Yet the media just sweeps away the statement. The guy makes a statement showing that his primary concern is his legacy, not the security of the country, nor the millions of people affected by the war.
Because nobody cares about Bush anymore, and rightly so. He's been largely irrelevant since the election season went into full swing, and since the election itself he's been the lamest of lame duck Presidents. With a week to go, he says something stupid, insensitive, and demonstrative of his utter lack of understanding or human compassion. Big deal. He was saying stuff like that during the abu Ghraib scandal, when it actually mattered. We all know what he's about. One more statement about how unfortunate it is that reality didn't go along with his fantasies of getting his face on Mt. Rushmore means... what exactly?
Good bye, Mr. President. Let's get the new guy in, and let historians worry about GWB.
Not that I'm a sunshine-daisy Obama optimist. He strikes me as more of a centrist republicrat than a lefty liberal. But taking over after Bush, he'll be hard pressed to do worse.
He strikes me as a liberal moderate who actually wants to accomplish things given the political reality of our country, though I'm not sure that's all that different. It would be very hard to be worse (the reason a McCain presidency didn't scare me much), but I think he'll actually make some modest positive progress (and in the cold chambers of my cynical heart this feels like starry-eyed optimism:P).
As much as I enjoyed your anecdote about a crappy contractor, I find it ridiculous on its face to say there's no other company that can put food in front of soldiers. Not to the point where this was so clear that nobody else even needed to be allowed to bid. Heck the army itself was doing it before Rummy decided to outsource everything as part of his effort to put his stamp on the military.
how many people who are casually dismissing this report would be howling with outrage if the article was about, say, Bush's choice for assistant director of the FCC instead of about someone on Obama's transition team.
Well obviously assistant director of the FCC is a bigger deal than a temporary consultant. I wouldn't be "howling", since that would be one of the tamest things Bush had done.
If the circumstances were actually the same, it really wouldn't bother me much at all other than that I don't like conflicts of interest no matter how small. I don't like this one. But it's not a big deal, and wouldn't have been if Bush had been doing it.
You've got to be kidding. When the hell did the media ever go easy on Bush? They blamed him for basically everything.
Yeah, I specifically remember the New York Times publishing a big apology piece begging forgiveness for how hard they were on Bush from 2001-2003, and how critical they were of his claims. That's it.
The only assets that remained were in control of his charity foundation.
Not exactly true. Once his remaining financial ties were discovered, he gave them over to the charity. A decent enough way to try to get rid of a conflict of interest after the fact. I'm sure there's no benefit to be had from making a fortune for his buddies, though.
Odd how this is the sort of post that pops up when it's a problem with the budding Obama administration but not so much when it has anything to do with Bush...
Well I'm not going to defend the OP, since I am cynical and I see no reason to defend Obama from the completely true accusation that he is a politician. Nor am I going to defend a conflict of interest.
But the simple fact is that the scale we're talking about, Bush vs Obama, is ridiculously different. Some low level advisor might get a temporary benefit from a suggestion Obama made regarding delaying DTV switchover, a relatively minor issue. Bush's vice president's former company was handed multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts (where in most cases the claim that this was because only halliburton could do it were flat wrong), to the point of even outsourcing our military's kitchens to this company. That's a conflict of interest that concerns me. If this was Bush, then it'd be his FCC chairman or Secretary of Commerce that was a VP for Verizon, who'd have already been given an exclusive contract for government wifi.
Bush's administration had plenty of minor conflicts of interest of around this level that I really never gave a rats ass about. They suck, but they're largely unavoidable. The difference is basically how important and high up these conflicts go, and how blatantly and severely they direct policy. We'll see how things turn out with the new guy, but right now just looking at the Cabinet-level picks Obama is no Bush and saying that is not inherently 'bias'.
President Elect Obama has a reasonable argument that the market is not ready for DTV. I personally think that it will never be ready for the DTV changeover and that we'll need to do it the hard way anyway, but that's just my opinion. The government had a specific way they wanted this done. They have yet to achieve that goal.
This is how I feel too. Yes we will have to do it the "hard way", by requiring a switchover. However that day does not have to be Feb 17th come hell or high water, a couple month delay should not significantly impact anything and would give time for the coupon program to be funded and more people to be prepared for the switch.
It's just gotten a lot of attention lately because of the attached conspiracy theorists looking to "prove" that Bush was going to attack Iran (he didn't).
He's still got six days left! Watch the news next Monday, I'm telling ya!
Becuase Radia Perlman held the Internet by the Mediterranean when she dipped it into the river Styx?
Goodness gracious. I can't believe that after all these millennia that people still haven't learned the most basic lesson of the story of Achilles: When dipping something into the Styx, use tongs so you can dip it all the way without getting your hand wet!
OT: I do like Doctor Who, but didn't that sound an awful lot like that "magic phone booth" in Superman II where he magically avoided losing his powers by (insert cheesy script device here) and standing in the booth?
The only thing wrong with that was that it stole a basic Star Trek trope, the "reversal of polarity".
See, earlier in the movie, Superman went inside the booth to lose his powers, and then uses it again to gain them back. But once the other Kryptonians are there, he reverses the booth so it takes powers from everyone outside the booth instead of inside. Pure genius!
So I forgive it for stealing the Star Trek meme due to it operating on multiple axes (lose/gain, inside/outside).
I see what you're saying, but give hippies their due. After all, the main gist of your argument for why violence is so great is that in the end it gets you laid, and let's be honest here that's the ultimate motivation for all the would-be Ghengis Khans and their legions. But the hippies were up to their necks in "free love", without the need for all that violence and the dangers of the resulting counter-violence. Their biggest risks were a bad acid trip and a case of the clap -- gotta take antibiotics, bummer man! You think tin-pot dictators like Saddam would have gone to all the trouble of oppressing half their people, making enemies of all their neighbors, risking constant assassination just to be able to order any women he wanted into his bed, if he could have gotten all the play he wanted just by saying "Hey wanna come to my drum circle, we've got a hookah?" I don't think so.
The world has changed, and we never see anything like it again, but for a brief period there, peace was tha shit.
Don't worry, I won't be. I'm aware of all the real-life problems you bring up and more. No matter who is in what position, there's a huge political machine to be dealt with.
So I'm not expecting it to go well. But with someone heading the FCC who doesn't seem bound and determined to fuck us over, I'm confident it will at least go better.
It's a very ancient meme. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had stock characters of the scheming slave manipulating their foolish masters. I suppose in many ways the readers of slashdot are the galley slaves of the modern world. Joking takes people's minds off the fact that being on call is the modern equivalent of being chained to an oar.
So wait, you're saying your chains are metaphorical?
Atheism is something of a loaded term since people seem to want to equate it with not only not believing in a god, but loudly denying the possibility of one.
Probably because we're trying to make a meaningful distinction between atheism and agnosticism.
Now now, pull yourself together, man! Time paradoxes are just a part of life in today's intelligently designed world, and nothing a well-adjusted member of society shouldn't be able to deal with. Why, it was just this past Christmas visiting family that I was looking at my family tree and discovered that I will have been my own great-grandfather. Instead of freaking out about how impossible it is, we all had a good laugh and then served desert.
Aren't you be glad that you'd finally be able to create life without the services of a woman?
But it's the "services of a woman" thing that's the whole point! The creating-life part is usually considered an undesirable side effect that is best avoided.
It's kinda like saying "aren't you glad that you'll finally be able to have alimony without the services of a women?"
That's correct. Now the next step, once we are sure that these things are capable of evolving into life, is to invent a time machine and send them back in time to become the seeds for life on this planet. As documented here.
How can you push/propel something if there's nothing to push against?
Since when is energy 'nothing'?
Pretty much everything I read about energy states that it requires a medium to travel in.
They disproved this theory a long time ago. Look up the Michelson-Morely experiment. It was only by extrapolation from things like sound waves that it was assumed a medium was required for electromagnetic waves.
That would mean, to me, that outer space is just a collection of tiny particles that have tiny mass and no inherit movement. Kind of like a really light (as in near weightless) soup. Objects traveling through space would push these tiny molecules out of the way momentarily as light travels at such a speed that it never deflects because of it's momentum.
Interesting, but this has the same problems as the luminiferous aether, in that it should have effects visible on the orbits of planets and so on, unless you're using "really light" as a synonym for "doesn't behave as though it has any mass at all" again. Eventually the only way to make the aether work was to assume it was massless -- that's right, even when a medium for electromagnetism was thought to exist, it was considered massless.
Err, I'm getting off track, but I don't buy that energy and matter are separate entities.
They aren't. They're the same thing. Or more specifically, mass is just a form of energy. Light is a form of energy which is not mass.
E=mc^2 is an amazing equation in part because it's so tough to grasp its full implications (I certainly won't claim anything close). It also makes much more sense than light having a really really teeny tiny mass that doesn't obey the rules that every other mass does. I don't understand why it makes you more comfortable to say light must have a mass because that means it's not "separate" when obviously it is separate in some way because nothing else that has mass can travel at c, and our equations regarding mass say it would be impossible for anything with mass to do so.
I was thinking more so that light has a very tiny mass that we cannot measure at this time. I just don't buy that something has 0 mass. If it did, it would be nothing.
No, it'd be purely energy. Why don't you think a wiggling electromagnetic field can't be said to be pure energy, and must involve tiny masses flying back and forth? I assure you that the electromagnetic field itself is a "thing" even though it has no mass.
And the problem is that regardless of our ability to measure tiny masses is that light having any mass at all, regardless of how tiny, causes all our equations to blow up. Equations that have been tested quite well on actual masses. To me, the idea that light is simply a form of energy with no mass makes a lot more sense than the idea that light does have mass, it just doesn't follow the same rules as every other kind of mass and can be accelerated to c without mass dilation. At the point where you're saying something has mass, but you don't actually put anything into any of the equations involving mass because they don't apply, that doesn't sound very useful to me other than to make you feel better. Isn't it easier to just accept that light has momentum but no mass?
Scientists have been contradicting themselves for decades. They all know light has mass. They also know that to travel at the speed of light requires infinite mass.
Wow, man, that's deep. I wasn't sure, so I went and asked a physicist friend to tell me the truth. He denied it, and said it's not true, light has no mass, just energy. I told him it was okay, I knew the truth that infinite mass is the same as zero mass. He not only wouldn't admit this, he said it was wrong!
Which means, damn, you're right! Science already knows this but just pretends its not the case! They are lying to the public in some kind of conspiracy, and my friend is in on it! But don't worry, with the new season of 24 starting I'll have plenty of inspiration to help me get the truth from him.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet the media just sweeps away the statement. The guy makes a statement showing that his primary concern is his legacy, not the security of the country, nor the millions of people affected by the war.
Because nobody cares about Bush anymore, and rightly so. He's been largely irrelevant since the election season went into full swing, and since the election itself he's been the lamest of lame duck Presidents. With a week to go, he says something stupid, insensitive, and demonstrative of his utter lack of understanding or human compassion. Big deal. He was saying stuff like that during the abu Ghraib scandal, when it actually mattered. We all know what he's about. One more statement about how unfortunate it is that reality didn't go along with his fantasies of getting his face on Mt. Rushmore means... what exactly?
Good bye, Mr. President. Let's get the new guy in, and let historians worry about GWB.
Not that I'm a sunshine-daisy Obama optimist. He strikes me as more of a centrist republicrat than a lefty liberal. But taking over after Bush, he'll be hard pressed to do worse.
He strikes me as a liberal moderate who actually wants to accomplish things given the political reality of our country, though I'm not sure that's all that different. It would be very hard to be worse (the reason a McCain presidency didn't scare me much), but I think he'll actually make some modest positive progress (and in the cold chambers of my cynical heart this feels like starry-eyed optimism :P).
As much as I enjoyed your anecdote about a crappy contractor, I find it ridiculous on its face to say there's no other company that can put food in front of soldiers. Not to the point where this was so clear that nobody else even needed to be allowed to bid. Heck the army itself was doing it before Rummy decided to outsource everything as part of his effort to put his stamp on the military.
how many people who are casually dismissing this report would be howling with outrage if the article was about, say, Bush's choice for assistant director of the FCC instead of about someone on Obama's transition team.
Well obviously assistant director of the FCC is a bigger deal than a temporary consultant. I wouldn't be "howling", since that would be one of the tamest things Bush had done.
If the circumstances were actually the same, it really wouldn't bother me much at all other than that I don't like conflicts of interest no matter how small. I don't like this one. But it's not a big deal, and wouldn't have been if Bush had been doing it.
You've got to be kidding. When the hell did the media ever go easy on Bush? They blamed him for basically everything.
Yeah, I specifically remember the New York Times publishing a big apology piece begging forgiveness for how hard they were on Bush from 2001-2003, and how critical they were of his claims. That's it.
Funded from what? The government is out of money.
How about the $20billion they made selling the spectrum that they're taking away?
The only assets that remained were in control of his charity foundation.
Not exactly true. Once his remaining financial ties were discovered, he gave them over to the charity. A decent enough way to try to get rid of a conflict of interest after the fact. I'm sure there's no benefit to be had from making a fortune for his buddies, though.
Odd how this is the sort of post that pops up when it's a problem with the budding Obama administration but not so much when it has anything to do with Bush...
Well I'm not going to defend the OP, since I am cynical and I see no reason to defend Obama from the completely true accusation that he is a politician. Nor am I going to defend a conflict of interest.
But the simple fact is that the scale we're talking about, Bush vs Obama, is ridiculously different. Some low level advisor might get a temporary benefit from a suggestion Obama made regarding delaying DTV switchover, a relatively minor issue. Bush's vice president's former company was handed multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts (where in most cases the claim that this was because only halliburton could do it were flat wrong), to the point of even outsourcing our military's kitchens to this company. That's a conflict of interest that concerns me. If this was Bush, then it'd be his FCC chairman or Secretary of Commerce that was a VP for Verizon, who'd have already been given an exclusive contract for government wifi.
Bush's administration had plenty of minor conflicts of interest of around this level that I really never gave a rats ass about. They suck, but they're largely unavoidable. The difference is basically how important and high up these conflicts go, and how blatantly and severely they direct policy. We'll see how things turn out with the new guy, but right now just looking at the Cabinet-level picks Obama is no Bush and saying that is not inherently 'bias'.
President Elect Obama has a reasonable argument that the market is not ready for DTV. I personally think that it will never be ready for the DTV changeover and that we'll need to do it the hard way anyway, but that's just my opinion. The government had a specific way they wanted this done. They have yet to achieve that goal.
This is how I feel too. Yes we will have to do it the "hard way", by requiring a switchover. However that day does not have to be Feb 17th come hell or high water, a couple month delay should not significantly impact anything and would give time for the coupon program to be funded and more people to be prepared for the switch.
It only seems fair that they allow us back stage when we're forced to allow them in our back doors.
It's just gotten a lot of attention lately because of the attached conspiracy theorists looking to "prove" that Bush was going to attack Iran (he didn't).
He's still got six days left! Watch the news next Monday, I'm telling ya!
Becuase Radia Perlman held the Internet by the Mediterranean when she dipped it into the river Styx?
Goodness gracious. I can't believe that after all these millennia that people still haven't learned the most basic lesson of the story of Achilles: When dipping something into the Styx, use tongs so you can dip it all the way without getting your hand wet!
Instead I say, well played sir!
By pure luck, I had no idea when Doctor Who aired and when/if it first mentioned reversing polarity. But I'll take it. :)
OT: I do like Doctor Who, but didn't that sound an awful lot like that "magic phone booth" in Superman II where he magically avoided losing his powers by (insert cheesy script device here) and standing in the booth?
The only thing wrong with that was that it stole a basic Star Trek trope, the "reversal of polarity".
See, earlier in the movie, Superman went inside the booth to lose his powers, and then uses it again to gain them back. But once the other Kryptonians are there, he reverses the booth so it takes powers from everyone outside the booth instead of inside. Pure genius!
So I forgive it for stealing the Star Trek meme due to it operating on multiple axes (lose/gain, inside/outside).
I see what you're saying, but give hippies their due. After all, the main gist of your argument for why violence is so great is that in the end it gets you laid, and let's be honest here that's the ultimate motivation for all the would-be Ghengis Khans and their legions. But the hippies were up to their necks in "free love", without the need for all that violence and the dangers of the resulting counter-violence. Their biggest risks were a bad acid trip and a case of the clap -- gotta take antibiotics, bummer man! You think tin-pot dictators like Saddam would have gone to all the trouble of oppressing half their people, making enemies of all their neighbors, risking constant assassination just to be able to order any women he wanted into his bed, if he could have gotten all the play he wanted just by saying "Hey wanna come to my drum circle, we've got a hookah?" I don't think so.
The world has changed, and we never see anything like it again, but for a brief period there, peace was tha shit.
Don't be disappointed when it doesn't go well.
Don't worry, I won't be. I'm aware of all the real-life problems you bring up and more. No matter who is in what position, there's a huge political machine to be dealt with.
So I'm not expecting it to go well. But with someone heading the FCC who doesn't seem bound and determined to fuck us over, I'm confident it will at least go better.
It's a very ancient meme. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had stock characters of the scheming slave manipulating their foolish masters. I suppose in many ways the readers of slashdot are the galley slaves of the modern world. Joking takes people's minds off the fact that being on call is the modern equivalent of being chained to an oar.
So wait, you're saying your chains are metaphorical?
I need to talk with HR...
You can train concentration through games, but violent games don't train violence.
You can train for violence with games, the military does it all the time.
That's not anything like saying games unwittingly program people to perform violent acts while they are playing a violent game just for fun.
Anyway, the only thing I have to say on the subject of treating ADHD with games is: Don't let them use Wario Ware!
Atheism is something of a loaded term since people seem to want to equate it with not only not believing in a god, but loudly denying the possibility of one.
Probably because we're trying to make a meaningful distinction between atheism and agnosticism.
Now now, pull yourself together, man! Time paradoxes are just a part of life in today's intelligently designed world, and nothing a well-adjusted member of society shouldn't be able to deal with. Why, it was just this past Christmas visiting family that I was looking at my family tree and discovered that I will have been my own great-grandfather. Instead of freaking out about how impossible it is, we all had a good laugh and then served desert.
Aren't you be glad that you'd finally be able to create life without the services of a woman?
But it's the "services of a woman" thing that's the whole point! The creating-life part is usually considered an undesirable side effect that is best avoided.
It's kinda like saying "aren't you glad that you'll finally be able to have alimony without the services of a women?"
the enzymes are being intelligently designed . . .
That's correct. Now the next step, once we are sure that these things are capable of evolving into life, is to invent a time machine and send them back in time to become the seeds for life on this planet. As documented here.
So why don't I recoil with infinite velocity when I'm hit by a photon?
Inertial dampeners, of course. Life on earth was pretty difficult until we had them installed.
How can you push/propel something if there's nothing to push against?
Since when is energy 'nothing'?
Pretty much everything I read about energy states that it requires a medium to travel in.
They disproved this theory a long time ago. Look up the Michelson-Morely experiment. It was only by extrapolation from things like sound waves that it was assumed a medium was required for electromagnetic waves.
That would mean, to me, that outer space is just a collection of tiny particles that have tiny mass and no inherit movement. Kind of like a really light (as in near weightless) soup. Objects traveling through space would push these tiny molecules out of the way momentarily as light travels at such a speed that it never deflects because of it's momentum.
Interesting, but this has the same problems as the luminiferous aether, in that it should have effects visible on the orbits of planets and so on, unless you're using "really light" as a synonym for "doesn't behave as though it has any mass at all" again. Eventually the only way to make the aether work was to assume it was massless -- that's right, even when a medium for electromagnetism was thought to exist, it was considered massless.
Err, I'm getting off track, but I don't buy that energy and matter are separate entities.
They aren't. They're the same thing. Or more specifically, mass is just a form of energy. Light is a form of energy which is not mass.
E=mc^2 is an amazing equation in part because it's so tough to grasp its full implications (I certainly won't claim anything close). It also makes much more sense than light having a really really teeny tiny mass that doesn't obey the rules that every other mass does. I don't understand why it makes you more comfortable to say light must have a mass because that means it's not "separate" when obviously it is separate in some way because nothing else that has mass can travel at c, and our equations regarding mass say it would be impossible for anything with mass to do so.
I was thinking more so that light has a very tiny mass that we cannot measure at this time. I just don't buy that something has 0 mass. If it did, it would be nothing.
No, it'd be purely energy. Why don't you think a wiggling electromagnetic field can't be said to be pure energy, and must involve tiny masses flying back and forth? I assure you that the electromagnetic field itself is a "thing" even though it has no mass.
And the problem is that regardless of our ability to measure tiny masses is that light having any mass at all, regardless of how tiny, causes all our equations to blow up. Equations that have been tested quite well on actual masses. To me, the idea that light is simply a form of energy with no mass makes a lot more sense than the idea that light does have mass, it just doesn't follow the same rules as every other kind of mass and can be accelerated to c without mass dilation. At the point where you're saying something has mass, but you don't actually put anything into any of the equations involving mass because they don't apply, that doesn't sound very useful to me other than to make you feel better. Isn't it easier to just accept that light has momentum but no mass?
Scientists have been contradicting themselves for decades. They all know light has mass. They also know that to travel at the speed of light requires infinite mass.
Wow, man, that's deep. I wasn't sure, so I went and asked a physicist friend to tell me the truth. He denied it, and said it's not true, light has no mass, just energy. I told him it was okay, I knew the truth that infinite mass is the same as zero mass. He not only wouldn't admit this, he said it was wrong!
Which means, damn, you're right! Science already knows this but just pretends its not the case! They are lying to the public in some kind of conspiracy, and my friend is in on it! But don't worry, with the new season of 24 starting I'll have plenty of inspiration to help me get the truth from him.