You keep operating under the assumption that I'm a fire breathing birther.
Obama was most likely born in the US.
The biggest amount of birther conspiracy that he might be guilty of is his mother making sure he was a US citizen on paper in order to make sure he had access to a life in the US even though she and he were living abroad.
Hell I wasn't born or raised in the US either (military brat), but unlike the President it'll take me all of 15 minutes to show you my orignal German and US birth certificates as well as my State Department Naturalization papers.
Ok so instead of ad-hominem, then you were going with good ol sterotyping.
My argument was that the scan was crap, and it is, but I think I've found a valid reason why it is so bad.
After doing a lot of digging. It hard finding any real info between the mouthbreathers on boths sides screaming at each other.
The document provided by the State of Hawaii is not a scan of the orginal, according to a post I saw, it is most likely a reprint off of microfilm, which was then scanned and released onto the web. That explains the water marking not matching the bend in the page, because it was a picture of a page in a book that was printed onto the security paper. It explains why his copy doesn't look like any of the other dozens of other copies on the internet from the same state. It explains why it looks brand new. It also explains why there were layers (from editing, yes the thing was doctored) because the quality of the micro film was probably so piss poor it was near impossible to read. If the film wasn't properly developed (I was a film photographer in a past life) that also explains why the darkness of the signatures and print vary all over the document.
So in otherwords the long form they provided is not an orginal. Again failure to communicate on the part of the Media and the President.
Whether or not he is a citizen, yes he probably is.
Is he a typical liberal politician from Chicago. He most certainly is. Which is why I didn't vote for him last time and won't vote for him next time.
And if you're at the point where you need to see the ink and fiber to be convinced, you're most likely not going to be convinced anyway.
Ad hominem arguments are not valid points when debating a topic.
My point is that the document they put out is crap and ambigous and it would be very easy for them to re-post a better copy. I've even stated exactly what level of quality would satisfy me.
Like I said, if someone wanted to go through the effort of producing a fake document, it would be fairly easy to produce one with realistic ink and paper.
Well maybe they should have, but instead we have this.
I'll tell you what. Make the President's requirements the same as the military's. He is after all the head of the military and is privy to litterally all clasified materials.
If that was the case he still would not have provided enough documentation.
My particular "birther" thoughts have nothing to do with race and everything to do with all the bullshit I'm constantly having to do and hoops that I have to jump through just to prove who I am...as a member of the military.
I could be standing in front of a person's desk in UNIFORM, with ID in hand, on a MILITARY BASE and they still expect to see all my orginal paper work not some half-assed digital copy if they didn't have it in their system.
So please take your tired "because he's black" arguments and stick them some place uncomfortable.
If he was black, white, yellow, red, or purple if he pulled the same stunt with a recruiter, or trying to get a security clearance, or a government passport they'd show him the door.
We aren't talking about the insane. We are talking about the other 80% of the population.
I'm glad they released the birth certificate. I'm unhappy that the piece of shit is of such low resolution that I can not with certainty poke holes in the nut job's arguments and get them to shut up about the whole thing at work because the President's people are incompetent and lazy.
"Sure, the resolution is quite poor, but all the information on the scan is legible, so why complain?"
Frankly its insulting, the only way it could have been worse was if it he pulled it out of his pocket wadded up and chucked it in our general direction.
I look the scanned copy and all I have is more questions. Not the scribble marks or that fact that it says "African" (personally i find that hard to be a conspiracy seeing as Hawaii is used to dealing with foreigners, we aren't talking about the deep South here). The fact that the resolution is so shitty and has so many compression artifacts that you can not tell one way or the other if it was fake/real. I've been doing digital archiving and editing of family documents since I got my first computer 18 years ago. What I'm seeing online as "The Proof" leaves me wanting more.
I want to be able to zoom in and see the paper fiber texture, the dust that tends show up on the scanner, the ink and pencil marks sitting on top of the surface of the page. Thing that are EXTREMELY EASY to decern from even a poor scan of an old style document.
If this is big conspiracy, not that I'm saying that it is, at least show the puplic a tiny amount of respect and call in some proper forgers. This low rez crap they've pawned off is insulting.
If the media would do a better job releasing the "news" to us then maybe the public would be more likely to believe what they were told.
The release of the "long form" birth certificate is a perfect example. In a day in age when someone says "Show me what you have" and then you take 3 years to release the info" when the correct response should have been, "hold on give me a second to scan it." People are justified in being skeptical of your motives and your message over something that should have been "news" for no more than 24 hours.
So they finally scan the damn thing and release it. People take one look at it and realize the thing looks like shit and justifiably immediately say "THAT LOOKS FAKE!"
They are justified because of all the hair pulling and stalling and name calling and the simple fact that which ever idiot flunky scanned the damn thing used a PDF file generator and had the compression settings set way too high. So to the untrained eye the thing looks wrong. (Even to the trained eye it looks fishy.)
Again the media and the politicians could have fixed the problem immediately by rescanning it and releasing it as a high resolution uncompressed TIFF or other file type. Something that would have taken only hours to do. This would have helped most of the general public understand easier and would have taken away most if not all the doubt, .
But that is not what we get. Again what we get is the media and the politicians wagging their fingers at us calling us names and calling everyone paranoid and racists when it was they who failed to communicate the information on both ocassions in a timely and clear manner.
People are fed up with this crap, so why should they trust them any more when they have repeatedly proven themselves to be at best incompetent much less trust worthy?
" Now, the U.S. economy has a nasty problem : much of the increased prosperity is not equitably shared with the people who CREATE the prosperity. A corporate executive may perform a valuable service, but he is not worth thousands or millions of times the other managers and engineers and other people who make his decisions reality. If this problem were reduced, and it were straightforward for people to move to higher tech careers without artificial barriers making it so inefficient, then things would work a lot smoother."
If they wish to share in the increase they need to spend less money on pot, over priced housing, and smart phones and more money on stocks. Also more people could move into higher tech careers if they had a real education, otherwise they are nothing more than automation waiting to happen.
Most true inovators own their own companies outright and are beyond wealthy. Others who are moving up the corporate ladder in a mega corp are one step above being a drone even with an engineering degree. No real risk equals no real reward. Now you know why CEOs of said corps get paid so much and the drones get the scraps.
It's not so much of a Lorri driver plopping down a cheap Garmin, it's more due to the fact that most of the roads in England can be easily described as "quaint" and "scenic" which is Latin for "sucks giant goat balls".
In the sixities and the seventies England there were massive road project just like in the US, but most were killed beyond a few major motorways after people freaked out about what it was doing to towns and the country side.
England is mostly little villages scattered everywhere. Diverting traffic around them means the death of the local service industry and going through them means destroying not just one but dozens of villages for every 100 or so miles of road.
The Lorrie (truck drivers) have no choice but to take the little roads, since there usually the only way to get to most towns.
Think about how much of a stink people make about runing a road through a 50-100 year old area of a town in the US and now image how people would react to that if they were 500-800+ year old towns (like nearly every thing is) in England.
Maybe it should just have a moron mode as a default factory setting, that it only mildly difficult to turn off. When on it that won't allow them to put in destinations that are more than 5 miles from their home. That should keep 95% of the idiots using GPS from straying to far away.
Step one: bathe on a regular basis, as in daily, this includes brushing one's teeth.
Step two: include activities that might occassional result in eposure to UV and body perspiration (see step one).
Step three: partake in tribal ritual known as social drinking with people outside one's immediate peer group.
Step three.one: wear a shirt to said social gathering, that has buttons, is not black, and does not have a saying on it that only anime/manga fans would get.
Step four: save the high brow subjects for those who can apreciated them, such as in who shot first Han or Greedo or how string theory is important to our daily lives.
Invasion of privacy is not just people seeing your wiener while you pee or snooping around your house when you are not home.
It's applies to anything that acuses you of something or demands proof of something before you are allowed to preceed. You know the whole you are innocent until proven guilty thing and all.
This set up assumes you are guilty, ie the car won't start, until you prove otherwise.
Besides cars have gotten annoying enough already, you want to add another $1000 to the price of a car to save what 9000 people a year? At 7 million cars a year that would be 7 billion dollars a year. That's a round $750,000 per person "saved" per year.
I'm thinking that the grand bulk of the 9000 are actually giant idiots and are not worth $10 much less $750,000. So if we narrow it down even more to those that are "worth" it that drives up the price per person even higher,let's say 10% now we are talking about $7,500,000 dollars per "save"
That's the problem with softheaded types they don't think it through. A seat belt is an easy fix. It works on the very cheap. I'm thinking there are much better things to spend our money on. Like mandatory birth control for all mouthbreathers. Which would probably take care of the whole 9000 per year killed along with a whole rash of other social ills.
Besides what's to keep a drunk from having their kids touch the wheel to start the car? There is a great side affect, so instead of the kids being parentless they are now dead too.
Natural selection is a good thing. If we kill off all the wolves in the world then the herd will grow retarded....
....damn it too late.
I'm pretty sure if we eliminate a main cause of death for people in their twenties they'll just come up with a new one. They're a pretty creative bunch I'm told.
If anything we should make it more dangerous. The whole herd being retarded thing and all.
How about not being allowed to drive anything but a motocycle till you are 21. I wonder how many could actually make it through that gauntlet.
I want a diesel-electric hybrid 4x4. Not a cross-over, aka stationwagon, or a LUVY (luxury utility vehicle), aka a mini-van for people who think they are too cool for mini-vans, and are barely capable of the utility portion, but an actual off-road 4x4 vehicle that gets over 30mpg.
Little toy cars that niether look good, perform well, or are priced within reason interest me at all. Ther are a few companies building electric motorcycles that are VERY interesting (Brammo), but unfortunately I just bought a new bike last year and won't be in the market again for a while.
I'm sure there are improvements to be made, but he is the President and does legitimately require a good bit of support infrastructure.
Or here is a crazy thought, he could just stay in Washington and get some work done, instead of going on vacation every other quarter and flying around campaigning for himself and his party.
Yep and a little side benefit to "subsidies" in the form of roads is the fact that all the rest of us get to use them too.
If they poured all that money into rails, you would be stuck on the rail road's schedule, the rail roads's trains, the rail road's desinations, etc, etc
Most Americans would respond to the return to that kind of control over our lives with a hearty "Go Fuck Yourself" rather than being stuck in public transporation.
The rail system is just fine for non-prioirty large bulk cargo, it just so happens to suck, and always has, for just about everything else.
This is hardly a tragedy. Considering how many books range from cheap to free on the Kindle, it makes libraries redundant.
Close the libraries and use the money to subsidize the purchase of readers for a town's residents and school children. The next itteration of basic eBooks will most likely drop below $100. Once that happens print sales will be decimated.
Sometimes I wonder how much of the new stuff rolling down the line is actually any better than the older stuff. Change for the sake of change is usually pointless.
I work the "high tech" world of aviation, where bleeding edge means tech from the 1990s.
We have the same problem though, guys that are pros with the hard wired 60-70s stuff don't want to learn how to troubleshoot the newer networked systems. They still command a premium though since those older systems can still be cracked open and repaired with a soldering iron, and no body, I mean nobody ever throws away a perfectly good airplane.
The young guys may be able to jump right in to the newer gear and be comfortable using the software, most don't have a clue how to actually troubleshoot wiring and components without it. So the whole thing sort of balances out.
Getting more pay just because you know the ins and the outs of the business. That experience is usually much more valuable that just knowing a few new things. Getting paid more just because you show up to work every day and manage to breath I think not.
You want to get paid the big bucks then get off your ass and get your nose in the books, that or go into management.
Yawn,
Saying that tablets are going to displace all the PCs in the world is like saying you don't need a chain saw just because they invented the Dremel.
Different tools for different jobs.
A tablet is near useless beyond websurfing, a little bit of media watching, and a minor amount of gaming. A market already serviced and heading towards saturation by smart phones.
They are too expensive, too fragile, too short lived (batteries), and too easy to loose. Until they come in packs of ten for $100 I can't see them becoming all that common.
Why the obsession with alternate liquid fuels? Switch to methane and you kill five birds with one stone.
1. The infrastructure to deliver it is already in place and is far less complicated than say what is needed for a hydrogen system.
2. The conversion costs are small and will work with most vehicles. Pickup trucks being the easiest to convert. (Cool trucks, no gay hybrids required.)
3. It's readily availabe just about everywhere. You can drill a hole in the ground to get it. You can make it with crop and animal waste on the farm. You can make it from sewage waste in the city. You can collect it as a by product from the petrolium industry. You could make your own fuel in your backyard if you were so inclined and had the space.
4. It is environment friendly. No bad polutants when you burn it and can come from "carbon neutral" sources if you still buy into such things.
5. We can make it in our own country and stop funding the overseas assholes. Let them try to eat their oil after we stop buying and see how far that gets them.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama was most likely born in the US.
The biggest amount of birther conspiracy that he might be guilty of is his mother making sure he was a US citizen on paper in order to make sure he had access to a life in the US even though she and he were living abroad.
Hell I wasn't born or raised in the US either (military brat), but unlike the President it'll take me all of 15 minutes to show you my orignal German and US birth certificates as well as my State Department Naturalization papers.
My argument was that the scan was crap, and it is, but I think I've found a valid reason why it is so bad.
After doing a lot of digging. It hard finding any real info between the mouthbreathers on boths sides screaming at each other.
The document provided by the State of Hawaii is not a scan of the orginal, according to a post I saw, it is most likely a reprint off of microfilm, which was then scanned and released onto the web. That explains the water marking not matching the bend in the page, because it was a picture of a page in a book that was printed onto the security paper. It explains why his copy doesn't look like any of the other dozens of other copies on the internet from the same state. It explains why it looks brand new. It also explains why there were layers (from editing, yes the thing was doctored) because the quality of the micro film was probably so piss poor it was near impossible to read. If the film wasn't properly developed (I was a film photographer in a past life) that also explains why the darkness of the signatures and print vary all over the document.
So in otherwords the long form they provided is not an orginal. Again failure to communicate on the part of the Media and the President.
Whether or not he is a citizen, yes he probably is.
Is he a typical liberal politician from Chicago. He most certainly is. Which is why I didn't vote for him last time and won't vote for him next time.
Ad hominem arguments are not valid points when debating a topic.
My point is that the document they put out is crap and ambigous and it would be very easy for them to re-post a better copy. I've even stated exactly what level of quality would satisfy me.
Like I said, if someone wanted to go through the effort of producing a fake document, it would be fairly easy to produce one with realistic ink and paper.
Well maybe they should have, but instead we have this.
If that was the case he still would not have provided enough documentation.
My particular "birther" thoughts have nothing to do with race and everything to do with all the bullshit I'm constantly having to do and hoops that I have to jump through just to prove who I am...as a member of the military.
I could be standing in front of a person's desk in UNIFORM, with ID in hand, on a MILITARY BASE and they still expect to see all my orginal paper work not some half-assed digital copy if they didn't have it in their system.
So please take your tired "because he's black" arguments and stick them some place uncomfortable.
If he was black, white, yellow, red, or purple if he pulled the same stunt with a recruiter, or trying to get a security clearance, or a government passport they'd show him the door.
I'm glad they released the birth certificate. I'm unhappy that the piece of shit is of such low resolution that I can not with certainty poke holes in the nut job's arguments and get them to shut up about the whole thing at work because the President's people are incompetent and lazy.
Frankly its insulting, the only way it could have been worse was if it he pulled it out of his pocket wadded up and chucked it in our general direction.
I look the scanned copy and all I have is more questions. Not the scribble marks or that fact that it says "African" (personally i find that hard to be a conspiracy seeing as Hawaii is used to dealing with foreigners, we aren't talking about the deep South here). The fact that the resolution is so shitty and has so many compression artifacts that you can not tell one way or the other if it was fake/real. I've been doing digital archiving and editing of family documents since I got my first computer 18 years ago. What I'm seeing online as "The Proof" leaves me wanting more.
I want to be able to zoom in and see the paper fiber texture, the dust that tends show up on the scanner, the ink and pencil marks sitting on top of the surface of the page. Thing that are EXTREMELY EASY to decern from even a poor scan of an old style document.
If this is big conspiracy, not that I'm saying that it is, at least show the puplic a tiny amount of respect and call in some proper forgers. This low rez crap they've pawned off is insulting.
It's their job to be skeptical of power not to be an enabler or even worse cheerleader.
Which is why the average Joe rightfully believes little of what the media has to say these days.
The release of the "long form" birth certificate is a perfect example. In a day in age when someone says "Show me what you have" and then you take 3 years to release the info" when the correct response should have been, "hold on give me a second to scan it." People are justified in being skeptical of your motives and your message over something that should have been "news" for no more than 24 hours.
So they finally scan the damn thing and release it. People take one look at it and realize the thing looks like shit and justifiably immediately say "THAT LOOKS FAKE!"
They are justified because of all the hair pulling and stalling and name calling and the simple fact that which ever idiot flunky scanned the damn thing used a PDF file generator and had the compression settings set way too high. So to the untrained eye the thing looks wrong. (Even to the trained eye it looks fishy.)
Again the media and the politicians could have fixed the problem immediately by rescanning it and releasing it as a high resolution uncompressed TIFF or other file type. Something that would have taken only hours to do. This would have helped most of the general public understand easier and would have taken away most if not all the doubt, .
But that is not what we get. Again what we get is the media and the politicians wagging their fingers at us calling us names and calling everyone paranoid and racists when it was they who failed to communicate the information on both ocassions in a timely and clear manner.
People are fed up with this crap, so why should they trust them any more when they have repeatedly proven themselves to be at best incompetent much less trust worthy?
If they wish to share in the increase they need to spend less money on pot, over priced housing, and smart phones and more money on stocks. Also more people could move into higher tech careers if they had a real education, otherwise they are nothing more than automation waiting to happen.
Most true inovators own their own companies outright and are beyond wealthy. Others who are moving up the corporate ladder in a mega corp are one step above being a drone even with an engineering degree. No real risk equals no real reward. Now you know why CEOs of said corps get paid so much and the drones get the scraps.
The man is a fucking idiot....the end.
In the sixities and the seventies England there were massive road project just like in the US, but most were killed beyond a few major motorways after people freaked out about what it was doing to towns and the country side.
England is mostly little villages scattered everywhere. Diverting traffic around them means the death of the local service industry and going through them means destroying not just one but dozens of villages for every 100 or so miles of road.
The Lorrie (truck drivers) have no choice but to take the little roads, since there usually the only way to get to most towns. Think about how much of a stink people make about runing a road through a 50-100 year old area of a town in the US and now image how people would react to that if they were 500-800+ year old towns (like nearly every thing is) in England.
Maybe it should just have a moron mode as a default factory setting, that it only mildly difficult to turn off. When on it that won't allow them to put in destinations that are more than 5 miles from their home. That should keep 95% of the idiots using GPS from straying to far away.
I do give you big props for properly following the logic tree even though the program is flawed!
Step one: bathe on a regular basis, as in daily, this includes brushing one's teeth.
Step two: include activities that might occassional result in eposure to UV and body perspiration (see step one).
Step three: partake in tribal ritual known as social drinking with people outside one's immediate peer group.
Step three.one: wear a shirt to said social gathering, that has buttons, is not black, and does not have a saying on it that only anime/manga fans would get.
Step four: save the high brow subjects for those who can apreciated them, such as in who shot first Han or Greedo or how string theory is important to our daily lives.
Step five: Go back to step one and repete.
It's applies to anything that acuses you of something or demands proof of something before you are allowed to preceed. You know the whole you are innocent until proven guilty thing and all.
This set up assumes you are guilty, ie the car won't start, until you prove otherwise.
Besides cars have gotten annoying enough already, you want to add another $1000 to the price of a car to save what 9000 people a year? At 7 million cars a year that would be 7 billion dollars a year. That's a round $750,000 per person "saved" per year.
I'm thinking that the grand bulk of the 9000 are actually giant idiots and are not worth $10 much less $750,000. So if we narrow it down even more to those that are "worth" it that drives up the price per person even higher,let's say 10% now we are talking about $7,500,000 dollars per "save"
That's the problem with softheaded types they don't think it through. A seat belt is an easy fix. It works on the very cheap. I'm thinking there are much better things to spend our money on. Like mandatory birth control for all mouthbreathers. Which would probably take care of the whole 9000 per year killed along with a whole rash of other social ills.
Besides what's to keep a drunk from having their kids touch the wheel to start the car? There is a great side affect, so instead of the kids being parentless they are now dead too.
I'm pretty sure if we eliminate a main cause of death for people in their twenties they'll just come up with a new one. They're a pretty creative bunch I'm told.
If anything we should make it more dangerous. The whole herd being retarded thing and all.
How about not being allowed to drive anything but a motocycle till you are 21. I wonder how many could actually make it through that gauntlet.
and Liberals think everyone that disagrees with them to be racist Nazis.
At least the Tea Party guys don't want to take 3/4 of my paycheck and give it to some mouthbreather.
Little toy cars that niether look good, perform well, or are priced within reason interest me at all. Ther are a few companies building electric motorcycles that are VERY interesting (Brammo), but unfortunately I just bought a new bike last year and won't be in the market again for a while.
Or here is a crazy thought, he could just stay in Washington and get some work done, instead of going on vacation every other quarter and flying around campaigning for himself and his party.
If they poured all that money into rails, you would be stuck on the rail road's schedule, the rail roads's trains, the rail road's desinations, etc, etc
Most Americans would respond to the return to that kind of control over our lives with a hearty "Go Fuck Yourself" rather than being stuck in public transporation.
The rail system is just fine for non-prioirty large bulk cargo, it just so happens to suck, and always has, for just about everything else.
Close the libraries and use the money to subsidize the purchase of readers for a town's residents and school children. The next itteration of basic eBooks will most likely drop below $100. Once that happens print sales will be decimated.
I work the "high tech" world of aviation, where bleeding edge means tech from the 1990s.
We have the same problem though, guys that are pros with the hard wired 60-70s stuff don't want to learn how to troubleshoot the newer networked systems. They still command a premium though since those older systems can still be cracked open and repaired with a soldering iron, and no body, I mean nobody ever throws away a perfectly good airplane.
The young guys may be able to jump right in to the newer gear and be comfortable using the software, most don't have a clue how to actually troubleshoot wiring and components without it. So the whole thing sort of balances out.
Getting more pay just because you know the ins and the outs of the business. That experience is usually much more valuable that just knowing a few new things. Getting paid more just because you show up to work every day and manage to breath I think not.
You want to get paid the big bucks then get off your ass and get your nose in the books, that or go into management.
Different tools for different jobs.
A tablet is near useless beyond websurfing, a little bit of media watching, and a minor amount of gaming. A market already serviced and heading towards saturation by smart phones.
They are too expensive, too fragile, too short lived (batteries), and too easy to loose. Until they come in packs of ten for $100 I can't see them becoming all that common.
Yes truly geek-a-rific! No not really.
The dude that made the light show in his pants and controlled it with his iPhone, that was both cool and true to the geek spirit.
This was just a douche bag with an iPad. Nothing even remotely interesting or cool about anyone with an iPad. Maybe a little sad, yes a little sad.
1. The infrastructure to deliver it is already in place and is far less complicated than say what is needed for a hydrogen system.
2. The conversion costs are small and will work with most vehicles. Pickup trucks being the easiest to convert. (Cool trucks, no gay hybrids required.)
3. It's readily availabe just about everywhere. You can drill a hole in the ground to get it. You can make it with crop and animal waste on the farm. You can make it from sewage waste in the city. You can collect it as a by product from the petrolium industry. You could make your own fuel in your backyard if you were so inclined and had the space.
4. It is environment friendly. No bad polutants when you burn it and can come from "carbon neutral" sources if you still buy into such things.
5. We can make it in our own country and stop funding the overseas assholes. Let them try to eat their oil after we stop buying and see how far that gets them.
Win, win, win, win, win.