And, not on your list, is actively trying to impeach the vice president. All the media seems to know about him is that he saw a UFO and his wife is hot.
Bill Maher had commented that the UFO quote was taken out of context, as well. He saw an object, couldn't identify it, and it was flying. Yup: that's a UFO. Nobody said anything about aliens, but there you go.
His impeachment resolution took real balls, too. Go Dennis!! Now only if Nancy Pelosi lets John Conyers go ahead with it and not hold his chairmanship over his head, this can move on.
I would happily and joyfully give up my right to vote in the next election for one million dollars.
A quarter of it would go to the Ron Paul campaign,
You bring up an interesting point - that of "buying a vote". With 250K, you not only get the chance to promote the candidate you like to a wider audience (increasing their odds), but you also buy a "share" in that candidate, getting them to be more likely to answer to you and respond to your needs.
So, by helping promote your candidate better, you "buy" the votes of more people who otherwise might not have considered him. Your lost vote might translate into dozens or hundred (or thousands?) of real votes. Sounds like lobbying!
And just how many of the cars in Iraq do you expect to have electronic ignition control?
Just about all of them. Iraq isn't Cuba, where the only cars they have are the ones left from before the revolution in the 50's. Most cars there are 80's and 90's Japanese models...
I seem to remember that in the mid-to-late 90s, large American cars, such as the Chevy Caprice, were also fairly common. Not sure what they're driving around in now, however.
Amen - I had one politician repeatedly leaving automated messages on my voicemail. I politely emailed him and asked him to stop, and he basically said "No" because it's 'more cost-efficient than mailings'.
You DO know that this was a Republican tactic in many areas to smear the Democrats. You would receive a robocall claiming to have important message about Democratic Candidate "X" (fill in your local person here). The message would take a while, but of course, most people would have hung up in outrage (repeated calls) pretty early on. It was only at the end of the message that you would learn that the call was being SPONSORED by the opposition. Pretty bad.
Even though what I hear them say is that they haven't got time to go to court first, they already have a court which can grant retroactive warrants.
Correct: they can go to the court up to 72 hours after the wiretapping, and get the approval to use the data already collected. There are judges waiting 24/7 to grant these warrants (literally). If the warrant is refused, then the data is inadmissible and unusable. But in 2005, for example, 2,072 warrants were requested and ALL were issued. The total denial rate in all of FISA's history is way less than 0.1% (no hard data handy).
The broader problem is that the current administration has declared that it doesn't needed even these rubber-stamp warrants. The only reason for this has to be that people are being tracked who shouldn't be. Political opponents, perhaps? Lawyers for pending government cases? The fact is, without a warrant/record of WHO was tapped, there's no oversight as to why they're being tapped.
You can have a suit filed against you anytime, it doesn't matter if you filed first. You can have a first suit filed against you without doing anything, or have a second suit or a counterclaim filed if you file first.
While I can't claim to be an attorney, I've worked in the legal industry for the past ten years in a document management role. I DO understand that while you can "sue back" after being sued in the first place, most judges take a dim view of such moves, and will often dismiss the countersuit if it was ONLY initiated by the first suit. That is: if they sue her back for penalties, but wouldn't have done so (or even noticed her) if she hadn't sued first, judges tend to view that as misuse of the courts.
If Congress really wanted to assure affordable internet access, they'd set about removing the "Universal Access Fee" (a/k/a "e-Rate" or the "Gore Tax") which has long since fulfilled it's stated purpose of subsidizing internet access to rural schools.
Remember, this is the "same" government that took ~100 years to remove the "Spanish American War" tax from our phone bill.
You made a lot of concise points to which I agree - these things have a "political" aspect (in the broader sense) that we often forget.
However, your last line stuck with me:
Sure the no-fly list has a lot of things wrong with it, but to those who support it, it seems to work. It got them re-elected, and there ain't been no hijackings since.
No aliens have landed in my back yard in the past seven years that I've lived there, so the anti-alien beam I disguised as a swing-set must be working?
It's more likely that there've been no hijackings in the last several years because we're dealing with an enemy with a LOT of patience. Remember, they attacked the World Trade Center back in the 1993, and then were content to sit around biding their time. Not only are they (extremists) more than willing to wait decades between attacks, but they've also probably enjoyed watching us beat OURSELVES up for the past six years.
Oh for CRYING OUT LOUD!! Topic as about a web site that changed it's story over time, I post a link to a personal web archival addon for Firefox, and it gets modded OFF-TOPIC?!
OK, a search on Google News on "Higazy" when the story broke showed a whole SIX hits, went down to zero for a while, then went back up to one. Any idea what's going on here?
Scrapbook is a neat one that you can install for Firefox to keep a record of every page you visit (on your computer). If you visit a web page and discover that it's different at a later time, you can browse Scrapbook for the old version of the page. The bonus is that it seems to keep the page format and structure intact.
Just don't think that PDFs cannot be modified. The full version of Adobe Acrobat has plenty of editing abilities, not to mention more sophisticated manual shuffling of the bits.
Adobe Acrobat Professional also gives you the ability to lock off various features (can't print, can't change, etc.) and can also digitally sign the PDF, so even if someone cracks open the PDF, they can't RE-sign it.
How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.
Says here that the update frequency for the notification is once per day; perhaps it hasn't hit that automatic checkpoint yet? As a sibling post said, wait until later today or tomorrow and it will show up. My jump from 6.10 to 7.04 showed up automatically six months ago.
The government has a habit of proposing something and then implementing it. They very rarely make proposals without intending to implement it.
The government has a habit of proposing something very scary, then implementing something not as scary as a "compromise". The problem is that everyone sees the compromise as something "better than the other solution", when it was actually the plan all along. Additionally, they've paved the way for the REAL scary thing later on. It's the apocryphal "frog in the boiling pot" approach.
Think about it; it you were in charge of a government organization and knew they habitually scaled down most budget submissions, you'd pad your $100K budget to $125K or $150K. If you get the higher amount, then you can party, but if you get the EXPECTED amount, then you can function the way you wanted to in the first place.
My other fear is that this system becomes a defacto standard for getting ANY medical care in the future, much like the Social Security Number has. Yes, you can try to use a distinct number other than SS#, but you'll have to take twice as long to get stuff done. In the future, you can expect any hospital, doctor or pharmacy to REFUSE to treat you until you turn over ALL info on file. After all, drug interactions, etc....
Sony probably thinks that is stealing too. They are contacting the politicians they own right now to create a law making it illegal not to buy their products.
We can laugh about this, but isn't that really what a media tax is? A fine for NOT buying the copyright material through normal channels? (Additional burden - assumption of guilt: you pay the fine on media that MIGHT be used to hold a copy of copyrighted material. If you use the media for data, or even as a coaster, you still pay that "fine".
If the PATRIOT Act is in conflict with the Constitution, then it is unpatriotic, just like the Members of Congress who voted it in and the President who signed the bill.
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, for getting the capitalization right on this Act! I've said it before, but the more we remember to keep the case on this one, the more people remember that it's an acronym, and NOT a description of the Act itself. Seriously: People Attracted To Rodents In Other Tights? Puppies Always Traveling Roughly If Others Try? Politicians Always Try Retiring In Other Towns?
Every time someone repeats it in mixed case, they buy into the whole scam.
Okay, I posted just last night that I try to not put on my grammar Nazi hat as frequently as I used to...
You want her hanged if you want her executed by hanging. You want her hung if you want her be a hermaphrodite.:)
(emphasis mine)
"her be?" Like the "Love Bug" in the movies? Or is this Ebonics?
(Totally with ya', man. I try to keep my grammar-Nazi hat off, but it's always more fun when there's a grammar - or spelling - error in a grammar Nazi post. Of course, in this case, it was basically a typo.)
The student was allowed to say what he wanted to say, he was not blocked from speaking up at all. In fact he was allowed to keep saying what he wanted to say long after he had broken the rules of the debate (and a Florida law, but that's less important).
In a true police state he would never have been allowed to speak at all. America is not a police state.
This is where the phrase 'chilling effect' comes in. The student may in fact not be prosecuted for his actions, or he may be charged for other, unrelated crimes. However, the threat of legal action (and, of course, the "torture" already inflicted) sends a message - "don't step out of line."
In a true police state, he would have been turned away before he had entered if his true intentions were known, or carried away at the doors if he didn't comply with the "go away" request. Oh, wait - this has alreadybeen going on around here. Isolated examples - the President has already declared that he doesn't want to see or hear dissent.
The difference between "free country" and "police state" is a continuum, not a line, and such a state can be enforced by simple threat, if not overt action.
You - are a genius. In this whole discussion, I don't believe anyone else saw the possibility you did! One guy getting Tazed brings up discussion around the water cooler, but a large crowd visibly acting up and getting subdued for visible craziness is brushed off.
Ha! Actually, I found it a few months after I finished my crude little batch file thing. I had used this article as a starting point, and just kept going with it - learned quite a bit. Probably one of the trickiest but most fun parts was setting up the keygen and transfer a minimum of user interaction, and to keep the amount of code to a minimum. It was all done with standard cygwin tools, DOS batch files, and environment variables for temporary variable storage.
RAID was originally about Redundancy using cheap hardware. I'm doing the same thing but with a different and non-real time algorithm. The performance gains from striping come at a risk of data corruption that I have never found to be worth the tradeoff.
Very clever! I came across an article many years ago (written in 1996) by a guy named Stephen Savage about a RAID implementation that he nicked as "AFRAID". In a RAID 5 implementation, the small-write parity performance penalty can be avoided if you defer the parity writes until disk load drops. If you queue them up, you gain substantial speed in exchange for a slight reduction in reliability. But, he makes the point that most of the known instances of data loss are due to circumstances other than disk failure, but other reasons (virus, user error, etc.)
BTW, I also created a set of batch files for family using SSH and Cygwin rsync to do remote backups of Windows machines to my basement Linux server. Every time someone logs in, rsync does a backup to my server. Initial backup took several weeks, but incrementals now take almost nothing. I've got to tweak it so that the backup interval is more like hourly.
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Bill Maher had commented that the UFO quote was taken out of context, as well. He saw an object, couldn't identify it, and it was flying. Yup: that's a UFO. Nobody said anything about aliens, but there you go.
His impeachment resolution took real balls, too. Go Dennis!! Now only if Nancy Pelosi lets John Conyers go ahead with it and not hold his chairmanship over his head, this can move on.
You bring up an interesting point - that of "buying a vote". With 250K, you not only get the chance to promote the candidate you like to a wider audience (increasing their odds), but you also buy a "share" in that candidate, getting them to be more likely to answer to you and respond to your needs.
So, by helping promote your candidate better, you "buy" the votes of more people who otherwise might not have considered him. Your lost vote might translate into dozens or hundred (or thousands?) of real votes. Sounds like lobbying!
Very clever!! It's so crazy it just might work!
I seem to remember that in the mid-to-late 90s, large American cars, such as the Chevy Caprice, were also fairly common. Not sure what they're driving around in now, however.
You DO know that this was a Republican tactic in many areas to smear the Democrats. You would receive a robocall claiming to have important message about Democratic Candidate "X" (fill in your local person here). The message would take a while, but of course, most people would have hung up in outrage (repeated calls) pretty early on. It was only at the end of the message that you would learn that the call was being SPONSORED by the opposition. Pretty bad.
Correct: they can go to the court up to 72 hours after the wiretapping, and get the approval to use the data already collected. There are judges waiting 24/7 to grant these warrants (literally). If the warrant is refused, then the data is inadmissible and unusable. But in 2005, for example, 2,072 warrants were requested and ALL were issued. The total denial rate in all of FISA's history is way less than 0.1% (no hard data handy).
The broader problem is that the current administration has declared that it doesn't needed even these rubber-stamp warrants. The only reason for this has to be that people are being tracked who shouldn't be. Political opponents, perhaps? Lawyers for pending government cases? The fact is, without a warrant/record of WHO was tapped, there's no oversight as to why they're being tapped.
While I can't claim to be an attorney, I've worked in the legal industry for the past ten years in a document management role. I DO understand that while you can "sue back" after being sued in the first place, most judges take a dim view of such moves, and will often dismiss the countersuit if it was ONLY initiated by the first suit. That is: if they sue her back for penalties, but wouldn't have done so (or even noticed her) if she hadn't sued first, judges tend to view that as misuse of the courts.
Darn, you beat me to it!
Remember, this is the "same" government that took ~100 years to remove the "Spanish American War" tax from our phone bill.
However, your last line stuck with me:
No aliens have landed in my back yard in the past seven years that I've lived there, so the anti-alien beam I disguised as a swing-set must be working?
It's more likely that there've been no hijackings in the last several years because we're dealing with an enemy with a LOT of patience. Remember, they attacked the World Trade Center back in the 1993, and then were content to sit around biding their time. Not only are they (extremists) more than willing to wait decades between attacks, but they've also probably enjoyed watching us beat OURSELVES up for the past six years.
Oh for CRYING OUT LOUD!! Topic as about a web site that changed it's story over time, I post a link to a personal web archival addon for Firefox, and it gets modded OFF-TOPIC?!
Replying to myself; it seems that Google News is now showing over 100 hits for "Higazy", so it appears things are perking up.
OK, a search on Google News on "Higazy" when the story broke showed a whole SIX hits, went down to zero for a while, then went back up to one. Any idea what's going on here?
Scrapbook is a neat one that you can install for Firefox to keep a record of every page you visit (on your computer). If you visit a web page and discover that it's different at a later time, you can browse Scrapbook for the old version of the page. The bonus is that it seems to keep the page format and structure intact.
Adobe Acrobat Professional also gives you the ability to lock off various features (can't print, can't change, etc.) and can also digitally sign the PDF, so even if someone cracks open the PDF, they can't RE-sign it.
Says here that the update frequency for the notification is once per day; perhaps it hasn't hit that automatic checkpoint yet? As a sibling post said, wait until later today or tomorrow and it will show up. My jump from 6.10 to 7.04 showed up automatically six months ago.
The government has a habit of proposing something very scary, then implementing something not as scary as a "compromise". The problem is that everyone sees the compromise as something "better than the other solution", when it was actually the plan all along. Additionally, they've paved the way for the REAL scary thing later on. It's the apocryphal "frog in the boiling pot" approach.
Think about it; it you were in charge of a government organization and knew they habitually scaled down most budget submissions, you'd pad your $100K budget to $125K or $150K. If you get the higher amount, then you can party, but if you get the EXPECTED amount, then you can function the way you wanted to in the first place.
My other fear is that this system becomes a defacto standard for getting ANY medical care in the future, much like the Social Security Number has. Yes, you can try to use a distinct number other than SS#, but you'll have to take twice as long to get stuff done. In the future, you can expect any hospital, doctor or pharmacy to REFUSE to treat you until you turn over ALL info on file. After all, drug interactions, etc....
We can laugh about this, but isn't that really what a media tax is? A fine for NOT buying the copyright material through normal channels? (Additional burden - assumption of guilt: you pay the fine on media that MIGHT be used to hold a copy of copyrighted material. If you use the media for data, or even as a coaster, you still pay that "fine".
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, for getting the capitalization right on this Act! I've said it before, but the more we remember to keep the case on this one, the more people remember that it's an acronym, and NOT a description of the Act itself. Seriously: People Attracted To Rodents In Other Tights? Puppies Always Traveling Roughly If Others Try? Politicians Always Try Retiring In Other Towns?
Every time someone repeats it in mixed case, they buy into the whole scam.
"her be?" Like the "Love Bug" in the movies? Or is this Ebonics?
(Totally with ya', man. I try to keep my grammar-Nazi hat off, but it's always more fun when there's a grammar - or spelling - error in a grammar Nazi post. Of course, in this case, it was basically a typo.)
In a true police state, he would have been turned away before he had entered if his true intentions were known, or carried away at the doors if he didn't comply with the "go away" request. Oh, wait - this has already been going on around here. Isolated examples - the President has already declared that he doesn't want to see or hear dissent.
The difference between "free country" and "police state" is a continuum, not a line, and such a state can be enforced by simple threat, if not overt action.
You - are a genius. In this whole discussion, I don't believe anyone else saw the possibility you did! One guy getting Tazed brings up discussion around the water cooler, but a large crowd visibly acting up and getting subdued for visible craziness is brushed off.
Ha! Actually, I found it a few months after I finished my crude little batch file thing. I had used this article as a starting point, and just kept going with it - learned quite a bit. Probably one of the trickiest but most fun parts was setting up the keygen and transfer a minimum of user interaction, and to keep the amount of code to a minimum. It was all done with standard cygwin tools, DOS batch files, and environment variables for temporary variable storage.
Very clever! I came across an article many years ago (written in 1996) by a guy named Stephen Savage about a RAID implementation that he nicked as "AFRAID". In a RAID 5 implementation, the small-write parity performance penalty can be avoided if you defer the parity writes until disk load drops. If you queue them up, you gain substantial speed in exchange for a slight reduction in reliability. But, he makes the point that most of the known instances of data loss are due to circumstances other than disk failure, but other reasons (virus, user error, etc.)
BTW, I also created a set of batch files for family using SSH and Cygwin rsync to do remote backups of Windows machines to my basement Linux server. Every time someone logs in, rsync does a backup to my server. Initial backup took several weeks, but incrementals now take almost nothing. I've got to tweak it so that the backup interval is more like hourly.