Sounds like they're trying to slow down everyone who will eventually find mounds of studipidity, incompetence, or corruption in those e-mails. Not that it would stop anyone from finding it...
And, of course, as a conservative (NON-Republican), I see this as just another case of Big Government ignoring the spirit of the law and not doing the will of the people.
Not to mention, as she complains about government waste and bureaucracy she's going far out of her way to add to it.
Funny that people would think that she's the one making other people look like idiots. I guess that's the Tea Party Reality Distortion field at work.
You don't have to use a key combination to get to the URL bar, you can just click on the tab. But if you like keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl+L still works to pull up the URL bar and highlight the current URL, and Ctrl+K still works for searching, just as those shortcuts have been standard in most browsers for years now.
Also, it's not on by default. The ability to even show the option is hidden away in about:flags. Once you allow that option to be shown, you still have to turn it on yourself. It's a very deliberate process.
I'm using it right now, and I really like it. I mentioned this in another post, but I'll say it again. Not only is it an option, but you have to find it first in about:flags, enable it, restart the browser, then right-click on a tab and choose "Hide the toolbar".
It's an option, hidden far out of the way, with multiple steps to get to it. It's not being forced on anyone.
A) It's not on by default. Not only do you have to go to about:flags to enable it, but you then have to right click on a tab and choose to hide it (from what I'm seeing, all new tabs seem to be hide the URL bar from then on). Thus, you still have to really want it hidden.
B) I like to be able to quickly get to the address bar to type in a URL or to copy the current URL, but I've always done that with Ctrl+L, which has always been much quicker than moving the mouse up there and selecting the URL. Ctrl+L still works perfectly, and Ctrl+K still clears the URL bar and drops in a question mark so you can just type what you want to search for.
More importantly, Apple doesn't have to change their program. If a competitor finds a way to so something cheaper, it makes Apple look like the "premium" product, without having to change anything. Apple has always been able to stay at least a step behind everyone else in terms of features, pricing and flexibility, and instead of hurting them, it's made their brand extremely valuable.
Also, they already have a huge ecosystem of existing accessories... Nobody else even comes recognizably close. With that ecosystem comes recognition in the minds of all consumers.
The software problem with DVDs on PCs was bad for a long time, too. You could get a DVD drive with a hardware decoder card, or one with software only. The software was most decidedly not free -- heaven help you if you lost the Power DVD disc that came with your PC, and Linux support was sketchy at best for quite a while. Some DVDs would come with some crappy player software that didn't include CSS encryption, but would sometimes goober up the DVD software you already had (PC Friendly!). If you have a DVD drive and you have the CSS decoder, you probably already have some type of player software, but PC Friendly would trick people into thinking they needed to install it.
Please don't act like everything was so much better in the glory days of DVDs. You're getting "better than they were before" confused with "better than they are now". At least now, even if your setup isn't optimal, you can still get 720p.
The standalone executables still depend on a runtime environment that has to be installed on the target computer, so you still can't just drop the.exe on any old computer and run it.
My corporate AT&T Blackberry plan doesn't allow for MMS, even though I have data and SMS... But I can send an e-mail to my wife's phone [10-digit-number]@tmomail.net, and she can send an MMS to my e-mail address... so we get essentially the same functionality. It's a bit of a hassle, but not terrible.
Hitler was not elected, but the reason why he was appointed chancellor is because his party had the majority in the parliament.
That was a large part of it. The other large part of it was the years of immense pressure exerted on President Hindenburg by those around him, including his own son, compounded by Hindenburg's advancing senility.
But Parliament's effect on the matter is not indicative of a problem with democracy. If anything it's the representatives in this case who are part of the problem.
The wolves/sheep is a terrible analogy, by the way, as DCstewieG already pointed out. If the wolves are in the minority, it just means even more sheep for the wolves.
Interesting that they're trying to emphasize a republic as being the fundamentally opposed to socialism... Because certainly there could possibly be any Socialist Republics. Or even a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...
Good point on the "winner takes all" point as being the reason why the popular vote doesn't match the electoral college votes, you're right, although I think it's still a combined effect of the smaller states getting an additional boost just for being states.
You consider it to be a problem, which I don't. The country was designed to be a a union of states, so it really should be the states making the decisions, not the entire mass of the country as a whole. My point is that the states vote according to the democractially-determined election, and then the states cast their votes almost exactly according to the will of the people that voted, with very little room for decision by any individual representative.
I can see why you'd be upset feeling that your vote is essentially thrown away, but even in a straight popular vote, the votes of the minority don't "count" anymore once the winner is determined. The rural areas would be completely swept away in a straight popular vote. At least the electoral college does provide some added representation at the state level for sections of the country that are almost completely rural compared to states that are completely urban.
It should be noted that the Weimar Republic doesn't really fall into this discussion, at least not as far as Hitler's concerned -- Hitler was not democratically elected. He was appointed Chancellor by the President, then seized the President's position after the President died, and combined the offices into the office of the Fürer.
I've already posted my own commentary on Glenn Beck's rant, which seems to be where you get your talking points, so I won't do the full thing again here, but suffice it to say, Hitler was not democratically elected to any position in the government, he was appointed by the president, and illegally seized control of the president's position after the president died.. Also, the USSR (I'm assuming that's what you meant instead of Russia?) and China were/are both republics by name. The US isn't a republic in the same sense that the rest of the world uses the term.
And just because a country has elections doesn't mean it's going to source an oppressive socialist regime. We've always had elections in the US... That's the part of our government that is done democratically, the rest is done by those democratically elected representatives. Are you saying we should do away with elections? Maybe you want to wait until we vote in your preferred Republican overlord?
It's splitting hairs in all the wrong places, and it gets us in trouble. Conservative talk radio people like to make a big deal about this, but they're really pretty lame about it. I heard a guy (subbing in for Rush Limbaugh one day) who pointed out that the word "democracy" is not in the Constitution. He may be correct, but the only instance of any form of "republic" is the section on States' governments, saying that the Federal Government needs to ensure that state governments have a republican form.
The worst example, though was a Glenn Beck rant about the subject... Unfortunately, the linked article has lost some of the text, apparently since the last time they redid the layout of Beck's site, but many of the historical inaccuracies are there. Specifically, this part:
Democracy is a very important word. We’re a republic. That’s why they use democracy. Democratically elected, let me give you just a list of a few people who have been democratically elected. Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad, Hitler, Mussolini I believe was democratically elected, democratically elected. Usually in a progressive world democratically elected comes with a little twist. There’s always something that happens. For instance, Hitler wasn’t the Führer. He was the chancellor, democratically elected. And then he cobbled together a coalition that everybody said, oh, no, that will never happen here. And it did, and he became the F[ührer].
The biggest problem here is that 3 out of the 5 names listed were *not* democratically elected, including Hitler, which Beck specifically (and erroneously) chooses to elaborate on. Hitler was not elected as Chancellor, he was appointed by the President (as was at the time, and still is the case today). For a fascinating read on the history behind that bit of political finagling, see the wikipedia article on the President who appointed him.
Also, many of those leaders preside(d) over countries which are (or were at the time) actually republics themselves. It's in most of their names: "the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela", "the People's Republic of Iran", etc. Germany didn't have the word republic in their name at the time, but historians (and even Beck himself) refer to the government of that era as the "Weimar Republic". The Weimar Republic was even a Constitutional Republic. Consider other countries that we don't want to be like, which also happen to be republics: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the People's Republic of China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). There are plenty more countries to list. Funny that the sponsor of this Utah bill is doing it specifically to guard against Socialist propaganda... because a republic couldn't possibly be Socialist (?)!
The thing is, we call ourselves a republic, but really we're the only republic of our kind in the world. We're not really a republic in the general sense, at least not according to the modern application of the word. In other words, we're not "a republic". We're the United States' version of a republic.
The other problem with Beck's anti-democracy rant is that our leaders (including our President) are democratically elected. You can make the argument that the electoral college is not a democratic process, but in all reality, the president almost always gets elected according to the popular vote, with very few exceptions. The exceptions (as I've already pointed out in other comments in this thread) are not due to the fact that representatives make the choice for us, but rather due to the fact that small states have more weight per capita than large states. I realize that Beck doesn't like the fact that Senators are now directly elected (as opposed to the original Constitutional process of having them elected by the state legislatures
When you cast your vote, what you are doing is determining what electors you'd like to go and vote for the president. Who the electors are, the specifics of their choosing and so on varies state to state a bit, but that is how it works and how a president can win the popular vote but lose the election
That's not how those situations happen. Electors voting against their state's popular vote has never changed the outcome of the election. The difference in those situations is based on the fact that in addition to electors based on population, each state gets 2 electors just for being a state. It's the weight of a state (rhyme intended) that makes the difference.
Electors rarely vote contrary to the popular vote, because as you noted, when you vote, you're not telling the electors who to vote for, you're choosing a set of electors. Those electors are either the Democrat Party's electors or the Republican Party's electors. Very rarely will a person from a specific party, chosen specifically by that party to vote for the party's candidate vote against that candidate if given the chance. The times it has happened have been to make a statement, where the electors knew they wouldn't affect the election in general.
Oh good grief... does *anyone* remember what they were taught in government in junior high? [...] Yes, sometimes the elected President did not get the majority of the popular vote. The Electors are not bound by law (in all states) to cast their vote according to popular vote. This is one of the checks and balances, designed by the founders of the nation, that prevents popular will from overcoming individual freedom. We're all taught this in school.
Apparently you don't understand how the electoral college works any better than the people you're trying to teach, which makes you just like Glenn Beck. My 8th grade history teach taught that exact same tripe. He also constantly mispronounced words (which had pronunciation guides in the textbooks!), and corrected other people's mispronunciations with his own. If you want to understand government, you should probably go back to high school or college level classes, where things aren't simplified to the point of being wrong.
The years where the electoral college result didn't match the popular vote had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the electors can make their own choices. The instances where an elector has voted contrary to his/her state's popular vote has never affected the result of the overall election. What has made that difference is the fact that just like Congressmen, electors are divied out to each state based on population, plus an additional two electors purely by virtue of the state being a state. This means that smaller states get a slightly proportionately larger voice per capita than larger states. And that is why the electoral college results don't always match the popular vote.
Here's another bit of trivia you might not have known, which explains why electors normally stick with the voters in their state:
When you vote, you're not telling a set of electors which candidate to cast their vote for, because there's not just one set of electors per state. Each party organization in each state picks a set of electors, and the popular vote decides which party's set of electors gets to cast their votes. Electors chosen in the last election by the Democrat party in a state where the popular vote went to the Democrat would have been very unlikely to vote for a Republican candidate -- they were chosen specifically by their party because they would vote for the party's candidate!
The few instances where an elector has voted contrary to the popular vote (and contrary to their own party) in their state has been more of small symbolic act of protest, knowing that it won't change the election.
The workings of the electoral college do very little to emphasize the role that electors play as representatives, as they represent their own party more than anything else. What the electoral college does do is emphasize the importance of the power of individual states.
I once stumbled across his show late at night, watched it for 15 minutes, and at the end, I really would have been dumber for having watched it, if I hadn't forced myself to review the facts that I know are true. Later I did some research on the topic and found not only inaccuracies and insinuations, but outright lies. Here's the link to the video of that show.
My favorite part of it is that even though I have always known that he doesn't care for science (à la climate change), I'm coming to the realization that he actively avoids understanding science and technical things, probably partly out of laziness and mostly because the political side he chooses conflicts so harshly with the hard truth of science.
For some examples of that in this video, see his suggestion of a surge protector as a solution (which as the patent in question points out, is actually part of the problem), the acceptance of Chaffetz's lie that the patent says it's for residential use, not for businesses, and his complete lack of attempt to understand the diagram for the second patent... because who could ever understand a diagram? All of the things he rants about are explained perfectly clearly in the patent itself, as well as in the letter that was sent to Chaffetz by Fannie Mae's lawyer. Both the letter and the patent are completely misrepresented, and in such a way that can only be done intentionally. There's no way that either Chaffetz or Beck read the patent and/or the letter and honestly believed that these patents involved a cap and trade conspiracy, unless they just threw out most of what they read with the excuse that it was too technical (which it's not).
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a feeling that this will all "fit in" with this guy's agenda.
Watch theblaze.com this week for new examples of fear-mongering bad science.
Sounds like they're trying to slow down everyone who will eventually find mounds of studipidity, incompetence, or corruption in those e-mails. Not that it would stop anyone from finding it...
And, of course, as a conservative (NON-Republican), I see this as just another case of Big Government ignoring the spirit of the law and not doing the will of the people.
Not to mention, as she complains about government waste and bureaucracy she's going far out of her way to add to it.
Funny that people would think that she's the one making other people look like idiots. I guess that's the Tea Party Reality Distortion field at work.
There's an episode of The Office about this: Season 3: The Convict.
Prison Mike can set this super straight
In IE8 (and earlier, I believe), Ctrl+L popped up an "Open" box. In IE9, it highlights the URL.
You don't have to use a key combination to get to the URL bar, you can just click on the tab. But if you like keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl+L still works to pull up the URL bar and highlight the current URL, and Ctrl+K still works for searching, just as those shortcuts have been standard in most browsers for years now.
Also, it's not on by default. The ability to even show the option is hidden away in about:flags. Once you allow that option to be shown, you still have to turn it on yourself. It's a very deliberate process.
I'm using it right now, and I really like it. I mentioned this in another post, but I'll say it again. Not only is it an option, but you have to find it first in about:flags, enable it, restart the browser, then right-click on a tab and choose "Hide the toolbar".
It's an option, hidden far out of the way, with multiple steps to get to it. It's not being forced on anyone.
A) It's not on by default. Not only do you have to go to about:flags to enable it, but you then have to right click on a tab and choose to hide it (from what I'm seeing, all new tabs seem to be hide the URL bar from then on). Thus, you still have to really want it hidden.
B) I like to be able to quickly get to the address bar to type in a URL or to copy the current URL, but I've always done that with Ctrl+L, which has always been much quicker than moving the mouse up there and selecting the URL. Ctrl+L still works perfectly, and Ctrl+K still clears the URL bar and drops in a question mark so you can just type what you want to search for.
More importantly, Apple doesn't have to change their program. If a competitor finds a way to so something cheaper, it makes Apple look like the "premium" product, without having to change anything. Apple has always been able to stay at least a step behind everyone else in terms of features, pricing and flexibility, and instead of hurting them, it's made their brand extremely valuable.
Also, they already have a huge ecosystem of existing accessories... Nobody else even comes recognizably close. With that ecosystem comes recognition in the minds of all consumers.
dot-slash? What do you have against the current working directory?
Maybe he understands that word, but not the next one.
The software problem with DVDs on PCs was bad for a long time, too. You could get a DVD drive with a hardware decoder card, or one with software only. The software was most decidedly not free -- heaven help you if you lost the Power DVD disc that came with your PC, and Linux support was sketchy at best for quite a while. Some DVDs would come with some crappy player software that didn't include CSS encryption, but would sometimes goober up the DVD software you already had (PC Friendly!). If you have a DVD drive and you have the CSS decoder, you probably already have some type of player software, but PC Friendly would trick people into thinking they needed to install it.
Please don't act like everything was so much better in the glory days of DVDs. You're getting "better than they were before" confused with "better than they are now". At least now, even if your setup isn't optimal, you can still get 720p.
The standalone executables still depend on a runtime environment that has to be installed on the target computer, so you still can't just drop the .exe on any old computer and run it.
My corporate AT&T Blackberry plan doesn't allow for MMS, even though I have data and SMS... But I can send an e-mail to my wife's phone [10-digit-number]@tmomail.net, and she can send an MMS to my e-mail address... so we get essentially the same functionality. It's a bit of a hassle, but not terrible.
But really, we don't use it anyway.
Hitler was not elected, but the reason why he was appointed chancellor is because his party had the majority in the parliament.
That was a large part of it. The other large part of it was the years of immense pressure exerted on President Hindenburg by those around him, including his own son, compounded by Hindenburg's advancing senility.
But Parliament's effect on the matter is not indicative of a problem with democracy. If anything it's the representatives in this case who are part of the problem.
Textbook Glenn Beck.
The wolves/sheep is a terrible analogy, by the way, as DCstewieG already pointed out. If the wolves are in the minority, it just means even more sheep for the wolves.
Interesting that they're trying to emphasize a republic as being the fundamentally opposed to socialism... Because certainly there could possibly be any Socialist Republics. Or even a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...
Good point on the "winner takes all" point as being the reason why the popular vote doesn't match the electoral college votes, you're right, although I think it's still a combined effect of the smaller states getting an additional boost just for being states.
You consider it to be a problem, which I don't. The country was designed to be a a union of states, so it really should be the states making the decisions, not the entire mass of the country as a whole. My point is that the states vote according to the democractially-determined election, and then the states cast their votes almost exactly according to the will of the people that voted, with very little room for decision by any individual representative.
I can see why you'd be upset feeling that your vote is essentially thrown away, but even in a straight popular vote, the votes of the minority don't "count" anymore once the winner is determined. The rural areas would be completely swept away in a straight popular vote. At least the electoral college does provide some added representation at the state level for sections of the country that are almost completely rural compared to states that are completely urban.
It should be noted that the Weimar Republic doesn't really fall into this discussion, at least not as far as Hitler's concerned -- Hitler was not democratically elected. He was appointed Chancellor by the President, then seized the President's position after the President died, and combined the offices into the office of the Fürer.
I've already posted my own commentary on Glenn Beck's rant, which seems to be where you get your talking points, so I won't do the full thing again here, but suffice it to say, Hitler was not democratically elected to any position in the government, he was appointed by the president, and illegally seized control of the president's position after the president died.. Also, the USSR (I'm assuming that's what you meant instead of Russia?) and China were/are both republics by name. The US isn't a republic in the same sense that the rest of the world uses the term.
And just because a country has elections doesn't mean it's going to source an oppressive socialist regime. We've always had elections in the US... That's the part of our government that is done democratically, the rest is done by those democratically elected representatives. Are you saying we should do away with elections? Maybe you want to wait until we vote in your preferred Republican overlord?
The worst example, though was a Glenn Beck rant about the subject... Unfortunately, the linked article has lost some of the text, apparently since the last time they redid the layout of Beck's site, but many of the historical inaccuracies are there. Specifically, this part:
Democracy is a very important word. We’re a republic. That’s why they use democracy. Democratically elected, let me give you just a list of a few people who have been democratically elected. Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad, Hitler, Mussolini I believe was democratically elected, democratically elected. Usually in a progressive world democratically elected comes with a little twist. There’s always something that happens. For instance, Hitler wasn’t the Führer. He was the chancellor, democratically elected. And then he cobbled together a coalition that everybody said, oh, no, that will never happen here. And it did, and he became the F[ührer].
The biggest problem here is that 3 out of the 5 names listed were *not* democratically elected, including Hitler, which Beck specifically (and erroneously) chooses to elaborate on. Hitler was not elected as Chancellor, he was appointed by the President (as was at the time, and still is the case today). For a fascinating read on the history behind that bit of political finagling, see the wikipedia article on the President who appointed him. Also, many of those leaders preside(d) over countries which are (or were at the time) actually republics themselves. It's in most of their names: "the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela", "the People's Republic of Iran", etc. Germany didn't have the word republic in their name at the time, but historians (and even Beck himself) refer to the government of that era as the "Weimar Republic". The Weimar Republic was even a Constitutional Republic. Consider other countries that we don't want to be like, which also happen to be republics: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the People's Republic of China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). There are plenty more countries to list. Funny that the sponsor of this Utah bill is doing it specifically to guard against Socialist propaganda... because a republic couldn't possibly be Socialist (?)!
The thing is, we call ourselves a republic, but really we're the only republic of our kind in the world. We're not really a republic in the general sense, at least not according to the modern application of the word. In other words, we're not "a republic". We're the United States' version of a republic.
The other problem with Beck's anti-democracy rant is that our leaders (including our President) are democratically elected. You can make the argument that the electoral college is not a democratic process, but in all reality, the president almost always gets elected according to the popular vote, with very few exceptions. The exceptions (as I've already pointed out in other comments in this thread) are not due to the fact that representatives make the choice for us, but rather due to the fact that small states have more weight per capita than large states. I realize that Beck doesn't like the fact that Senators are now directly elected (as opposed to the original Constitutional process of having them elected by the state legislatures
When you cast your vote, what you are doing is determining what electors you'd like to go and vote for the president. Who the electors are, the specifics of their choosing and so on varies state to state a bit, but that is how it works and how a president can win the popular vote but lose the election
That's not how those situations happen. Electors voting against their state's popular vote has never changed the outcome of the election. The difference in those situations is based on the fact that in addition to electors based on population, each state gets 2 electors just for being a state. It's the weight of a state (rhyme intended) that makes the difference.
Electors rarely vote contrary to the popular vote, because as you noted, when you vote, you're not telling the electors who to vote for, you're choosing a set of electors. Those electors are either the Democrat Party's electors or the Republican Party's electors. Very rarely will a person from a specific party, chosen specifically by that party to vote for the party's candidate vote against that candidate if given the chance. The times it has happened have been to make a statement, where the electors knew they wouldn't affect the election in general.
Oh good grief... does *anyone* remember what they were taught in government in junior high? [...] Yes, sometimes the elected President did not get the majority of the popular vote. The Electors are not bound by law (in all states) to cast their vote according to popular vote. This is one of the checks and balances, designed by the founders of the nation, that prevents popular will from overcoming individual freedom. We're all taught this in school.
Apparently you don't understand how the electoral college works any better than the people you're trying to teach, which makes you just like Glenn Beck. My 8th grade history teach taught that exact same tripe. He also constantly mispronounced words (which had pronunciation guides in the textbooks!), and corrected other people's mispronunciations with his own. If you want to understand government, you should probably go back to high school or college level classes, where things aren't simplified to the point of being wrong.
The years where the electoral college result didn't match the popular vote had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the electors can make their own choices. The instances where an elector has voted contrary to his/her state's popular vote has never affected the result of the overall election. What has made that difference is the fact that just like Congressmen, electors are divied out to each state based on population, plus an additional two electors purely by virtue of the state being a state. This means that smaller states get a slightly proportionately larger voice per capita than larger states. And that is why the electoral college results don't always match the popular vote.
Here's another bit of trivia you might not have known, which explains why electors normally stick with the voters in their state:
When you vote, you're not telling a set of electors which candidate to cast their vote for, because there's not just one set of electors per state. Each party organization in each state picks a set of electors, and the popular vote decides which party's set of electors gets to cast their votes. Electors chosen in the last election by the Democrat party in a state where the popular vote went to the Democrat would have been very unlikely to vote for a Republican candidate -- they were chosen specifically by their party because they would vote for the party's candidate!
The few instances where an elector has voted contrary to the popular vote (and contrary to their own party) in their state has been more of small symbolic act of protest, knowing that it won't change the election.
The workings of the electoral college do very little to emphasize the role that electors play as representatives, as they represent their own party more than anything else. What the electoral college does do is emphasize the importance of the power of individual states.
I admire you for saying you've "only seen the trilogy".
Episodes 1 - 3 should always be passed off as extended universe... or fanfiction.
I once stumbled across his show late at night, watched it for 15 minutes, and at the end, I really would have been dumber for having watched it, if I hadn't forced myself to review the facts that I know are true. Later I did some research on the topic and found not only inaccuracies and insinuations, but outright lies. Here's the link to the video of that show.
My favorite part of it is that even though I have always known that he doesn't care for science (à la climate change), I'm coming to the realization that he actively avoids understanding science and technical things, probably partly out of laziness and mostly because the political side he chooses conflicts so harshly with the hard truth of science.
For some examples of that in this video, see his suggestion of a surge protector as a solution (which as the patent in question points out, is actually part of the problem), the acceptance of Chaffetz's lie that the patent says it's for residential use, not for businesses, and his complete lack of attempt to understand the diagram for the second patent... because who could ever understand a diagram? All of the things he rants about are explained perfectly clearly in the patent itself, as well as in the letter that was sent to Chaffetz by Fannie Mae's lawyer. Both the letter and the patent are completely misrepresented, and in such a way that can only be done intentionally. There's no way that either Chaffetz or Beck read the patent and/or the letter and honestly believed that these patents involved a cap and trade conspiracy, unless they just threw out most of what they read with the excuse that it was too technical (which it's not).