When I was stationed in Italy (in the north, about mid-way between Milan and Venice) our first night off post we stopped to get a "real" Italian pizza. Imagine our surprise when, after it came out of the over, the server proceeded to pour about 1/2 cup of olive oil over the whole thing. As if pizza weren't greasy enough!
Yeah, I wasn't particularly impressed with "real" Italian pizza. I definately like the Americanized version better. But I wouldn't call pizza hut "real" pizza either. When I think of real pizza I think of New York City pizzeria style -- thin crust, huge slices that you have to fold over to eat..... nothing like it.
On the other hand, every bite of pasta I ate during my three years in Italy was divine.
Yeah. And the antipastos. Absolutely loved them. Seems like all the Italians do is eat. Our hostess kept apologizing to us for "only" being able to make four antipastos when she made us dinner the first night. I was the only one in our group that was able to put away all of that food. I think she wanted to marry me by the time that trip was done;)
Remember the story about Amtrak security forcing someone to delete the photos they had taken? With the preponderance of hot spots and more and more cameras supporting Wi-Fi, this would mean that the concept of deleting photos may soon be an anachronism (and none too soon).
Is there any reason why you couldn't undelete them afterwards and render it an anachronism without Wi-Fi? Most of those data cards use FAT as I recall and file undelete operations are fairly trivial with that filesystem.
But, since your folks could shell out several thousand dollars for the cruise, then get them to shell out a few more bucks for an Iridium 9555 [iridium9555.com]. I don't know what pricing is on the service
Yeah, I looked all over their website for pricing on the service and couldn't find it. It must be one of those "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" kind of things;)
But, then again Anti Obama people also demonstrate Cult like behavior as well.
Maybe you should just narrow it down to 'all partisans show cult like behavior'?
I used to think that the easiest way to kill off Dailykos would have been for George W. Bush to come out and endorse breathing oxygen. Half of that site would have suffocated themselves out of sheer spite;)
Partisans of all political stripes scare the hell out of me.
No mistake there at all buddy. People came to their right senses and realised that being ruled by unelected bodies was not a good idea (we're still working on the monarchy). Having a hereditary, unelected body of folk making the laws might seem a really cute idea from 3000 miles away but it's a bit archaic in this day and age.
I'd take that over having the tyranny of the majority that your electoral system and the House of Commons seems to produce. Mind you, I'd rather have a Constitutional Republic than either of those systems, but that seems to be a controversial subject on your side of the pond.
Or was that a plea from you to have the USA taken under the wing of the British Monarchy and its Parliament again?;-)
Well, I'd rather be under the wing of Her Majesty The Queen and her Parliament than under the wings of some of the other Governments on this rock. But no, we won our independence fair and square and you can't have us back;) We'll have to settle for all being a part of the Anglosphere and having the same legal/political traditions.
What you're missing, is this harassment only applies to legal entries. The borders remain utterly wide open for illegals
I don't see what one has to do with the other unless your argument is that we shouldn't bother to secure legal border crossings because it's so easy to enter this country illegally. Perhaps we should secure the border better and make it harder to enter this country illegally?
That plays into the other Orwellian theme of modern america, which is to make it impossible for any individual to not be a criminal, thus making oppression of anyone at any time "OK".
Huh? I'll agree that we have too many laws but it's hardly "impossible" for "any individual" not to be a criminal.
That's why this individual failure of the american empire is important
I'd love to see the American "empire" fail. Let the rest of the World worry about taking care of themselves for a change. If we ended our interventionist foreign policy and just adopted a stance of armed neutrality (similar to what the Swiss do) people wouldn't have any reason to fly airplanes into our buildings. Hell we could even keep our nuclear deterrent -- who is going to attack/invade a country with hundreds of millions of guns and nuclear weapons?
Personally I don't see why any non-violent criminal has to spend a significant amount of time in the slammer, though I have heard some convincing arguments that it does work for white collar crime.
So if I break into your house when you aren't home and steal all your stuff you don't think I should spend a significant amount of time in the slammer?
My opinion is that the side-effects of the "war on drugs" are far worse than the effects of drug addiction. Turf wars and gang violence affect people who want nothing to do with drugs, whereas legalized drugs would primarily hurt users and those closest to the users.
I agree. I'll make a sweeping statement of my own: Personally I don't see why any person who commits a victimless crime should spend any time in the slammer.
It's sufficient to handle my 8mbit/s cable connection and the iptables/traffic shaping rules I have setup that go with it. I've never tested it with a local connection to see just how much throughput it can handle but I can easily peg my internet connection without any problems. It has 128 megs of ram and a 8 gig hard drive.
I've thought about replacing it many times but why bother? It consumes around 20 watts and doesn't even require any fans besides the one in the power supply. Any newer computer is going to consume at least two or three times as much juice and be a lot louder.
If not, then how do you propose to limit their access? Is it more of an intrusion of privacy to monitor all ex-cons 24/7 or only to require that people register their firearms
What makes you think that requiring gun registration from people who aren't criminals will keep them out of the hands of criminals? Is it the fact that cars are never stolen because they are registered?
how do you propose to discover whom the true owner of a firearm is?
Maybe the same way that we discover whom the true owner of any other stolen piece of property is: the serial number? I don't have to register my TV with law enforcement but they'll still be able to figure out it's mine if it gets stolen and winds up in the pawn shop......
You want to protect yourself from the government, get a law degree...
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand? If you don't like guns then try and get 38 states to ratify an amendment repealing the 2nd amendment. Don't try to kill our rights via death by a thousand cuts. Otherwise it'll be your rights they come after next.
Not true, start tagging the story diedvorakdie or ohnoitsdvorak.
See, this is why I miss USENET. In the old days it would have been "dvorak.die.die.die". I just don't think you can successfully convey how mind-numbingly stupid he is with only two dies.
You are indeed correct. I still have one running Linux and acting as a router. Works just fine and consumes so little power (compared to modern systems) that I haven't been inclined to replace it. Has an uptime of >1,000 days too. I was shooting for 2,000 until we had a 71 hour long power outage that exhausted my UPS.
Actually, people often complain about all of those as well, especially "pistol permits" as you've put it, given than the Second Amendment guarantees the RIGHT to bear arms, not the right to get permission from the government, provided you can provide them with a good enough reason, then pay them and subject yourself to intense scrutiny, and then MAYBE get the right to bear arms in the end.
Preaching to the choir here. I understand your point of view and whole heartily agree, especially on the 2nd amendment. My idea of gun "control" would be limited to background checks at point of sale to ensure you aren't a convicted criminal/mental case and laws against straw purchasing. I would also require that the records be destroyed as soon as the transaction was completed. Anything beyond that seems to be an infringement to me.
I was just pointing out that it seems pretty stupid to draw the line in the sand at entry/exit requirements when even most die-hard libertarians would acknowledge that a fundamental function of state sovereignty is controlling who can enter and exit your country. That's actually one of the powers that the Federal Government has that I don't have any issues with.
We are about to find out whether that is also true in the USA.
I don't think it is. Yet anyway. How many states stood up and flipped Washington off over real-id? Our system is more decentralized than the UK's. That's one of the reasons I'm leery of the geniuses that think we should continue to expand the power of the Federal Government. Personally I'd chop the Federal Government down to size and shift the responsibility for the social safety net to the states.
It is indeed ironic, but I think you'll find that most of that work was done in the 1911 parliament act [schoolnet.co.uk]. Can't blame the Dear Leader (aka Tony Blair) for that one.
I wasn't blaming him for it. I knew it stemmed from the Parliament Act. Just an observation on my part. Defanging the Lords looks like (in hindsight) a pretty stupid move.
I don't know what you'd replace them with in the context of the UK that would provide a similar check-and-balance. Having an elected upper-house is just going to be the Commons with different members. Then again, I also think the United States should repeal the 17th amendment and go back to having Senators appointed by the States.
That's a fairly unpopular viewpoint but I'm of the opinion that too much democracy leads to the tyranny of the majority. What's going on right now in the UK would seem to validate that belief.....
The US demands that everyone wanting a tourist visa need to have a clean criminal record. (And I'm not talkin about having done jail time, everything more serious that a traffic ticket and you're disqualified.)
Canada has the same requirement. A buddy of mine got turned away because he had a misdemeanor DWI 20 years ago. Do you really think he posed a threat to the good citizens of Canada?
Yes, it's "Do not pass go, take the next plane home, and if you were from a country in the visa waiver program, you can forget about that now and go to the nearest consulate to get an actual tourist visa every time you want to enter the States again since you've been denied entry once."
If you didn't figure it out ahead of time before getting on the plane then don't expect me to have much sympathy for you. Every single time I've traveled overseas (even to places I've already been) I've done my homework to find out in advance what the entry/exit requirements are and to make sure those requirements haven't changed since the last time I traveled.
Those dumb questions aren't unique to the United States. I've had much the same exchange as you've just outlined both times I entered the EU and when I traveled to Israel. When I was in Israel I shot down the question of "What if they don't work?" by showing him all of the trinkets I had just bought in the duty-free shop using my credit cards;)
The bit I really object to however is the fingerprints and the photo and the putting 4 people to handle two 747s of Europeans and 6 people to process the US Citizens.
*shrug*, dunno what to tell you there. Maybe when foreign visitors can vote the politicians will allocate equal resources to processing them at the border? Again, I'd question if this is really unique to the United States or not. I haven't traveled in a few years so I don't recall if I saw this in other countries or not.
I like the US but US immigration is by far the worst in the world and destroys all enjoyment about arriving in the country.
You've never been to Israel:P Besides, no amount of immigration stupidity is enough to dampen my enjoyment at finally being free from the hours I spent sitting in that sardine can^W^Wcoach section.
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or will he take steps to allow parents to determine what their kids can and cannot see?
Why is that even a job for Government? I have a novel idea: supervise your kids when they are watching TV or using the internet.
When I was stationed in Italy (in the north, about mid-way between Milan and Venice) our first night off post we stopped to get a "real" Italian pizza. Imagine our surprise when, after it came out of the over, the server proceeded to pour about 1/2 cup of olive oil over the whole thing. As if pizza weren't greasy enough!
Yeah, I wasn't particularly impressed with "real" Italian pizza. I definately like the Americanized version better. But I wouldn't call pizza hut "real" pizza either. When I think of real pizza I think of New York City pizzeria style -- thin crust, huge slices that you have to fold over to eat..... nothing like it.
On the other hand, every bite of pasta I ate during my three years in Italy was divine.
Yeah. And the antipastos. Absolutely loved them. Seems like all the Italians do is eat. Our hostess kept apologizing to us for "only" being able to make four antipastos when she made us dinner the first night. I was the only one in our group that was able to put away all of that food. I think she wanted to marry me by the time that trip was done ;)
Remember the story about Amtrak security forcing someone to delete the photos they had taken? With the preponderance of hot spots and more and more cameras supporting Wi-Fi, this would mean that the concept of deleting photos may soon be an anachronism (and none too soon).
Is there any reason why you couldn't undelete them afterwards and render it an anachronism without Wi-Fi? Most of those data cards use FAT as I recall and file undelete operations are fairly trivial with that filesystem.
But, since your folks could shell out several thousand dollars for the cruise, then get them to shell out a few more bucks for an Iridium 9555 [iridium9555.com]. I don't know what pricing is on the service
Yeah, I looked all over their website for pricing on the service and couldn't find it. It must be one of those "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" kind of things ;)
He poses to us an intriguing and difficult problem and we solve it through various obtuse and technical solutions.
God help him if he comes back in a month and asks for advice on getting laid ;)
But, then again Anti Obama people also demonstrate Cult like behavior as well.
Maybe you should just narrow it down to 'all partisans show cult like behavior'?
I used to think that the easiest way to kill off Dailykos would have been for George W. Bush to come out and endorse breathing oxygen. Half of that site would have suffocated themselves out of sheer spite ;)
Partisans of all political stripes scare the hell out of me.
DOn't be one of those fools that travel halfway around the world to sit in a McDonalds or an internet cafe.
Yeah, do what my girlfriend wanted to do when we went to Florence instead: Find a pizza hut ;)
No mistake there at all buddy. People came to their right senses and realised that being ruled by unelected bodies was not a good idea (we're still working on the monarchy). Having a hereditary, unelected body of folk making the laws might seem a really cute idea from 3000 miles away but it's a bit archaic in this day and age.
I'd take that over having the tyranny of the majority that your electoral system and the House of Commons seems to produce. Mind you, I'd rather have a Constitutional Republic than either of those systems, but that seems to be a controversial subject on your side of the pond.
Or was that a plea from you to have the USA taken under the wing of the British Monarchy and its Parliament again? ;-)
Well, I'd rather be under the wing of Her Majesty The Queen and her Parliament than under the wings of some of the other Governments on this rock. But no, we won our independence fair and square and you can't have us back ;) We'll have to settle for all being a part of the Anglosphere and having the same legal/political traditions.
Who uses large, clunky, old PCs for low traffic firewall/routers anymore?
People who don't see the point in replacing something that's working just fine with something that's going to cost money?
What you're missing, is this harassment only applies to legal entries. The borders remain utterly wide open for illegals
I don't see what one has to do with the other unless your argument is that we shouldn't bother to secure legal border crossings because it's so easy to enter this country illegally. Perhaps we should secure the border better and make it harder to enter this country illegally?
That plays into the other Orwellian theme of modern america, which is to make it impossible for any individual to not be a criminal, thus making oppression of anyone at any time "OK".
Huh? I'll agree that we have too many laws but it's hardly "impossible" for "any individual" not to be a criminal.
That's why this individual failure of the american empire is important
I'd love to see the American "empire" fail. Let the rest of the World worry about taking care of themselves for a change. If we ended our interventionist foreign policy and just adopted a stance of armed neutrality (similar to what the Swiss do) people wouldn't have any reason to fly airplanes into our buildings. Hell we could even keep our nuclear deterrent -- who is going to attack/invade a country with hundreds of millions of guns and nuclear weapons?
Personally I don't see why any non-violent criminal has to spend a significant amount of time in the slammer, though I have heard some convincing arguments that it does work for white collar crime.
So if I break into your house when you aren't home and steal all your stuff you don't think I should spend a significant amount of time in the slammer?
My opinion is that the side-effects of the "war on drugs" are far worse than the effects of drug addiction. Turf wars and gang violence affect people who want nothing to do with drugs, whereas legalized drugs would primarily hurt users and those closest to the users.
I agree. I'll make a sweeping statement of my own: Personally I don't see why any person who commits a victimless crime should spend any time in the slammer.
What's your throughput like on that beast?
It's sufficient to handle my 8mbit/s cable connection and the iptables/traffic shaping rules I have setup that go with it. I've never tested it with a local connection to see just how much throughput it can handle but I can easily peg my internet connection without any problems. It has 128 megs of ram and a 8 gig hard drive.
I've thought about replacing it many times but why bother? It consumes around 20 watts and doesn't even require any fans besides the one in the power supply. Any newer computer is going to consume at least two or three times as much juice and be a lot louder.
If not, then how do you propose to limit their access? Is it more of an intrusion of privacy to monitor all ex-cons 24/7 or only to require that people register their firearms
What makes you think that requiring gun registration from people who aren't criminals will keep them out of the hands of criminals? Is it the fact that cars are never stolen because they are registered?
how do you propose to discover whom the true owner of a firearm is?
Maybe the same way that we discover whom the true owner of any other stolen piece of property is: the serial number? I don't have to register my TV with law enforcement but they'll still be able to figure out it's mine if it gets stolen and winds up in the pawn shop......
You want to protect yourself from the government, get a law degree...
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand? If you don't like guns then try and get 38 states to ratify an amendment repealing the 2nd amendment. Don't try to kill our rights via death by a thousand cuts. Otherwise it'll be your rights they come after next.
Not true, start tagging the story diedvorakdie or ohnoitsdvorak.
See, this is why I miss USENET. In the old days it would have been "dvorak.die.die.die". I just don't think you can successfully convey how mind-numbingly stupid he is with only two dies.
With apologies to CleverNickName, here's a shoutout to all my old friends on alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die ;)
the 486sx, IIRC, lacked an FPU
You are indeed correct. I still have one running Linux and acting as a router. Works just fine and consumes so little power (compared to modern systems) that I haven't been inclined to replace it. Has an uptime of >1,000 days too. I was shooting for 2,000 until we had a 71 hour long power outage that exhausted my UPS.
Eh? Why does New York State have your prints? What did you do wrong?
I work for an OMH (Office of Mental Health) facility and have a pistol permit. Either of those would have required me to cough up my prints.
Actually, people often complain about all of those as well, especially "pistol permits" as you've put it, given than the Second Amendment guarantees the RIGHT to bear arms, not the right to get permission from the government, provided you can provide them with a good enough reason, then pay them and subject yourself to intense scrutiny, and then MAYBE get the right to bear arms in the end.
Preaching to the choir here. I understand your point of view and whole heartily agree, especially on the 2nd amendment. My idea of gun "control" would be limited to background checks at point of sale to ensure you aren't a convicted criminal/mental case and laws against straw purchasing. I would also require that the records be destroyed as soon as the transaction was completed. Anything beyond that seems to be an infringement to me.
I was just pointing out that it seems pretty stupid to draw the line in the sand at entry/exit requirements when even most die-hard libertarians would acknowledge that a fundamental function of state sovereignty is controlling who can enter and exit your country. That's actually one of the powers that the Federal Government has that I don't have any issues with.
We are about to find out whether that is also true in the USA.
I don't think it is. Yet anyway. How many states stood up and flipped Washington off over real-id? Our system is more decentralized than the UK's. That's one of the reasons I'm leery of the geniuses that think we should continue to expand the power of the Federal Government. Personally I'd chop the Federal Government down to size and shift the responsibility for the social safety net to the states.
It is indeed ironic, but I think you'll find that most of that work was done in the 1911 parliament act [schoolnet.co.uk]. Can't blame the Dear Leader (aka Tony Blair) for that one.
I wasn't blaming him for it. I knew it stemmed from the Parliament Act. Just an observation on my part. Defanging the Lords looks like (in hindsight) a pretty stupid move.
I don't know what you'd replace them with in the context of the UK that would provide a similar check-and-balance. Having an elected upper-house is just going to be the Commons with different members. Then again, I also think the United States should repeal the 17th amendment and go back to having Senators appointed by the States.
That's a fairly unpopular viewpoint but I'm of the opinion that too much democracy leads to the tyranny of the majority. What's going on right now in the UK would seem to validate that belief.....
Probably because Canadian politicians don't intone "Freedom" every time they exhale.
If you don't like our politicians then don't vote for them ;)
Let's lock the Department of Homeland FUD out and let the tourists in.
I'm all for abolishing the Department of Homeland Security. I fail to see how creating one mega-bureaucracy makes us any safer.
The US demands that everyone wanting a tourist visa need to have a clean criminal record. (And I'm not talkin about having done jail time, everything more serious that a traffic ticket and you're disqualified.)
Canada has the same requirement. A buddy of mine got turned away because he had a misdemeanor DWI 20 years ago. Do you really think he posed a threat to the good citizens of Canada?
Yes, it's "Do not pass go, take the next plane home, and if you were from a country in the visa waiver program, you can forget about that now and go to the nearest consulate to get an actual tourist visa every time you want to enter the States again since you've been denied entry once."
If you didn't figure it out ahead of time before getting on the plane then don't expect me to have much sympathy for you. Every single time I've traveled overseas (even to places I've already been) I've done my homework to find out in advance what the entry/exit requirements are and to make sure those requirements haven't changed since the last time I traveled.
Oh and the dumb questions
Those dumb questions aren't unique to the United States. I've had much the same exchange as you've just outlined both times I entered the EU and when I traveled to Israel. When I was in Israel I shot down the question of "What if they don't work?" by showing him all of the trinkets I had just bought in the duty-free shop using my credit cards ;)
The bit I really object to however is the fingerprints and the photo and the putting 4 people to handle two 747s of Europeans and 6 people to process the US Citizens.
*shrug*, dunno what to tell you there. Maybe when foreign visitors can vote the politicians will allocate equal resources to processing them at the border? Again, I'd question if this is really unique to the United States or not. I haven't traveled in a few years so I don't recall if I saw this in other countries or not.
I like the US but US immigration is by far the worst in the world and destroys all enjoyment about arriving in the country.
You've never been to Israel :P Besides, no amount of immigration stupidity is enough to dampen my enjoyment at finally being free from the hours I spent sitting in that sardine can^W^Wcoach section.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis? [youtube.com]
That's fucking awesome. I love the ending ;)