64MB compact flash card / USB reader
(Mini Usual Stuff)
MS monthly patch of the week
Antivirus / Ad-aware
Putty
Leatherman and mini-nutdriver set
It's been a long time since I've needed anything else. I used to carry a Trinux CD, but now it's Knoppix.
I use the compact flash card because it fits in both my camera and my PDA.
(yes, I know we vote for a slate of electors)
on
The Nader Factor
·
· Score: 1
I meant that we don't know or care who they are; they're just the people each party puts up. It would be fun to vote for actual people as electors, rather than for a specific candidate.
Re:Its the fault of the electoral system
on
The Nader Factor
·
· Score: 1
It's not only in the case of a tie, but if no candidate gets a majority. The national media called this possibility a "constitutional crisis" in 2000, but nothing could be more wrong. The founders *expected* there not to be a majority in the Electoral College, which is why they set things up the way they did. I think it would be cool to watch the system work.
Re:Right tool, using the wrong end....
on
The Nader Factor
·
· Score: 1
I've been thinking about the Electoral College lately. For in stance, there is no rule saying how a state should select its electors. All of them do this by popular vote, and all but a couple (Maine being one) do it winner-take-all.
But there's no reason people don't elect the individual electors as the founders envisioned. It won't happen anytime soon, of course, since the current system is so much easier for those in power to manage.
What is it Christians don't like to hear? Oh right
[Matthew 7:3-5, KJV]
Most would prefer the modern English version:
3 Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
Actually, most Christians are afraid to stand up to non-Christians. We're afraid to be called hypocrites, because we know we aren't perfect.
But notice He says to first remove the plank/beam, then look for the speck. We're to be ever mindful of our own huge faults when helping others find their tiny ones. If our attitude is that we're helping someone with a tiny problem, we won't condemn them for their faults.
Or put another way, we're just beggars teling other beggars where to find bread.
The heart of his article is one paragraph. I'll split it up into sentences, since it's too off-base to do all at once.
Think about our behavior over the past four years.
"Our" behavior? What have "we" been doing? Mr. Lessig suffers from LGS, Liberal Guilt Syndrome, which demands that we feel bad about everything good that happens. Further, he tries to disguise his obvious criticism of President Bush by not naming him but declaring it to be "our" behavior.
We have cut taxes but increased spending, benefiting us but burdening our kids.
I agree that having a plan to both cut taxes and increase spending is not wise, but it's not so simple as that. President Bush inherited the dot-bomb crash, and decided to cut taxes to cope with it. He did recommend a bunch of spending increases that I can't support, and then there was that pesky 9/11 thing. Mr. Lessig glosses over that, though, because it doesn't fit his reality.
We have relaxed the control of greenhouse emissions, creating cheaper energy for us but astronomically higher costs for our kids, if they are to avoid catastrophic climatic change.
Mr. Bush extended the grandfathering of older power plants to get up to speed wrt the Clean Air Act and other regulations. He pulled out of that stupid Kyoto treaty. None of that is "relaxing" controls. Even if he had relaxed controls, it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans as far as the climate is concerned. Global warming is not a real thing. It's a phony emergency invented by the Left to further their own agenda.
We have waged an effectively unilateral war against Iraq, giving some a feeling of resolve but engendering three generations of angry souls focused upon a single act of revenge: killing Americans.
What's wrong per se with a unilateral war? Most wars are unilateral. The President, rightly or wrongly, judged that Iraq was a threat to our national security. He waited 14 months while the leadership of United Nations lined their pockets with money stolen from the Oil for Food program. He got Congressional approval for military action. We are not beholden to any other nation or group of nations as to what military action we do or do not take. As to whether generations of Iraqis will hate us, I don't know. I do know they are glad to be out from under Saddam.
And we have suffocated stem cell research through absurdly restrictive policies, giving the sanctimonious ground upon which to rally, while guaranteeing that kids with curable diseases will suffer unnecessary deaths. In each case, we have burdened children - that one group that can't complain - so as to supposedly benefit those of us who do.
The policy is: don't kill anybody to get your stem cells. What's so drastic about that? Especially since there's no evidence, NONE, that fetal stem cells can help cure anybody of anything. Rather, they tend to grow cancers.
So next time, I hope he sticks to ripping Darl McBride.
(Disclaimer: I lean right, but I love the truth more than I like leaning)
-Democratic forms get tossed in the trash, but not Republican forms...
If that is what happened. All that is certain is that some forms were brought to the FBI that had been ripped in half. We don't know who did the ripping, or why. Maybe these were duplicates - people filling out two forms. Maybe the people turning in the forms to the FBI did it. Who knows?
-It's Texas Republicans who are Gerrymandering in their redistricting efforts...
Both parties have done this forever. It's wrong, but you should see the Congressional districts in Democrat-controlled Illinois. Also, the minority party always cries gerrymandering to get leverage. Whether it's happening in Texas, and what effect it finally has, who knows.
-Sinclair wishes to put an obviously anti Kerry Docuganda on TV...
You can't ignore the overwhelming mainstream media bias. Besides, Mr. Kerry is proud of his service to the country in Viet Nam. Those who served with him recall it differently. There are other groups who do honor his service, though.
-Flordia 2000 -- Black voters are disenfranchised by the thousands. Guess which way they lean?
Ah yes, the 'disenfranchised Florida voter' myth. Here is the reality:
Prior to the 2000 election (in the race for Miami Mayor), there was a scandal about convicted felons voting. The Miami Herald ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about the Florida voter rolls having thousands of felons and deceased voters. In response to the public outcry, Florida Legislature mandated that the Secretary of State clean up the voter registration rolls.
Anybody who's ever maintained a list of names and addresses knows that they are error-prone. Complicating this, some states don't bar felons from voting, while Florida does. A felon moving from a voting-felon state should continue to vote, while a felon shouldn't be able to move from a non-voting-felon state in order to vote. (Can you say "reform"?)
So five months before the election, the Secretary of State sent the state purge list to the counties. They keyed on full name, since that's the only common field in both databases. They also gave the aliases that the felons were known to have used. Apparently at least one county election official was on the list! As a result of the flaws in the state list, many counties continued to get their lists from the courts, illegally ignoring the official state list.
People were given an chance to re-register if they could show that they were not a convicted felon or dead, but merely had the same name. From glennbeck.com, (conservative site, but the figures are in the ballpark, anyway):
Research revealed that 239 [of] the 4,678 African Americans on the Miami-Dade felons' were eventually cleared to vote which represented 5.1 percent of the total number of blacks on the felons list. Of the 1,264 whites on the list, 125 proved to be there by mistake-which is 9.9 percent of the total. The error rate for whites was almost double that for blacks.
Most of the people who were made to re-register did so without difficulty. There were a handful of people who didn't get themselves re-registered for various reasons.
While that is a hassle for those handfull of people, and it's clear that the system is flawed, it certainly doesn't represent a systematic effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters, African-American or otherwise.
(Disclaimer: I lean right, but I love the truth more than I like leaning)
-Democratic forms get tossed in the trash, but not Republican forms...
If that is what happened. All that is certain is that some forms were brought to the FBI that had been ripped in half. We don't know who did the ripping, or why. Maybe these were duplicates - people filling out two forms. Maybe the people turning in the forms to the FBI did it. Who knows?
-It's Texas Republicans who are Gerrymandering in their redistricting efforts...
Both parties have done this forever. It's wrong, but Texas is not the only place where redistricting efforts have been charged with foul play. You should see the Congressional districts in Democrat-controlled Illinois. Also, that's what the out-of-power party always says, in an effort to get leverage. Whether it's happening in Texas, and what effect it finally has, who knows.
-Sinclair wishes to put an obviously anti Kerry Docuganda on TV...
What about CBS-ABC-NBC-CNN? You can't ignore that media bias. Besides, Mr. Kerry is proud of his service to the country in Viet Nam. There are others who served with him who recall it differently. There are other groups who honor his service, though.
-Flordia 2000 -- Black voters are disenfranchised by the thousands. Guess which way they lean?
Ah yes, the 'disenfranchised Florida voter' myth. Here is the reality:
Prior to the 2000 election (in the race for Miami Mayor), there was a scandal about convicted felons voting. The Miami Herald ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about the Florida voter rolls having thousands of felons and deceased voters. In response to the public outcry, Florida Legislature mandated that the Secretary of State clean up the voter registration rolls.
Anybody who's ever maintained a list of names and addresses knows that they are always filled with errors. This was complicated by the fact that some states don't bar felons from voting, while Florida does. A felon moving from a voting-felon state should continue to vote, while a felon shouldn't be able to move from a non-voting-felon state in order to vote. (Can you say "reform"?)
So five months before the election, the Secretary of State sent a list to the counties to use to purge their individual voter registration lists of felons and the deceased. They keyed on full name, since that's the only common field in both databases. They also gave the aliases that the felons were known to have used. Apparently at least one county election official was on the list! As a result of the flaws in the state list, many counties continued to get their lists from the courts, illegally ignoring the official state list.
People were given an chance to re-register if they could show that they were not a convicted felon, but merely had the same name. From glennbeck.com, (conservative site, but the figures are in the ballpark, anyway):
Research revealed that 239 [of] the 4,678 African Americans on the Miami-Dade felons' were eventually cleared to vote which represented 5.1 percent of the total number of blacks on the felons list. Of the 1,264 whites on the list, 125 proved to be there by mistake-which is 9.9 percent of the total. The error rate for whites was almost double that for blacks.
Most of the people who were made to re-register did so without difficulty. There were a handful of people who didn't get themselves re-registered because they couldn't wade throught
I'm an idiot. Must get some sleep now. And I've got to lay off the sauce. I wrote the parent thinking about those stupid powered carts they call "scooters", but are just powered wheelchairs.
Enabling in the sense that it enables laziness. Rather than being forced to get some exercise, people are told to get a "scooter". It's a powered wheelchair. A scooter is a skateboard with handlebars.
For the genuinely disabled, a wheelchair is the difference between thriving and rotting. Most Segway ownere I see are just too lazy to do their own walking.
I see a lot of obese grandmothers, age 55, riding around on these things with their nose in the air, and I remember something I heard an old Irish country doctor tell an elderly patient: "You don't want to lose your walk. Once you lose your walk, everything goes."
All we need to do is vote our mind and trust the system. Quit worrying about who everyone else is voting for - vote with the herd and you may as well stay home.
The Electoral College is set up to pick a winner, or if there is no majority, the House votes from the top three; if the House can't pick by majority, then the Senate votes on the top two. The system was set up for multiple parties.
She said she suspected Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September, may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more and possibly causing the crash.
Why do I get the feeling that everything that's gone wrong in the state of Florida for the last two months was ultimately caused by bad weather?
A computer "stored" in a hot room shouldn't be damaged. These must really be delicate devices.
I believe that a fertilized egg is a human being. Generally, a human being shouldn't be harmed, whether it's 1 day old or 10 years old.
Whether that extends to refusing to feed it by letting it attach to the uterine wall or by refusing to let it make a sandwich when it's 10 I will leave as an exercise for the reader. I do see those two situations as equivalent, however.
People say that life begins at birth, or life begins at conception. I think they're both wrong.
Life continues *through* conception.
A sperm cell can either be alive or dead. An egg can either be alive or dead. They come together before they die, and the new entity is still alive. The cell splits, and on it goes.
Where do you draw the line? I draw it at conception. You draw it at birth, I assume.
Ok.
I think it's illogical to say that an embryo, or an older fetus, or a premature baby is, or is not, a human being based on its location.
And if the majority of us decide... What're you going to do
about it?
What will I do? I'll keep talking. Get used to it.
The majority is not always right. In fact, the tyranny of the majority is one thing we should be consider when talking about experiments such as this. What happens when the majority decide that you are needed in some experiment?
"Sorry pal, we need your kidneys. Carry this filter -- you'll be fine."
It's quite amazing the hysterical reaction people have to clones when natural clones - also known under the technical term "same-egg twins" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a brave new world.
One side of it is that yes, they are natural. But the argument is not about simply splitting the single fertilized ovum and creating two people out of one, each to be given the full rights of personhood. That's a red herring. The argument is about splitting the cell (or splitting two cells apart) and using one or both halves for experimentation.
Anyone who is against cloning has to come up with better arguments than "it's unnatural".
See above. Human life is not ours with which to experiment. That is one stone in civilization's foundation, that we agree with our fellow man to respect his life if he respects ours and those of others.
Personally, I feel the discussion about cloning is largely provoked by people with political agendas, as are many divisive arguments around the world. People who have true feelings about the value of human life should better try to help the victims of war and famine, man-made disasters that kill millions.
It's not a political agenda, it's informed revulsion. Yes, there is evil in the world. Do you use the presence of one wrong thing to justify additional, unrelated wrong things? Two wrongs don't right one another.
"There's lots of death in the world" is no justification for more killing. If you want to argue that it's not killing, then that's one thing, but you equated these lives with those snuffed out by genocide:
But, I guess one clone is more of a danger to our claims of moral superiority than a million dead Sudanese or Congolese.
Uh, are we killing millions of Africans? We can't stop people in other nations from killing one another. We can't even stop people from killing one another in our own country.
But we don't make it legal.
Argue that X kills, and we can go off on that tangent about just and unjust X, who gets to decide the fate of its innocent victims and its "deserving" ones. Whatever X you pick, it still doesn't justify experimenting with human life.
Shifting the argument to researching theoretically curable diseases means you want to roll the dice and see what happens. You're betting with chips that aren't yours on odds you can't know.
Call me a cynic but this debate is full of shit.
You may be cynical, but that's not so bad. A cynic merely distrusts motives, which is usually wise in small doses.
metaphor: n., a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
Slashdot Mirror
Only tools wear condoms.
"You can't install it to your hard drive."
Yes, you can: knx-hdinstall.
(Mini Usual Stuff)
It's been a long time since I've needed anything else. I used to carry a Trinux CD, but now it's Knoppix.
I use the compact flash card because it fits in both my camera and my PDA.
I meant that we don't know or care who they are; they're just the people each party puts up. It would be fun to vote for actual people as electors, rather than for a specific candidate.
It's not only in the case of a tie, but if no candidate gets a majority. The national media called this possibility a "constitutional crisis" in 2000, but nothing could be more wrong. The founders *expected* there not to be a majority in the Electoral College, which is why they set things up the way they did. I think it would be cool to watch the system work.
I've been thinking about the Electoral College lately. For in stance, there is no rule saying how a state should select its electors. All of them do this by popular vote, and all but a couple (Maine being one) do it winner-take-all.
But there's no reason people don't elect the individual electors as the founders envisioned. It won't happen anytime soon, of course, since the current system is so much easier for those in power to manage.
Most would prefer the modern English version:
Actually, most Christians are afraid to stand up to non-Christians. We're afraid to be called hypocrites, because we know we aren't perfect.
But notice He says to first remove the plank/beam, then look for the speck. We're to be ever mindful of our own huge faults when helping others find their tiny ones. If our attitude is that we're helping someone with a tiny problem, we won't condemn them for their faults.
Or put another way, we're just beggars teling other beggars where to find bread.
The policy is: don't kill anybody to get your stem cells. What's so drastic about that? Especially since there's no evidence, NONE, that fetal stem cells can help cure anybody of anything. Rather, they tend to grow cancers.
So next time, I hope he sticks to ripping Darl McBride.
Mr. Lessig is a noted voice in the FOSS movement, but his hysterical, sky-is-falling political rhetoric is truly breathtaking.
It almost made me run out and protest Nixon and his damned Viet Nam war.
If that is what happened. All that is certain is that some forms were brought to the FBI that had been ripped in half. We don't know who did the ripping, or why. Maybe these were duplicates - people filling out two forms. Maybe the people turning in the forms to the FBI did it. Who knows?
Both parties have done this forever. It's wrong, but you should see the Congressional districts in Democrat-controlled Illinois. Also, the minority party always cries gerrymandering to get leverage. Whether it's happening in Texas, and what effect it finally has, who knows.
You can't ignore the overwhelming mainstream media bias. Besides, Mr. Kerry is proud of his service to the country in Viet Nam. Those who served with him recall it differently. There are other groups who do honor his service, though.
Ah yes, the 'disenfranchised Florida voter' myth. Here is the reality:
Prior to the 2000 election (in the race for Miami Mayor), there was a scandal about convicted felons voting. The Miami Herald ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about the Florida voter rolls having thousands of felons and deceased voters. In response to the public outcry, Florida Legislature mandated that the Secretary of State clean up the voter registration rolls.
Anybody who's ever maintained a list of names and addresses knows that they are error-prone. Complicating this, some states don't bar felons from voting, while Florida does. A felon moving from a voting-felon state should continue to vote, while a felon shouldn't be able to move from a non-voting-felon state in order to vote. (Can you say "reform"?)
So five months before the election, the Secretary of State sent the state purge list to the counties. They keyed on full name, since that's the only common field in both databases. They also gave the aliases that the felons were known to have used. Apparently at least one county election official was on the list! As a result of the flaws in the state list, many counties continued to get their lists from the courts, illegally ignoring the official state list.
People were given an chance to re-register if they could show that they were not a convicted felon or dead, but merely had the same name. From glennbeck.com, (conservative site, but the figures are in the ballpark, anyway):
Most of the people who were made to re-register did so without difficulty. There were a handful of people who didn't get themselves re-registered for various reasons.
While that is a hassle for those handfull of people, and it's clear that the system is flawed, it certainly doesn't represent a systematic effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters, African-American or otherwise.
As
If that is what happened. All that is certain is that some forms were brought to the FBI that had been ripped in half. We don't know who did the ripping, or why. Maybe these were duplicates - people filling out two forms. Maybe the people turning in the forms to the FBI did it. Who knows?
Both parties have done this forever. It's wrong, but Texas is not the only place where redistricting efforts have been charged with foul play. You should see the Congressional districts in Democrat-controlled Illinois. Also, that's what the out-of-power party always says, in an effort to get leverage. Whether it's happening in Texas, and what effect it finally has, who knows.
What about CBS-ABC-NBC-CNN? You can't ignore that media bias. Besides, Mr. Kerry is proud of his service to the country in Viet Nam. There are others who served with him who recall it differently. There are other groups who honor his service, though.
Ah yes, the 'disenfranchised Florida voter' myth. Here is the reality:
Prior to the 2000 election (in the race for Miami Mayor), there was a scandal about convicted felons voting. The Miami Herald ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about the Florida voter rolls having thousands of felons and deceased voters. In response to the public outcry, Florida Legislature mandated that the Secretary of State clean up the voter registration rolls.
Anybody who's ever maintained a list of names and addresses knows that they are always filled with errors. This was complicated by the fact that some states don't bar felons from voting, while Florida does. A felon moving from a voting-felon state should continue to vote, while a felon shouldn't be able to move from a non-voting-felon state in order to vote. (Can you say "reform"?)
So five months before the election, the Secretary of State sent a list to the counties to use to purge their individual voter registration lists of felons and the deceased. They keyed on full name, since that's the only common field in both databases. They also gave the aliases that the felons were known to have used. Apparently at least one county election official was on the list! As a result of the flaws in the state list, many counties continued to get their lists from the courts, illegally ignoring the official state list.
People were given an chance to re-register if they could show that they were not a convicted felon, but merely had the same name. From glennbeck.com, (conservative site, but the figures are in the ballpark, anyway):
Most of the people who were made to re-register did so without difficulty. There were a handful of people who didn't get themselves re-registered because they couldn't wade throught
I'm an idiot. Must get some sleep now. And I've got to lay off the sauce. I wrote the parent thinking about those stupid powered carts they call "scooters", but are just powered wheelchairs.
Sorry for wasting bandwidth.
Enabling in the sense that it enables laziness. Rather than being forced to get some exercise, people are told to get a "scooter". It's a powered wheelchair. A scooter is a skateboard with handlebars.
For the genuinely disabled, a wheelchair is the difference between thriving and rotting. Most Segway ownere I see are just too lazy to do their own walking.
I see a lot of obese grandmothers, age 55, riding around on these things with their nose in the air, and I remember something I heard an old Irish country doctor tell an elderly patient: "You don't want to lose your walk. Once you lose your walk, everything goes."
Let's see, that means it's the Federalists against the Whigs again? I thought TFA said it was Republicans and Democrats now.
A third party vote is not a wasted vote.
All we need to do is vote our mind and trust the system. Quit worrying about who everyone else is voting for - vote with the herd and you may as well stay home.
The Electoral College is set up to pick a winner, or if there is no majority, the House votes from the top three; if the House can't pick by majority, then the Senate votes on the top two. The system was set up for multiple parties.
Not to be insensitive to natural disasters, but:
Why do I get the feeling that everything that's gone wrong in the state of Florida for the last two months was ultimately caused by bad weather?
A computer "stored" in a hot room shouldn't be damaged. These must really be delicate devices.
I believe that a fertilized egg is a human being. Generally, a human being shouldn't be harmed, whether it's 1 day old or 10 years old.
Whether that extends to refusing to feed it by letting it attach to the uterine wall or by refusing to let it make a sandwich when it's 10 I will leave as an exercise for the reader. I do see those two situations as equivalent, however.
>false premise that an embryo is a human being
I guess we just disagree.
People say that life begins at birth, or life begins at conception. I think they're both wrong.
Life continues *through* conception.
A sperm cell can either be alive or dead. An egg can either be alive or dead. They come together before they die, and the new entity is still alive. The cell splits, and on it goes.
Where do you draw the line? I draw it at conception. You draw it at birth, I assume.
Ok.
I think it's illogical to say that an embryo, or an older fetus, or a premature baby is, or is not, a human being based on its location.
What will I do? I'll keep talking. Get used to it.
The majority is not always right. In fact, the tyranny of the majority is one thing we should be consider when talking about experiments such as this. What happens when the majority decide that you are needed in some experiment?
"Sorry pal, we need your kidneys. Carry this filter -- you'll be fine."
Okay, see another post on this topic.
One side of it is that yes, they are natural. But the argument is not about simply splitting the single fertilized ovum and creating two people out of one, each to be given the full rights of personhood. That's a red herring. The argument is about splitting the cell (or splitting two cells apart) and using one or both halves for experimentation.
See above. Human life is not ours with which to experiment. That is one stone in civilization's foundation, that we agree with our fellow man to respect his life if he respects ours and those of others.
It's not a political agenda, it's informed revulsion. Yes, there is evil in the world. Do you use the presence of one wrong thing to justify additional, unrelated wrong things? Two wrongs don't right one another.
"There's lots of death in the world" is no justification for more killing. If you want to argue that it's not killing, then that's one thing, but you equated these lives with those snuffed out by genocide:
Uh, are we killing millions of Africans? We can't stop people in other nations from killing one another. We can't even stop people from killing one another in our own country.
But we don't make it legal.
Argue that X kills, and we can go off on that tangent about just and unjust X, who gets to decide the fate of its innocent victims and its "deserving" ones. Whatever X you pick, it still doesn't justify experimenting with human life.
Shifting the argument to researching theoretically curable diseases means you want to roll the dice and see what happens. You're betting with chips that aren't yours on odds you can't know.
You may be cynical, but that's not so bad. A cynic merely distrusts motives, which is usually wise in small doses.
But I think you distrust your own.
Harvard, founded as a seminary, now becomes Frankenstein's Laboratory.
Human cloning is simply sick and wrong. There are lines not to cross in the search for knowledge, and this is one of them.
If they're looking for a disease to cure, how about their own sociopathy?
I know this will get modded down, but I don't care.
No, I'm not being funny, other than that sad irony of a once glorious institution now mired in an ethical quag.
He has huge stones, I'll give him that.
McBride saying that the FOSS community are trying to take away his precious IP is ... I just tried to think of an analogue and I couldn't.
What hulking brass ones! How does he walk?
Nader called the President a "messianic militarist" for saying that he has an active belief in God.
That's one of the most intolerant things I've ever read.
>Saves ink?
metaphor: n., a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
*Sigh*. Looks like not many got the humor.