Hey but wait! Today is October 1st that they "discovered" the May 9th reference. That's the day Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia! That PROVES it was an attack against Iran, because Iran is Persia!
October 1 is also the day Germany annexed the Sudetenland... and the day the USS Grouper torpedoed the Lisbon Maru mistakenly... and the day the Israeli Air Force bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis (too bad they didn't get Arafat back then!).
And this is the problem of trying to follow "date code" clues. Assuming you didn't mistake a hexadecimal pointer for a datecode, you still generally have a 1/365 chance (ostensibly 1/366 for leap years, but for some reason February 29th just seems to be a relatively boring day anyways) of hitting some coincidental match anyways.
Dozens of regimes have the motivation, capability and demonstrated willingness to do things like this.
Hell, thousands of hackers across the world have the motivation, capability, and demonstrated willingness to do things like this. And that's not even before we get to the professional virus-writers that are tied in with outfits like yakuza and russian mafia gangs these days operating various blackmail/extortion gambits.
It sounds more like the "idea" is based on someone who has some grudge against Israel and found a convenient outlet for it, just like all the other "waah the jews did it" conspiracy theories that always sprout up - including the dork who posted a "jews also did wtc" in the first post (thankfully probably trollmarked down to -1 by now) to this article.
So the entire idea of the "Israel created this to attack Iran" idea is based on finding the date May 9, 1979 hidden in the code - and that because it's the first day the current theocratic asshats running Iran beheaded the first Jew of their despotic regime? Really?
This is like playing Nostradamus. Pluck something vague, go hunting, and see what you can say later to claim you "predicted it." For instance, in Eastern bloc countries, May 9 1945 is "Victory Day." I'm sure some prominent politician somewhere in there also died on May 9, 1979. A google search for that date came back with 196,000 results just on the precise phrase "May 9, 1979".
The trouble is we now have to have a super majority in the senate to make any progress. That is an unreasonable demand.
Blame the Democrats for that one. They are the ones who created the current Senate rules, which allow for any Senator to place an "anonymous hold" on any bill and allowed for "painless filibustering" in which nobody has to actually stand and talk in order to sustain a filibuster.
When the Republicans were talking about undoing this rule - remember a few years back? - the Democrats screamed holy hell and so the Republicans caved. Which kind of seems to be a theme when the Republicans are in power...
The conservatives are blocking every bill (even tax cuts) in an effort to reinforce their campaign motto that government can't and shouldn't do anything.
The reason is simple: there is no compromise from the Democrats. "Compromise" requires that each side give somewhat to meet somewhere in the middle. Pelosi, controlling the floor of the house, hasn't allowed any contributions from the Republican side whatsoever. For one example, the famous "meeting" when Obama - after bills were already in committee - "met with" Republican leaders to "ask for their ideas" on health care? Not one thing from that meeting was even considered as an amendment to the bill that Pelosi put up for a vote.
You don't hand someone multiple thousands of pages that you wrote without their input, demand that they vote on it without even time to read and examine it, and then claim that they didn't "compromise" with you. It simply doesn't work that way.
The only real opposition is coming from right of center democrats because they're actually willing to eventually vote and can extract demands as a result. When you have no vote to offer then you don't have a bargaining position.
You have it backwards. Pelosi and her cronies are the ones who aren't compromising. Why should the Republicans vote for any bill that has a dozen poison pill attachments to it? Why, for that matter, should someone vote for it when their proffered amendments were either shot down or not even allowed a full floor vote?
Again - compromise has to come from both sides. The current House leadership, especially, doesn't compromise for shit, so it's no wonder that the Republicans are simply saying "why should we bother?"
I'm sorry, what? In what conceivable way are you kept in slavery?
What, precisely, would you call a class of people who are denied a real education, stuffed into ghettos and barrios, and forced into lives full of working dead-end jobs or languishing on public assistance in "exchange" for the guarantee that they will vote for the political party that the slave-masters tell them to vote for?
How have they lied about improving education?
Despite all the money put into education over the years, has even one Democrat program done anything but spend more money with no repeatable results on any appreciable scale? NO. Even the "stellar magnet schools" and "stellar charter schools" work well for about 5 years before sliding back down into the toilet.
So, I'm confused. You think it's ok to have racially based attacks on people? Or maybe its attacks on gay people that you are ok with?
I don't agree that attacks on anyone are a good idea. But neither do I believe that the punishment should be any different whether you attacked someone because of their skin color, or their sexual preference, or the fact that they were your competition in a drug gang, or because they slept with your wife, or because you wanted to steal their car, or any other reason someone would have to do violence to another human being.
It's the ACT that is to be punished, not the thought. When we start regulating thought, we slide into a very, very, very bad place.
Bush and Reagan have been the biggest contributors to the national debt.
Bush and Reagan's major debt contributions come from times when DEMOCRATS HELD THE CONGRESS. Remember, you idiot, it is the CONGRESS that makes the budget and controls the purse strings - all the President gets is an up-or-down, veto/pass vote.
It would be different if we had line-item veto, but it's not. Reagan passed the budgets he passed that came from DEMOCRATS, because the alternative was to shut down the government. Clinton DID shut down the government because he wanted MORE spending. Bush passed the crap that Pelosi and Reid handed him rather than shut down the government.
Pay attention. Not just to who was president, but go year by year. What do we find? The correlation in debt increases is not by who was President, but by WHO CONTROLLED THE CONGRESS. This is not a surprise: Constitutionally, CONGRESS WRITES THE BUDGET.
Under Reagan, through Bush, and - here's the important part - THROUGH THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF CLINTON WHEN THE DEMOCRATS CONTROLLED CONGRESS - the debt went up. Only when the Republicans took control of the purse strings did that trend reverse.
Likewise, where is the large spike in debt during the years of Bush II? That's right - 2006-2008 WHEN THE DEMOCRATS TOOK CONGRESS. And the trend continues through Obama.
If you think you can blame any President for the budget, you're a fool. He's the last line of defense, and a pretty fucking weak one absent a line-item veto. When you want to know who fucked us over and increased the debt, you need to look at the Congressional leadership instead!
Checks and balances are not there to prevent a dominant ideology.
Again, you are a fool. Checks and balances are there to counteract ambition with ambition, counteract greed with greed, counteract power with power. The whole point is to stop things that should not be going on. If your entire government is m
You know, over time I've noticed an inverse relationship between the intelligence of a poster and their partisanship.
I hate them all equally. Why? Because both parties are completely corrupt. The nice thing is, when it works properly, the US governmental system is designed to account for that and counter their corruption by playing them off of each other. The problem we get is when one organized political group manages to co-opt both sides of the counterbalance, at which point they start getting away with doing things that they should never be allowed to do.
There was an idiot in another reply describing this as "gridlock" - but that's the POINT. If one side is stopping the other from doing the wrong things, then the system is working as advertised and all that should get through is the things that are actually of need/benefit for the country. If the opposition stops opposing, or there is no real opposition (like what happens when one party gets hold of both houses of Congress and the Presidency all at the same time), then we have a far worse problem.
Compared to the alternatives, gridlock isn't a bad thing!
What the hell, it's feeding the troll, but I've got a quiet afternoon planned.
What? That's absurd. Who keeps voting against minimum wage laws? Who keeps voting against worker safety laws? Who keeps voting against extended unemployment benefits? How by any stretch of the imagination are Democrats keeping people in "virtual slavery"? If anyone, it's the Republicans keeping workers in virtual slavery.
Wrong. Democrat "safe districts" are almost always full of a group of poor, uneducated "minorities" with higher joblessness rates, higher dropout rates, higher crime rates, higher underage gang membership rates, the works. Democrats don't WANT the people in these districts to get away from the blight, however. If you have ever seen a Dem in these areas campaigning, or watched what they put forth in terms of policies, it is NEVER what actually needs to be done to clear up crime, get rid of the gangs, and clean it up to attract any decent business back to the area.
Want to know how Detroit became the shithole it is? Decades of corruption on the parts of corrupt assholes like Coleman Young, Dennis Archer, and Kwame Kilpatrick who systematically stole whatever tax money they could while telling the captive poor that they'd better not vote Republican because those "evil mean white assholes" wanted to take away their welfare checks and food stamps. Want to know how Los Angeles got to be where it is? How Memphis got to be the murder capital of the US for a couple years? Milwaukee? East St. Louis? How about Washington DC, where the poverty pimps had the machine so rigged that Marion Barry kept getting reelected and reelected even after being a convicted felon, in and out of jail, and is back on the city council as a poverty pimp even today.
Democrats don't want to improve the lot of blacks or hispanics. They want to keep them locked up in dead-end ghettos and barrios, reliably cut off from society and happily voting Democrat like cattle lest those "evil mean white devils" somehow make things worse for them.
The clusterfuck "No Child Left Behind" was a Bush initiative. Are you from Bizarro World?
Local school boards in my area are invariably Democrat. Teacher's Unions, which seem to exist largely to ensure that the crappiest teachers stick around forever, are invariably and reliably Democrat. Ted Kennedy, a Democrat, was the NCLB's primary co-author and its primary sponsor through the legislative process. The NCLB passed the House by a 384-45 vote and Senate by 91-8; Nays were 5 Republican 3 Democrat in the Senate and 34 Republican, 10 Democrat in the House.
I think you're the one from Bizarro World; I already pointed out how much of a stupid, retarded RINO Bush was.
I don't live in Louisiana, and neither do most Americans. Just because the idiot on your city council are Democrats doesn't mean all Democrats are idiots... News flash: Again, PWARA. Look it instead of listening to Limbaugh and cure your ignorance if you dare.
I don't listen to Limbaugh because he's a partisan hack. I have better things to do with my time. Of course, I don't live in Louisiana either. More states than just Louisiana got fucked over by the Katrina Debris.
Also, what the fuck do you mean by PWARA? Or did you mean PRWORA? As in this shitty piece of garbage legislation that is basically a meaningless, in-name-only change since it has holes in it to drive an entire truckload full of generational fraudsters through?
Any poor person, white or black, who votes Republican is even more stupid than a rich man voting Democrat.
Any poor person, white or black, who votes reliably one way or the other - instead of understanding the meaning of checks and balances and working to ensure that neither of these asshole parties completely controls the governmen
You got that one wrong, you meant to write Republicans (homophobic, racist, anti-middle class...).
As opposed to Democrats, who keep people in what is basically slavery, lie about trying to "improve education" while doing their best to make sure it is never improved for their voting base, tax the fuck out of people to pay for deadbeats (my city is now 13bn in the hole thanks to demofucks on the city council and the mayor's office not doing shit to get the Katrina Debris out: those lazy assholes are STILL demanding government payouts and housing/welfare checks with no plan to ever go home) and endorse the evisceration of the First Amendment, Second Amendment, and anything else in that pesky "Constitution" thingy that gets in their way?
Who voted against the repeal of DADT? Republicans
Also most of the joint chiefs of staff... who are not republicans.
Who voted against a more comprehensive anti hate crime law?
I believe the word you really mean is "thoughtcrime law", which many of us of a libertarian bent view as a Bad Thing.
Who sleeps with the religious right bowing to its will? Republicans.
Funny. Ever seen black preachers in action, poverty-pimping the slaves back to the Democrat for another round of uninformed, uneducated, "voting"?
Who voted against tax breaks for small businesses 2 weeks ago? Republicans.
What else was in the bill? Oh yeah, another round of TARP-crap that would have been WORTHLESS to small businesses. But you're too busy being a partisan fucktard to notice.
Who voted against tax breaks for corporations who keep jobs in the U.S. less than a week ago? Republicans.
See above...
Who created a $13 TRILLION hole in the government finances? BUSH thank you very much, he's a republicans.
Who voted for every bit of that spending legislation? Oh yeah, the DEMOCRATS... including Obama, every time since 2004...
As for the last 30 years, actually I beat you, let's do 60 years, under Democrats the income of the middle class has steadily increased by 3%/year and that of the upper class by 2%/year, under Republicans the increase has been around 1% for both.
Do you mean under a Democrat president or Democrat congress? Because the two are fundamentally different due to the lack of a line-item veto. The strongest growth was actually 1994-2000, when it was Clinton in the President's chair (holding the Republicans in check when he wasn't too busy getting blowjobs from interns) but the Republicans at least being sort-of fiscally responsible in the spending bills which Clinton only got a veto/pass vote on.
If we had a line item veto, I'd say fuck it, just make sure that no party gets hold of House, Senate, and Presidency all at once. As it stands, I'm more comfortable with a Republican congress and a Democrat president to hold them in check, thanks.
The problem is NOT one side or the other. The problem is Americans are too fucking stupid and uneducated these days to recognize that in order for our system to work, we have to have some goddamn checks and balances. The system, as stated, is not to rely on the goodness of men, but rather, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
If there's a Democrat in the oval office, I vote Republican for congress. If there's a Republican in the oval office, I vote Democrat for office. Every time we've had one party controlling it all - Carter, Clinton's first two years, Bush's first six (and fuck it, his last two as well, since he was a wimpy-ass lame-duck RINO retard who didn't veto even ONE THING that Pelosi and Reid sent his way in 2006-2008), America suffered for it.
That's the reality. Now grow up and get your partisan head out of your partisan ass.
Yes, but if you tie the commercial loudness to the loudness of Monday Night Football, then by its very nature if you turn down the volume knob during MNF, you won't have to worry about the commercials still blasting the shit out of your eardrums, and if you turned the volume up a little during the much-quieter CSI, you won't have to worry about the commercials knocking you over in your chair or scaring the cat into climbing up the walls.
Unlike some legislation, this seems to be rather sensible.
Combine this with the COICA act the Demofucks are pushing on "fast track" through the Senate right now, though, and you maybe see why the Rethuglicans (and anyone without major brain damage or MafiAA membership) are afraid?
THAT bill, which is coming up for a wee-hours vote while everyone is being distracted by other issues (thanks for "fast-tracking", Corrupt Shitwad Leahy!), is nothing but a censorship package, complete with the ability to shut down websites without actual findings of fact or evidence of a crime and the ability to order US ISP's to "black out" websites overseas that whoever's in charge from the government finds "objectionable."
Great Firewall of America, here we come... bought and paid for by the Chinese money laundered to the Democrats in the past couple decades, and ready soon to "black out" the same sites the Chinese already black out.
Because as of right now it's only in testing... so if you're experiencing this right now while "sititng" in your living room, I would like to know how this is possible.
Watch it when you mention "backroom deals." Those things are what got us the 1976 copyright extension act, 1998 Mickey Mouse/Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, DMCA, DMCA2, ACTA (thankfully not ratified yet but just watch them slip it through in the dead of night).
We can just bet that the real reason this is being "delayed" is that the Senate right now is busy passing the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (aka the "Fuck Consumers In The Ass Act") under a "fast-track" by the corrupt party in power (as opposed to the corrupt party OUT of power).
They want to have the authority to shut down any website they see fit by accusing it of "piracy." Not only that, they want the ability to order US ISP's to "black out" access to overseas websites they accuse of "piracy."
How long till this starts to be a tool for political repression? Seems the Democrats have taken a page from their funding backers over in China. Maybe in a few years rather than needing Tor to get news out to people inside China, we'll be needing it just to survive the Great Firewall of America...
When Real ID was announced, my response (having previously been stalked and cyberstalked by a psychotic ex) was to write a nice letter to Blizzard telling them precisely where they could shove "Real ID."
When I have a kid, I'm going to look up the set list from a 1960's chemistry kit (I still have the manual), buy the equipment, and lay my hands on as many of the chemicals as I can.
Part of the stupidity is, of course, the ridiculous prohibitions on "shipping chemicals" these days. It's easier to go out and get several points of rather impure potassium nitrate (fertilizer) from a feed store than it is to get a very small amount of pure stuff from a chemical supply company, packaged and labeled.
Of course, you could also teach your kid methods for purifying chemicals... but they you're a mean, evil nasty terrarist rawr.
FFS, they can't describe any number of chemicals that "asplode" on television these days. Thermite is a binary compound and they had to "hide" what one of the components is, I mean come on, how stupid is that? Mr. Wizard, back in the day, used to tell you every bit of what was used - to recreate some of the experiments, they specifically said to have your parents go out and buy certain things (dry cleaning bag + alcohol burner = hot air balloon?) and do it safely WITH them; these days, even for easily safely try-able stuff, Mythbusters has to stick a big "don't try this at home EVAR" warning on the front of every show lest some little moron injure himself. And their dedicated "DO try this at home" book has been languishing at the publishers for over two years now from what I hear.
Hollyweird REALLY owns the Democrats. So it's not surprising that when crap like this passes, Hollyweird and the MafiAA's hands are all over it, and invariably the sponsor is a Dem. 1976 Copyright Extension, Sonny Bono (may Mary Bono and Jack Valenti fucking rot in hell for that) Copyright Extension Act, DMCA, DMCA2, ACTA, you name it.
On the flipside, the DMCA passed the House by "voice vote" and the Senate by "unanimous consent" before Clinton signed it into law. So it's readily apparent we can't count on the Republicans for crap to protect citizens' rights either.
Republicrats. Demicans. Who can tell the fucking difference any more? One wants to screw you up the ass and tell you they're protecting you by doing so, the other wants to screw you up the ass and tell you it's good for you and you'll like it if you just give it a chance.
Or in the words of HL Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
The CPSC are a bunch of idiots. And you are right with them, that's for sure.
It used to be that our kids could get actually USEFUL science kits. Ones that would let them build things, try out different experiments, and yes, occasionally make something that smelled bad, or smoked, made a small bang. And we used to say one simple thing about them: parents, don't let your kid play with the kit unsupervised.
Now, of course, thanks to a generation of deadbeat fucking morons who think that kids raise themselves, we are instead stuck in a world where anything that could possibly be dangerous for kids is off-limits. Small wonder most American kids grow up today with their faces in front of the TV, either watching brain-rotting crap or playing repetitive, non-inspiring video games that should come with a warning "imagination not required" on the side, and getting fatter every day from it.
Instead of having the kids run around the world, try things, learn, and get the occasional scraped knee or other injury, now it's nothing but "OMG don't let the kids outside it might be DANGEROUS out there!"
While we're busy "thinking of the children", their brains are rotting away. Way to go, parents.
However, sometimes they make mistakes in the bills and particularly resourceful people actually manage to get things done in spite of the best efforts of Congress.
Not this time. The bill as written is basically a "fuck JSC, move everything to Florida" bill. It was written this way because JSC's in Clear Lake, TX, which is a solidly conservative district (thanks to the same Democrat gerrymandering that keeps Gene Green and Sheila Jackson Lee in "safe districts"), while KSC out in Florida is located in a district that's actually in-play, needs more jobs, and Obama wants to help Suzanne Kosmas (democrat, Florida 24th) get reelected.
Plain old political pandering, nothing more. I once bought into the "democrats are the party of science" lies, never will bother with that particular lie again.
They have a 4-year-old kid and a dog, which is reason enough to have the hard drive route and keep the original discs locked safely in a closet where small larval-human hands or puppy teeth can't chew them to bits. The hard drive is easier to replace and a lot harder to damage in the first place.
Of course Sky is upset because the blackmail got out - they were KNOWINGLY WORKING WITH THE BLACKMAILERS.
Whoever greenlit "working with" ACS:Law or anyone else of the sort at Sky ought to immediately be canned, stripped to their underwear, and unceremoniously thrown into the street never to find a job working at any telecommunications or technology firm again. And the people who hired those idiots should get the same treatment.
Now that you've finished raving like an idiot, let the grownups tell you how the world REALLY works.
In the REAL world, cities pull funding from traffic ticket money. This has come to the point where even giant metroplexes rely on month-to-month ticket and fine monies for their operating budget - for a stellar example, look at the news from a couple years go from the city of Houston (3rd largest metroplex in the US) when then-mayor, now governor-candidate Bill White stood up in a city council meeting and tried to blame the city's entire budget shortfall on "the police not writing enough tickets."
Since they require this revenue, the pigs are given ticket quotas for each month. By hook or by crook they are ordered to meet these minimums. If they don't, they get written up. If they get written up enough, they theoretically get either fired, or denied promotion. So the pigs have every fucking incentive to be as corrupt as they need to be to write the tickets up. And by the time they graduate out of traffic detail (the lowest rung on the ladder), any semblance of honor or honesty they may once have had is long fucking gone.
All this tells the cops is that next time, they need to beat the guy up and break his camera/phone bad enough that the video can't be recovered. That way, they can lie and say whatever they want about what happened, and the video can't contradict him.
We have an asshole cop who has learned a neat "trick" near my house; he parks at a 45-degree angle, the wrong way down the wrong side of a cul-de-sac, and watches for people to go past the stop sign, making sure his dashcam can't see the sign or cars. Then, soon as anyone pulls out, he just pulls forward, cites for a fraudulent "failure to fully stop", and fills his ticket quota for the month.
Until it's a requirement that all police interactions must be videotaped, the fucking pigs will find any way they can to avoid it. They're all corrupt - if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many traffic cops you think are legit, and then realize they ALL start out on a traffic beat learning from the other cops how to get away with fraudulently filling their quota and acting outside the system.
The major problem now is that 99% of all good edits submitted to wikipedia are reverted anyways as false positives.
The reason for this is that corrupt administrators do nothing to stop it, and corrupt idiots wanting to become admins just sit all day on the semi-automated tools like "Twinkle" or "Huggle" reverting anything in sight to get their edit counts up.
The real issue is disinformation, which is vastly more subtle. The only defense is fact-checking or seeking out references.
While true, the larger problem with wikipedia is, and has always been, cadres of editors who carry around administrator support to ban any opposing viewpoint, picking off anyone who comes to their "owned" articles one at a time so as to prevent a consensus change. I spent a good amount of time analyzing the writings of a former wikipedia administrator who gave up on the whole thing, as well as the old writings of another one who, after being part of the corrupt system a long while, somehow stepped on the wrong toes and got finally tossed out. Comparing them to wikipedia behavior today, it's apparent that nothing has changed and the whole system, especially the "administrators", "bureaucrats", and "arbitration committee", are completely corrupt.
You can dig up all the sources you want; all they have to do is scream how it's not a "real" source, or simply revert-war you as a group and then accuse you of "breaking 3RR", and you're toast. Have the temerity to reveal an organized campaign by these groups in an unblock request, and they'll send along one of the Wiki-Assassins like Sandstein, FisherQueen, Barek, or the various other "unblock patrollers" to abuse you, harass you, and finally just hound you into something they can use to push for an indefinite ban. Often, they'll just out-and-out lie, claiming someone ran "checkuser" (a tool that NEVER comes up with a response other than guilty) and that you are a "sockpuppet" of someone else.
The people who hacked hypervisor didn't give two shits about "getting games for free." It was about getting linux running with full hardware access.
The people who hacked the PSP didn't give a shit about "getting games for free" either. They did it because they wanted to get their programs and code to run freely - things like a proper browser that didn't suck ass (come on Sony, would it have KILLED you to allow space for a swap file from the memory stick?).
GBA and DS - I could believe you, or I could look at the library of fully freely available homebrew games only loadable via flash cart.
Now, do these eventually get co-opted by those who want to "get games for free"? Probably so. All systems get hacked over time, it's in the nature of systems. Depending on how prevalent the system, and whether there are options otherwise, it can take a short or long time. Sony knew, when they killed OtherOS, that they were immensely speeding up the process, and anything else they do from this point is just the result of their being too paranoid, senile, or incompetent to know better.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey but wait! Today is October 1st that they "discovered" the May 9th reference. That's the day Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia! That PROVES it was an attack against Iran, because Iran is Persia!
October 1 is also the day Germany annexed the Sudetenland... and the day the USS Grouper torpedoed the Lisbon Maru mistakenly... and the day the Israeli Air Force bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis (too bad they didn't get Arafat back then!).
And this is the problem of trying to follow "date code" clues. Assuming you didn't mistake a hexadecimal pointer for a datecode, you still generally have a 1/365 chance (ostensibly 1/366 for leap years, but for some reason February 29th just seems to be a relatively boring day anyways) of hitting some coincidental match anyways.
Presuming the author was born in 1979 you have a 1 in 365 chance... I like those odds!
Dozens of regimes have the motivation, capability and demonstrated willingness to do things like this.
Hell, thousands of hackers across the world have the motivation, capability, and demonstrated willingness to do things like this. And that's not even before we get to the professional virus-writers that are tied in with outfits like yakuza and russian mafia gangs these days operating various blackmail/extortion gambits.
It sounds more like the "idea" is based on someone who has some grudge against Israel and found a convenient outlet for it, just like all the other "waah the jews did it" conspiracy theories that always sprout up - including the dork who posted a "jews also did wtc" in the first post (thankfully probably trollmarked down to -1 by now) to this article.
So the entire idea of the "Israel created this to attack Iran" idea is based on finding the date May 9, 1979 hidden in the code - and that because it's the first day the current theocratic asshats running Iran beheaded the first Jew of their despotic regime? Really?
This is like playing Nostradamus. Pluck something vague, go hunting, and see what you can say later to claim you "predicted it." For instance, in Eastern bloc countries, May 9 1945 is "Victory Day." I'm sure some prominent politician somewhere in there also died on May 9, 1979. A google search for that date came back with 196,000 results just on the precise phrase "May 9, 1979".
Ridiculous.
The trouble is we now have to have a super majority in the senate to make any progress. That is an unreasonable demand.
Blame the Democrats for that one. They are the ones who created the current Senate rules, which allow for any Senator to place an "anonymous hold" on any bill and allowed for "painless filibustering" in which nobody has to actually stand and talk in order to sustain a filibuster.
When the Republicans were talking about undoing this rule - remember a few years back? - the Democrats screamed holy hell and so the Republicans caved. Which kind of seems to be a theme when the Republicans are in power...
The conservatives are blocking every bill (even tax cuts) in an effort to reinforce their campaign motto that government can't and shouldn't do anything.
The reason is simple: there is no compromise from the Democrats. "Compromise" requires that each side give somewhat to meet somewhere in the middle. Pelosi, controlling the floor of the house, hasn't allowed any contributions from the Republican side whatsoever. For one example, the famous "meeting" when Obama - after bills were already in committee - "met with" Republican leaders to "ask for their ideas" on health care? Not one thing from that meeting was even considered as an amendment to the bill that Pelosi put up for a vote.
You don't hand someone multiple thousands of pages that you wrote without their input, demand that they vote on it without even time to read and examine it, and then claim that they didn't "compromise" with you. It simply doesn't work that way.
The only real opposition is coming from right of center democrats because they're actually willing to eventually vote and can extract demands as a result. When you have no vote to offer then you don't have a bargaining position.
You have it backwards. Pelosi and her cronies are the ones who aren't compromising. Why should the Republicans vote for any bill that has a dozen poison pill attachments to it? Why, for that matter, should someone vote for it when their proffered amendments were either shot down or not even allowed a full floor vote?
Again - compromise has to come from both sides. The current House leadership, especially, doesn't compromise for shit, so it's no wonder that the Republicans are simply saying "why should we bother?"
I'm sorry, what? In what conceivable way are you kept in slavery?
What, precisely, would you call a class of people who are denied a real education, stuffed into ghettos and barrios, and forced into lives full of working dead-end jobs or languishing on public assistance in "exchange" for the guarantee that they will vote for the political party that the slave-masters tell them to vote for?
How have they lied about improving education?
Despite all the money put into education over the years, has even one Democrat program done anything but spend more money with no repeatable results on any appreciable scale? NO. Even the "stellar magnet schools" and "stellar charter schools" work well for about 5 years before sliding back down into the toilet.
So, I'm confused. You think it's ok to have racially based attacks on people? Or maybe its attacks on gay people that you are ok with?
I don't agree that attacks on anyone are a good idea. But neither do I believe that the punishment should be any different whether you attacked someone because of their skin color, or their sexual preference, or the fact that they were your competition in a drug gang, or because they slept with your wife, or because you wanted to steal their car, or any other reason someone would have to do violence to another human being.
It's the ACT that is to be punished, not the thought. When we start regulating thought, we slide into a very, very, very bad place.
Bush and Reagan have been the biggest contributors to the national debt.
Bush and Reagan's major debt contributions come from times when DEMOCRATS HELD THE CONGRESS. Remember, you idiot, it is the CONGRESS that makes the budget and controls the purse strings - all the President gets is an up-or-down, veto/pass vote.
It would be different if we had line-item veto, but it's not. Reagan passed the budgets he passed that came from DEMOCRATS, because the alternative was to shut down the government. Clinton DID shut down the government because he wanted MORE spending. Bush passed the crap that Pelosi and Reid handed him rather than shut down the government.
Look closely at this graph I am about to link:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1900_2010&view=1&expand=&units=p&fy=fy11&chart=G0-fed&bar=0&stack=1&size=l&title=US%20Federal%20Deficit%20As%20Percent%20Of%20GDP&state=US&color=c&local=s
Pay attention. Not just to who was president, but go year by year. What do we find? The correlation in debt increases is not by who was President, but by WHO CONTROLLED THE CONGRESS. This is not a surprise: Constitutionally, CONGRESS WRITES THE BUDGET.
Under Reagan, through Bush, and - here's the important part - THROUGH THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF CLINTON WHEN THE DEMOCRATS CONTROLLED CONGRESS - the debt went up. Only when the Republicans took control of the purse strings did that trend reverse.
Likewise, where is the large spike in debt during the years of Bush II? That's right - 2006-2008 WHEN THE DEMOCRATS TOOK CONGRESS. And the trend continues through Obama.
If you think you can blame any President for the budget, you're a fool. He's the last line of defense, and a pretty fucking weak one absent a line-item veto. When you want to know who fucked us over and increased the debt, you need to look at the Congressional leadership instead!
Checks and balances are not there to prevent a dominant ideology.
Again, you are a fool. Checks and balances are there to counteract ambition with ambition, counteract greed with greed, counteract power with power. The whole point is to stop things that should not be going on. If your entire government is m
You know, over time I've noticed an inverse relationship between the intelligence of a poster and their partisanship.
I hate them all equally. Why? Because both parties are completely corrupt. The nice thing is, when it works properly, the US governmental system is designed to account for that and counter their corruption by playing them off of each other. The problem we get is when one organized political group manages to co-opt both sides of the counterbalance, at which point they start getting away with doing things that they should never be allowed to do.
There was an idiot in another reply describing this as "gridlock" - but that's the POINT. If one side is stopping the other from doing the wrong things, then the system is working as advertised and all that should get through is the things that are actually of need/benefit for the country. If the opposition stops opposing, or there is no real opposition (like what happens when one party gets hold of both houses of Congress and the Presidency all at the same time), then we have a far worse problem.
Compared to the alternatives, gridlock isn't a bad thing!
What the hell, it's feeding the troll, but I've got a quiet afternoon planned.
What? That's absurd. Who keeps voting against minimum wage laws? Who keeps voting against worker safety laws? Who keeps voting against extended unemployment benefits? How by any stretch of the imagination are Democrats keeping people in "virtual slavery"? If anyone, it's the Republicans keeping workers in virtual slavery.
Wrong. Democrat "safe districts" are almost always full of a group of poor, uneducated "minorities" with higher joblessness rates, higher dropout rates, higher crime rates, higher underage gang membership rates, the works. Democrats don't WANT the people in these districts to get away from the blight, however. If you have ever seen a Dem in these areas campaigning, or watched what they put forth in terms of policies, it is NEVER what actually needs to be done to clear up crime, get rid of the gangs, and clean it up to attract any decent business back to the area.
Want to know how Detroit became the shithole it is? Decades of corruption on the parts of corrupt assholes like Coleman Young, Dennis Archer, and Kwame Kilpatrick who systematically stole whatever tax money they could while telling the captive poor that they'd better not vote Republican because those "evil mean white assholes" wanted to take away their welfare checks and food stamps. Want to know how Los Angeles got to be where it is? How Memphis got to be the murder capital of the US for a couple years? Milwaukee? East St. Louis? How about Washington DC, where the poverty pimps had the machine so rigged that Marion Barry kept getting reelected and reelected even after being a convicted felon, in and out of jail, and is back on the city council as a poverty pimp even today.
Democrats don't want to improve the lot of blacks or hispanics. They want to keep them locked up in dead-end ghettos and barrios, reliably cut off from society and happily voting Democrat like cattle lest those "evil mean white devils" somehow make things worse for them.
The clusterfuck "No Child Left Behind" was a Bush initiative. Are you from Bizarro World?
Local school boards in my area are invariably Democrat.
Teacher's Unions, which seem to exist largely to ensure that the crappiest teachers stick around forever, are invariably and reliably Democrat.
Ted Kennedy, a Democrat, was the NCLB's primary co-author and its primary sponsor through the legislative process.
The NCLB passed the House by a 384-45 vote and Senate by 91-8; Nays were 5 Republican 3 Democrat in the Senate and 34 Republican, 10 Democrat in the House.
I think you're the one from Bizarro World; I already pointed out how much of a stupid, retarded RINO Bush was.
I don't live in Louisiana, and neither do most Americans. Just because the idiot on your city council are Democrats doesn't mean all Democrats are idiots... News flash: Again, PWARA. Look it instead of listening to Limbaugh and cure your ignorance if you dare.
I don't listen to Limbaugh because he's a partisan hack. I have better things to do with my time.
Of course, I don't live in Louisiana either. More states than just Louisiana got fucked over by the Katrina Debris.
Also, what the fuck do you mean by PWARA? Or did you mean PRWORA? As in this shitty piece of garbage legislation that is basically a meaningless, in-name-only change since it has holes in it to drive an entire truckload full of generational fraudsters through?
Any poor person, white or black, who votes Republican is even more stupid than a rich man voting Democrat.
Any poor person, white or black, who votes reliably one way or the other - instead of understanding the meaning of checks and balances and working to ensure that neither of these asshole parties completely controls the governmen
You got that one wrong, you meant to write Republicans (homophobic, racist, anti-middle class...).
As opposed to Democrats, who keep people in what is basically slavery, lie about trying to "improve education" while doing their best to make sure it is never improved for their voting base, tax the fuck out of people to pay for deadbeats (my city is now 13bn in the hole thanks to demofucks on the city council and the mayor's office not doing shit to get the Katrina Debris out: those lazy assholes are STILL demanding government payouts and housing/welfare checks with no plan to ever go home) and endorse the evisceration of the First Amendment, Second Amendment, and anything else in that pesky "Constitution" thingy that gets in their way?
Who voted against the repeal of DADT? Republicans
Also most of the joint chiefs of staff... who are not republicans.
Who voted against a more comprehensive anti hate crime law?
I believe the word you really mean is "thoughtcrime law", which many of us of a libertarian bent view as a Bad Thing.
Who sleeps with the religious right bowing to its will? Republicans.
Funny. Ever seen black preachers in action, poverty-pimping the slaves back to the Democrat for another round of uninformed, uneducated, "voting"?
Who voted against tax breaks for small businesses 2 weeks ago? Republicans.
What else was in the bill? Oh yeah, another round of TARP-crap that would have been WORTHLESS to small businesses. But you're too busy being a partisan fucktard to notice.
Who voted against tax breaks for corporations who keep jobs in the U.S. less than a week ago? Republicans.
See above...
Who created a $13 TRILLION hole in the government finances? BUSH thank you very much, he's a republicans.
Who voted for every bit of that spending legislation? Oh yeah, the DEMOCRATS... including Obama, every time since 2004...
As for the last 30 years, actually I beat you, let's do 60 years, under Democrats the income of the middle class has steadily increased by 3%/year and that of the upper class by 2%/year, under Republicans the increase has been around 1% for both.
Do you mean under a Democrat president or Democrat congress? Because the two are fundamentally different due to the lack of a line-item veto. The strongest growth was actually 1994-2000, when it was Clinton in the President's chair (holding the Republicans in check when he wasn't too busy getting blowjobs from interns) but the Republicans at least being sort-of fiscally responsible in the spending bills which Clinton only got a veto/pass vote on.
If we had a line item veto, I'd say fuck it, just make sure that no party gets hold of House, Senate, and Presidency all at once. As it stands, I'm more comfortable with a Republican congress and a Democrat president to hold them in check, thanks.
The problem is NOT one side or the other. The problem is Americans are too fucking stupid and uneducated these days to recognize that in order for our system to work, we have to have some goddamn checks and balances. The system, as stated, is not to rely on the goodness of men, but rather, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
If there's a Democrat in the oval office, I vote Republican for congress. If there's a Republican in the oval office, I vote Democrat for office. Every time we've had one party controlling it all - Carter, Clinton's first two years, Bush's first six (and fuck it, his last two as well, since he was a wimpy-ass lame-duck RINO retard who didn't veto even ONE THING that Pelosi and Reid sent his way in 2006-2008), America suffered for it.
That's the reality. Now grow up and get your partisan head out of your partisan ass.
Yes, but if you tie the commercial loudness to the loudness of Monday Night Football, then by its very nature if you turn down the volume knob during MNF, you won't have to worry about the commercials still blasting the shit out of your eardrums, and if you turned the volume up a little during the much-quieter CSI, you won't have to worry about the commercials knocking you over in your chair or scaring the cat into climbing up the walls.
Unlike some legislation, this seems to be rather sensible.
Combine this with the COICA act the Demofucks are pushing on "fast track" through the Senate right now, though, and you maybe see why the Rethuglicans (and anyone without major brain damage or MafiAA membership) are afraid?
THAT bill, which is coming up for a wee-hours vote while everyone is being distracted by other issues (thanks for "fast-tracking", Corrupt Shitwad Leahy!), is nothing but a censorship package, complete with the ability to shut down websites without actual findings of fact or evidence of a crime and the ability to order US ISP's to "black out" websites overseas that whoever's in charge from the government finds "objectionable."
Great Firewall of America, here we come... bought and paid for by the Chinese money laundered to the Democrats in the past couple decades, and ready soon to "black out" the same sites the Chinese already black out.
Because as of right now it's only in testing ... so if you're experiencing this right now while "sititng" in your living room, I would like to know how this is possible.
Because MS is already sending invitations to selected people to beta-test the new Xbox Live and Kinect setups?
Watch it when you mention "backroom deals." Those things are what got us the 1976 copyright extension act, 1998 Mickey Mouse/Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, DMCA, DMCA2, ACTA (thankfully not ratified yet but just watch them slip it through in the dead of night).
We can just bet that the real reason this is being "delayed" is that the Senate right now is busy passing the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (aka the "Fuck Consumers In The Ass Act") under a "fast-track" by the corrupt party in power (as opposed to the corrupt party OUT of power).
They want to have the authority to shut down any website they see fit by accusing it of "piracy." Not only that, they want the ability to order US ISP's to "black out" access to overseas websites they accuse of "piracy."
How long till this starts to be a tool for political repression? Seems the Democrats have taken a page from their funding backers over in China. Maybe in a few years rather than needing Tor to get news out to people inside China, we'll be needing it just to survive the Great Firewall of America...
No, let's clarify this.
When Real ID was announced, my response (having previously been stalked and cyberstalked by a psychotic ex) was to write a nice letter to Blizzard telling them precisely where they could shove "Real ID."
The default should be opt-out, no question!
When I have a kid, I'm going to look up the set list from a 1960's chemistry kit (I still have the manual), buy the equipment, and lay my hands on as many of the chemicals as I can.
Part of the stupidity is, of course, the ridiculous prohibitions on "shipping chemicals" these days. It's easier to go out and get several points of rather impure potassium nitrate (fertilizer) from a feed store than it is to get a very small amount of pure stuff from a chemical supply company, packaged and labeled.
Of course, you could also teach your kid methods for purifying chemicals... but they you're a mean, evil nasty terrarist rawr.
FFS, they can't describe any number of chemicals that "asplode" on television these days. Thermite is a binary compound and they had to "hide" what one of the components is, I mean come on, how stupid is that? Mr. Wizard, back in the day, used to tell you every bit of what was used - to recreate some of the experiments, they specifically said to have your parents go out and buy certain things (dry cleaning bag + alcohol burner = hot air balloon?) and do it safely WITH them; these days, even for easily safely try-able stuff, Mythbusters has to stick a big "don't try this at home EVAR" warning on the front of every show lest some little moron injure himself. And their dedicated "DO try this at home" book has been languishing at the publishers for over two years now from what I hear.
Hollyweird REALLY owns the Democrats. So it's not surprising that when crap like this passes, Hollyweird and the MafiAA's hands are all over it, and invariably the sponsor is a Dem. 1976 Copyright Extension, Sonny Bono (may Mary Bono and Jack Valenti fucking rot in hell for that) Copyright Extension Act, DMCA, DMCA2, ACTA, you name it.
On the flipside, the DMCA passed the House by "voice vote" and the Senate by "unanimous consent" before Clinton signed it into law. So it's readily apparent we can't count on the Republicans for crap to protect citizens' rights either.
Republicrats. Demicans. Who can tell the fucking difference any more? One wants to screw you up the ass and tell you they're protecting you by doing so, the other wants to screw you up the ass and tell you it's good for you and you'll like it if you just give it a chance.
Or in the words of HL Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
Oh good fucking grief.
The CPSC are a bunch of idiots. And you are right with them, that's for sure.
It used to be that our kids could get actually USEFUL science kits. Ones that would let them build things, try out different experiments, and yes, occasionally make something that smelled bad, or smoked, made a small bang. And we used to say one simple thing about them: parents, don't let your kid play with the kit unsupervised.
Now, of course, thanks to a generation of deadbeat fucking morons who think that kids raise themselves, we are instead stuck in a world where anything that could possibly be dangerous for kids is off-limits. Small wonder most American kids grow up today with their faces in front of the TV, either watching brain-rotting crap or playing repetitive, non-inspiring video games that should come with a warning "imagination not required" on the side, and getting fatter every day from it.
Instead of having the kids run around the world, try things, learn, and get the occasional scraped knee or other injury, now it's nothing but "OMG don't let the kids outside it might be DANGEROUS out there!"
While we're busy "thinking of the children", their brains are rotting away. Way to go, parents.
However, sometimes they make mistakes in the bills and particularly resourceful people actually manage to get things done in spite of the best efforts of Congress.
Not this time. The bill as written is basically a "fuck JSC, move everything to Florida" bill. It was written this way because JSC's in Clear Lake, TX, which is a solidly conservative district (thanks to the same Democrat gerrymandering that keeps Gene Green and Sheila Jackson Lee in "safe districts"), while KSC out in Florida is located in a district that's actually in-play, needs more jobs, and Obama wants to help Suzanne Kosmas (democrat, Florida 24th) get reelected.
Plain old political pandering, nothing more. I once bought into the "democrats are the party of science" lies, never will bother with that particular lie again.
I suggested doing this same thing for friends.
They have a 4-year-old kid and a dog, which is reason enough to have the hard drive route and keep the original discs locked safely in a closet where small larval-human hands or puppy teeth can't chew them to bits. The hard drive is easier to replace and a lot harder to damage in the first place.
Of course Sky is upset because the blackmail got out - they were KNOWINGLY WORKING WITH THE BLACKMAILERS.
Whoever greenlit "working with" ACS:Law or anyone else of the sort at Sky ought to immediately be canned, stripped to their underwear, and unceremoniously thrown into the street never to find a job working at any telecommunications or technology firm again. And the people who hired those idiots should get the same treatment.
Now that you've finished raving like an idiot, let the grownups tell you how the world REALLY works.
In the REAL world, cities pull funding from traffic ticket money. This has come to the point where even giant metroplexes rely on month-to-month ticket and fine monies for their operating budget - for a stellar example, look at the news from a couple years go from the city of Houston (3rd largest metroplex in the US) when then-mayor, now governor-candidate Bill White stood up in a city council meeting and tried to blame the city's entire budget shortfall on "the police not writing enough tickets."
Since they require this revenue, the pigs are given ticket quotas for each month. By hook or by crook they are ordered to meet these minimums. If they don't, they get written up. If they get written up enough, they theoretically get either fired, or denied promotion. So the pigs have every fucking incentive to be as corrupt as they need to be to write the tickets up. And by the time they graduate out of traffic detail (the lowest rung on the ladder), any semblance of honor or honesty they may once have had is long fucking gone.
THAT is the reality.
Get it through your head.
There is no such thing as a "good cop" any more. They're either corrupt and lying, or they are corrupt and protecting the lying ones.
It's worse than that.
All this tells the cops is that next time, they need to beat the guy up and break his camera/phone bad enough that the video can't be recovered. That way, they can lie and say whatever they want about what happened, and the video can't contradict him.
We have an asshole cop who has learned a neat "trick" near my house; he parks at a 45-degree angle, the wrong way down the wrong side of a cul-de-sac, and watches for people to go past the stop sign, making sure his dashcam can't see the sign or cars. Then, soon as anyone pulls out, he just pulls forward, cites for a fraudulent "failure to fully stop", and fills his ticket quota for the month.
Until it's a requirement that all police interactions must be videotaped, the fucking pigs will find any way they can to avoid it. They're all corrupt - if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many traffic cops you think are legit, and then realize they ALL start out on a traffic beat learning from the other cops how to get away with fraudulently filling their quota and acting outside the system.
The major problem now is that 99% of all good edits submitted to wikipedia are reverted anyways as false positives.
The reason for this is that corrupt administrators do nothing to stop it, and corrupt idiots wanting to become admins just sit all day on the semi-automated tools like "Twinkle" or "Huggle" reverting anything in sight to get their edit counts up.
The real issue is disinformation, which is vastly more subtle. The only defense is fact-checking or seeking out references.
While true, the larger problem with wikipedia is, and has always been, cadres of editors who carry around administrator support to ban any opposing viewpoint, picking off anyone who comes to their "owned" articles one at a time so as to prevent a consensus change. I spent a good amount of time analyzing the writings of a former wikipedia administrator who gave up on the whole thing, as well as the old writings of another one who, after being part of the corrupt system a long while, somehow stepped on the wrong toes and got finally tossed out. Comparing them to wikipedia behavior today, it's apparent that nothing has changed and the whole system, especially the "administrators", "bureaucrats", and "arbitration committee", are completely corrupt.
You can dig up all the sources you want; all they have to do is scream how it's not a "real" source, or simply revert-war you as a group and then accuse you of "breaking 3RR", and you're toast. Have the temerity to reveal an organized campaign by these groups in an unblock request, and they'll send along one of the Wiki-Assassins like Sandstein, FisherQueen, Barek, or the various other "unblock patrollers" to abuse you, harass you, and finally just hound you into something they can use to push for an indefinite ban. Often, they'll just out-and-out lie, claiming someone ran "checkuser" (a tool that NEVER comes up with a response other than guilty) and that you are a "sockpuppet" of someone else.
The people who hacked hypervisor didn't give two shits about "getting games for free." It was about getting linux running with full hardware access.
The people who hacked the PSP didn't give a shit about "getting games for free" either. They did it because they wanted to get their programs and code to run freely - things like a proper browser that didn't suck ass (come on Sony, would it have KILLED you to allow space for a swap file from the memory stick?).
GBA and DS - I could believe you, or I could look at the library of fully freely available homebrew games only loadable via flash cart.
Now, do these eventually get co-opted by those who want to "get games for free"? Probably so. All systems get hacked over time, it's in the nature of systems. Depending on how prevalent the system, and whether there are options otherwise, it can take a short or long time. Sony knew, when they killed OtherOS, that they were immensely speeding up the process, and anything else they do from this point is just the result of their being too paranoid, senile, or incompetent to know better.