I don't think I'm minimizing it. I understand your concerns but the realty is that the CEO did not make the remark as the CEO, that was ancillary to the comment. The best or most that can be said that the company participated in was donating to the CEO's wife's charity which does other things then fight gay marriage. You may call that a hate group but others don't.
I find that it's a lot like condemning a family because a crazy uncle went on a crime spree. "no, junior, you can't play with your best friend billy, his uncle is a criminal". Especially when you have the mayors of cities saying that legal businesses cannot participate in their economy because of political speech and religious beliefs.
I mean forget about all this mumbo jumbo on spirit and soul or afterlife, if a person is clinically dead, can they still think or experience something on any level? If so, to what extent and should we reconsider how we treat these people?
On the other hand, we do not bother to much with restoring cognitive brain function in traumatic head trauma cases where the brain is damaged significantly. We do attempt to retrain them if possible to make use of other parts of the brain for the same type of skills and function. I know a guy who laid a bike down and impaled his head, through the helmet, on an Iron rod sticking out the side of a telephone pole. They said he is a 1 percent'er, as generally only one percent of people survive something like that and he made a decent recovery. Still has issues with balance sometimes and is a complete ass at times, but he was a prick before the accident too. His mother says he's changed, I think he's more of an ass more often, but most people can't tell the difference outside him constantly bringing the subject up and almost falling two or three times an hour If not sitting.
So if the consciousness is there even though the ability to express it isn't, then perhaps we could recreate this ability and perhaps end some suffering from situations like that where people damage or destroy the ability to express their consciousness.
This could have applications outside of mortality. But I guess is brain dead really dead could be the question.
So you're agreeing that there IS collusion? Then why did you deny it? Your words were "Changing from that definition does not make this great conspiracy to deny new founded civil rights by some political group" but now you're saying you don't dispute it? If you want to say a conspiracy is collusion, whatever, I don't think there's a conspiracy, I just think there's a bunch of people with that agenda. And you don't seem to be disputing it, so what were you trying to say?
Lol.. You must have a comprehension problem or something. "plenty of groups colluding" does not mean all groups. Some people may be conspiring but not all people. Hence there is no grand conspiracy by any single political group.
If you want to discuss polygamy, you can, but you're missing something about marriages. They provide specific benefits as a matter of law, that can't be awarded any other way. You may not care. But others do. Yet you are so willing to support the people who would deny that access to others, by proclaiming that the truly intolerant people are the ones who just won't get with the program and accept the discrimination and abuse.
So you are saying that the gays want to marry to take advantage of those benefits reserved for traditional marriages? Polygamist still fall into that same category then.
And it's not that I support those apposing gay marriage, I just see the hypocrisy of those supporting it saying be nice, be accepting, you bigoted evil people who should go away.
But do keep trying to fool us with that sophistry. See your premise is that somehow we must be foolishly tolerant, to the point of being unable to resist any oppression. All that reflects is a maliciously inaccurate understanding of the concept of tolerance to the point of being an absolute and crippling position, as opposed to the more nuanced reflection it really is. Not that you care, and no, we don't all necessarily call the majority of people bigots because they don't support same-sex marriage, what we do is point out the bigots who DO oppose same-sex marriage due to their intolerance of homosexuality. You're just trying the same deceptive argument they are, that somehow we can't point out bigotry and intolerance because that's the real crime. Have you even read Dan Cathy's position? He wasn't saying "I don't support Same-Sex Marriage" but expressing that it was offensive to God.
Yep, you are batshit crazy. First, I'm explaining what someone else was saying, not me. I happen to agree with them in that you will never get someone to support your side by attempting to insult them. All it does it drive them further apart. If you were serious about gaining support for two people of the same sex to marry, you would take their advice and find peaceful ways to change their minds.
You know what what makes you look like? That you've bought into their bat-shit crazy sophistry. That you believe they're somehow the victims since they're being asked to refrain from oppression and abusiveness. Really, in what universe do the bullies get to make that argument, and the rest of us are just supposed to swallow that obvious fraud without noticing? Do you think we've never encountered children attempting to be manipulative and convince us that they're being picked on when they're the one who started the fight?
In the universe where you come in kicking and screaming about how horrible everyone is, how fake their god is, and demand they discard the values held by generations upon generations of their civilization. That is the universe where the so called bullies have a right to stand up for themselves. As I said, most of these people do not see it as oppression or abusive any more then it being against the law to rob or murder someone is oppression and abusive.
And the point of referring to the mockery is to spare myself the trouble of bothering to refute your arguments
Perhaps things like a lobotomy don't always change personalities but rather the ability to express the personality. I've read of people who were supposedly cured of mental illness in the past by a lobotomy who carefully calculated their behavior long enough to get out from under doctor supervision and commit suicide. We understand how the brain transmits and interprets thoughts better then we do how it creates thoughts.
I say a UID of almost 2.5 million. pwngeek (2485940) to be exact. While you are right, a 5 digit UID is lower then an 6 digit, the 2,485,940 UID is 2.5 times higher then the op's 970136 id. Or if my math doesn't fail me, there has been at least as many users plus half the amount of users who signed up before him that have signed up after him.
Maybe it's a sign that we are getting old. I did just buy a girl a rocking chair and roller skates the other day for her 49th birthday. Told her the skates was so she could push the chair around easily.
Conspiracy implies a secret agenda or cabal. That's not the case, but there are plenty of groups working in concert to fight the rights of same-sex couples to get married. Please don't tell me you can't recognize how there are organized groups with the agenda to "protect" marriage.
Conspiracy implies collusion. And yes, there are plenty of groups colluding to maintain marriage as between a man and a woman. I don't particularly find fault with that and I don't particularly find fault with gays wanting extra rights to marry someone of the same sex either.
LOL, yes that's a great argument there. They have the right to also marry somebody of the opposite sex and you won't complain. Completely indifferent to the desires and feelings of the homosexual to be with who they want, not be bound by your imposition upon them.
It's completely indifferent to the desire and feelings of the polygamist too. Marriage laws between a man and a woman are not stopping homosexuals from being with whoever they want, it's only stopping them from marrying whoever they want. A good portion of society who can marry choose to not marry and get along just fine.
And you try to present them as wanting more rights than others. Colbert already mocked both of these points.
Are you surprised that a comedian mocked something? I'm not, it is what they do. Or do you have a hidden point in here? Perhaps it's because a comedian mocked something it means it's baseless now. Look out, Jay Leno mocked global warming a few weeks ago. I guess the consensus was wrong.
Nope, it's empty rhetoric meant to make people get lost in a knot of twisted logic, confusing people with the idea that somehow the real victims in the situation here are the ones who want to deny a freedom to others, not the ones objecting to that intolerance. It's a vacuous attempt to dis credit the opposition by turning their arguments against them, in a way that completely misses the point of genuine tolerance is not to blind ourselves to oppressors, but to not oppress others. This does not stop the tolerant from resisting or rejecting those who do express bigotry no matter how often those same bigots try to argue it is so.
Actually, it's saying why should I listen to you pretending to be all moral when you can't follow your own advice. As I said, keeping marriage between a man and a women is not seen as oppression by the majority of the world and quite a few people in the US. Calling them bigots and claiming it is bigotry is really only reinforcing that they made the right decision because it makes you look batshit crazy.
Even if gays are born that way (as if Evolution said no more of your genes need to be in the gene pool), the defining act is still very much a choice, a choice some people aren't comfortable with.
The "politics" section of slashdot was added supposedly for a temporary measure around the 2000 or 2004 elections because people were trying to inject politics about the elections into normal discussion.
The temporary turned into permanent and the quality of articles and the discussion went down hill since then. That was my point, it was about the politics section. Before that was around, stories like this never would have made it out of someone's journal entry.
And I would say a 6 digit UID is pretty low considering the hardrive crash of circa 2000 and a some people like me had to find new logins (mostly due to inactivity and switching ISP's too often to recover the password to the old log on before and after the crash). But I know there are at least 1,900,000 UIDs or more, almost double the 800,000 some odd number the op received. I got my new UID sometime in the middle of 2001 or 2002, considering that Slashdot was created in 1997 and this is 2012, I would say it's relatively low.
Marriage in the majority of the world is or was defined until recently between a man and a women. Changing from that definition does not make this great conspiracy to deny new founded civil rights by some political group. In fact, it would imply the opposite as all the sudden something had been found and claimed to be a violation of rights. Gays already have the same rights everyone else has, to marry someone of the opposite sex. Now they want to marry someone of the same sex on top of that.
Personally, I don't care one way or the other. I think even polygamy should be accepted if someone wants it. Anyways, the GP said if you are going to claim tolerance, you need to be tolerant of the intolerant too. Not a profound statement but a solid one.
To be fair, the CEO made the comments outside the business realm to a group at a southern baptist online convention. His son repeated and clarified the remarks when asked by reporters outside that. The official company stance on the issue was somewhat agnostic as they said they didn't want o be involved in the debate and wanted to leave it to the political and government arenas.
It is really being blown out or portion to state that Chick-Fil-A itself as a company other then donating to a charity the owner's wife is involved with has an anti gay or anti gay marriage stance. Even with the controversy in the headlines, we haven't seen any gays step forward saying they were refused promotions or denied jobs because of their orientation.
It probably depends on the sites you visit. or how heavy you rely on separate tabs and windows. My 4 hour FF experience is using 787 MB, the plug in container is consuming 500+ MB and flash is already up to 437 MB. And yes I'm running 3 windows with at least 5 tabs open in each. This is a light day for me but I don't have those memory issues in Chrome. FF gets really bad when I allow addons to load too.
I second this. Even updates change the UI when the user can change it back to something remotely similar to what they had. It's just apain in the ass when you want to be productive and all the sudden everything is different because of an update then you have to hunt down how to find everything and put it back into place.
After suffering this for a while and hearing that Firefox was trying to be Google's Chrome, I bit the bullet and downloaded Chrome. Chrome seems to run cleaner and faster on some sites so I use both most of the time. It isn't the release cycles, it's Firefox demanding that my UI be different- that it be a clone of something else, that made me look at something else.
No, that's more like stumble. Its when you discover the village of smurfs as the result of your stumble (being closer to the ground) that you stumbled upon something.
Well, I was trying to avoid the issue of whether or not Americans would do the jobs or not. I know they will do it, a lot of them were doing the jobs before they got replaced by illegals. They just don't want to do it for free.
I've seen people lose their jobs to illegals. The same claim that Americans won't do it was bandied about as if those displaced workers never existed. No matter how many times you pointed directly at them, the pro illegal crowd refused to see them. It's an argument I don't want to get in the middle of again because of all the illogical and outright lies the pro illegals camp will make. The unions even support illegal coming in and undercutting American workers and displacing us.
Every illegal working in the US is a job a US citizen cannot do. Whether or not they would do it, or do it for the pay is besides the point, if the position is filled by an illegal, it is not being filled by an unemployed citizen,
The number of illegals in the country is about 4% of the population. If every one of them were working jobs (they are not) that would drop our unemployment rate almost in half.
I think the most disparaging problem is how the west has treated Russia. Bush basically said, stop kicking and screaming, you not going to harm us with the missile defense shield. We ignored their concerns on a lot of other things and demanded they support our positions on others. We even bribed them to follow our stances. We were at odds with them on Egypt, Lybia, and I think Russia pretty much put their foot down with Syria- and China seems to support them.
Putin is the wild card who is trying to reimplement some of the old soviet era internal policies and might just conflate the west helping the rebels in Syria against their wishes with a "terrorist attack" and use it to rally his people to a war they would willingly participate in. He already claimed foreign influences (specifically the US) staged a protest and attempted to interfere with their own elections.
Their objection to interference with Syria is that it is a civil war and foreigners shouldn't be picking the winners of an internal struggle. Especially when Syria was a founding member of the UN and has spent effort and resources in the past to maintain the UN's objectives just to be overthrown by that same group. I understand the different opinions about Syria's behavior but it does seem that outsiders are attempting to topple several middle eastern countries and implement governments more favorable to them. This is one of the same concepts that caused Russia to Rally behind Putin in the last elections with a 64% victory. His campaign theme was mostly "enemies here and abroad are trying to destroy Russia" and his victory speech specifically said âoeWe have shown that nobody can impose anything on us,â
I sort of think this is a thing Putin might welcome. He sees a natural order of things that is out of balance to him.
The costs of the wars were not a secret. The appropriation were pubic and congress certainly knew about the expenses when amending and passing the federal budget.
The reason they were and still should be off budget expenditures (emergency spending) is because when the wars and need disappear, so should the spending. With it being on budget, without an explicit law or rule in place (and there is not one) that stats the funding gets removed from the budget as the need for it decreases or the wars end, then congress can spend it on anything else they want despite it being almost completely borrowed.
Emergency appropriations can be accounted for within the budget to properly show debt/deficit. The debate was really about getting the funding on budget so it could be used for other thing after the wars died off. Congress clearly intended this to happen which is illustrated by objections to the wars often resorting to how the money could better be spent.
They are set up in a fail safe method where it takes multiple distinct inputs to override and launch. This as the name implies, fails to a safe mode if any part of the system or launch is missing to prevent them from going off because of a bug in one or several parts of the system.
Actually, Russia is not that far off. We have been at odds with them in a lot of places since trying to install the missile defense shield in Europe. They even threatened to re-target US cities with their Nuclear arsenal. Bush didn't help things with saying it didn't concern us much because Russia is a friendly country.
Fast forward to today and we see them blocking UN action on Syria (which i think is appropriate) and Iran (which i think is inappropriate). If we start openly supporting Syrian rebels in a way that is more then cheer leading, its possible that Russia will reignite the cold war or even strike us to make a point. I think we are past the days of proxy wars and will be directly involved if things get to the point of a cold war again.
FFS, "Often times, the infections like the rogue AV infections where the result of infected otherwise legitimate sites using exploits in MS internet explorer or Flash to infect the user's system with no interaction of their own."
should read "Often times, infections like the rogue AV infections was the result of infected but otherwise legitimate sites serving up infection using exploits in MS internet explorer, Flash, or Java to infect the user's system with little to no interaction of user outside visiting the site.
Fun fact, Almost every time I view the router logs and find porn sites in them, it happens that someone violated the security policy and brought unsecured media from home and infected their work system, clicked yes for a popup and installed something or somehow infected the computer with malware that the Antivirus didn't pick up. I don't know if it cause and effect where the malware caused the porn lookups or if the malware was the result of the porn lookups, but I know a symptom of the malware was pornographic popups. Often times, the infections like the rogue AV infections where the result of infected otherwise legitimate sites using exploits in MS internet explorer or Flash to infect the user's system with no interaction of their own.
As for being prudish or open-minded, it's really a cover your own ass thing. In the US at least, simply watching porn in front of other staff can be grounds for a sexual discrimination and hostile workplace action. In the 1980's, they even tried to keep Clarence Thomas from being appointed to the supreme court over an accusation by Anita Hill that he had a porn video tape in his hands and when she inquired about it, he ask her if she wanted to watch it too. This was being claimed as sexual harassment at a time when sexual harassment was considered more of the type with the boss requiring women to slep with then for a promotion of salary increase.
This might be mainly a US centric concern too. And the amount of porn sites being visited might be a sign of infected computers more then bored employees acting inappropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I'm minimizing it. I understand your concerns but the realty is that the CEO did not make the remark as the CEO, that was ancillary to the comment. The best or most that can be said that the company participated in was donating to the CEO's wife's charity which does other things then fight gay marriage. You may call that a hate group but others don't.
I find that it's a lot like condemning a family because a crazy uncle went on a crime spree. "no, junior, you can't play with your best friend billy, his uncle is a criminal". Especially when you have the mayors of cities saying that legal businesses cannot participate in their economy because of political speech and religious beliefs.
Well, that is sort of the question now isn't it?
I mean forget about all this mumbo jumbo on spirit and soul or afterlife, if a person is clinically dead, can they still think or experience something on any level? If so, to what extent and should we reconsider how we treat these people?
On the other hand, we do not bother to much with restoring cognitive brain function in traumatic head trauma cases where the brain is damaged significantly. We do attempt to retrain them if possible to make use of other parts of the brain for the same type of skills and function. I know a guy who laid a bike down and impaled his head, through the helmet, on an Iron rod sticking out the side of a telephone pole. They said he is a 1 percent'er, as generally only one percent of people survive something like that and he made a decent recovery. Still has issues with balance sometimes and is a complete ass at times, but he was a prick before the accident too. His mother says he's changed, I think he's more of an ass more often, but most people can't tell the difference outside him constantly bringing the subject up and almost falling two or three times an hour If not sitting.
So if the consciousness is there even though the ability to express it isn't, then perhaps we could recreate this ability and perhaps end some suffering from situations like that where people damage or destroy the ability to express their consciousness.
This could have applications outside of mortality. But I guess is brain dead really dead could be the question.
Lol.. You must have a comprehension problem or something. "plenty of groups colluding" does not mean all groups. Some people may be conspiring but not all people. Hence there is no grand conspiracy by any single political group.
So you are saying that the gays want to marry to take advantage of those benefits reserved for traditional marriages? Polygamist still fall into that same category then.
And it's not that I support those apposing gay marriage, I just see the hypocrisy of those supporting it saying be nice, be accepting, you bigoted evil people who should go away.
Yep, you are batshit crazy. First, I'm explaining what someone else was saying, not me. I happen to agree with them in that you will never get someone to support your side by attempting to insult them. All it does it drive them further apart. If you were serious about gaining support for two people of the same sex to marry, you would take their advice and find peaceful ways to change their minds.
In the universe where you come in kicking and screaming about how horrible everyone is, how fake their god is, and demand they discard the values held by generations upon generations of their civilization. That is the universe where the so called bullies have a right to stand up for themselves. As I said, most of these people do not see it as oppression or abusive any more then it being against the law to rob or murder someone is oppression and abusive.
His TV analogy is not all that far off.
Perhaps things like a lobotomy don't always change personalities but rather the ability to express the personality. I've read of people who were supposedly cured of mental illness in the past by a lobotomy who carefully calculated their behavior long enough to get out from under doctor supervision and commit suicide. We understand how the brain transmits and interprets thoughts better then we do how it creates thoughts.
Will his consciousness cease to exist or will his ability to show us it exist cease?
That's sort of a serious part of the question. Does someone's consciousness really cease to exist or just our ability to perceive it.
I say a UID of almost 2.5 million. pwngeek (2485940) to be exact. While you are right, a 5 digit UID is lower then an 6 digit, the 2,485,940 UID is 2.5 times higher then the op's 970136 id. Or if my math doesn't fail me, there has been at least as many users plus half the amount of users who signed up before him that have signed up after him.
Maybe it's a sign that we are getting old. I did just buy a girl a rocking chair and roller skates the other day for her 49th birthday. Told her the skates was so she could push the chair around easily.
Conspiracy implies collusion. And yes, there are plenty of groups colluding to maintain marriage as between a man and a woman. I don't particularly find fault with that and I don't particularly find fault with gays wanting extra rights to marry someone of the same sex either.
It's completely indifferent to the desire and feelings of the polygamist too. Marriage laws between a man and a woman are not stopping homosexuals from being with whoever they want, it's only stopping them from marrying whoever they want. A good portion of society who can marry choose to not marry and get along just fine.
Are you surprised that a comedian mocked something? I'm not, it is what they do. Or do you have a hidden point in here? Perhaps it's because a comedian mocked something it means it's baseless now. Look out, Jay Leno mocked global warming a few weeks ago. I guess the consensus was wrong.
Actually, it's saying why should I listen to you pretending to be all moral when you can't follow your own advice. As I said, keeping marriage between a man and a women is not seen as oppression by the majority of the world and quite a few people in the US. Calling them bigots and claiming it is bigotry is really only reinforcing that they made the right decision because it makes you look batshit crazy.
Even if gays are born that way (as if Evolution said no more of your genes need to be in the gene pool), the defining act is still very much a choice, a choice some people aren't comfortable with.
The "politics" section of slashdot was added supposedly for a temporary measure around the 2000 or 2004 elections because people were trying to inject politics about the elections into normal discussion.
The temporary turned into permanent and the quality of articles and the discussion went down hill since then. That was my point, it was about the politics section. Before that was around, stories like this never would have made it out of someone's journal entry.
And I would say a 6 digit UID is pretty low considering the hardrive crash of circa 2000 and a some people like me had to find new logins (mostly due to inactivity and switching ISP's too often to recover the password to the old log on before and after the crash). But I know there are at least 1,900,000 UIDs or more, almost double the 800,000 some odd number the op received. I got my new UID sometime in the middle of 2001 or 2002, considering that Slashdot was created in 1997 and this is 2012, I would say it's relatively low.
Marriage in the majority of the world is or was defined until recently between a man and a women. Changing from that definition does not make this great conspiracy to deny new founded civil rights by some political group. In fact, it would imply the opposite as all the sudden something had been found and claimed to be a violation of rights. Gays already have the same rights everyone else has, to marry someone of the opposite sex. Now they want to marry someone of the same sex on top of that.
Personally, I don't care one way or the other. I think even polygamy should be accepted if someone wants it. Anyways, the GP said if you are going to claim tolerance, you need to be tolerant of the intolerant too. Not a profound statement but a solid one.
No, it's being tolerant by definition. Tolerance means overlooking something you dislike.
And most people, or a lot of them, do not consider defining marriage between a man and a woman a bad thing.
You have a relatively low UID, perhaps you remember and long for Slashdot before the politics section was installed temporarily and never got removed.
I too remember of a better time in slashdot history. I guess we are getting old and useless or something.
To be fair, the CEO made the comments outside the business realm to a group at a southern baptist online convention. His son repeated and clarified the remarks when asked by reporters outside that. The official company stance on the issue was somewhat agnostic as they said they didn't want o be involved in the debate and wanted to leave it to the political and government arenas.
It is really being blown out or portion to state that Chick-Fil-A itself as a company other then donating to a charity the owner's wife is involved with has an anti gay or anti gay marriage stance. Even with the controversy in the headlines, we haven't seen any gays step forward saying they were refused promotions or denied jobs because of their orientation.
It probably depends on the sites you visit. or how heavy you rely on separate tabs and windows. My 4 hour FF experience is using 787 MB, the plug in container is consuming 500+ MB and flash is already up to 437 MB. And yes I'm running 3 windows with at least 5 tabs open in each. This is a light day for me but I don't have those memory issues in Chrome. FF gets really bad when I allow addons to load too.
I second this. Even updates change the UI when the user can change it back to something remotely similar to what they had. It's just apain in the ass when you want to be productive and all the sudden everything is different because of an update then you have to hunt down how to find everything and put it back into place.
After suffering this for a while and hearing that Firefox was trying to be Google's Chrome, I bit the bullet and downloaded Chrome. Chrome seems to run cleaner and faster on some sites so I use both most of the time. It isn't the release cycles, it's Firefox demanding that my UI be different- that it be a clone of something else, that made me look at something else.
No, that's more like stumble. Its when you discover the village of smurfs as the result of your stumble (being closer to the ground) that you stumbled upon something.
Well, I was trying to avoid the issue of whether or not Americans would do the jobs or not. I know they will do it, a lot of them were doing the jobs before they got replaced by illegals. They just don't want to do it for free.
I've seen people lose their jobs to illegals. The same claim that Americans won't do it was bandied about as if those displaced workers never existed. No matter how many times you pointed directly at them, the pro illegal crowd refused to see them. It's an argument I don't want to get in the middle of again because of all the illogical and outright lies the pro illegals camp will make. The unions even support illegal coming in and undercutting American workers and displacing us.
What is not true, it sounds like you are agreeing with me.
I think I would take 21 billion over five years compared to $2 trillion over ten.
I know, I linked to a biased right wing website, but it claims to pull the numbers from the CBO.
Every illegal working in the US is a job a US citizen cannot do. Whether or not they would do it, or do it for the pay is besides the point, if the position is filled by an illegal, it is not being filled by an unemployed citizen,
The number of illegals in the country is about 4% of the population. If every one of them were working jobs (they are not) that would drop our unemployment rate almost in half.
I think the most disparaging problem is how the west has treated Russia. Bush basically said, stop kicking and screaming, you not going to harm us with the missile defense shield. We ignored their concerns on a lot of other things and demanded they support our positions on others. We even bribed them to follow our stances. We were at odds with them on Egypt, Lybia, and I think Russia pretty much put their foot down with Syria- and China seems to support them.
Putin is the wild card who is trying to reimplement some of the old soviet era internal policies and might just conflate the west helping the rebels in Syria against their wishes with a "terrorist attack" and use it to rally his people to a war they would willingly participate in. He already claimed foreign influences (specifically the US) staged a protest and attempted to interfere with their own elections.
Their objection to interference with Syria is that it is a civil war and foreigners shouldn't be picking the winners of an internal struggle. Especially when Syria was a founding member of the UN and has spent effort and resources in the past to maintain the UN's objectives just to be overthrown by that same group. I understand the different opinions about Syria's behavior but it does seem that outsiders are attempting to topple several middle eastern countries and implement governments more favorable to them. This is one of the same concepts that caused Russia to Rally behind Putin in the last elections with a 64% victory. His campaign theme was mostly "enemies here and abroad are trying to destroy Russia" and his victory speech specifically said âoeWe have shown that nobody can impose anything on us,â
I sort of think this is a thing Putin might welcome. He sees a natural order of things that is out of balance to him.
The costs of the wars were not a secret. The appropriation were pubic and congress certainly knew about the expenses when amending and passing the federal budget.
The reason they were and still should be off budget expenditures (emergency spending) is because when the wars and need disappear, so should the spending. With it being on budget, without an explicit law or rule in place (and there is not one) that stats the funding gets removed from the budget as the need for it decreases or the wars end, then congress can spend it on anything else they want despite it being almost completely borrowed.
Emergency appropriations can be accounted for within the budget to properly show debt/deficit. The debate was really about getting the funding on budget so it could be used for other thing after the wars died off. Congress clearly intended this to happen which is illustrated by objections to the wars often resorting to how the money could better be spent.
They are set up in a fail safe method where it takes multiple distinct inputs to override and launch. This as the name implies, fails to a safe mode if any part of the system or launch is missing to prevent them from going off because of a bug in one or several parts of the system.
Actually, Russia is not that far off. We have been at odds with them in a lot of places since trying to install the missile defense shield in Europe. They even threatened to re-target US cities with their Nuclear arsenal. Bush didn't help things with saying it didn't concern us much because Russia is a friendly country.
Fast forward to today and we see them blocking UN action on Syria (which i think is appropriate) and Iran (which i think is inappropriate). If we start openly supporting Syrian rebels in a way that is more then cheer leading, its possible that Russia will reignite the cold war or even strike us to make a point. I think we are past the days of proxy wars and will be directly involved if things get to the point of a cold war again.
FFS,
"Often times, the infections like the rogue AV infections where the result of infected otherwise legitimate sites using exploits in MS internet explorer or Flash to infect the user's system with no interaction of their own."
should read
"Often times, infections like the rogue AV infections was the result of infected but otherwise legitimate sites serving up infection using exploits in MS internet explorer, Flash, or Java to infect the user's system with little to no interaction of user outside visiting the site.
Fun fact,
Almost every time I view the router logs and find porn sites in them, it happens that someone violated the security policy and brought unsecured media from home and infected their work system, clicked yes for a popup and installed something or somehow infected the computer with malware that the Antivirus didn't pick up. I don't know if it cause and effect where the malware caused the porn lookups or if the malware was the result of the porn lookups, but I know a symptom of the malware was pornographic popups. Often times, the infections like the rogue AV infections where the result of infected otherwise legitimate sites using exploits in MS internet explorer or Flash to infect the user's system with no interaction of their own.
As for being prudish or open-minded, it's really a cover your own ass thing. In the US at least, simply watching porn in front of other staff can be grounds for a sexual discrimination and hostile workplace action. In the 1980's, they even tried to keep Clarence Thomas from being appointed to the supreme court over an accusation by Anita Hill that he had a porn video tape in his hands and when she inquired about it, he ask her if she wanted to watch it too. This was being claimed as sexual harassment at a time when sexual harassment was considered more of the type with the boss requiring women to slep with then for a promotion of salary increase.
This might be mainly a US centric concern too. And the amount of porn sites being visited might be a sign of infected computers more then bored employees acting inappropriately.