> Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore.
The complaining stems from the fact that something really genuinely good has been deliberately taken away from us. Gnome 1.x was much better than any of the other options. It did everything we wanted a desktop environment to do. It had all the features we wanted, and every single one of them was fully configurable.
Then someone decided "options are bad" and started taking it all away. At first we thought it was just because of the rewrite (when they rewrote 2.0 to use the new GTK), so we hung in there, thinking we'd eventually get our features back... but then they started taking away more and more and more. By the time we realized what was going on, it was too late to fork 1.x, because it would no longer compile against contemporary libraries. (Gnome has always had eleventy bajillion dependencies.)
Then in the 3.x series they started inserting more and more *unwanted* features. I don't just mean unnecessary features that I personally don't have any need for; it goes beyond that. I'm talking about features that are actively intrusive and cannot be turned off, like the way it now insists on popping up extra windows you don't want while you're in the middle of trying to work on other things, and this behavior cannot be disabled. Gnome has become so horrible, it beggars the imagination to realize that every release they still manage somehow to find a way to make it yet worse.
It's really sad. Gnome used to be something I could not just use but also happily recommend. Now it's so awful, I can't imagine anyone actually liking it.
Back in the day, you could by Jarts. The package included six rather heavy pointy metal spikes with plastic fins on them (three each with two different colors of plastic fins), front-weighted so that they would land point first when thrown, and heavy enough that they would pierce into even fairly hard soil and stick upright; yellow plastic goal rings; and instructions.
IIRC, the instructions actually called for two people to stand at opposite ends of the yard, with one of the yellow target rings for the other guy to aim at laying on the ground in front of your feet, and then you'd throw the Jarts toward one another in an attempt to land them in the target. Or maybe that's just how we played, when we visited Grandpa and Grandma's house when I was a kid. (They didn't have a lot of other toys around, because they raised their kids in the era before it was expected that every child get new toys every year; but they did have an old set of Jarts, so we amused ourselves with those. Occasionally we even talked Grandpa into playing with us.)
Anyway, my point is, none of us ever actually got hurt with those things, but the risk we were taking was obviously rather larger than with these magnet toys, and we were well behaved. If you gave Jarts to a group of athletically inclined kids with a taste for violence, it's virtually a sure thing someone would become injured.
All you need to do is get a small brick wall (four feet wide by six feet tall is enough) set up in the network administrator's office. Next to this set a bucket, and keep the bucket full of rocks. The rocks should be small but as sharp and pointy as possible. First thing each day, have the network administrator put one or two of the rocks inside each of his shoes and keep it there for the rest of his shift, then periodically have him bang his head against the brick wall.
This will adequately simulate all the really important aspects of the experience of working with MSAD. Technically you could also use Samba, but it isn't necessary.
> this is not more censorship, it can actually be seen as less.
The amount of censorship that is actually happening is the same. The difference is, now it's easier for people to find out that it is happening, and (at least in general terms) why.
So while it's not less censorship as such, it is an improvement.
> I couldn't tell you where ANY pay phones around here are.
Try looking. They're often unobtrusive. Common sites include shopping centers, banks, fast food restaurants (particularly ones that are part of a large franchise chain), and local government buildings. The payphone may be outside the building (possibly behind it in some cases) or tucked away down a hall near the restrooms. Of course, not EVERY restaurant or bank or shopping center or public building has one; but some of them do. Look around.
I happen to know of two of them within two minutes' walk of here in different directions, and I wasn't actually paying attention (because I'm less than a ten minute walk from home, so it's kind of moot). If I made a point of actually looking I could probably find more.
Granted, if you're out hiking across the cornfields or through the woods you may need to go a bit farther, until you find signs of civilization.
> So the top usability improvement that I would like to see is for them to > accept payment using a prepaid card like in many European countries.
The reason North American payphones don't generally have that is because almost all of them were already in place by the mid twentieth century (fifties, sixties, seventies at the latest) -- prior to the widespread adoption of credit cards (in the eighties and nineties). By the time prepaid cards were at all common, so were cellphones.
Things happened in somewhat a different order in Europe. This probably varies a bit from country to country, but in general my impression is that prepaid cards were widely adopted somewhat earlier (partly because European banks were never legally required to offer checking account services on reasonable terms, so people were much more desperate for payment options; there were also cultural reasons and some just plain happenstance), and cellular networks arose several years later than in America (because key technology for that was test-marketed out of Chicago initially and so caught on in America soonest -- this also explains some of the differences in how calls to cellphones are billed in America versus Europe).
With all that said, you actually *can* use a calling card at a North American payphone (I have done so), but this fact is not obvious from looking at the payphone (typically, instructions were printed on the back of the card or in the documentation that came with it), and most Americans don't have calling cards anyway. It used to be that almost all college students had them (because their parents wanted to get phone calls, and calling cards were cheaper than collect calls), but between the rise of ubiquitous cellphones and the increasing percentage of idiot parents who give their kids full-blown credit cards "for emergencies", calling cards are a lot less common now.
I don't happen to know whether it is possible to use a more general-purpose card (credit card, checking account card, etc) at a payphone. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, but I don't know for sure or know how to go about it. If you're genuinely interested in this capability, you could at least try asking at your bank. It's possible they may have an answer.
Unfortunately, between inflation and shifting economies of scale (which have made the relative cost of calls at a payphone call, always higher than an equivalent normal call, even more expensive now), just keeping a quarter in the ashtray or glove compartment for emergencies is really no longer a really viable option. If payphones all took bills you could keep a five tucked away somewhere (in the central console, in the pocket on the back of a seat, between the seat cushions, in an envelope under a floor mat, whatever), but as I said above the payphones in America are largely older models, no longer used often enough to pay for a lot of upgrades, so they frequently don't have the modern features you see in e.g. pop machines. Also, most people would be tempted to get that five out and use it for something else, because it represents more purchasing power (for things other than phone calls) than the quarter you needed in the eighties (e.g., a long-distance call at a payphone now costs more than a McDonald's milkshake).
In a true emergency (in the personal sense -- it doesn't have to qualify for calling 911), you can still make a collect call from a payphone. This does require that you know someone who will take a collect call from you, so try not to burn ALL your bridges.
But yeah, if you're interested in using payphones to make casual garden-variety calls, e.g., to have somebody pick you up from a carpooling drop-off, you might consider looking into getting a calling card. I'm pretty sure those are still available. Even better, if you memorize the number, you don't have to actually have the card with you to use it. You do have to be able to find a payphone though.
A third possibility is that it's a rotating substitution cipher (perhaps using Enigma). The part at the end could indicate encryption settings, either directly or via lookup in a schedule. This would make it similar to what the German navy used, for example.
The thing that's going to make the encryption hard to break is the fact that the message is so short and was recovered in isolation.
> Didn't Enlightenment (and Raster himself) get purged from the > GNOME project because the community turned on him because > of the poor quality of his code?
I think it was more that the Gnome people were (at that time) determined to have multiple possible Gnome-compliant window managers so the user would have a choice. (This was _before_ the anti-choice jihad that brought us Gnome 2.) Their plan, at the time, was to feature a different default window manager in each release. After Enlightenment, the next one was Sawfish, which I still use, on account of the fact that it's much better than the current default Gnome window manager at doing what I want a window manager to do and staying out of my way otherwise.
I experimented with going back to Enlightenment, but the old version had not been maintained sufficiently to really work on a modern system (e.g. it does not interact as it should with modern versions of gnome-panel; sawfish on the other hand does that just fine and thus can be used as a drop-in replacement for metacity or whatever the new default wm is in Gnome), and the new Enlightenment, besides still being in alpha, was also trying to be an entire desktop environment, one with a new organizational paradigm to replace traditional overlapping windows, and that wasn't really what I was looking for, personally.
So I stuck with Sawfish. It works for me. It does what I want a window manager to do, and it stays out of my way apart from that.
Let me guess: you added a boolean not to the conditional that checks to see whether you're playing in non-scoring debug mode when you die, so that if you're not it treats you as though you were and asks you if you want to die (yes/no)?
Indeed, a lot of NetHack players would consider this the only legitimate way to play. Anything else is cheating -- unless you're a developer legitimately operating in non-scoring debug mode in order to test new features or attempt to reproduce bugs.
Oh, you _died_? Well, then, the game will consider possibly leaving a tombstone with your name on it and how you died so that potentially up to one future player will see it and know your fate. Do you want your possessions identified? You know that unidentified iron ring you were carrying, that you couldn't get Slinky to step on? Turns out he was just being fickle. It was actually an uncursed ring of poison resistance and probably would have saved your life. Too bad you weren't wearing it.
Well, anyway, back to the character creation screen with you. Do you want NetHack to automatically select a role, race, gender, and alignment for you?
> Why not concentrate on tablets and phones first?
Because people expect significantly more from desktops than from phones.
The article says this: > The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer.
That would make any sense at all if, in addition to processing power, the phone also had multiple gigabytes of primary memory and could utilize multiple peripherals for input (keyboard, mouse, etc) and output (monitors, printers, speaker systems), store hundreds of gigabytes of data, connect to multiple networks (including high-speed wired ones), and run desktop applications.
Traditionally, even the smartest phones aren't expected to do any of that. It isn't mostly the processing power that's holding them back.
> We support international observation of elections in other nations. > When it comes to us, it's only fair-play to say "sure, have at it".
I tend to agree with that. However, I don't live in Texas, and strangely enough I don't seem to have much pull with their state legislature, which is where the change would have to be made.
You mean Doom clones? I lost interest in those sometime in the late nineties after noticing that if you've played one you've essentially played them all. Though I do think the aalib version of Quake is a neat hack.
My desktop is fine. It uses precisely the resolution I want it to use on each monitor. Under no circumstances would I ever want an application window (other than the control panel that I use to set it up) to *mess* with that.
Then again, I also can't imagine circumstances where I would want an application window to be "fullscreen". (Maximized, yes, but maximized windows don't overlap my panels. That's important.)
Why do game developers always assume that my computer doesn't have any other purpose except to play their game? I've got other stuff on this computer -- stuff that is more important than the games. My computer is my alarm clock, my calendar, and a communication tool, among other things. Games had darned well better stay in the window I put them in, or I won't be playing them.
There wouldn't be any point in fixing the vote. It ain't broke. Fixing it would be a no-op.
Everybody already knows the outcome. Texas voted for McCain with a twelve-point spread. They haven't gone Dem since the seventies (specifically, they voted for Carter, along with virtually the entire South). You don't need a graduate degree in statistics to figure out the pattern here. Texas isn't going to vote for Obama. They just don't swing that way.
The guys you accuse of intending to fix the vote belong to the party that's going to win in Texas anyway, inevitably, by a substantial margin.
> Are you suggesting that Texas doesn't need fair elections?
If Texan elections were tampered with, resulting in any outcome other than what it would be anyway, it would be extremely obvious, especially in a close election. Texas is not even remotely a swing state. Anybody who doesn't already know where their electoral votes are going is either a moron or just hasn't taken any interest at all in US politics.
There is, by the way, nothing really wrong with not being interested in US politics. I'm a US citizen, and our politics bore me. If I didn't live here, I doubt if I'd pay very close attention. But I think we can safely assume that international election observers are not in this category. Thus, either they are morons or else they know perfectly well that looking for fraud in the upcoming election in Texas is a wild goose chase but are making a pretense of wanting to do so anyway. My first guess would be the latter. They're not genuinely interested in observing anything: they just want to make a political point about their disapproval of US politics in general and the political right in particular. Well, election laws in most US states are designed to prevent people from hanging around the polling booths trying to make a political point. We call that "interfering with the election," and we don't allow it.
> I'm curious why you'd think that voters would feel > intimidated by international observers.
Everyone knows how Europeans feel about US politics. On the internet, where geography doesn't usually make itself evident, we can still easily tell who the Europeans are every time anything political comes up. They are consistently rude and make themselves odious, criticizing things they obviously don't understand at all, complaining that our leaders aren't doing about things we wouldn't ever want them doing (or that they *are* doing things Europeans don't want them doing, as if somehow that should matter), and just generally making out like the US really should try to be more European and less American. In fact, if I had to pick a single word that characterizes European political views, the word would be "anti-American".
Do Americans visit European web forums and loudly criticize your choice in elected officials, airing American complaints about whether your leaders are doing their job in a way that suits us? Ha. We barely even know who your elected officials *are* most of the time. Sometimes we don't. Why would we care? Why would we poke our noses into someone else's business, especially when the business in question is something as boring as politics?
Let's make a deal: you guys elect whoever you want in your countries, and we'll elect whoever we want in ours.
> The Supremacy Clause clearly states that federal > law trumps state law wherever they conflict.
Yes, but in this case federal law very clearly says that you have to follow state law on this matter and that the federal government has no jurisdiction. The supremacy clause won't help you, because your argument is in conflict with federal law.
> 2. Treaties trump federal law wherever they conflict.
Only if they are ratified by the US Congress and do not violate the US Constitution.
The supremacy clause requires that the US constitution and federal law be followed primarily, with state law being secondary. However, under the US constitution and US federal law, elections are required to be run by the state, and the federal government has no jurisdiction over these kinds of procedural matters. State law is the primary authority because federal law _makes_ it the primary authority for this. The supremacy clause is really only relevant where there's some conflict between state and federal law, but there's no conflict here: federal law says you do what the state law requires.
If the OCSE agreement had been made into a federal law by the US Congress, then there would be a constitutionality question that would need to be examined by the Supreme Court. To the best of my knowledge, however, Congress hasn't done that. Consequently, tthis matter can be easily resolved by a lower court. Frankly, it won't even go to court unless somebody's a complete idiot, because there's no case.
> not a lower level law specified by a bunch of little > upstarts that think they have more power than they do.
Technically, under US law, elections are required to be run by the state. The federal government specifies the date of the election and certain other things but has no jurisdiction at all over procedural matters such as this. Legally speaking, the people you're calling "upstarts" are in fact the primary authority in this matter.
In fact, state law even governs the details of how electors for federal offices are selected, which explains how it is that a couple of states can choose to split their electoral votes proportionally even though most states assign all of their electoral votes to the overall winner at the state level. The federal government has never had any say in this. It's a "reserved power", meaning the US constitution dictates that it falls under state or local law, NOT federal law.
(Of course, education is also a reserved power, and yet the federal government manages to worm its way in by means of handing out federal tax money with strings attached which was never ruled unconstitutional when it first started to happen, became accepted practice, and is now so thoroughly entrenched that it can never be eliminated. Fortunately, this has not been allowed to happen when it comes to elections. If elections were "encouraged" the way the US DOE "encourages" education, we would indeed be a banana republic.)
> Additionally, why should there be unsupervised "observers" standing > around a polling place and potentially intimidating voters
Well, yes, that's exactly the kind of thing the law was intended to prevent. The same law would apply to politically motivated domestic non-profit groups that want to "observe" the elections to prove that their candidate should have been elected or whatever.
The law was not intended to prevent the UN from ascertaining whether the election was fair. It was intended to prevent anyone from making the election unfair.
And yeah, if the UN observers are Europeans, as would be typical, I think you will find a lot of Texans significantly more distrustful of them than of the local Board of Elections people who run the election. Heck, that would be true here in Ohio, which does not lean to the right (the opposite side of the political spectrum from almost all Europeans) like Texas does. (Ohio is just about as balanced a swing state as you can find in the US. Call us fair-weather fans if you want. Another way to look at it is that liberals and conservatives live together and work together and get along together here. We even put up with Michigan fans.)
Microsoft's finest products are all hardware. I use one of their peripheral devices (an optical multi-button wheel mouse) at home, and it's great. It works right out of the box, no hassles, no need to hunt down any drivers or anything, with every OS I've tried since I bought it. (Currently I'm running lenny.) It tracks on pretty much any surface, and the buttons don't stick or anything. For the level of quality, it was priced very competitively. Microsoft makes great hardware.
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> Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore.
The complaining stems from the fact that something really genuinely good has been deliberately taken away from us. Gnome 1.x was much better than any of the other options. It did everything we wanted a desktop environment to do. It had all the features we wanted, and every single one of them was fully configurable.
Then someone decided "options are bad" and started taking it all away. At first we thought it was just because of the rewrite (when they rewrote 2.0 to use the new GTK), so we hung in there, thinking we'd eventually get our features back... but then they started taking away more and more and more. By the time we realized what was going on, it was too late to fork 1.x, because it would no longer compile against contemporary libraries. (Gnome has always had eleventy bajillion dependencies.)
Then in the 3.x series they started inserting more and more *unwanted* features. I don't just mean unnecessary features that I personally don't have any need for; it goes beyond that. I'm talking about features that are actively intrusive and cannot be turned off, like the way it now insists on popping up extra windows you don't want while you're in the middle of trying to work on other things, and this behavior cannot be disabled. Gnome has become so horrible, it beggars the imagination to realize that every release they still manage somehow to find a way to make it yet worse.
It's really sad. Gnome used to be something I could not just use but also happily recommend. Now it's so awful, I can't imagine anyone actually liking it.
Back in the day, you could by Jarts. The package included six rather heavy pointy metal spikes with plastic fins on them (three each with two different colors of plastic fins), front-weighted so that they would land point first when thrown, and heavy enough that they would pierce into even fairly hard soil and stick upright; yellow plastic goal rings; and instructions.
IIRC, the instructions actually called for two people to stand at opposite ends of the yard, with one of the yellow target rings for the other guy to aim at laying on the ground in front of your feet, and then you'd throw the Jarts toward one another in an attempt to land them in the target. Or maybe that's just how we played, when we visited Grandpa and Grandma's house when I was a kid. (They didn't have a lot of other toys around, because they raised their kids in the era before it was expected that every child get new toys every year; but they did have an old set of Jarts, so we amused ourselves with those. Occasionally we even talked Grandpa into playing with us.)
Anyway, my point is, none of us ever actually got hurt with those things, but the risk we were taking was obviously rather larger than with these magnet toys, and we were well behaved. If you gave Jarts to a group of athletically inclined kids with a taste for violence, it's virtually a sure thing someone would become injured.
All you need to do is get a small brick wall (four feet wide by six feet tall is enough) set up in the network administrator's office. Next to this set a bucket, and keep the bucket full of rocks. The rocks should be small but as sharp and pointy as possible. First thing each day, have the network administrator put one or two of the rocks inside each of his shoes and keep it there for the rest of his shift, then periodically have him bang his head against the brick wall.
This will adequately simulate all the really important aspects of the experience of working with MSAD. Technically you could also use Samba, but it isn't necessary.
> this is not more censorship, it can actually be seen as less.
The amount of censorship that is actually happening is the same. The difference is, now it's easier for people to find out that it is happening, and (at least in general terms) why.
So while it's not less censorship as such, it is an improvement.
> I couldn't tell you where ANY pay phones around here are.
Try looking. They're often unobtrusive. Common sites include shopping centers, banks, fast food restaurants (particularly ones that are part of a large franchise chain), and local government buildings. The payphone may be outside the building (possibly behind it in some cases) or tucked away down a hall near the restrooms. Of course, not EVERY restaurant or bank or shopping center or public building has one; but some of them do. Look around.
I happen to know of two of them within two minutes' walk of here in different directions, and I wasn't actually paying attention (because I'm less than a ten minute walk from home, so it's kind of moot). If I made a point of actually looking I could probably find more.
Granted, if you're out hiking across the cornfields or through the woods you may need to go a bit farther, until you find signs of civilization.
> So the top usability improvement that I would like to see is for them to
> accept payment using a prepaid card like in many European countries.
The reason North American payphones don't generally have that is because almost all of them were already in place by the mid twentieth century (fifties, sixties, seventies at the latest) -- prior to the widespread adoption of credit cards (in the eighties and nineties). By the time prepaid cards were at all common, so were cellphones.
Things happened in somewhat a different order in Europe. This probably varies a bit from country to country, but in general my impression is that prepaid cards were widely adopted somewhat earlier (partly because European banks were never legally required to offer checking account services on reasonable terms, so people were much more desperate for payment options; there were also cultural reasons and some just plain happenstance), and cellular networks arose several years later than in America (because key technology for that was test-marketed out of Chicago initially and so caught on in America soonest -- this also explains some of the differences in how calls to cellphones are billed in America versus Europe).
With all that said, you actually *can* use a calling card at a North American payphone (I have done so), but this fact is not obvious from looking at the payphone (typically, instructions were printed on the back of the card or in the documentation that came with it), and most Americans don't have calling cards anyway. It used to be that almost all college students had them (because their parents wanted to get phone calls, and calling cards were cheaper than collect calls), but between the rise of ubiquitous cellphones and the increasing percentage of idiot parents who give their kids full-blown credit cards "for emergencies", calling cards are a lot less common now.
I don't happen to know whether it is possible to use a more general-purpose card (credit card, checking account card, etc) at a payphone. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, but I don't know for sure or know how to go about it. If you're genuinely interested in this capability, you could at least try asking at your bank. It's possible they may have an answer.
Unfortunately, between inflation and shifting economies of scale (which have made the relative cost of calls at a payphone call, always higher than an equivalent normal call, even more expensive now), just keeping a quarter in the ashtray or glove compartment for emergencies is really no longer a really viable option. If payphones all took bills you could keep a five tucked away somewhere (in the central console, in the pocket on the back of a seat, between the seat cushions, in an envelope under a floor mat, whatever), but as I said above the payphones in America are largely older models, no longer used often enough to pay for a lot of upgrades, so they frequently don't have the modern features you see in e.g. pop machines. Also, most people would be tempted to get that five out and use it for something else, because it represents more purchasing power (for things other than phone calls) than the quarter you needed in the eighties (e.g., a long-distance call at a payphone now costs more than a McDonald's milkshake).
In a true emergency (in the personal sense -- it doesn't have to qualify for calling 911), you can still make a collect call from a payphone. This does require that you know someone who will take a collect call from you, so try not to burn ALL your bridges.
But yeah, if you're interested in using payphones to make casual garden-variety calls, e.g., to have somebody pick you up from a carpooling drop-off, you might consider looking into getting a calling card. I'm pretty sure those are still available. Even better, if you memorize the number, you don't have to actually have the card with you to use it. You do have to be able to find a payphone though.
A third possibility is that it's a rotating substitution cipher (perhaps using Enigma). The part at the end could indicate encryption settings, either directly or via lookup in a schedule. This would make it similar to what the German navy used, for example.
The thing that's going to make the encryption hard to break is the fact that the message is so short and was recovered in isolation.
> I ... look at my feet when interacting with other people
That means you're an introverted geek.
If you were an extroverted geek, you'd look at the other person's feet, or at least the floor midway between their feet and yours.
> Didn't Enlightenment (and Raster himself) get purged from the
> GNOME project because the community turned on him because
> of the poor quality of his code?
I think it was more that the Gnome people were (at that time)
determined to have multiple possible Gnome-compliant window
managers so the user would have a choice. (This was _before_
the anti-choice jihad that brought us Gnome 2.) Their plan, at
the time, was to feature a different default window manager in
each release. After Enlightenment, the next one was Sawfish,
which I still use, on account of the fact that it's much better
than the current default Gnome window manager at doing
what I want a window manager to do and staying out of my
way otherwise.
I experimented with going back to Enlightenment, but the
old version had not been maintained sufficiently to really
work on a modern system (e.g. it does not interact as it
should with modern versions of gnome-panel; sawfish on
the other hand does that just fine and thus can be used
as a drop-in replacement for metacity or whatever the new
default wm is in Gnome), and the new Enlightenment,
besides still being in alpha, was also trying to be an entire
desktop environment, one with a new organizational
paradigm to replace traditional overlapping windows,
and that wasn't really what I was looking for, personally.
So I stuck with Sawfish. It works for me. It does what
I want a window manager to do, and it stays out of my
way apart from that.
Let me guess: you added a boolean not to the conditional that checks to see whether you're playing in non-scoring debug mode when you die, so that if you're not it treats you as though you were and asks you if you want to die (yes/no)?
Indeed, a lot of NetHack players would consider this the only legitimate way to play. Anything else is cheating -- unless you're a developer legitimately operating in non-scoring debug mode in order to test new features or attempt to reproduce bugs.
Oh, you _died_? Well, then, the game will consider possibly leaving a tombstone with your name on it and how you died so that potentially up to one future player will see it and know your fate. Do you want your possessions identified? You know that unidentified iron ring you were carrying, that you couldn't get Slinky to step on? Turns out he was just being fickle. It was actually an uncursed ring of poison resistance and probably would have saved your life. Too bad you weren't wearing it.
Well, anyway, back to the character creation screen with you. Do you want NetHack to automatically select a role, race, gender, and alignment for you?
> Why not concentrate on tablets and phones first?
Because people expect significantly more from desktops than from phones.
The article says this:
> The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer.
That would make any sense at all if, in addition to processing power, the phone also had multiple gigabytes of primary memory and could utilize multiple peripherals for input (keyboard, mouse, etc) and output (monitors, printers, speaker systems), store hundreds of gigabytes of data, connect to multiple networks (including high-speed wired ones), and run desktop applications.
Traditionally, even the smartest phones aren't expected to do any of that. It isn't mostly the processing power that's holding them back.
> We support international observation of elections in other nations.
> When it comes to us, it's only fair-play to say "sure, have at it".
I tend to agree with that. However, I don't live in Texas, and strangely enough I don't seem to have much pull with their state legislature, which is where the change would have to be made.
> for more advanced (read: 3D) games
You mean Doom clones? I lost interest in those sometime in the late nineties after noticing that if you've played one you've essentially played them all. Though I do think the aalib version of Quake is a neat hack.
Actually, personally, I don't eat gummi bears at all. I've never cared for them.
(This does not stop me from getting fat eating other foods, of course...)
Wait...
There are people who eat gummy bears one at a time (as opposed to just tossing handfuls of them into your gaping maw)?
Huh. I learn somethin' new every day. Thanks, Slashdot.
My desktop is fine. It uses precisely the resolution I want it to use on each monitor. Under no circumstances would I ever want an application window (other than the control panel that I use to set it up) to *mess* with that.
Then again, I also can't imagine circumstances where I would want an application window to be "fullscreen". (Maximized, yes, but maximized windows don't overlap my panels. That's important.)
Why do game developers always assume that my computer doesn't have any other purpose except to play their game? I've got other stuff on this computer -- stuff that is more important than the games. My computer is my alarm clock, my calendar, and a communication tool, among other things. Games had darned well better stay in the window I put them in, or I won't be playing them.
You do know we're talking about Texas, right?
There wouldn't be any point in fixing the vote. It ain't broke. Fixing it would be a no-op.
Everybody already knows the outcome. Texas voted for McCain with a twelve-point spread. They haven't gone Dem since the seventies (specifically, they voted for Carter, along with virtually the entire South). You don't need a graduate degree in statistics to figure out the pattern here. Texas isn't going to vote for Obama. They just don't swing that way.
The guys you accuse of intending to fix the vote belong to the party that's going to win in Texas anyway, inevitably, by a substantial margin.
> Are you suggesting that Texas doesn't need fair elections?
If Texan elections were tampered with, resulting in any outcome other than what it would be anyway, it would be extremely obvious, especially in a close election. Texas is not even remotely a swing state. Anybody who doesn't already know where their electoral votes are going is either a moron or just hasn't taken any interest at all in US politics.
There is, by the way, nothing really wrong with not being interested in US politics. I'm a US citizen, and our politics bore me. If I didn't live here, I doubt if I'd pay very close attention. But I think we can safely assume that international election observers are not in this category. Thus, either they are morons or else they know perfectly well that looking for fraud in the upcoming election in Texas is a wild goose chase but are making a pretense of wanting to do so anyway. My first guess would be the latter. They're not genuinely interested in observing anything: they just want to make a political point about their disapproval of US politics in general and the political right in particular. Well, election laws in most US states are designed to prevent people from hanging around the polling booths trying to make a political point. We call that "interfering with the election," and we don't allow it.
> I'm curious why you'd think that voters would feel
> intimidated by international observers.
Everyone knows how Europeans feel about US politics. On the internet, where geography doesn't usually make itself evident, we can still easily tell who the Europeans are every time anything political comes up. They are consistently rude and make themselves odious, criticizing things they obviously don't understand at all, complaining that our leaders aren't doing about things we wouldn't ever want them doing (or that they *are* doing things Europeans don't want them doing, as if somehow that should matter), and just generally making out like the US really should try to be more European and less American. In fact, if I had to pick a single word that characterizes European political views, the word would be "anti-American".
Do Americans visit European web forums and loudly criticize your choice in elected officials, airing American complaints about whether your leaders are doing their job in a way that suits us? Ha. We barely even know who your elected officials *are* most of the time. Sometimes we don't. Why would we care? Why would we poke our noses into someone else's business, especially when the business in question is something as boring as politics?
Let's make a deal: you guys elect whoever you want in your countries, and we'll elect whoever we want in ours.
> The Supremacy Clause clearly states that federal
> law trumps state law wherever they conflict.
Yes, but in this case federal law very clearly says that you have to follow state law on this matter and that the federal government has no jurisdiction. The supremacy clause won't help you, because your argument is in conflict with federal law.
> 2. Treaties trump federal law wherever they conflict.
Only if they are ratified by the US Congress and do not violate the US Constitution.
The supremacy clause requires that the US constitution and federal law be followed primarily, with state law being secondary. However, under the US constitution and US federal law, elections are required to be run by the state, and the federal government has no jurisdiction over these kinds of procedural matters. State law is the primary authority because federal law _makes_ it the primary authority for this. The supremacy clause is really only relevant where there's some conflict between state and federal law, but there's no conflict here: federal law says you do what the state law requires.
If the OCSE agreement had been made into a federal law by the US Congress, then there would be a constitutionality question that would need to be examined by the Supreme Court. To the best of my knowledge, however, Congress hasn't done that. Consequently, tthis matter can be easily resolved by a lower court. Frankly, it won't even go to court unless somebody's a complete idiot, because there's no case.
> not a lower level law specified by a bunch of little
> upstarts that think they have more power than they do.
Technically, under US law, elections are required to be run by the state. The federal government specifies the date of the election and certain other things but has no jurisdiction at all over procedural matters such as this. Legally speaking, the people you're calling "upstarts" are in fact the primary authority in this matter.
In fact, state law even governs the details of how electors for federal offices are selected, which explains how it is that a couple of states can choose to split their electoral votes proportionally even though most states assign all of their electoral votes to the overall winner at the state level. The federal government has never had any say in this. It's a "reserved power", meaning the US constitution dictates that it falls under state or local law, NOT federal law.
(Of course, education is also a reserved power, and yet the federal government manages to worm its way in by means of handing out federal tax money with strings attached which was never ruled unconstitutional when it first started to happen, became accepted practice, and is now so thoroughly entrenched that it can never be eliminated. Fortunately, this has not been allowed to happen when it comes to elections. If elections were "encouraged" the way the US DOE "encourages" education, we would indeed be a banana republic.)
> Additionally, why should there be unsupervised "observers" standing
> around a polling place and potentially intimidating voters
Well, yes, that's exactly the kind of thing the law was intended to prevent. The same law would apply to politically motivated domestic non-profit groups that want to "observe" the elections to prove that their candidate should have been elected or whatever.
The law was not intended to prevent the UN from ascertaining whether the election was fair. It was intended to prevent anyone from making the election unfair.
And yeah, if the UN observers are Europeans, as would be typical, I think you will find a lot of Texans significantly more distrustful of them than of the local Board of Elections people who run the election. Heck, that would be true here in Ohio, which does not lean to the right (the opposite side of the political spectrum from almost all Europeans) like Texas does. (Ohio is just about as balanced a swing state as you can find in the US. Call us fair-weather fans if you want. Another way to look at it is that liberals and conservatives live together and work together and get along together here. We even put up with Michigan fans.)
Microsoft's finest products are all hardware. I use one of their peripheral devices (an optical multi-button wheel mouse) at home, and it's great. It works right out of the box, no hassles, no need to hunt down any drivers or anything, with every OS I've tried since I bought it. (Currently I'm running lenny.) It tracks on pretty much any surface, and the buttons don't stick or anything. For the level of quality, it was priced very competitively. Microsoft makes great hardware.
It's their software I Do Not Want.