Someone who says the Constitution grants them the unlimited right to shoot people in the face without consequences has a bit less reason to be heard
I don't know of anyone who has said that. More importantly, if you don't respect the rights of others (such as the right to *life*, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), then the courts will remove your right to own a gun. If you shoot someone in the face, you don't get a gun anymore.
How do you explain the fact that Tea Parties have existed for a bit, but only the last one was a HUGE media event, even though there has been no real increases in taxes for some bit
You're right--taxes didn't go up. But spending did. The government spent nearly 1 trillion dollars in the last few months of the Bush presidency--then Obama nearly tripled it in the first few months of his.
One possible outcome of this is taxes going up, another is insane inflation like we saw during the great depression.
, and the previous canidate was also a big spender (larger than Obama so far).
I'd like to see those figures.
The Iraq war has an estimated cost of just under $1 trillion dollars over 8 years. Approximately $125bn per year. In the first few months of Obama's presidency, he signed bills and spend just under two trillion dollars.
Just to recap--Bush: Just under $1 trillion for the war in 8 years. Obama: Just under $2 trillion for the bailout in a few months.
That's what I objected to. That's why most people were out on the 4th protesting.
Most Republicans voted for Bush,
My only defense is that I was 20 and stupid when he was elected. At 24 I was just starting to catch on.;)
conservatism just because they don't like Obama over-spending in ways they personally don't like, not because of government over spending in general.
It's picking the lesser of two evils. McCain is a douche, but I voted for him because he was *slightly* better than Obama. Other people are voting Democrat because they are pissed at the Republicans for putting McCain up. Others are voting for Obama because he promised to bring the troops home--and deep down, the Iraq war is unconstitutional.
Neither would I. I would if you wouldn't have included the second part of that, though. Good government is based on ideological fist fights, the second someone wished to remove that, then they veer on evil.
The government is based on a legal contract that specifically says what the government can't do to it's citizens, and specifically says what actions it is allowed to take. When they violate that contract, they are dishonest. When people try or succeed in taking office with promises that they will violate that contract and the rights of the citizens, that is evil.
Here I disagree. We have nothing against roads and other public works, nor do we have much against the police and fire departments. Most of us are even for government spent research (such as ARPA's internet, NASA, etc...). You might be against these, I don't know.
I am against those.:)
I can sort of see the *federal* government providing the interstate system under the constitution (Article 1, Section 8) where it discusses post roads.
And there's nothing wrong with your individual state voting on, taxing, and providing highways, bridges, etc..
Back in the Good 'Ol Days, fire departments were simply groups of able-bodied men who would drop whatever they were doing and rush to try and put a fire out. (here)
(And note that I'm not saying it's the best or correct solution. Your town/city/whatever can vote to have a fire department or not.)
Actually I don't think the second amendment gives a the blanket right for everyone to be armed
Correct. It acknowledges that American citizens the right to be armed, but it does not acknowledge the right of people who deny others their rights (like criminals) to have guns.
and I'm not scared of guns (own a couple myself). The two problem terms is the word "militia", and the parsing of the word "people" (as opposed to "persons").
A militia being a group of citizens bringing their armaments. A militia is not a group of people who are given guns by the government--that's called an Army. It is not possible to form a militia unless 'the people' have their own weapons to pick up in times of crisis to help defend their country, state, town, neighborhood, or home.
This is a different debate though, I just point this out to show that there is valid ambiguity here
And I've pointed out that it's not ambiguous.
and not all people who disagree with you are gun haters, or people frightened of guns.
True. They can also be Socialists, Marxists, Elitists, etc...;)
Never said or implied that. I was just balancing the debate, and pointing out that both major parties are participating in this idiocy.
Debates aren't about balance, they are about discussing right and wrong, or pros and cons.
Let me clarify, I'm sorry for being a bit vague there; Some of the Tea Party scene were actual people, who actually had views they wanted to present. A large part of the scene was coopted by Republican think-tanks, and asto-turfing firms.
I know a majority of the people participating in the tea party. Not a single one was coopted by Republican think-tanks. I think you're confusing 'people coopted by Republican think-tanks' with 'people who joined the Republican party because they mostly agree with their values'.
If I believe that government spending is out of control--and the Republican party also believes that--am I suddenly being coopted by Republican think-tanks? No. And while it is impossible for me to know if some 'big evil secretive Republican mastermind' paid or coerced some people into participating in the tea parties, I would highly doubt they could round up 50,000 people without someone saying "Hey--Bob Smith from the Republican party is paying me $50 to show up and say I hate the Democrats."
I really doubt the original tea party groups approved, or endorsed, the paid idiots standing around with birther signs, for example.
I'm not on the 'birther' bandwagon--but a friend of mine repeatedly tells me the following: "It is a constitutional requirement. Obama did not present evidence. If he were born in the US, it would be very easy to make the whole argument disappear. Show proof."
I didn't really follow the whole birth certificate thing. He's President now, and the Supreme Court apparently declined to hear the case on his certificate. It's the least of the problems with our government.
Good, you have a case... This wasn't the point though. I disagree with you on many of these issues, and this too is fine. The second you try to impose your views on others, or censor their ability to disagree, then we venture into what I'd call evil, though.
I wouldn't call asking the government to behave constitutionally 'evil'. You are free to have your beliefs and do your own thing in life. And so am I. When one group gets the government to take money from another group (like the current healthcare hot topic takes money from everyone to help cover uninsured), that's evil. Actually, when your work is taken from you to serve another it's called slavery.
if I'm dead, I have no secrets of my own to keep anymore, so I'd probably want my friends and family to have access to all my stuff -- ssh keys, gpg keys, porn
I can imagine it now...
Timmy: I sure miss dad.
Billy: Me too. But he left me $5,000. What'd he leave you?
Timmy: A NAS with 8 TB of porn...
Yeah? I have the right use purchase anything I want (within legal boundaries*). I have the right to purchase PhoneX instead of PhoneY. I have the right to use TelecomA instead of TelecomB. Why shouldn't I have the right to use my desired phone with my desired telecom?
Because it's not your choice. Telecom is a bad example though because huge portions of their networks were built with taxpayer money--but most companies built up capital and decided to provide a service. They set the rules and price in which that service is offered. If you don't like the price and/or rules, don't buy it. If enough people don't buy it, they go out of business. If someone like you gets annoyed and decides to start a company with less rules and restrictions and/or better service, you'll win more customers. Of course it goes both ways, the other company can turn around and 'compete' with you by lowering their costs, providing better services, etc... It's called capitalism.
The drafters are dead, and the context for much of what they wrote is completely lost to us.
Read the federalist papers. Read texts and documents from and about the founders around the time it was ratified. They give pretty darned clear details. Maybe not absolute, but enough to know that our current government is completely out of control.
Look at the Second Amendment, how you parse comma can lead to vastly different readings.
You only have vastly different meanings because some idiots are afraid of guns. If the second amendment were about books, no one would be complaining: "A well regulated library being necessary to the education of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."
There would be zero debate about people having the right to own books, or have books at home, or carry books while out in public.
I only get worried when someone insists that their point is correct and all others should be censored.
I am right...;) But I don't want dissenting opinions to be censored, or silenced.
The opposition is doing this too, inserting fake interested red necks into debates, and trying to side track completely unrelated events towards the ends of killing Obama's healthcare
So if Democrats are doing it, it's 'ok' because the Republicans are allegedly doing it?
And it's totally impossible that there is a large number of people in the country that flat-out don't want the government having *anything* to do with healthcare?
Same with the fake Tea Party scene back on tax day.
I participated. I'm not a Republican. In fact, when the local Republican chairman asked me if I would march with the group of Republicans, I said 'no'. Is it impossible for you to believe that there are people out there that want their taxes lowered? People that want the government to stop spending trillions of dollars?
Maybe I should ignore the Democrats when they protest the next war because they're 'astroturf protesters' brought in by the left because the right allegedly does it? (Come to think of it though, I haven't seen any more war protests now that Obama is president. Is the war suddenly OK now?)
It annoys me that the interested parties can't just come out and STATE THEIR CASE.
Fine. Here's the case. The government needs to stop spending our money on unconstitutional activities. The constitution very specifically says what each branch can do. There is no provision in the system for healthcare. No provision for the FAA, FCC, ATF, CDC, FBI, etc... Cut all the special programs out too--like housing assistance, farm subsidies, etc... Balance the budget and get spending under control or we will force you to. Stop taking away the rights of the people. Stop screwing with gun rights, freedom of speech, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, etc...or once again, the people will force you to stop.
Being that they only resort to astroturfing and other dishonesties, I personally think that these causes (both pro and con) have no actually argument, and should be completely ignored.
Taking away all the politics of the issue, one side is correct even if they are misguided. No one has the right to take money from me and give it to someone else at the point of a gun. (aka IRS enforcement agents)
But calling it a "death panel" is a bit hyperbolic. So far I haven't seen anything about removing the ability to shop around.
Really? It's in the senate bill. Not that it's been passed, but they are currently debating it. Once you lose your insurance, you're stuck with government insurance...and they will be cutting costs. Just look at medicare. Look at the VA system. People are denied treatments because of costs. 'death pane
At least one potential downside is that you forget to log in. Then everyone gets a deathgram and you've scared the hell out of everyone.
That's why I mentioned in my post about a 'reminder' feature. Say you set your your 'death timer' at 1 month and your reminder at 1 week. When you have 1 week left on your timer, you get an email or SMS. And ultimately, if you set this all up and totally forget about it and/or ignore it, there's not much I can do. I can't tell the difference between 'dead you' and 'I-forgot-to-sign-in you'.
You sound like a young man, not quite cynical enough to be middle-aged like me...
Not quite middle-aged yet, but I'll hit 30 in less than a year.
It's understandable that you think it's bullshit because it's not logical. It's not logical. It's Monopolistic Business as usual
I understand you don't like Comcast and think they are an evil monopoly and that the word 'monopoly' is justification enough for you any time Comcast does anything you don't like.
compounded with a shit load of legal and back office agreements as to territories and policies, and hourly slaves following the rules to hang on to a shitty job.
You're totally right. There must be some sort of territory, policy, or mysterious voodoo that prevents Comcast from accepting money and dragging service a few hundred feet away. That definitely follows with your modus operandi that logic is out the window...
I have the deepest sympathy for you, darkpixel2k, your bright outlook on life is probably the last vestige of childhood left to you, and we're taking it away.
The old bastion of the idiot. You should try and sound condescending towards me to win your point rather then actually breaking my argument.
The GP posted a link to a post by HeronBlademaster saying that Comcast sucks because they wouldn't provide service to his dad's company even through they had cable across the street, and they couldn't even convince Comcast to run cable if the company HeronBlademaster's dad works for paid for it.
Which is total BS. Comcast would be glad to take HeronBlademaster's dad's companies money to expand their infrastructure free of charge.
I'm not commenting on HeronBlademaster's solution being dumb, I'm commenting that HeronBlademaster's is full of shit that Comcast wouldn't accept money from someone to expand their infrastructure free of charge.
Not at all. The summary clearly states that it requires 2 people that YOU appoint to confirm death before they will send the e-mail. This means these two people need to know about the service.
I had a much better idea, never started the project though.
You can (optionally) encrypt the messages via GPG and upload them to the site. Address them to whomever you want. (E-mail is free, if you want something sent out via postal mail, you must put a deposit on your account.) You set a timer--like 2 days, 1 week, 1 month, etc... You signing into the website resets the timer. If you don't sign in, the system assumes you are dead and your stuff is delivered. Obviously with options to remind you via email or SMS that your are about to be considered 'dead' or what-not.
I even registered deadlocker.com 2 years ago for the project. Since I have done exactly jack *#&$ with it in 2 years, I have resolved to let it expire. Bah.
That post is BS.
I've run into the *exact* same situation with Comcast. One of my clients has Comcast less than 50 feet away from their building--it's across a street.
The part about your story that doesn't line up is that Comcast wouldn't let him pay for it. Comcast flat-out told us if we wanted cable pulled under the street, we would have to pay something on the order of $23,000. Alternatively, we could *find* 10 people in our office park that would commit to 2 years of service and they'd pull the cable for free.
Instead, we made a deal with a house on the opposite side of the street to host our Comcast modem and one side of a wireless bridge. We still pay the same per month, but we're 'sharing' a small fraction of our internet connection with a nice old lady.
I seem to remember that he went over details during the primary, when he and Hillary were duking it out for the worst public health care plan.
I must have missed that one. I never once heard him nail down *anything* about healthcare.
The details changed a bit, but thats to be expected from unleashing it on congress. Regardless, we the voters are still culpable since we then voted for him without being even a little bit sure of the details.
True. I always find it funny that every single one of those people took an oath to uphold, and defend the constitution--yet not a single one of them does it. Not a single one cares about our freedom.
Completely true, and on its face this is a good example of healthy democracy in action.
Which is why we are supposed to be a representative republic. Unfortunately we don't have enough representatives due to Public Law 62-5--otherwise we would have thousands and thousands of congresscritters, each representing a much smaller chunk of the population...making them more responsible. Instead of trying to talk to 10 representatives for your entire state, you might be talking to two representatives from your *city*.
Though we run into two problems, astroturfing
Yes--astroturfing like when the Democrats planted a fake Doctor at a recent town hall meeting?
, and the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum (my way or no way at all).
I don't see anything wrong with "my way or no way at all". Should I be allowed to shoot you in the face for no reason? I'd bet your answer is "no". Maybe we should 'compromise' or try to find 'middle ground'. Maybe I should just 'wing' you?.
In life, there are situations that are definitely right or definitely wrong. Giving one person freedom at the expense of taking freedom from another person is one of those 'definitely wrong' situations.
People aren't being honest here, either that or our population has truly become dominated by the lunatic fringe.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. If you have a few thousand people making a bunch of noise amongst millions that are simply being quite and going about their daily lives, it may seem that way.
The people spouting things about "death panels"... They scare me.
It shouldn't scare you unless you are 65+.
The majority of healthcare costs (on the order of 75%) come from people 65 and up. So if you have to cut costs, where would you do it? Stop giving life-saving treatment to the old people? Yeah. They won't vote for much longer anyways. Give the treatment to the people who will vote for you for a long time--like 18-year-olds.
The government fix for the healthcare system is to tell people (like doctors) what they are allowed to make. Doctors will turn around and start cutting costs by giving less expensive drugs which may not work as well, giving you worse treatment. They will also see less patients. If the government says you get $1,000 per day, and you reach that amount after seeing 5 patients, why see more? Why see another 5 patients if the government is just going to take the money or not pay you more?
I'm really not sure what I should feel, as the system is so complicated that I doubt ANYONE truly knows what is best.
Good idea. Put the government in charge. If no one knows best, the government will absolutely 'not know best' better than anyone.
I don't understand the liberal idea that we should give the government tons of power.
The thinking seems to be along the lines of "Obama is teh awesome! He's getting us healthcare."
...and you're completely ignoring the fact that Obama will be out of office in roughly 3.5 years or maybe 7.5...then what? What is we accidentally elect the next Hitler--and the power that we gave Obama/Government (totally managing our healthcare) ends up in the hands of the next guy--and he says "Kill everyone who is sick"?
I know it's not very likely that we'd elect the next Hitler--but why even give government the chance to take our freedoms away? Sure, they could use them for good, but they could also mis-use them.
All I do know to believe is that there are people who go broke through complicated (and often unnecessary) medical procedures.
What? You didn't have insurance to cover the cost? I do. So my being responsible means I need to take care of you being irresponsible?
Worse, because they can't afford them, some people go without them completely and end up with worse conditions that hospitals have to deal with in the end. This is unacceptable as a citizen and as a human being.
Where is life fair? When you were born were you guaranteed never to have medical problems? On top of that, where were you guaranteed that someone else *had* to take care of you free of charge (or on the cheap) so you could afford it?
I'd like to know what right it is that *you* have to live and force someone to take care of you, when the average liberal thinks it's ok to kill a baby? What makes you so special?
I recall reading a Republican Representative's quote in Time magazine a while back about how if they can beat Obama's healthcare plan, they'll beat HIM.
Lame quote. This isn't a game about 'beating Obama'. It's about saying "You don't have the right to inflict this on me.".
If Obama tomorrow decided to do something constitutional--I'd be 100% behind him. It's not about beating Obama. It's about limiting the unconstitutional power of government which is taking away my freedoms.
That, to me, is pure evil. They oppose a plan not because it's in the best interest of the people (or so they believe, in any case) but because they want political power.
Agreed. It's human nature to want power. And what most people do with it is evil and wrong.
I don't want Obama having power over my private healthcare decisions between my doctor and I anymore than I'd want Bush having that power--or the person who comes after Obama.
We run into a problem with calling Obama's health care plan evil though... A majority of people voted for him, knowing EXACTLY that he would do this,
You're wrong. He never said during his campaign that he would do this. He simply said 'Healthcare Reform'. Some people took that to mean fixing insurance companies, others may have through of things along the lines of Medicare and Medicate, while others yet had visions of the Post Office and the DMV.
In any vote, there are more than two sides.
Take Bush for example. Some people didn't like him because he was too right-wing (i.e. most Democrats). Some people liked him because he shared a lot of their views (i.e. most Republicans). Yet some people didn't like him because he wasn't right-wing enough (I'd guess a lot of Libertarians).
Same thing with the healthcare. There are some people that want his healthcare plan, others that oppose it, and finally some that think he's not socialist enough.
The only evil people are those who claim to have the "Truth", and are willing to inflict it upon others against their wills. Evil is nothing but a synonym for people who utter the phrase "for their own good".
What mistake? The ribbon is fine, it takes 5 mins to pick up unless you have a learning disability or a brain dead MS hater.
I am a MS-hater, and probably brain-dead too. It took me 15 minutes, dorking around with office to figure out that giant fucking orb that takes up 1/3 of my screen is actually the file menu. Why did they take a perfectly good UI that everyone knows like the back of their hand and turn it on it's ear?
Split loom sucks, especially for ethernet wires, you still need to tie it down to make things look nice and it doesn't deal with extra wire very well. I only use it to protect against rodent chewing (I have pet rabbits) when I have a single wire running to the wall.
Yeah--they totally suck. That's why I installed Jeffries Tubes around my office. They make cable management a snap--you simply grab some futuristic plug-looking glowing thing and use it to patch around any outage. The down-side is that I often run into unknown mysterious organisms that cause frequent network outages and power problems. But one side benefit is that if you call in some sort of engineer to help solve the problem, you can often solve what appear to be complex personal and professional problems during the idle chit-chat while working in said Jeffries Tubes...
$18 mil for a website and in a total coincidence the contract goes to a company run by people who have given tens of thousands of dollars to house majority leader Steny Hoyer (D)
That's a good gig though. $18 million to design a website that tells you your tax money is going into a giant sinkhole...oh, and about $18 million went to a certain web design company...
Wait, I misread that. You seriously overwrote a machine while it was running and it worked without the running OS exploding in flames? That's bordering on miraculous. Was this before the kernel implemented buffer caching at all?:-D
Either way, you could do it just as easily and much more safely by booting that clone machine with an install CD and dropping to the command line. Installing an OS on the clone machine, booting off that installed volume, and then overwriting your root partition is entirely the wrong way to solve that problem.
I honestly didn't expect it to work. If the replacement machine exploded on boot, I would have told the customer 'tough luck, we have to take your production machine offline for an hour or so'.
I was flat-out amazed that it worked. It's probably due to the fact that the machine had a decent chunk of memory and all it was doing was serving pages. I think the only writes to the local disk were apache logs and the syslog.
Which brings up the obvious question: why would any OS allow a user-space tool of any kind to perform writes to a block device for a drive with mounted volumes? There's no reason in the universe for an OS to allow that to occur. Similarly, there's no reason to allow writes to the block device for any mounted partition....
I think you miss the power of Linux.
A year ago, I had a linux box that was dying that *had* to stay up and running. (Why didn't they have a cluster or something?) I grabbed an identical machine, mounted the nfs backup share and did a 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/nas/machine.img'. I installed Linux on the identical machine (this was before the Ubuntu Live CD existed), mounted the nfs share and did a 'dd if=/nas/machine.img of=/dev/sda'. Then I did a 'reboot -n'. Aside from a few corrupted/tmp files, the machine booted without any problems and has been in service for a few years now.
Try restoring over top of a running copy of Windows.
First, that a vulnerability in WebDav, not IIS really. Secondly, it can only be exploited in IIS 5.1, which is the windows XP version of IIS. No serious host is going to be serving pages from XP, nor would they leave WebDav enabled.
How about:
No serious software company builds a webserver for a workstation OS.
or
No one would ever run IIS on a $120 copy of Windows XP when they could go out and spend $800 for Windows Server.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who says the Constitution grants them the unlimited right to shoot people in the face without consequences has a bit less reason to be heard
I don't know of anyone who has said that. More importantly, if you don't respect the rights of others (such as the right to *life*, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), then the courts will remove your right to own a gun. If you shoot someone in the face, you don't get a gun anymore.
How do you explain the fact that Tea Parties have existed for a bit, but only the last one was a HUGE media event, even though there has been no real increases in taxes for some bit
You're right--taxes didn't go up. But spending did. The government spent nearly 1 trillion dollars in the last few months of the Bush presidency--then Obama nearly tripled it in the first few months of his.
One possible outcome of this is taxes going up, another is insane inflation like we saw during the great depression.
, and the previous canidate was also a big spender (larger than Obama so far).
I'd like to see those figures.
The Iraq war has an estimated cost of just under $1 trillion dollars over 8 years. Approximately $125bn per year. In the first few months of Obama's presidency, he signed bills and spend just under two trillion dollars.
Just to recap--Bush: Just under $1 trillion for the war in 8 years. Obama: Just under $2 trillion for the bailout in a few months.
That's what I objected to. That's why most people were out on the 4th protesting.
Most Republicans voted for Bush,
My only defense is that I was 20 and stupid when he was elected. At 24 I was just starting to catch on. ;)
conservatism just because they don't like Obama over-spending in ways they personally don't like, not because of government over spending in general.
It's picking the lesser of two evils. McCain is a douche, but I voted for him because he was *slightly* better than Obama. Other people are voting Democrat because they are pissed at the Republicans for putting McCain up. Others are voting for Obama because he promised to bring the troops home--and deep down, the Iraq war is unconstitutional.
Neither would I. I would if you wouldn't have included the second part of that, though. Good government is based on ideological fist fights, the second someone wished to remove that, then they veer on evil.
The government is based on a legal contract that specifically says what the government can't do to it's citizens, and specifically says what actions it is allowed to take. When they violate that contract, they are dishonest. When people try or succeed in taking office with promises that they will violate that contract and the rights of the citizens, that is evil.
Here I disagree. We have nothing against roads and other public works, nor do we have much against the police and fire departments. Most of us are even for government spent research (such as ARPA's internet, NASA, etc...). You might be against these, I don't know.
I am against those. :)
I can sort of see the *federal* government providing the interstate system under the constitution (Article 1, Section 8) where it discusses post roads.
And there's nothing wrong with your individual state voting on, taxing, and providing highways, bridges, etc..
Back in the Good 'Ol Days, fire departments were simply groups of able-bodied men who would drop whatever they were doing and rush to try and put a fire out. (here)
(And note that I'm not saying it's the best or correct solution. Your town/city/whatever can vote to have a fire department or not.)
Actually I don't think the second amendment gives a the blanket right for everyone to be armed
Correct. It acknowledges that American citizens the right to be armed, but it does not acknowledge the right of people who deny others their rights (like criminals) to have guns.
and I'm not scared of guns (own a couple myself). The two problem terms is the word "militia", and the parsing of the word "people" (as opposed to "persons").
A militia being a group of citizens bringing their armaments. A militia is not a group of people who are given guns by the government--that's called an Army. It is not possible to form a militia unless 'the people' have their own weapons to pick up in times of crisis to help defend their country, state, town, neighborhood, or home.
This is a different debate though, I just point this out to show that there is valid ambiguity here
And I've pointed out that it's not ambiguous.
and not all people who disagree with you are gun haters, or people frightened of guns.
True. They can also be Socialists, Marxists, Elitists, etc... ;)
Never said or implied that. I was just balancing the debate, and pointing out that both major parties are participating in this idiocy.
Debates aren't about balance, they are about discussing right and wrong, or pros and cons.
Let me clarify, I'm sorry for being a bit vague there; Some of the Tea Party scene were actual people, who actually had views they wanted to present. A large part of the scene was coopted by Republican think-tanks, and asto-turfing firms.
I know a majority of the people participating in the tea party. Not a single one was coopted by Republican think-tanks. I think you're confusing 'people coopted by Republican think-tanks' with 'people who joined the Republican party because they mostly agree with their values'.
If I believe that government spending is out of control--and the Republican party also believes that--am I suddenly being coopted by Republican think-tanks? No. And while it is impossible for me to know if some 'big evil secretive Republican mastermind' paid or coerced some people into participating in the tea parties, I would highly doubt they could round up 50,000 people without someone saying "Hey--Bob Smith from the Republican party is paying me $50 to show up and say I hate the Democrats."
I really doubt the original tea party groups approved, or endorsed, the paid idiots standing around with birther signs, for example.
I'm not on the 'birther' bandwagon--but a friend of mine repeatedly tells me the following: "It is a constitutional requirement. Obama did not present evidence. If he were born in the US, it would be very easy to make the whole argument disappear. Show proof."
I didn't really follow the whole birth certificate thing. He's President now, and the Supreme Court apparently declined to hear the case on his certificate. It's the least of the problems with our government.
Good, you have a case... This wasn't the point though. I disagree with you on many of these issues, and this too is fine. The second you try to impose your views on others, or censor their ability to disagree, then we venture into what I'd call evil, though.
I wouldn't call asking the government to behave constitutionally 'evil'. You are free to have your beliefs and do your own thing in life. And so am I. When one group gets the government to take money from another group (like the current healthcare hot topic takes money from everyone to help cover uninsured), that's evil. Actually, when your work is taken from you to serve another it's called slavery.
Also, isn't this what insurance companies do now?
Maybe so--but I have the choice to pick zero
if I'm dead, I have no secrets of my own to keep anymore, so I'd probably want my friends and family to have access to all my stuff -- ssh keys, gpg keys, porn
I can imagine it now...
Timmy: I sure miss dad.
Billy: Me too. But he left me $5,000. What'd he leave you?
Timmy: A NAS with 8 TB of porn...
Yeah? I have the right use purchase anything I want (within legal boundaries*). I have the right to purchase PhoneX instead of PhoneY. I have the right to use TelecomA instead of TelecomB. Why shouldn't I have the right to use my desired phone with my desired telecom?
Because it's not your choice. Telecom is a bad example though because huge portions of their networks were built with taxpayer money--but most companies built up capital and decided to provide a service. They set the rules and price in which that service is offered. If you don't like the price and/or rules, don't buy it. If enough people don't buy it, they go out of business. If someone like you gets annoyed and decides to start a company with less rules and restrictions and/or better service, you'll win more customers. Of course it goes both ways, the other company can turn around and 'compete' with you by lowering their costs, providing better services, etc... It's called capitalism.
The drafters are dead, and the context for much of what they wrote is completely lost to us.
Read the federalist papers. Read texts and documents from and about the founders around the time it was ratified. They give pretty darned clear details. Maybe not absolute, but enough to know that our current government is completely out of control.
Look at the Second Amendment, how you parse comma can lead to vastly different readings.
You only have vastly different meanings because some idiots are afraid of guns. If the second amendment were about books, no one would be complaining: "A well regulated library being necessary to the education of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."
There would be zero debate about people having the right to own books, or have books at home, or carry books while out in public.
I only get worried when someone insists that their point is correct and all others should be censored.
I am right... ;) But I don't want dissenting opinions to be censored, or silenced.
The opposition is doing this too, inserting fake interested red necks into debates, and trying to side track completely unrelated events towards the ends of killing Obama's healthcare
So if Democrats are doing it, it's 'ok' because the Republicans are allegedly doing it?
And it's totally impossible that there is a large number of people in the country that flat-out don't want the government having *anything* to do with healthcare?
Same with the fake Tea Party scene back on tax day.
I participated. I'm not a Republican. In fact, when the local Republican chairman asked me if I would march with the group of Republicans, I said 'no'. Is it impossible for you to believe that there are people out there that want their taxes lowered? People that want the government to stop spending trillions of dollars?
Maybe I should ignore the Democrats when they protest the next war because they're 'astroturf protesters' brought in by the left because the right allegedly does it? (Come to think of it though, I haven't seen any more war protests now that Obama is president. Is the war suddenly OK now?)
It annoys me that the interested parties can't just come out and STATE THEIR CASE.
Fine. Here's the case. The government needs to stop spending our money on unconstitutional activities. The constitution very specifically says what each branch can do. There is no provision in the system for healthcare. No provision for the FAA, FCC, ATF, CDC, FBI, etc... Cut all the special programs out too--like housing assistance, farm subsidies, etc... Balance the budget and get spending under control or we will force you to. Stop taking away the rights of the people. Stop screwing with gun rights, freedom of speech, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, etc...or once again, the people will force you to stop.
Being that they only resort to astroturfing and other dishonesties, I personally think that these causes (both pro and con) have no actually argument, and should be completely ignored.
Taking away all the politics of the issue, one side is correct even if they are misguided. No one has the right to take money from me and give it to someone else at the point of a gun. (aka IRS enforcement agents)
But calling it a "death panel" is a bit hyperbolic. So far I haven't seen anything about removing the ability to shop around.
Really? It's in the senate bill. Not that it's been passed, but they are currently debating it. Once you lose your insurance, you're stuck with government insurance...and they will be cutting costs. Just look at medicare. Look at the VA system. People are denied treatments because of costs. 'death pane
At least one potential downside is that you forget to log in. Then everyone gets a deathgram and you've scared the hell out of everyone.
That's why I mentioned in my post about a 'reminder' feature. Say you set your your 'death timer' at 1 month and your reminder at 1 week. When you have 1 week left on your timer, you get an email or SMS. And ultimately, if you set this all up and totally forget about it and/or ignore it, there's not much I can do. I can't tell the difference between 'dead you' and 'I-forgot-to-sign-in you'.
You sound like a young man, not quite cynical enough to be middle-aged like me...
Not quite middle-aged yet, but I'll hit 30 in less than a year.
It's understandable that you think it's bullshit because it's not logical. It's not logical. It's Monopolistic Business as usual
I understand you don't like Comcast and think they are an evil monopoly and that the word 'monopoly' is justification enough for you any time Comcast does anything you don't like.
compounded with a shit load of legal and back office agreements as to territories and policies, and hourly slaves following the rules to hang on to a shitty job.
You're totally right. There must be some sort of territory, policy, or mysterious voodoo that prevents Comcast from accepting money and dragging service a few hundred feet away. That definitely follows with your modus operandi that logic is out the window...
I have the deepest sympathy for you, darkpixel2k, your bright outlook on life is probably the last vestige of childhood left to you, and we're taking it away.
The old bastion of the idiot. You should try and sound condescending towards me to win your point rather then actually breaking my argument.
but it sounds like Comcast still sucks balls.
The GP posted a link to a post by HeronBlademaster saying that Comcast sucks because they wouldn't provide service to his dad's company even through they had cable across the street, and they couldn't even convince Comcast to run cable if the company HeronBlademaster's dad works for paid for it.
Which is total BS. Comcast would be glad to take HeronBlademaster's dad's companies money to expand their infrastructure free of charge.
I'm not commenting on HeronBlademaster's solution being dumb, I'm commenting that HeronBlademaster's is full of shit that Comcast wouldn't accept money from someone to expand their infrastructure free of charge.
Not at all. The summary clearly states that it requires 2 people that YOU appoint to confirm death before they will send the e-mail. This means these two people need to know about the service.
I had a much better idea, never started the project though.
You can (optionally) encrypt the messages via GPG and upload them to the site. Address them to whomever you want. (E-mail is free, if you want something sent out via postal mail, you must put a deposit on your account.) You set a timer--like 2 days, 1 week, 1 month, etc... You signing into the website resets the timer. If you don't sign in, the system assumes you are dead and your stuff is delivered. Obviously with options to remind you via email or SMS that your are about to be considered 'dead' or what-not.
I even registered deadlocker.com 2 years ago for the project. Since I have done exactly jack *#&$ with it in 2 years, I have resolved to let it expire. Bah.
I live in WA, though I'm a native Californian from Humboldt county
Oh--I was wondering why traffic was backed up for 10 miles on Friday. Thanks for clearing that up. ;)
Occasionally local projects get stopped due to red tape (either government or corporate).
A certain cable Internet provider refusing to run cables across the street.
That post is BS.
I've run into the *exact* same situation with Comcast. One of my clients has Comcast less than 50 feet away from their building--it's across a street.
The part about your story that doesn't line up is that Comcast wouldn't let him pay for it. Comcast flat-out told us if we wanted cable pulled under the street, we would have to pay something on the order of $23,000. Alternatively, we could *find* 10 people in our office park that would commit to 2 years of service and they'd pull the cable for free.
Instead, we made a deal with a house on the opposite side of the street to host our Comcast modem and one side of a wireless bridge. We still pay the same per month, but we're 'sharing' a small fraction of our internet connection with a nice old lady.
I seem to remember that he went over details during the primary, when he and Hillary were duking it out for the worst public health care plan.
I must have missed that one. I never once heard him nail down *anything* about healthcare.
The details changed a bit, but thats to be expected from unleashing it on congress. Regardless, we the voters are still culpable since we then voted for him without being even a little bit sure of the details.
True. I always find it funny that every single one of those people took an oath to uphold, and defend the constitution--yet not a single one of them does it. Not a single one cares about our freedom.
Completely true, and on its face this is a good example of healthy democracy in action.
Which is why we are supposed to be a representative republic. Unfortunately we don't have enough representatives due to Public Law 62-5--otherwise we would have thousands and thousands of congresscritters, each representing a much smaller chunk of the population...making them more responsible. Instead of trying to talk to 10 representatives for your entire state, you might be talking to two representatives from your *city*.
Though we run into two problems, astroturfing
Yes--astroturfing like when the Democrats planted a fake Doctor at a recent town hall meeting?
, and the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum (my way or no way at all).
I don't see anything wrong with "my way or no way at all". Should I be allowed to shoot you in the face for no reason? I'd bet your answer is "no". Maybe we should 'compromise' or try to find 'middle ground'. Maybe I should just 'wing' you?.
In life, there are situations that are definitely right or definitely wrong. Giving one person freedom at the expense of taking freedom from another person is one of those 'definitely wrong' situations.
People aren't being honest here, either that or our population has truly become dominated by the lunatic fringe.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. If you have a few thousand people making a bunch of noise amongst millions that are simply being quite and going about their daily lives, it may seem that way.
The people spouting things about "death panels"... They scare me.
It shouldn't scare you unless you are 65+.
The majority of healthcare costs (on the order of 75%) come from people 65 and up. So if you have to cut costs, where would you do it? Stop giving life-saving treatment to the old people? Yeah. They won't vote for much longer anyways. Give the treatment to the people who will vote for you for a long time--like 18-year-olds.
The government fix for the healthcare system is to tell people (like doctors) what they are allowed to make. Doctors will turn around and start cutting costs by giving less expensive drugs which may not work as well, giving you worse treatment. They will also see less patients. If the government says you get $1,000 per day, and you reach that amount after seeing 5 patients, why see more? Why see another 5 patients if the government is just going to take the money or not pay you more?
I'm really not sure what I should feel, as the system is so complicated that I doubt ANYONE truly knows what is best.
Good idea. Put the government in charge. If no one knows best, the government will absolutely 'not know best' better than anyone.
...and you're completely ignoring the fact that Obama will be out of office in roughly 3.5 years or maybe 7.5...then what? What is we accidentally elect the next Hitler--and the power that we gave Obama/Government (totally managing our healthcare) ends up in the hands of the next guy--and he says "Kill everyone who is sick"?
I don't understand the liberal idea that we should give the government tons of power.
The thinking seems to be along the lines of "Obama is teh awesome! He's getting us healthcare."
I know it's not very likely that we'd elect the next Hitler--but why even give government the chance to take our freedoms away? Sure, they could use them for good, but they could also mis-use them.
All I do know to believe is that there are people who go broke through complicated (and often unnecessary) medical procedures.
What? You didn't have insurance to cover the cost? I do. So my being responsible means I need to take care of you being irresponsible?
Worse, because they can't afford them, some people go without them completely and end up with worse conditions that hospitals have to deal with in the end. This is unacceptable as a citizen and as a human being.
Where is life fair? When you were born were you guaranteed never to have medical problems? On top of that, where were you guaranteed that someone else *had* to take care of you free of charge (or on the cheap) so you could afford it?
I'd like to know what right it is that *you* have to live and force someone to take care of you, when the average liberal thinks it's ok to kill a baby? What makes you so special?
I recall reading a Republican Representative's quote in Time magazine a while back about how if they can beat Obama's healthcare plan, they'll beat HIM.
Lame quote. This isn't a game about 'beating Obama'. It's about saying "You don't have the right to inflict this on me.".
If Obama tomorrow decided to do something constitutional--I'd be 100% behind him. It's not about beating Obama. It's about limiting the unconstitutional power of government which is taking away my freedoms.
That, to me, is pure evil. They oppose a plan not because it's in the best interest of the people (or so they believe, in any case) but because they want political power.
Agreed. It's human nature to want power. And what most people do with it is evil and wrong.
I don't want Obama having power over my private healthcare decisions between my doctor and I anymore than I'd want Bush having that power--or the person who comes after Obama.
We run into a problem with calling Obama's health care plan evil though... A majority of people voted for him, knowing EXACTLY that he would do this,
You're wrong. He never said during his campaign that he would do this. He simply said 'Healthcare Reform'. Some people took that to mean fixing insurance companies, others may have through of things along the lines of Medicare and Medicate, while others yet had visions of the Post Office and the DMV.
In any vote, there are more than two sides. Take Bush for example. Some people didn't like him because he was too right-wing (i.e. most Democrats). Some people liked him because he shared a lot of their views (i.e. most Republicans). Yet some people didn't like him because he wasn't right-wing enough (I'd guess a lot of Libertarians).
Same thing with the healthcare. There are some people that want his healthcare plan, others that oppose it, and finally some that think he's not socialist enough.
Yes, and the people who oppose it for purely ideological reasons as well.
I'm lost...
Obama forcing his healthcare plan on us is evil, and opposing it for whatever reason is evil as well?
The only evil people are those who claim to have the "Truth", and are willing to inflict it upon others against their wills. Evil is nothing but a synonym for people who utter the phrase "for their own good".
What mistake? The ribbon is fine, it takes 5 mins to pick up unless you have a learning disability or a brain dead MS hater.
I am a MS-hater, and probably brain-dead too. It took me 15 minutes, dorking around with office to figure out that giant fucking orb that takes up 1/3 of my screen is actually the file menu. Why did they take a perfectly good UI that everyone knows like the back of their hand and turn it on it's ear?
I don't hear any sound. :(
Sound?
There was sound?
>clickety..< >tap< >tap!<
>rustle< >tap!< >tap!<
#@$^!
>tap< >tap< >TAP!< >BASH!<
>BASH< >BASH!< >BASH!!!<
Shit. PulseAudio crashes again on my laptop.
Split loom sucks, especially for ethernet wires, you still need to tie it down to make things look nice and it doesn't deal with extra wire very well. I only use it to protect against rodent chewing (I have pet rabbits) when I have a single wire running to the wall.
Yeah--they totally suck. That's why I installed Jeffries Tubes around my office. They make cable management a snap--you simply grab some futuristic plug-looking glowing thing and use it to patch around any outage. The down-side is that I often run into unknown mysterious organisms that cause frequent network outages and power problems. But one side benefit is that if you call in some sort of engineer to help solve the problem, you can often solve what appear to be complex personal and professional problems during the idle chit-chat while working in said Jeffries Tubes...
$18 mil for a website and in a total coincidence the contract goes to a company run by people who have given tens of thousands of dollars to house majority leader Steny Hoyer (D)
That's a good gig though. $18 million to design a website that tells you your tax money is going into a giant sinkhole...oh, and about $18 million went to a certain web design company...
Exactly. Isn't this just like a wolf warning that the chicken coop should have a free and open society with no fences?
Or to put it another way: Is there any answer that you're going to give that doesn't recommend I spend dump trucks full of cash at your company?
Wait, I misread that. You seriously overwrote a machine while it was running and it worked without the running OS exploding in flames? That's bordering on miraculous. Was this before the kernel implemented buffer caching at all? :-D
Either way, you could do it just as easily and much more safely by booting that clone machine with an install CD and dropping to the command line. Installing an OS on the clone machine, booting off that installed volume, and then overwriting your root partition is entirely the wrong way to solve that problem.
I honestly didn't expect it to work. If the replacement machine exploded on boot, I would have told the customer 'tough luck, we have to take your production machine offline for an hour or so'.
I was flat-out amazed that it worked. It's probably due to the fact that the machine had a decent chunk of memory and all it was doing was serving pages. I think the only writes to the local disk were apache logs and the syslog.
A year ago, [...] (this was before the Ubuntu Live CD existed) [...] machine booted without any problems and has been in service for a few years now.
A year ago, before Ubuntu Live CD existed...
Sorry, I meant to say 'A few years ago'...
Which brings up the obvious question: why would any OS allow a user-space tool of any kind to perform writes to a block device for a drive with mounted volumes? There's no reason in the universe for an OS to allow that to occur. Similarly, there's no reason to allow writes to the block device for any mounted partition....
I think you miss the power of Linux. /tmp files, the machine booted without any problems and has been in service for a few years now.
A year ago, I had a linux box that was dying that *had* to stay up and running. (Why didn't they have a cluster or something?) I grabbed an identical machine, mounted the nfs backup share and did a 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/nas/machine.img'. I installed Linux on the identical machine (this was before the Ubuntu Live CD existed), mounted the nfs share and did a 'dd if=/nas/machine.img of=/dev/sda'. Then I did a 'reboot -n'. Aside from a few corrupted
Try restoring over top of a running copy of Windows.
First, that a vulnerability in WebDav, not IIS really. Secondly, it can only be exploited in IIS 5.1, which is the windows XP version of IIS. No serious host is going to be serving pages from XP, nor would they leave WebDav enabled.
How about:
No serious software company builds a webserver for a workstation OS.
or
No one would ever run IIS on a $120 copy of Windows XP when they could go out and spend $800 for Windows Server.