Texas? WTF? In 2000, Gore won in only one county there. Brazos county, home of Texas A&M University, and a damn disproportionate conglomeration of college students.
Not true. Gore won several TX counties near the Mexican border.
Also, a better site than Tanenbaum's for predicting the winner is here. Sam Wang of Princeton University uses a statistical method for averaging all recent polls rather than rely on just the latest for his predictions.
Personally I'm predicting a blowout for Kerry. This is based for starters on Wang's data. 2nd, last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Chris Matthews said that the exit polls from early voting in Iowa had Kerry 11 points up. 30% of Iowa has already voted. There has also been a huge early turnout in Democratic areas in FL, NV, GA, and NC. 3rd, a recent Zogby poll of 18-29 year-olds with cell phones gave Kerry 55%, Bush 40%. Every other poll I've seen is based exclusively on land lines, so if the 18-29 year-olds vote this year (and granted, they usually do not), the polls could be way off. Finally, Karl Rove's strategy is based on getting some 4 million more Evangelical Christians to the polls than went in 2000. Problem is that the size of this group may be a myth. A devout Christian friend of mine invited me to a party Friday night with some of his church buddies. Not a group I normally hang out with, but I like being exposed to new ideas. Turns out this small sample favored Kerry over Bush by 50-40. A few were still very undecided (yes, even today there are still undecided voters in Ohio!). All of this leads me to believe that Kerry will clobber Bush.
"The Washington Redskins have proved to be a time-tested election predictor. In the previous 15 elections, if the Washington Redskins have lost their last home game prior to the election, the incumbent party has lost the White House. When they have won, the incumbent has stayed in power."
Does the quality of the teams (Packers 3-4, Redskins 2-4) usually mirror the quality of the candidates as much as it does this year?
Elian Gonzales and his family being raided by armed federal agents ring a bell?
His dad was in Cuba and had legal custody. A six year old kid belongs with his dad. He shouldn't have been used as a pawn by some political group. I'm a dad and any dad who loves his kids will tell you that Reno and Co. did the right thing.
And if you want to talk about felons, a large number of Clinton's cabinet and adivsors were under investigation, indicted, and in several cases convicted, while he was in office. Mysterious deaths, disappearing law records, vindictive firings of innocent people... it was a circus. Or don't you recall?
Clinton's Administration had more scandals than Reagan and Nixon combined.
Er, no they did not. Almost all of Nixon's aides faced jail time as a result of Watergate. One of Reagan's Cabinet Secs (Cap Weinberger) had to be pardoned by Bush I to keep him from being prosecuted because of his role in Iran-Contra. Another of Reagan's Sec's resigned due to a scandal at HUD. Similarly only two of Clinton's Cabinet faced indictment (Cisneros, again at HUD and Espy at Ag). Pretty much every other "scandal" in the Clinton admin turned out to be a figment of over active Republican imaginations. Watergate and Iran-Contra make Clinton's scandals look tame by comparison.
Are you disturbed by the religious right that wants to outlaw late-term abortions, with a provision allowing them to be performed in the case where a mother's life is in danger?
Here is my abortion position: 1st and 2nd trimester, no restrictions. By the 3rd trimester, the woman has effectively made her decision and I have no problems with restrictions as long as they have a provision that allows a women to have an abortion in the event that there is medical evidence that continuing the pregnancy will put her life in serious danger. It is also reasonable to place restrictions on minor kids having abortions (e.g. parental notification) as long as there is an out for judicial review. There are cases where a father has raped his daughter and forcing her to get parental permission is unconscionable. As I understand the polls on this subject, my views pretty much match the mainstream. They also are the reasons why Kerry voted against the partial birth abortion ban (no provision for saving the life of the mother) and the parental notification requirement (no provision for judicial review).
Don't even get me started on the Iraq war. John Kerry should be thrown in jail for aiding the enemy.
This "insightful" comment is the reason I distrust Republicans and won't vote for Bush. Too many seem to equate reasonable dissent and constructive criticism with treason.
Every time I ask self-proclaimed democrats why they support abortion, they say they believe in a womans right to choose...
There are many here in the US without the hubris to proclaim that they know the mind of God and who do not wish to force their religous beliefs down the throats of others. Abortion is a difficult personal choice that only a woman and her own conscience can make. I find it particularly disturbing that the religious zelots on the right would outlaw late term abortions with no provision for protecting the life of the mother. By doing so, they will surely kill some women whose pregnancy has developed serious life threatening complications. It must truly feel rightous to have such moral clarity that you know that the fetus's life is always more important than the mother's.
I tried a 2.6 kernel on my Slackware box at home a couple of months ago. The machine became really unresponsive and felt much slower. This won't do on a desktop box.
I've noticed this too. I've got 2xPIII@1Ghz w/ 1GB Ram and sometimes I can't even get the box to recognize that I've moved the mouse when the box has a low load avg and isn't using much memory. The 2.4 kernels don't have this problem. IIRC, the 2.6 series scheduler has a check for CPU hogs. But I suspect that it is confusing the X Application that is really the hog with the X Window System itself.
There is another catagory: those who don't care if god exists or not. Would you change your behavior or your ethical standards if you knew that god did (did not) exist? If no, then why care if god exists? If god does exists, god is just another phenomena to be poked and prodded and therorized about like any other piece of the universe. If god exists, I am not going to worship him/her/it, I'm going to try and understand what it is. If god does not exist, then the universe has one less phenomena that can be investigated. There is no loss in this case since the universe will still have a large supply of interesting phenomena to study.
show me some evidence they have ever used technology in attacks in the past.
that just doesn't fly at all.
See, you have answered your own question. Those technologicaly advanced airplanes just didn't fly at all once they hit their targets on 9/11. And the train bombers in Spain didn't use their cell phones to help ET phone home either.
Terrorists don't use technology for their attacks. They misuse technology. Think of them as script kiddies that kill people.
Still not sure why outage data would really help them though. Tom Clancy could probably whip up a scenario or two, though.
So now you've nuanced your view from not sending kids of high ranking officials, which is stupid, into harms way, to just sending the kids of executives of companies you find socially irresponsible. I find the ACLU to be irresponsible, can we sent the kids of the ACLU national director?
No. My view is not nuanced. I want the powerful and priviledged to share the burden of US wars. When the wealthy are given tax cuts just before a war that has cost the US $200B so far and do not send themselves or their children to fight in that war in numbers proportional to the size of their group, they are not doing their share. They are making the rest of us pay in one way or the other. A draft in which their children have an equal chance of being forced to go to war would even the playing field a bit. I do not seek to draft only the children of the powerful and I do not seek to draft the children of the wealthy because of who their parents are. I seek to draft them because in a war, everyone must contribute. A draft would force the children of the elites to take their chances just like everyone else. And maybe, in the process, those elites would learn to think twice before starting a war.
Silly child. You've obviously never served in the military and haven't a clue. If you had, you would instantly understand that Kerry could not have been telling the North Vietnamese anything they couldn't already have learned from the evening news.
You need to stop reading those right wing fringe conspiracy websites and learn how the real world works. And even McNamara thinks Vietnam was unwinable. The sad thing is that Iraq may be unwinable for the same reason: We don't understand the country, its culture, or why the enemy is fighting.
Ashcroft's son won't be let near the fighting and has next to zero chance of dying. If Ashcroft's son was picked up by the insurgents it would be too grand a propaganda coup for the bad guys. Still better than nothing, I suppose. But one counterexample does not negate the general principal that 99.999% of Bush's friends do not have sons or daughters in Iraq and received huge tax cuts as well. They are simply not shouldering their share of this war. That has been left to the middle class and the poor. Lets send the kids of the oil company executives off to war.
Dude, I know people who died in Vietnam. For nothing. I know people in Iraq today. They stand a chance of dying for nothing, too. Working to prevent your friends from dying for nothing is not treason, it is the definition of patriotism.
Do not qoute part of an argument out of context and pretend that by answering that that you have debunked the argument. The whole argument is that Bush's cronies are doing nothing to shoulder any of the burden of the Iraq war. A draft would force them to take their chances along with the rest of us.
And John Ashcroft's son is an ensign in the US Navy, and did a tour in the Gulf, and apparently
is going back.
That's nice. If Ashcroft's son ever runs for office, I'll give him a hearing. But Ashcroft's son is not The US Attorney General. The father is still a chickenhawk hypocrite like most of the Sr Administration figures.
So you think it would be more fair to have a draft, forcing people to join the military who don't want to, than to maintain a volunteer only force. [scratches head]
Not necessarily. I'd be happy to see those who are so strongly in favor of the Iraq war pay a large extra tax if they don't want to go themselves. There is something rather sickening about giving tax breaks to the wealthy who do not send their sons and yet seem to be the loudest supporters of the Iraq war. I was under the impression that during a war, we were all in this together and we should all be contributing.
I say that because I have also heard the argument that there was no waiting list at all, but instead as few as 10 other applicants. I guess my question is, how do we know the status of the "waiting list" for the TANG in 1968? How do we know which people on it were even medically qualified? Since you have said this was a fact I was curious if you could help clear up the matter and cite a source.
Yeah, this one is pretty muddled, but try this. Most Guard/Reserve units had long waiting lines in 1968 since these units were regarded as a safe way of staying out of Vietnam.
Oh, and this was all after something like 4-5 years as a guard pilot... it is not like he got his initial training and vanished.
So, lets say you sign up for 6 years but blow off the last year. I mean, like, WTF, why not? After all, you did complete 5/6ths of your contract. Bet there are more than a few Nat'l Guard troops in Iraq who wish they could get away with that today and some vets who might still be alive today if they had been able to do that during the 'Nam.
Believe what you want, but Rangle was quite mad that the priviledged few were unwilling to join the the few and the proud. Go read the Congressional Record and view the news accounts from when the bill was introduced. Do you have any facts to back up your opinion?
No, the purpose of the bills is to scare the soccer moms into voting for Kerry.
The bills were introduced in Jan 2003, long before the Dems had a nominee for 2004. Go read Rangle's and Holling's Congressional Record statements introducing the bills. The bills were also discussed on CNN, CSPAN, and the PBS News Hour shortly after they were introduced.
The purpose of these bills is to call attention to the fact that Bush is unwilling to share the burdens of the war in Iraq among all Americans. The wealthy get tax cuts, the middle class (their children actually) get the bill, and the poor, without jobs or access to job training, have few alternatives except to do the fighting. A draft without any exemptions would even the burden somewhat.
Some facts:
George Bush miraculously jumped to the top of a 500+ person waiting list to get his berth in the Nat'l Guard and then failed to show up for a flight physical after the US spent approx $1M to train him as a pilot.
John Ashcroft received several deferments during Vietnam. One was a critical occupation deferment for teaching business law at a Missouri college.
Trent Lott (R, MS) avoided the Vietnam draft and lies about it.
Out of the top three Republicans in the House and the top three Republicans in the Senate, none served in the military.
It seems only fair that the children or grandchildren of these fine folks should be given a chance to die for their country just like the rest of us. Maybe it would make their parents think a little longer about the need to go to war and then do a better job of planning for the occupation afterword.
Yes this is true, but going the libertarian way is opening Pandora's box. The thing is if you are going to do that you need to go all in (IMHO). Most Americans (/. crowd included) don't really want that. The few that do are often seen as more conservative than the Republican Party.
Economics has something called The Theory of the Second Best that shows, among other things, that if you start with a regulated economy and then partially deregulate it, society can actually end up worse off then it was originally with the more fully regulated economy. I suspect that this partially explains why many deregulation initiatives are so hard to accomplish. On the surface the removal of an individual regulation often sounds like a good idea. But when the dereg is put into the context of a complete system, it is often a bad idea.
The story does not say that the law is restricted to sharing of copyrighted materials only. Suppose someone writes a political paraody song about their boss that they want to diseminate anonymously. This law could make the anonymous sharing of such material a crime. If you have info that the law applies only to copyrighted material, then show us. The story did not have enough info to answer that either way.
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Texas? WTF? In 2000, Gore won in only one county there. Brazos county, home of Texas A&M University, and a damn disproportionate conglomeration of college students.
Not true. Gore won several TX counties near the Mexican border.
Also, a better site than Tanenbaum's for predicting the winner is here. Sam Wang of Princeton University uses a statistical method for averaging all recent polls rather than rely on just the latest for his predictions.
Personally I'm predicting a blowout for Kerry. This is based for starters on Wang's data. 2nd, last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Chris Matthews said that the exit polls from early voting in Iowa had Kerry 11 points up. 30% of Iowa has already voted. There has also been a huge early turnout in Democratic areas in FL, NV, GA, and NC. 3rd, a recent Zogby poll of 18-29 year-olds with cell phones gave Kerry 55%, Bush 40%. Every other poll I've seen is based exclusively on land lines, so if the 18-29 year-olds vote this year (and granted, they usually do not), the polls could be way off. Finally, Karl Rove's strategy is based on getting some 4 million more Evangelical Christians to the polls than went in 2000. Problem is that the size of this group may be a myth. A devout Christian friend of mine invited me to a party Friday night with some of his church buddies. Not a group I normally hang out with, but I like being exposed to new ideas. Turns out this small sample favored Kerry over Bush by 50-40. A few were still very undecided (yes, even today there are still undecided voters in Ohio!). All of this leads me to believe that Kerry will clobber Bush.
"The Washington Redskins have proved to be a time-tested election predictor. In the previous 15 elections, if the Washington Redskins have lost their last home game prior to the election, the incumbent party has lost the White House. When they have won, the incumbent has stayed in power."
Does the quality of the teams (Packers 3-4, Redskins 2-4) usually mirror the quality of the candidates as much as it does this year?
Elian Gonzales and his family being raided by armed federal agents ring a bell?
His dad was in Cuba and had legal custody. A six year old kid belongs with his dad. He shouldn't have been used as a pawn by some political group. I'm a dad and any dad who loves his kids will tell you that Reno and Co. did the right thing.
And if you want to talk about felons, a large number of Clinton's cabinet and adivsors were under investigation, indicted, and in several cases convicted, while he was in office. Mysterious deaths, disappearing law records, vindictive firings of innocent people... it was a circus. Or don't you recall?
s/Clinton/Reagan/g;
Clinton's Administration had more scandals than Reagan and Nixon combined.
Er, no they did not. Almost all of Nixon's aides faced jail time as a result of Watergate. One of Reagan's Cabinet Secs (Cap Weinberger) had to be pardoned by Bush I to keep him from being prosecuted because of his role in Iran-Contra. Another of Reagan's Sec's resigned due to a scandal at HUD. Similarly only two of Clinton's Cabinet faced indictment (Cisneros, again at HUD and Espy at Ag). Pretty much every other "scandal" in the Clinton admin turned out to be a figment of over active Republican imaginations. Watergate and Iran-Contra make Clinton's scandals look tame by comparison.
Are you disturbed by the religious right that wants to outlaw late-term abortions, with a provision allowing them to be performed in the case where a mother's life is in danger?
Here is my abortion position: 1st and 2nd trimester, no restrictions. By the 3rd trimester, the woman has effectively made her decision and I have no problems with restrictions as long as they have a provision that allows a women to have an abortion in the event that there is medical evidence that continuing the pregnancy will put her life in serious danger. It is also reasonable to place restrictions on minor kids having abortions (e.g. parental notification) as long as there is an out for judicial review. There are cases where a father has raped his daughter and forcing her to get parental permission is unconscionable. As I understand the polls on this subject, my views pretty much match the mainstream. They also are the reasons why Kerry voted against the partial birth abortion ban (no provision for saving the life of the mother) and the parental notification requirement (no provision for judicial review).
Don't even get me started on the Iraq war. John Kerry should be thrown in jail for aiding the enemy.
This "insightful" comment is the reason I distrust Republicans and won't vote for Bush. Too many seem to equate reasonable dissent and constructive criticism with treason.
Every time I ask self-proclaimed democrats why they support abortion, they say they believe in a womans right to choose...
There are many here in the US without the hubris to proclaim that they know the mind of God and who do not wish to force their religous beliefs down the throats of others. Abortion is a difficult personal choice that only a woman and her own conscience can make. I find it particularly disturbing that the religious zelots on the right would outlaw late term abortions with no provision for protecting the life of the mother. By doing so, they will surely kill some women whose pregnancy has developed serious life threatening complications. It must truly feel rightous to have such moral clarity that you know that the fetus's life is always more important than the mother's.
Funny, I don't remember seeing American troops flying crosses as they ran into battle.
Hmmm, Try reading this or this.
I tried a 2.6 kernel on my Slackware box at home a couple of months ago. The machine became really unresponsive and felt much slower. This won't do on a desktop box.
I've noticed this too. I've got 2xPIII@1Ghz w/ 1GB Ram and sometimes I can't even get the box to recognize that I've moved the mouse when the box has a low load avg and isn't using much memory. The 2.4 kernels don't have this problem. IIRC, the 2.6 series scheduler has a check for CPU hogs. But I suspect that it is confusing the X Application that is really the hog with the X Window System itself.
I thought they did it one year to the day after the war started. Seems like a reaonable day to choose.
There is another catagory: those who don't care if god exists or not. Would you change your behavior or your ethical standards if you knew that god did (did not) exist? If no, then why care if god exists? If god does exists, god is just another phenomena to be poked and prodded and therorized about like any other piece of the universe. If god exists, I am not going to worship him/her/it, I'm going to try and understand what it is. If god does not exist, then the universe has one less phenomena that can be investigated. There is no loss in this case since the universe will still have a large supply of interesting phenomena to study.
show me some evidence they have ever used technology in attacks in the past.
that just doesn't fly at all.
See, you have answered your own question. Those technologicaly advanced airplanes just didn't fly at all once they hit their targets on 9/11. And the train bombers in Spain didn't use their cell phones to help ET phone home either.
Terrorists don't use technology for their attacks. They misuse technology. Think of them as script kiddies that kill people.
Still not sure why outage data would really help them though. Tom Clancy could probably whip up a scenario or two, though.
Telco exchanges are built like brick shithouses for precisely that reason. Ever see one with even a single window?
Yes. The exchange up the street from me has windows. But then, I'll bet it was built in the 1930s.
Specifically, the UCMJ prevents political activity while in uniform.
Maybe someone should have told that to the delegates to the RNC. Three % were active duty personnel.
So now you've nuanced your view from not sending kids of high ranking officials, which is stupid, into harms way, to just sending the kids of executives of companies you find socially irresponsible. I find the ACLU to be irresponsible, can we sent the kids of the ACLU national director?
No. My view is not nuanced. I want the powerful and priviledged to share the burden of US wars. When the wealthy are given tax cuts just before a war that has cost the US $200B so far and do not send themselves or their children to fight in that war in numbers proportional to the size of their group, they are not doing their share. They are making the rest of us pay in one way or the other. A draft in which their children have an equal chance of being forced to go to war would even the playing field a bit. I do not seek to draft only the children of the powerful and I do not seek to draft the children of the wealthy because of who their parents are. I seek to draft them because in a war, everyone must contribute. A draft would force the children of the elites to take their chances just like everyone else. And maybe, in the process, those elites would learn to think twice before starting a war.
Silly child. You've obviously never served in the military and haven't a clue. If you had, you would instantly understand that Kerry could not have been telling the North Vietnamese anything they couldn't already have learned from the evening news. You need to stop reading those right wing fringe conspiracy websites and learn how the real world works. And even McNamara thinks Vietnam was unwinable. The sad thing is that Iraq may be unwinable for the same reason: We don't understand the country, its culture, or why the enemy is fighting.
Ashcroft's son won't be let near the fighting and has next to zero chance of dying. If Ashcroft's son was picked up by the insurgents it would be too grand a propaganda coup for the bad guys. Still better than nothing, I suppose. But one counterexample does not negate the general principal that 99.999% of Bush's friends do not have sons or daughters in Iraq and received huge tax cuts as well. They are simply not shouldering their share of this war. That has been left to the middle class and the poor. Lets send the kids of the oil company executives off to war.
Dude, I know people who died in Vietnam. For nothing. I know people in Iraq today. They stand a chance of dying for nothing, too. Working to prevent your friends from dying for nothing is not treason, it is the definition of patriotism.
Do not qoute part of an argument out of context and pretend that by answering that that you have debunked the argument. The whole argument is that Bush's cronies are doing nothing to shoulder any of the burden of the Iraq war. A draft would force them to take their chances along with the rest of us.
And John Ashcroft's son is an ensign in the US Navy, and did a tour in the Gulf, and apparently is going back.
That's nice. If Ashcroft's son ever runs for office, I'll give him a hearing. But Ashcroft's son is not The US Attorney General. The father is still a chickenhawk hypocrite like most of the Sr Administration figures.
So you think it would be more fair to have a draft, forcing people to join the military who don't want to, than to maintain a volunteer only force. [scratches head]
Not necessarily. I'd be happy to see those who are so strongly in favor of the Iraq war pay a large extra tax if they don't want to go themselves. There is something rather sickening about giving tax breaks to the wealthy who do not send their sons and yet seem to be the loudest supporters of the Iraq war. I was under the impression that during a war, we were all in this together and we should all be contributing.
I say that because I have also heard the argument that there was no waiting list at all, but instead as few as 10 other applicants. I guess my question is, how do we know the status of the "waiting list" for the TANG in 1968? How do we know which people on it were even medically qualified? Since you have said this was a fact I was curious if you could help clear up the matter and cite a source.
Yeah, this one is pretty muddled, but try this. Most Guard/Reserve units had long waiting lines in 1968 since these units were regarded as a safe way of staying out of Vietnam.
Oh, and this was all after something like 4-5 years as a guard pilot... it is not like he got his initial training and vanished.
So, lets say you sign up for 6 years but blow off the last year. I mean, like, WTF, why not? After all, you did complete 5/6ths of your contract. Bet there are more than a few Nat'l Guard troops in Iraq who wish they could get away with that today and some vets who might still be alive today if they had been able to do that during the 'Nam.
Believe what you want, but Rangle was quite mad that the priviledged few were unwilling to join the the few and the proud. Go read the Congressional Record and view the news accounts from when the bill was introduced. Do you have any facts to back up your opinion?
No, the purpose of the bills is to scare the soccer moms into voting for Kerry.
The bills were introduced in Jan 2003, long before the Dems had a nominee for 2004. Go read Rangle's and Holling's Congressional Record statements introducing the bills. The bills were also discussed on CNN, CSPAN, and the PBS News Hour shortly after they were introduced.
Some facts:
- George Bush miraculously jumped to the top of a 500+ person waiting list to get his berth in the Nat'l Guard and then failed to show up for a flight physical after the US spent approx $1M to train him as a pilot.
- Dick Cheny got five deferments because he had other priorities in the '60s than military service.
- John Ashcroft received several deferments during Vietnam. One was a critical occupation deferment for teaching business law at a Missouri college.
- Trent Lott (R, MS) avoided the Vietnam draft and lies about it.
- Out of the top three Republicans in the House and the top three Republicans in the Senate, none served in the military.
It seems only fair that the children or grandchildren of these fine folks should be given a chance to die for their country just like the rest of us. Maybe it would make their parents think a little longer about the need to go to war and then do a better job of planning for the occupation afterword.Yes this is true, but going the libertarian way is opening Pandora's box. The thing is if you are going to do that you need to go all in (IMHO). Most Americans (/. crowd included) don't really want that. The few that do are often seen as more conservative than the Republican Party.
Economics has something called The Theory of the Second Best that shows, among other things, that if you start with a regulated economy and then partially deregulate it, society can actually end up worse off then it was originally with the more fully regulated economy. I suspect that this partially explains why many deregulation initiatives are so hard to accomplish. On the surface the removal of an individual regulation often sounds like a good idea. But when the dereg is put into the context of a complete system, it is often a bad idea.
The story does not say that the law is restricted to sharing of copyrighted materials only. Suppose someone writes a political paraody song about their boss that they want to diseminate anonymously. This law could make the anonymous sharing of such material a crime. If you have info that the law applies only to copyrighted material, then show us. The story did not have enough info to answer that either way.