Because the mechanism by which the DNA blueprint is actually used to create proteins (in a mechanism that itself uses proteins) is *spectacularly* complex.
"IBM estimates that the folding model for a 300-residue protein will encompass more than one billion forces acting over one trillion time steps. Even for Blue Gene, modeling such a folding process is expected to take about a year of around-the-clock processing."
Your understanding of the revolutionary is a sad commentary on the educational system that apparently failed you. The issue was NOT over the ability for the government to make such decisions (conscription, taxation et al) but over doing so WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
So, in response to this and other outrages the (representative) colonial governments sent their CONCRIPTED militias and "forced them to kill other people".
I'll grant you that the Federal Government did not directly conscript soldiers (despite General Washington's pleas). That power was reserved to the colonial governments, which did in fact use it. Those conscripts were then sent off to join the army - a "back door draft" if you will. I'll also grant that conscripts were generally allowed to hire a replacement, making actual service in effect voluntary... for those that could afford it (a bit more than half)
This country was NOT founded upon the principle that citizens have no responsibilities that can be imposed upon them by government. But, on the principle that the government that imposes such requirement must be representative of, and accountable to, those being imposed upon.
And yet there was a ruling that cities cannot keep their building codes "secret" by selling them for large sums of money only to selected contractors.
...but what happened to the security-through-obscurity mantra here
And yet building codes aren't security procedures that benefit from being kept secret from those trying to bypass them.
Just because its a "regulation" doesn't make keeping it secret any less despicable on behalf of our government.
No... because it is outlining security procedures is what makes keeping it secret less despicable on behalf of our government.
If it's "ok" to have secret laws (don't kid yourself calling them regulations... if you must obey, it's a law)
YOU have no obligation to obey these regulations. They are laws for Airlines. YOU are not REQUIRED to do ANYTHING by this law. You can get in no trouble, you can suffer no penalties. There is nothing YOU can do to violate this law. That said there is admittedly one aspect of these regulations that does have an effect on you: The Airline is required as part of their own security policy to ask for your photo ID... As a private concern the airline is also free to ask you to stand on your head and whistle dixie as a condition of boarding.
(don't kid yourself calling them regulations... if you must obey, it's a law)
Don't worry I'm not kidding myself... I was clearing up the parent posters real or pretended ignorance talking about legislative acts when he (should) know full well that agencies (enabled by legislation) promulgate regulations with the power of law.
I never bought that mantra... it is a simplistic bumper sticker sentiment. Obscurity is often a valid *component* of security. Obscurity is a contributing but not sufficient component of security. Telling someone who is attempting to subvert your security exactly what procedures you have in place to prevent them from doing so is simple stupidity. Only someone who has elevated a simplistic slogan from an unrelated debate into an article of religious faith equally valid in every sphere would fail to see that. Gilmore is a "true believer" his faith is immune to logic or reason. His ideology driven obsession with one threat (from government) utterly blinds him to other threats (from terrorists).
Government encroachment of our rights is a legitimate danger. But paranoia fueled shrillness about reasonable precautions makes Gilmore a useless guardian of our liberties. Nobody listens to car alarms anymore because they go off for no real reason. Activists like John Gilmore are the same thing.
No he's right and John Gilmore is just being an ass.
The "federal law" is in fact an FAA regulation. Federal law allows the FAA to keep regulations concerning the details of security precautions secret. I hope the valid reasons for this would be obvious.
It is very clear from the FAA's letter that the situation is more complex than a single line in a regulation saying "passengers must provide a photo ID" that the FAA could excerpt to show Gilmore. Quite likely the photo ID requirement is part of an internal airline policy designed to meet a whole host of FAA regulations, some very precise, some general and vague. The airlines' internal policy is probably subject to federal review and approval. Think of it as something like the combination of zoning and building safety laws that apply to construction in a city.
So, what is *techincally* the internal policy of the airline is probably at least partly written by lawyers to conform to a bunch of regulation... the airline is a little loose in it's language and says it's required by "federal law" (which to their thinking, it is). The government on the other hand doesn't have a neat, single line of legislation saying "passengers must present a photo ID" but some lines about that (with certain proviso's, exceptions, procedures to take in the event that an airline chooses not to require photo ID's etc. etc.) a whole mass of regulation that leads the airline to simply cut the gordian knot and flatly require photo ID's without exception. The FAA doesn't have a nice neat one line to show Gilmore and doesn't want to release the whole mess because to do so would provide those trying to circumvent security procedure too many details.
In the end requiring a photo ID is a reasonable request. I'm happy that Gilmore is riding a bus instead... his brand of pedantic blindly ideological asshattery should have inconvenient consequences.
The REAL problem with political blogging is many-fold. The first is that they do not attempt anything like a NPOV in selecting stories.
...That is to say, most political idealogs believe in the incompetence of everyone but their side
True... but this is a problem with ANY news source. People have points of view and this comes out even whey they attempt(!) to be neutral. The multiplicity of news sources & commentary from many points of view is a positive development in this regard. True, many readers limit their sources to those they agree with, but by and large even stories that contradict their assumptions tend to bleed into those sources because their ideological opponents have the same ability to publish and popularize their views. It is effectively impossible for stories to be buried anymore. "The truth will out" is more true today (and much quicker) than when there were only a handful of news sources.
Another thing that is REALLY wrong with blogs is that they are at best tertiary sources of information.
Directly linked to the secondary sources we had before in the news media, and pretty often linked to primary sources as well.
The more interesting blogs to me are those by actual experts in whatever field they are blogging on, the people that otherwise would have been quoted briefly (often innacurately) in a news article. Or blogs by actual witnesses to events in the news (i.e. iraqi blogs, soldiers blogs) These people have the same problems of bias compounded by being passionate participants but that is typical of *primary* sources, which these blogs are. Views and opinions of participants which in a news article would be reduced to a one line summary (or caricature) are given in full.
You think this is limited to political ideologues? It is implicit in having an opinion, any opinion, that you believe any and all contrary opinions are wrong. Now how you react to those contrary opinions can be respectful, can be open-minded or can be dismissive or insulting. Bloggers are individuals, some are obnoxious in their opinions some are open-minded and participate in intelligent debate. This librarian is an example of someone who is somewhat obnoxious in his opinions - "the absurd idea.." The breezily presentation of his opinions as something "everybody knows" (i.e. Google's "notoriously inefficient search engine.") when in fact "everybody" knows no such thing. It's a tactic to shut down debate and "win" without actually having to present evidence supporting your contention. He's very dismissive of his opponents "I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts." without providing any evidence to support this view. Contrary to his contention many of the most popularly read bloggers are academics themselves, Glen Reynolds for instance is a professor of constitutional law. He may write Instapundit in the casual manner typical of blogs but I suspect he does plenty of "sustained reading of complex texts" probably more so than Michael Gorman (have you ever read books on constitutional law? The field is pretty damn close to the the sine qua non of "complex texts").
This rant is better written that the average blog post but as logical argumentation and respectful debate it is down there with the worst. Professionals are by necessity threatened by the democratization and commoditization of their professions, that is all this rant amounts to.
It is not a no brainer
Sorry... I didn't really complete my thought. The choice for developers between Microsoft and WHAT-WG would be a no brainer... or at least that is what WHAT-WG is hoping. The WHAT-WG solution despite it's (significant) technical disadvantages would be available to 100% of users the moment it is finalized. The Microsoft solution will only work for people running Longhorn. Right now that really is a no brainer, Since adoption of new technology isn't instantaneous it will continue to be a "no brainer" for a while after longhorn is actually (finally) on the market. By the time the number of longhorn users makes Microsoft's solution more attractive there will likely be a "Web Forms 3.0" addressing at least some of the failings of the first implementation.
I also think it's likely that the open standard solutions aren't in direct competition with each other. The politics of the situation at the W3C will probably lead to a combination of the two approaches. Evolutionary progress now does not preclude adoption of the revolutionary approach when it's ready. The evolutionary stop-gap may even smooth the path to the revolutionary solution when it's ready. Actually I suspect that the conflict between the two camps at the W3C is being exaggerated for the purposes of a "good story". Thw WHAT-WG site claims that Web Forms 2.0 and XForms are complementary rather than competing.
No, You didn't get it straight. Microsoft is pursuing their own proprietary solution completely separate from these two competing standards.
The fight at the W3C is over the open standard Microsoft will be ignoring and/or attempting to crush. One side (tech purists?) is advocating a completely new, technically elegant revolutionary new standard. The other side (Microsoft competitors) is worried that this totally new miracle standard, despite it's technical advantages will be crushed in the marketplace by the proprietary Microsoft "standard". They believe it will be crushed for two reasons: 1) It will take a long time to implement and then for users to adopt and Microsoft will beat it to the market with their solution and 2) It will never be supported by dominant web browser. The alternative they advocate an "evolutionary" refinement of existing standards that can actually be implemented with existing browsers using javascript. It beats Microsoft to the market, it's already supported by everybody including Microsoft(!) it's a no-brainer for web application developers trying to decide which technology to use.
I'm going to assume you realize that plenty of low income workers might have trouble funding retirement with non-existent savings.
I am going to assume you realize that part of the reason those savings are non-existent is because money is being taken out of their paychecks and "saved" for them by the government. If that same money were still set aside but they could *really* save/invest it rather than sent into the maw of the federal government they would have/could in the future get a MUCH better return on their money.
I'm completely unable to explain why my father-in-law with a $10 million estate gets a check every month.
Simple really. Social security was sold to the voters as a kind of government guaranteed retirement savings account - NOT as welfare or a scheme of wealth transfer. For an entire lifetime they were told that the money taken out of every paycheck was being invested for them by government. That payments then when they were young, and not making very much would entitle them to a retirement benefit later. It's has all been a big lie of course... Social security is a Ponzi scheme, there never was an "investment" the money going in was spent the moment it was received. Like any other Ponzi scheme it's doomed to collapse. unless there is a fundamental reform.
The current Democratic leadership just wants to punt. Due to marginal reforms over the last decade the inevitable collapse has been pushed off another 40 years. They'll mostly all be dead then so there is no problem. I'll leave it to a 25 year old who will retire that year to respond to *that* line of "reasoning".
There are however two serious responses. One is to admit that Social Security is welfare... purely a transfer payment and not a retirement account by adding means-testing (your idea). The other is to add an actual retirement account to the system (President Bush's idea).
Actually, It's not fake and originally it wasn't bad... It's from Cicero. It's been used by printers and designers since the 1500's when some printer grabbed a coupe of pieces of already set type from a completed project (apparently "The Extremes of Good and Evil" by Cicero) to quickly mock-up some text for another project and kept using the same bit of text over and over for that purpose - trimming out letters or adding them in to fit the copy to the space. Thus perfectly good latin "...dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." became "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,"
Actually designers usually call it "greeking" or sometimes "lorem ipsum" I suppose "greek" is from "It's all greek to me." Traditionally they use a corrupted fragment of latin poetry (from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero) starting with the phrase "Lorem ipsum dolor." Printers and designers have been using that same text since the 1500's when a printer took that fragment of already set type from one project to quickly mocked up text for another project.
The reason for using "greeking" is that the designer usually knows about how much text will eventually go there but doesn't have it yet. You need some sample text to use as a design element. If you use real text that people understand they spend their time reading it rather than critiquing the design itself.
Does this give you any faith in the system? I sure as hell don't want to blame a side as much as I want to say the american voting system just isn't good enough to deal with the fact that our nation is split 50/50.
.001% of a vote that probably had a .2% rate of error and/or fraud. By opening the whole can of worms in the court they cause the very problem they are trying to avoid: a failure of trust in the system and it's results.
Not really. It's not that the system is particularly bad... it's just that even the best of systems will have some small margin of error, and that the margin of victory in this election (and Florida 2000) are within that margin of error. At such a small margin of victory the decision comes down to random chance not "the will of the people."
The best thing to do would be to have iron-clad rules before hand & simply follow them... The problem is that with fierce partisans on either side the rules will be challenged on any and every basis by whichever side loses and our courts are only too willing to step in to split hairs over grand principles of "fairness" applied to
The result is that now people don't trust elections whose outcomes are NOT in serious dispute... where the margin of victory well exceeds any errors or likely fraud. Look at the obsession with Ohio with a close but clear 2.1% margin of victory. I'm sure if the shoe were on the other foot we'd be hearing from Republicans about machine politics in Philadelphia. (PA was decided by 2.3%) or allegations of fraud by Democratic 527's in Wisconsin. (A truly close race decided by 0.4% ).
I have real concerns about the possibility of fraud by both newfangled digital means and old-fashioned ballot box stuffing/dead people voting kind. But margins of victory in the hundreds of thousands are not seriously disputable and it's "win at any cost" lawsuits and the overheated rhetoric of activist lawyers that make them appear so. For all their public protestations of devotion to high principles these lawsuits are doing real persistent damage to the practice of democracy in our country.
I have a BBEdit t-shirt picked up at a mid-90's Macworld that begs to differ.
BBEdit
It doesn't suck®
Of course that is when they were using it as a registered trademark for their corporation... I'm sure it was used among Apple engineers and Mac software developers informally for years prior to it's becoming such a catch phrase that the marketing department picked it up to register it as a trademark.
Because Apple's business model revolves around producing hit products (a lot like Jobs other business). A big part of making a product a "big hit" rather than "just another product" is how it's initial launch is managed. Jobs method is surprise... a big announcement of a major new cool product THAT NO ONE EXPECTED introduced with the understated trademark phrase "Oh, just one more thing..." A leak ruins the surprise (or even turns it into a negative if the real product doesn't live up to the leaked details). It damages the enthusiasm and buzz around a new product that Apple needs to create in order to turn a nice product into "the cool new thing" everybody is talking about and just HAS to have.
Contractors have been sued (in 2002), employees have lost their jobs (a webmaster in 2003), and relationships with major vendors have been seriously damaged (ATI in 2000) on account of leaks.
Sacking a VP would be a big deal but it would be in character. Motorola announcing a Motorola branded phone that can play iTunes songs is not a leak and not about an Apple product. A leak about an Apple branded(!) phone *IS*.
Then again this could be calculated misdirection to protect some other product and heighten the surprise. This is something Apple appears to have done before - prior to the launch of the iPod there were tons of rumors about all sorts of products, none of them MP3 players. I suspect that Jobs, like Churchill, believes the truth is so important it must be protected by a vanguard of lies.
There is an interesting correlation between presidents and their respective turnover rates that should also be taken into account.
Could you explain this statement? The only correlation that I see is that recent Presidents have higher number of resignations than those in the past, but that doesn't seem to be your meaning. This change over time probably reflects a changing political culture with the addition of a few cabinet posts as a contributing factor (Eisenhower had 10 Cabinet Secretaries, GWB has 15 in addition to another 6 "cabinet level" positions).
The Bush administration thus far has been notable in it's very low turnover in the Cabinet. In his first term only 2 cabinet positions changed hands, historically quite low. This is probably due to a desire for continuity and a sense of urgency after 9/11. The result is that some cabinet members that would have resigned earlier are taking the changeover as an opportunity to get out.
Another factor in this spate of changes is that W. is impatient to press his political advantage coming out of the election. Unlike most second term presidents who are content to rest on their laurels Bush actually has a farily aggressive policy agenda for his second term and feels the need to hit the ground running. People like Powell that wanted to hang around for a 6 months or more to tie up loose ends are being pushed to get out to clear the decks for their successors. Bush's perception is that he has two years to accomplish anything. After the 2006 midterm elections he will be a true lame duck with no leverage. He wants the team he will be playing with for those two vital years in place immediately... no hanging around unless you intend to stay on through '06. Resign now and do it quickly so approval of the full slate of nominees can be the incoming congresses first order of business.
YES! Fascism is corporatism.
Did you miss the second half of my post?
Your conflation of labor and fascism is nonsense: the fascist/communist conflicts that almost destroyed the world from 1940s Eurasia has echoed in geopolitics ever since.
Ah.. you did read the second half... but are too confused by the word "corporate" and too simplistic in your conflation of communism with labor and capitalism with fascism to understand it. Yes Fascism was corporatist but "Corporatism" as understood in that era did NOT mean "rule by for-profit business corporations" as it is used now. It was based on Syndicalism (rule by labor unions) which in italy used the Fasces as their symbol since the literal meaning of Fascio is "union". Mussolini joined the local Fascio of the Syndicalist party the Fasci d'azione rivoluzionaria internazionalista in 1914. He formed his own offshoot the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919 which moved to advocating "mixed syndicates" which included not only labor unions but also the employers & management and thus became "corporatist" as the term was understood at the time. Corporatism refers to collaborative government by class cooperation (as opposed to Marxist "class struggle") through "corporations" bodies where corporate decisions were made by both labor and capital corporately. The 22 "corporations" that the Fascists set up to control industrial and economic policy and that were represented in the Fascist Parliament had equal representation by business owners & management on one hand and the labor unions on the other with government bureaucracies actually making the bulk of the decisions. The Fascists did not formally nationalize all industry as socialists would but government exerted total control through comprehensive regulation setting prices, wages, and other terms of employment, production, and distribution. Big businessmen wielded influence (as did their union counterparts as well as government officials most of all) but small businesses, farmers, professionals where de-facto employees of the state.
In American political terms I'll leave it to you to figure out which domestic party most resembles the Fascist conception of governments economic role: comprehensive business regulation, joint trade-union/employer decision making, wage and price controls etc. Hint: Roosevelt EXPLICITLY stated that he drew inspiration from Italy to deal with the crisis of the great depression. FDR modeled many of his policies on Italian examples. For his part Mussolini highly praised the New Deal. History and and the expansionist nationalist component of Fascism made Mussolini and FDR enemies but on economics and domestic policy the two men and their parties saw eye to eye.
Leftists are embarrassed by the common roots they share with Fascism and their common statist assumptions about the role of government. They recast the fascist domestic policy as capitalist and try to conflate it's European authoritarian, collectivist neo-feudalist conservatism with America's liberal, capitalist, individualist conservatism. They point to the violence of the conflict between fascism and socialism to prove their point that the two are opposite poles when in fact fascism is socialism's near relative abutting it on the political spectrum. The mutual violence I think is better explained in the fact that the heretic is always hated and feared far more than the unbeliever. It is their near agreement on so many things that makes their disagreement on a few vital points so violent. It also explains why historically all who deviated slightly from the communist party line were (rightly) condemned as "fascists" - the theoretical differences between the two ideologies are fairly minor, and their practical differences non-existent.