You can't bike 4 miles before smelling like a pig? What has the world come to....
Thanks much, Mr. Waddams. My work has no shower facilities. Being in the industrial sector, there's not even a gym nearby. Also, it's full of professional office drones. You know, the batty kind who have nothing better to do than whine if you're sweaty, or your socks don't match, or they don't like the scent of todays particular pit stick, or they think you looked at them funny.
It's almost 35C out today, with almost no wind. Been that way all month. In about 2 months, it'll be below 0C for roughly 6 months. Random drops to -30C or worse. Plenty of wind though, that's the great thing about winter up north. The worst days will be, with windchill, -55C.
So, yes, technically I could bike... for the brief cool fall period before the snow flies, and then again for the brief spring period where the weather is accommodating. Other than that, I'll either be a little bit sweaty from 20 minutes or worse slogging through traffic in the heat, or frozen solid.
what is the environmental advantage of electricity for cars ? It's mostly made with fossil fuels. I've never understood this. Am I missing something ? The efficiency of the little motor in your car is much less than the efficiency of, say, a nuclear power plant, or a gas-fired turbine, or even (iirc) a coal fired plant. And it's certainly dirtier than hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, or tidal. Additionally, gas and coal plants can (don't, but can) clean their emissions a lot better than your tailpipe. And finally, it cuts down on in-city pollution and smog.
Additionally, having an electric car means that when the electric company upgrades their plant, you're automatically greener. With a gas car, you're still polluting the same amount.
My round trip to work is 7.5 KM. A little too far to walk or bike (and not be too fragrant for my cow-irkers), but perfect for this little beastie. In fact, even though I live in one of the worlds sprawliest cities, it's still enough to get me one-way somewhere, and I can plug in there for the trip home. I'm sure this would be great for most people and their little jaunts to the grocery store, or to get a movie, or insert the blank here. The majority of driving is short little trips, and this fills the bill. Of course, I'll still keep my bigger, gas fueled beast for when I have further to go, but this should be a real option for many people.
"Oh, right, we just saw his 80-year-old self. *sigh* "
it's a prequel to a well know franchise, whether or not he dies is a given. Remember. True, but there's always the outside hope that he actually does die and is replaced by an alien doppleganger or changling or something, thusly fucking with the entire cannon.:D
I really hope Berman isn't involved in this movie. I've been a Trekk(ie)/(er) all my life, but, come on, Time Traveling Nazi Aliens? That's when I threw up my hands and gave up hope.
If Berman is involved, I'm sure his next brilliant move will be having that old Asian guy from Heros show up.
On another note... Nimoy is 76? Wow, the heros of the old days get old quick. Of course, this pretty much sets up the movie as "Old guys sitting around the old captains home, thinking about the old days... queue movie-length flashback... oh no, young doppleganger is in trouble! Will he survive?? Oh, right, we just saw his 80-year-old self. *sigh*.... start Trek drinking game..."
Whaddya bet some poor mid-level admin gets blamed and tossed for this? And the upper-management guy who ignored the recommendations for testing or redundancy still gets his bonus for good fiscal performance.
Go into Firehose, find the article (it'll be a dark green bar), click on "-", then click on "dupe". That's right folks... "The Firehose: Because the Editors just don't care anymore"
700 watt hours of electricity per day, enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours.
Are people really so stupid that they need this explained to them? And if so, how on earth do they ever make sense of their electric bill? You presume people make sense of their electric bills, instead of just paying it like blind obedient sheep. Your comments are at odds with your low UID. It confuses me.
It's too bad these rovers don't have some sort of wind turbines to be utilized for energy. They could have extended an already impressive run. That would be nice, but don't forget Mars has something like 99% less atmosphere than us. So little air pressure that if you jumped out of a plane on Mars and popped a parachute, you'd be the next crater Spirit went to study. I just can't see it being practical, at least on the scale of the rovers.
If the first player puts their mark in a corner, the only correct moves for the second player is to mark one of the 2 adjacent squares. There is no way to garauntee victory in tic-tac-toe, regardless of who goes first. There are plenty of ways to lose though. Incorrect. The only way to defend yourself is to take the middle square. Otherwise:
X-- --- ---
XO- --- ---
XO- --- X--
XO- O-- X--
XO- O-- X-X
(or some minor variation thereof) is the final and inevitable outcome. If you take the middle square, and then block the side that X tries to fill up, X has to block your string through the middle and you've a draw. Otherwise, you lose, just that easy, every time.
The range of possibilities when you're playing second against someone who doesn't employ this strategy is too great to get into here, but it's not as promising, that's for sure.
I've been developing an algorithm to solve that game for years, and so far all I've come up with is: start with the middle square. Nah, that's false.
If you're going first, put your mark in the corner. Almost regardless of what your opponent does, put your next mark in an adjacent corner. He'll now have to block you, and then you put your third mark in yet another corner, and voila, you have 2 winning moves. The only defense against it is to take the middle square with your first move and then block whatever side X tries to take with your second, and then X has to block your row with his third. That ends the game in a draw.
The only winning move going second is to play for a draw. You won't win unless your opponent makes a mistake.
Previous posters are right, this is either thoughtcrime or guilt by association.
Here's what it's saying: We can, without notice, seize all the property and money of anyone who, in our sole determination:
1) Commits or intends to commit violence to screw with peace, stability, political reform, or economic reconstruction. (see, now that's not so bad, is it?) 2) Gives any money, materials, logistical support, or technical support, to a person or group doing (1) (So, if you contribute to "Save Iraqi Orphans" and it turns out they were using the money to build bombs, you can have all your assets seized) 3) Is owned, controlled, acted, or may act, for someone covered by this order (Your landlord or boss gets nailed by this order, watch out!)
Don't forget Section 2: 1) Trying to avoid this order is prohibited. 2) Forming a conspiracy to violate this order is prohibited. translation: if you try and get out of it, you're doubly screwed. If it's your family sitting around with no money and food, you'd better just watch them starve, trying to help them will get you in shit
And Section 4:
If someones (or some groups) property is frozen by this order, any form of donation to them is now illegal, because that would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency. Because I hate charity. Stupid freeloaders
So, here we've got another No Oversight way for the gov't to screw ya'll over. They just bring this up, freeze every single thing you own, and then you... what? Fight back? With what lawyer? How you gonna live while this slogs through the courts? You can't make any money, and no-one can help you or they get the same treatment. And judging by your other performances (how long have those guys been at gitmo?), it'll take years for you to get your day in court.
And all it takes is one cop or FBI badass to stand there and go "What? I just heard you say you want to fly to iraq and commit violence. That's it, total asset freeze!". You say it won't happen? I say it's another cheap and easy tool for feds to use while trying to shake you down. "Help us out, or we'll take everything you own, and now there's no court oversight to stop us.". It doesn't matter if they'd eventually lose in court. You're still starving on the streets long before then.
And why was this so vitally, immediately necessary, that he felt he could just EO it instead of getting, oh, I dunno, that funny "Legislative" branch of goverment to.... legislate?
I hate all this "what if" causality crap they throw into these articles. "What if I measure the event and then don't do it?" is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while... and I work in IT! If you were able to measure the event, then that means the event occurred. Whether or not you've caught up to the point in time that it occurred doesn't matter. Equally, if you decide you don't want to do it, then there will be no event for you to measure, because it never occurred. Is this really so hard? And this isn't the same as the grandfather paradox, they shouldn't be compared. This is "if I make a choice to do something, can I choose to not do it after the effect happens but before the event does?" (answer, NO, imho, ymmv). The grandfather paradox is different. (tangent) Personally, I'm in favour of the "alternate realities" view on time travel... if you go back in time and change something, that reality splits off into a separate reality, with events there unfolding in their new, special way, while you still belong to your original timestream. So the "new" reality unfolds of dead granddad, but you still belong to your original stream where grampa was around to promise he'd pull out, and thus begat daddy. Of course, I'm generally in favour of the "infinite realities" view, where every choice in life splits off into it's own reality, but that's a mostly separate discussion.
So, you had a single bad update that was distributed by Microsoft (you do know that it would have been Western Digital that wrote the driver, and then gave it to MS, right?), and therefore have sworn off all Microsoft (but, oddly, not WD) products in the future. That sounds like a perfectly fair and balanced approach to the situation. Damn them for distributing a driver the manufacturer said was OK!
[less serious] I'm with you buddy. I know when something goes wrong on my car, the best course of action is to immediately and forever boycott that car manufacturer. While this has increasingly limited my selection over the years, I'm finding some wonderful little gems from Eastern Europe. The only problem has been finding raw cabbage to run them on. [/less serious]
I don't particularly buy the argument that electronic voting is somehow more or less difficult to tamper with than paper voting. Sure there is no guarantee that the hardware and software is protected and will truly offer a fair vote - but can you really say the same thing for paper? Remember those ballots have to go to a machine that counts them. That machine is not perfect - it is just as prone to error and manipulation as your electronic system. Of course with paper ballots you can resort to a manual recount but that is costly and time consuming. Moreover if you think electronic and mechanical counters are unreliable a human is a disaster. BZZZZZT. Sorry, but this was so wrong I had to respond.
Your mistake is an issue of scale. It's relatively easy to slip in one or two false paper ballots. It may not even be that hard to make the machine a little more picky when it comes to checking punchouts on the democrat side of the ballot. But there's backups, paper backups, that get checked and confirmed, even if at a small ratio. Someone watching the pile of ballots go through the machine can find it odd that mostly left-leaning candidates get kicked out as incomplete ballots. Little things can be snuck through easier.
But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.
Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.
Really, the 2000 Florida situation was unique, because a swing of a few votes either way made a huge difference. But at least ya'll could go back and CHECK. In '04 all you got was "here's the number, if you don't like it too bad". I'd rather have a few weeks of checking to make sure everythings fair, rather than an instant biased result with no appeal.
The scale of the flaws of electronic voting far outweigh the flaws of mechanical voting. With mechanical, a few votes can get screwed up. With electronic, a whole election can.
The plot (spoiler warning!)
on
New X-Files Movie
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'm glad this is happening, the world was crying out for a new X Files movie. I'm glad all my protest letters to Fox finally had an effect.
Now that it's starting, I can tell you all the plotline. In the first half of the movie, Scully and Mulder will travel deep into the artic to find the lost alien mothership that contains the special brand of bees needed to resurrect the Lone Gunmen. In the second half of the movie, Scully and Mulder will try to save the world from Zombie Lone Gunmen.
Now is the time to show if you have any actual political muscle or not. I'm a boomer, thinking back, last time I had anything to do with music and the radio and politics was an incident where a local college decided to censor their online little micro fm radio djs (girlfriend I had then was one of them) back during the viet nam war period. With one days notice we shut that school down, I mean a complete halt. No one went to class, buildings occupied, we just sat and said no censorship, free the station, etc. It worked, the authorities caved. I guess times change, so much is done online now that "in your face" brand last ditch activism type protesting has become passe or something. It's not really passe, it's just that we'll all get shot if we try it. And then tasered repeatedly, arrested, and shipped off to an aircraft hanger where we'll be left with no food, water, first aid, or facilities overnight. Then the most outspoken of us will be taken to jail and held without bail as a threat to the public peace. And when we finally get to trial (which will be booked to take as long as possible), we'll be convicted of violating "free speech zones", regardless of the truth, and sent off to federal prison with an exorbitant sentence "to serve as an example", where the guards will occasionally "forget" to lock our cell doors, along with those of the most vicious gang-rapists they can find. Once we finally get out, we'll also be charged with some sort of sexual deviancy for peeing in the corner of the aircraft hanger, convicted of something like "public exposure", and have our names put on the Sex Offenders Registry. Then, for the rest of our lives, we'll have to tell every employer, landlord, and neighbour that we're on the SOR. And as much as we'll explain what really happened, they'll just hear "SOR" and tune out the rest. Our house will be vandalized, Block Parent groups will organize protests outside our house, and we'll undoubtedly, eventually, accidentally come within 200 feet of a school or playground or park, and be sent back to prison for a very long time. Only this time it will be for "Sexual Deviancy involving a minor". And we all know how much the prison population will love that. So, ya, Net Radio, gotta say it might not be worth all that.
(I really wish I was kidding about all this. I really do. I never actually thought I'd look fondly upon the days of Kent State.)
- The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. (because, yanno, those have nothing to do with the guy in charge of health for the country...) - Top officials delayed for years and tried to "water down" a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said (Ve must toe ze party line, mein Heir) - Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. (Umm... Godwins Law warning!) - He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings. (You work for us, not for those namby-pamby girly men) - And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics (because we in the Republican party hate those damn cripples. They're just sponging off social welfare anyways.) - The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said. (It's true, actually. If we could instantly kill every liberal, global warming would be solved. Mostly because of the >50% loss in population, but still, technically, true...) - Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government's nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. (pfft! What would a DOCTOR know about TOBACCO?) - When stem cells became a focus of debate, Dr. Carmona said he proposed that his office offer guidance "so that we can have, if you will, informed consent." "I was told to stand down and not speak about it," he said. "It was removed from my speeches." (pfft! What would a DOCTOR know about STEM CELLS?) - The global health report was never approved, Dr. Carmona said, because he refused to sprinkle the report with glowing references to the efforts of the Bush administration. (truthfully, he did mention the Bush administration, but only in the context of "World health is suffering because Bush makes everyone sick to their stomachs...) - Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners' health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said. (this must be why Libby never went to jail)
And the administrations response? "It's disappointing to us," Ms. Lawrimore said, "if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation."
The only good side of all of this is that we only have ~1.3 years left. I just fear it's ~1 year too much.
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization's longtime ties to a "prominent family" that he refused to name.
"I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said. Wow... just... wow. Let's torpedo the Special Olympics because they're associated with someone from the other party. That's pretty damn low.
"Coming up on our 11 o'clock news... President Bush unexpectedly attacked by an unruly mob and severely beaten with crutches and canes. VP Cheney terrorized by motorized wheelchairs. Gov't suspects Al Quada."
This has got to be the worst nightmare of every sexy, busty teenage green- or pink-haired schoolgirl, ninja, and swordswoman in Japan!
GMD -- Please stop with the "I know I'll be modded down for this..." crap I'm positive I'll be modded down for this, but I had to compliment you on your choice of sigs...
Do you have the Playboy Channel? I tried it, but it wasn't violent enough for me. I found it's much better if you throw ketchup packets at the screen...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks much, Mr. Waddams. My work has no shower facilities. Being in the industrial sector, there's not even a gym nearby. Also, it's full of professional office drones. You know, the batty kind who have nothing better to do than whine if you're sweaty, or your socks don't match, or they don't like the scent of todays particular pit stick, or they think you looked at them funny.
It's almost 35C out today, with almost no wind. Been that way all month.
In about 2 months, it'll be below 0C for roughly 6 months. Random drops to -30C or worse. Plenty of wind though, that's the great thing about winter up north. The worst days will be, with windchill, -55C.
So, yes, technically I could bike... for the brief cool fall period before the snow flies, and then again for the brief spring period where the weather is accommodating. Other than that, I'll either be a little bit sweaty from 20 minutes or worse slogging through traffic in the heat, or frozen solid.
I think I'll stick with the car
Additionally, having an electric car means that when the electric company upgrades their plant, you're automatically greener. With a gas car, you're still polluting the same amount.
That's just off the top of my head, mind you.
My round trip to work is 7.5 KM. A little too far to walk or bike (and not be too fragrant for my cow-irkers), but perfect for this little beastie. In fact, even though I live in one of the worlds sprawliest cities, it's still enough to get me one-way somewhere, and I can plug in there for the trip home. I'm sure this would be great for most people and their little jaunts to the grocery store, or to get a movie, or insert the blank here. The majority of driving is short little trips, and this fills the bill.
Of course, I'll still keep my bigger, gas fueled beast for when I have further to go, but this should be a real option for many people.
it's a prequel to a well know franchise, whether or not he dies is a given. Remember. True, but there's always the outside hope that he actually does die and is replaced by an alien doppleganger or changling or something, thusly fucking with the entire cannon.
Now there's a movie I'd pay to see...
I really hope Berman isn't involved in this movie. I've been a Trekk(ie)/(er) all my life, but, come on, Time Traveling Nazi Aliens? That's when I threw up my hands and gave up hope.
... oh no, young doppleganger is in trouble! Will he survive?? Oh, right, we just saw his 80-year-old self. *sigh* .... start Trek drinking game..."
If Berman is involved, I'm sure his next brilliant move will be having that old Asian guy from Heros show up.
On another note... Nimoy is 76? Wow, the heros of the old days get old quick. Of course, this pretty much sets up the movie as "Old guys sitting around the old captains home, thinking about the old days... queue movie-length flashback
Where's the +1 "100% fucking right" mod option?
Whaddya bet some poor mid-level admin gets blamed and tossed for this? And the upper-management guy who ignored the recommendations for testing or redundancy still gets his bonus for good fiscal performance.
Are people really so stupid that they need this explained to them? And if so, how on earth do they ever make sense of their electric bill? You presume people make sense of their electric bills, instead of just paying it like blind obedient sheep.
Your comments are at odds with your low UID. It confuses me.
I don't like to think of it as a comment on relative group intelligence so much as a communal fondness for "Wargames".
X--
---
---
XO-
---
---
XO-
---
X--
XO-
O--
X--
XO-
O--
X-X
(or some minor variation thereof) is the final and inevitable outcome.
If you take the middle square, and then block the side that X tries to fill up, X has to block your string through the middle and you've a draw. Otherwise, you lose, just that easy, every time.
The range of possibilities when you're playing second against someone who doesn't employ this strategy is too great to get into here, but it's not as promising, that's for sure.
If you're going first, put your mark in the corner. Almost regardless of what your opponent does, put your next mark in an adjacent corner. He'll now have to block you, and then you put your third mark in yet another corner, and voila, you have 2 winning moves.
The only defense against it is to take the middle square with your first move and then block whatever side X tries to take with your second, and then X has to block your row with his third. That ends the game in a draw.
The only winning move going second is to play for a draw. You won't win unless your opponent makes a mistake.
Previous posters are right, this is either thoughtcrime or guilt by association.
Here's what it's saying: We can, without notice, seize all the property and money of anyone who, in our sole determination:
1) Commits or intends to commit violence to screw with peace, stability, political reform, or economic reconstruction.
(see, now that's not so bad, is it?)
2) Gives any money, materials, logistical support, or technical support, to a person or group doing (1)
(So, if you contribute to "Save Iraqi Orphans" and it turns out they were using the money to build bombs, you can have all your assets seized)
3) Is owned, controlled, acted, or may act, for someone covered by this order
(Your landlord or boss gets nailed by this order, watch out!)
Don't forget Section 2:
1) Trying to avoid this order is prohibited.
2) Forming a conspiracy to violate this order is prohibited.
translation: if you try and get out of it, you're doubly screwed. If it's your family sitting around with no money and food, you'd better just watch them starve, trying to help them will get you in shit
And Section 4:
If someones (or some groups) property is frozen by this order, any form of donation to them is now illegal, because that would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency.
Because I hate charity. Stupid freeloaders
So, here we've got another No Oversight way for the gov't to screw ya'll over. They just bring this up, freeze every single thing you own, and then you... what? Fight back? With what lawyer? How you gonna live while this slogs through the courts? You can't make any money, and no-one can help you or they get the same treatment. And judging by your other performances (how long have those guys been at gitmo?), it'll take years for you to get your day in court.
And all it takes is one cop or FBI badass to stand there and go "What? I just heard you say you want to fly to iraq and commit violence. That's it, total asset freeze!". You say it won't happen? I say it's another cheap and easy tool for feds to use while trying to shake you down. "Help us out, or we'll take everything you own, and now there's no court oversight to stop us.".
It doesn't matter if they'd eventually lose in court. You're still starving on the streets long before then.
And why was this so vitally, immediately necessary, that he felt he could just EO it instead of getting, oh, I dunno, that funny "Legislative" branch of goverment to.... legislate?
Sorry USA. It sucks to be you.
I hate all this "what if" causality crap they throw into these articles. "What if I measure the event and then don't do it?" is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while... and I work in IT! If you were able to measure the event, then that means the event occurred. Whether or not you've caught up to the point in time that it occurred doesn't matter. Equally, if you decide you don't want to do it, then there will be no event for you to measure, because it never occurred. Is this really so hard?
And this isn't the same as the grandfather paradox, they shouldn't be compared. This is "if I make a choice to do something, can I choose to not do it after the effect happens but before the event does?" (answer, NO, imho, ymmv). The grandfather paradox is different. (tangent) Personally, I'm in favour of the "alternate realities" view on time travel... if you go back in time and change something, that reality splits off into a separate reality, with events there unfolding in their new, special way, while you still belong to your original timestream. So the "new" reality unfolds of dead granddad, but you still belong to your original stream where grampa was around to promise he'd pull out, and thus begat daddy.
Of course, I'm generally in favour of the "infinite realities" view, where every choice in life splits off into it's own reality, but that's a mostly separate discussion.
So, you had a single bad update that was distributed by Microsoft (you do know that it would have been Western Digital that wrote the driver, and then gave it to MS, right?), and therefore have sworn off all Microsoft (but, oddly, not WD) products in the future. That sounds like a perfectly fair and balanced approach to the situation. Damn them for distributing a driver the manufacturer said was OK!
[less serious]
I'm with you buddy. I know when something goes wrong on my car, the best course of action is to immediately and forever boycott that car manufacturer. While this has increasingly limited my selection over the years, I'm finding some wonderful little gems from Eastern Europe. The only problem has been finding raw cabbage to run them on.
[/less serious]
Your mistake is an issue of scale. It's relatively easy to slip in one or two false paper ballots. It may not even be that hard to make the machine a little more picky when it comes to checking punchouts on the democrat side of the ballot. But there's backups, paper backups, that get checked and confirmed, even if at a small ratio. Someone watching the pile of ballots go through the machine can find it odd that mostly left-leaning candidates get kicked out as incomplete ballots. Little things can be snuck through easier.
But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.
Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.
Really, the 2000 Florida situation was unique, because a swing of a few votes either way made a huge difference. But at least ya'll could go back and CHECK. In '04 all you got was "here's the number, if you don't like it too bad". I'd rather have a few weeks of checking to make sure everythings fair, rather than an instant biased result with no appeal.
The scale of the flaws of electronic voting far outweigh the flaws of mechanical voting. With mechanical, a few votes can get screwed up. With electronic, a whole election can.
I'm glad this is happening, the world was crying out for a new X Files movie. I'm glad all my protest letters to Fox finally had an effect.
Now that it's starting, I can tell you all the plotline. In the first half of the movie, Scully and Mulder will travel deep into the artic to find the lost alien mothership that contains the special brand of bees needed to resurrect the Lone Gunmen.
In the second half of the movie, Scully and Mulder will try to save the world from Zombie Lone Gunmen.
I particularily liked how regulators agreed with BP that they didn't have room on their site to build a new waste water treatment plant.
On their 1400 ACRE site.
Oy.
(I really wish I was kidding about all this. I really do. I never actually thought I'd look fondly upon the days of Kent State.)
So, let's see here...
From TFA:
- The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. (because, yanno, those have nothing to do with the guy in charge of health for the country...)
- Top officials delayed for years and tried to "water down" a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said (Ve must toe ze party line, mein Heir)
- Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. (Umm... Godwins Law warning!)
- He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings. (You work for us, not for those namby-pamby girly men)
- And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics (because we in the Republican party hate those damn cripples. They're just sponging off social welfare anyways.)
- The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said. (It's true, actually. If we could instantly kill every liberal, global warming would be solved. Mostly because of the >50% loss in population, but still, technically, true...)
- Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government's nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. (pfft! What would a DOCTOR know about TOBACCO?)
- When stem cells became a focus of debate, Dr. Carmona said he proposed that his office offer guidance "so that we can have, if you will, informed consent." "I was told to stand down and not speak about it," he said. "It was removed from my speeches." (pfft! What would a DOCTOR know about STEM CELLS?)
- The global health report was never approved, Dr. Carmona said, because he refused to sprinkle the report with glowing references to the efforts of the Bush administration. (truthfully, he did mention the Bush administration, but only in the context of "World health is suffering because Bush makes everyone sick to their stomachs...)
- Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners' health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said. (this must be why Libby never went to jail)
And the administrations response?
"It's disappointing to us," Ms. Lawrimore said, "if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation."
The only good side of all of this is that we only have ~1.3 years left.
I just fear it's ~1 year too much.
"I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said. Wow... just... wow. Let's torpedo the Special Olympics because they're associated with someone from the other party. That's pretty damn low.
"Coming up on our 11 o'clock news... President Bush unexpectedly attacked by an unruly mob and severely beaten with crutches and canes. VP Cheney terrorized by motorized wheelchairs. Gov't suspects Al Quada."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Bush at work again, I see....
GMD
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Please stop with the "I know I'll be modded down for this..." crap I'm positive I'll be modded down for this, but I had to compliment you on your choice of sigs...
That's sad and pathetic. No slashdotter in his/her right mind should have that level of arcane knowledge.
;)
Please turn in your nerd glasses and funky keyboard at the door, and sign over your low UID (preferably to me...)