Probable cause and a warrant does not mean you need to be shown them.
Oh yes it does. How about that rejoinder, Mr. Know-It-All? All you need to know is that you are wrong. How's about them apples? Don't like it? Find it in the constitution that we've got to tolerate fascist authoritarians like you. I think all decent Americans know that when government gets too opaque, it is indistinguishable from dictatorship, you know, the kind you worship. Why, because if no one knows the "original limitations", then they don't really exist. Except to the person who's seen them but won't reveal them. So you're left having to trust someone, someone who may or may not have the nation's interests above his own. And with no checks on his authority, he can do anything he wants to.
Please get a damn education on what your pretending to know about.
Ouch, you sure got us there. You've also stated nothing but your own assertions that everything you say is infallible. We are at an impasse, it would seem, smart guy.
"No, it's privileged, based on other privileged stuff and legal opinions that I am not allowed to share with you, sorry."
And I gotta agree with the other posters who suggest you crawl in a dark hole in some other nation and die. As soon as possible. Trust me, I have a secrete warrant directing you to.
The "flashing neon sign" effect is unlikely without a malfunctioning LED control. While you refer to negligible startup and stop times, I don't think you understand just how small they are. Many dimmable LED lights don't actually dim the LED at all, instead they turn the LED on and off around a thousand times per second - much faster than the eye can distinguish.
I only meant that if one tried an overly simple motion-controlled lighting scheme, you could be turning the lights on and off all the time, irritating sleeping residents. I didn't mean to imply that I'd never seen a triac, SCR or FET in my life and that pulse width modulation was the tool of the devil. I've seen security lighting set up so poorly that it pops on every time a bunny hops by, then turns off 15 seconds later, making me wonder when Veronica Lake or Lauren Bacall was going to knock on the door. I really didn't intend to address the specifics of dimming at all in that short post, so I am glad that you pointed out the additional advantages of LED w.r.t. dimmability for the sake of discussion.
Also, both high pressure sodium and low pressure sodium lamps(2 most common street lamps) have a more pleasant spectrum on the eyes.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that low pressure sodium lamps have a pleasant spectrum before. Sure, the bright monochromatic yellow may be intriguing to look at, but the world it illuminates is a weird ghostly yellow and black landscape. In fact, they make a good total-color-blindness simulator. There's a reason that despite the power efficiency, low pressure sodium is used only for utility lighting, and it's the color rendering (that and the restart time).
With LED lighting, you could potentially save power by turning on full illumination only in areas in use, and keeping unoccupied outdoor areas much dimmer. LEDs can be turned on and off quickly, with negligible startup and restart times. I'm sure that would require careful planning for gradually lighting up an area to avoid dazzling pedestrians or drivers and not creating a flashing-neon-sign film noir effect for people sleeping indoors nearby, but there could be potential. An unused light turned off is very efficient.
OK, so I was being generous to poor Herbert Hoover. The GDP was "depressed", "shrunk", "stifled", "stomped on" and "smashed". Then he went and pissed on it's grave. I was understating with "stunted".
But only slightly
So it's a "slight" difference when it's the difference in slope between "Normal" and "New Deal" but it's huge when it's the difference in slope pre- and post-rearmament?
If you remove the increase in slope following "Rearmament . ..", then the projected Real GDP line crosses the dotted line about mid-1943. As drawn, they intersect at about January 1942. That is not 10 years. My point stands: with or without rearmament, GDP growth in the New Deal years was greater than the "Full Normal GDP" growth. If you wish to argue just on the absolute value of GDP, which you appear to be, you can't just assume that the whole decline in the Hoover years somehow wouldn't have occurred if FDR weren't elected 4 years after the market crash.
I've read "How to Lie with Statistics". Everyone should. It makes it much easier to see through common "shifting base" tricks and slope sleight-of-hand.
The Great Depression lasted for 12 years. Pre-war deficit spending did nothing to bring the country out of depression. This graph [wikipedia.org] shows that what the New Deal did was stunt the economy at approx 25% of what it should have been.
You drew a completely unsupportable conclusion from that graph. The entire decline in GDP (plus some extra) occurs between "Depression Begins in US" and "FDR Takes Office". The slope of the GDP line between "FDR Takes Office" and "Rearmament Begins" is greater than the "Full Normal GDP" dotted line. Since it's going from "little" to "big", that means "growth". In the Hoover years, the GDP went from "big" to "little". This is the "stunting" or decline period. You can't blame FDR's starting point on the New Deal, due to the unidirectional nature of time as we know it. In other words, New Deal programs could only change the "future" rather than the "past" w.r.t. their own time frame.
You shouldn't have to calibrate per use. My phone is a touch screen device and I use it all day. Since I've bought it over a year ago it never lost its calibration.
As an engineering problem, your phone has several advantages over a touch-screen voting machine.
Size. Your phone's screen is an order of magnitude smaller in linear dimension and therefore two orders of magnitude smaller in are than the touchscreen on a voting machine. The cost of the voting machine's touchscreen is therefore much greater.
Volume. Your phone is produced in far greater quantities than a voting machine. This results in cost savings through volume purchasing of its component parts. It also allows engineering costs to be recovered over a larger number of devices.
Service Life. Your phone is designed for a service life of about 2 years, and probably won't be used that long due to obsolescence, loss, novelty wearing off, catastrophic damage, etc. A voting machine is expected to last much longer.
All these factors combine to give you much less "bang for your buck" in a voting machine than a phone. So when you ask,
How much do tax payers shell out for these pieces of shit? With that kind of cash floating around, and for something as important as voting, there shouldn't be stupid issues like this?
. . . you have to consider that these things are more costly than you think for a given quality of parts and design engineering. Also, the counties that buy the equipment have issues that are also as important as voting competing for funding. Many of these issues are more obvious every day, like fire and police protection, so it's hard to argue for extra expense for higher quality voting machines if it means one less fire truck.
Suggesting a calibrate per use is ignoring the root the problem.
You're right, but it's not just the calibration. I would argue that electronic voting machines as we know them today are just too expensive to design and build, and that the compromises we must make in quality and reliability to achieve affordability are too great.
Touch screens ARE analog devices and depending on technology may have to be calibrated. I'm sure that for a competitive bid situation they use the cheapest technology they can get away with. Does anyone know what ES&S are using?
They use commodity serial-interface touchscreens purchased through their Taiwanese parts suppliers. It's a transparent overlay on top of the LCD. ES&S uses a contractor with engineering in Kansas and Taiwan, a purchasing office in Taiwan and a factory in the Philippines. They don't do much of the actual engineering or coding themselves.
The touchscreen calibration routine runs once when the device is powered up and can be run again by anyone with the "supervisor ballot".
And Dreadneck, Smallpond and others are right, it is analog, and it can drift. The touchscreen and the display are separate components, and must be calibrated to work together. Changes in the environment like temperature can result in variation in the output from the touchscreen.
Holy crap! I just noticed the sidebars. "Transition to Black Rule in America"!!!!! "Kill Whitey: The Truth about Anti-White Hate Speech"!! You'd think I'd stumbled into a Texas GOP convention.
If the weight capacity isn't signifigantly more than the capacity of the human body, then what would be the point, aside from an interesting halloween costume?
Lots of people have lifting capacity less than an average human body due to disease, injury or age. These people might like to have jobs or pick up grandchildren.
One can only hope he's making bad arguments in a secret plot to get shot down by the courts while being able to look like he's "standing up against terrorism."
One can hope.
Sigh.
Relentless, uncompromising enforcement is one way to try to get rid of a bad law. I hope that's it, but I have my doubts, and I'll continue to complain.
This is in contrast to the new Republican approach of gleefully cheering that something bad is happening to our country, 'cause the "Evil Black One who Socializes our Business and eats Baby Jesuses" caused it -- "serves 'em right those durn libruls and homosexuals and Jews that done kilt our Savior!"
I didn't vote for him and predicted every dumb thing he has done. This guy is totally predictable. It is Clinton all over again. Hang on to your wallets!
Actually, it was pretty hard to hang on to my wallet in the Clinton years, what with all the money stuffed in it. If that's what I can expect, sign me up!
suggests that someone, quite possibly "new Republicans"*, thinks that the term "fascist" means "even worser", rather than its more traditional definition. Private enterprise, especially politically well connected enterprises, flourished under fascist control in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 40s.
*new Republican: A person, most likely a Southerner, who has become a republican after 1968. Easily distinguished by puzzling distaste for Lincoln and use of old Dixiecrat rhetoric disguised with modern code phrases.
Let me ask you this - when do you feel it is appropriate to apologize for past foreign policy, if ever? (Not a loaded question - I'm genuinely curious...)
I would say it's appropriate when it was done in bad faith and resulted in worsened foreign relations.
I am a little frightened by the willingness of most of you to accept this without any corroboration. Searching the web I find no real reporting on this just blogs already predisposed to an anti-lawenforcement bias. And these blogs are just linking to the original story. Not saying it didn't happen, things like this do sadly happen, but shouldn't we have a higher standard.. I mean this isn't digg.
It would be a little tedious to preface every post with "Assuming that what I read is true, then my opinion is . .."
The view that high cholesterol is bad, and saturated fats are always a no-no is, on closer examination [opednews.com] another example of problems being created out of nothing in order to sell more drugs.
Initially, the cholesterol/sat-fat hypothesis was driven almost entirely by the force of will and personality of Ancel Keys, long before big pharma cooked up anything to lower total cholesterol. I don't mean to imply that drug companies haven't been opportunistic about the situation once they had something to sell, though.
President Obama was unable to meet with Queen Elizabeth, since she passed away a while ago. Instead he met with HM Queen Elizabeth II. I know it sounds pedantic, but they are different people.
For reasons which you have already cited, it would be unlikely that anyone else would require clarification regarding which Queen Elizabeth was the subject of the article.
The problem has always been the ABC shows I like, such as Lost. They won't work under Linux . ..
They barely work under Windows. Every few weeks a Windows or Firefox update or a streaming change at ABC causes ABC's player to break in new ways. Which means I've gotta google the latest problem to fix my wife's computer so she can see her stories again. It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Not true. Deductions phase out as you make more money. As such, it is possible to have a $2000 increase in pay and lose enough deductions such that you wind up paying over $2000 more in taxes.
OK, That might be possible in particular cases. You also could get into trouble with the AMT. But neither of these arguments could be used against an across-the-board pay raise for an entire staff. That would require the employer to have extraordinary knowledge of every employee's tax situation and a great deal of coincidence.
At any rate, the OP said the excuse was that the extra pay would bump them into a higher bracket, not that it would cost them deductions. So I still think that if this really happened, the employees got the "song and dance".
Last year we had money left in the bank where I work. If the employees took anymore home in pay, it would have bumped us up a tax bracket and we would have made less after taxes. So what were our options?
I'm assuming you're in the US, or if not, somewhere else with progressive marginal income tax rates. If that is so, then it sounds like the folks where you work got suckered. Additional income would have only bumped some or all of the difference into another tax bracket. You'd still take home more if you got a raise/bonus/whatever. They also forgot other options like D) Paying the employees in the form of non-taxable benefits, like retirement plans and health coverage expansion.
Slashdot Mirror
Probable cause and a warrant does not mean you need to be shown them.
Oh yes it does. How about that rejoinder, Mr. Know-It-All? All you need to know is that you are wrong. How's about them apples? Don't like it? Find it in the constitution that we've got to tolerate fascist authoritarians like you. I think all decent Americans know that when government gets too opaque, it is indistinguishable from dictatorship, you know, the kind you worship. Why, because if no one knows the "original limitations", then they don't really exist. Except to the person who's seen them but won't reveal them. So you're left having to trust someone, someone who may or may not have the nation's interests above his own. And with no checks on his authority, he can do anything he wants to.
Please get a damn education on what your pretending to know about.
Ouch, you sure got us there. You've also stated nothing but your own assertions that everything you say is infallible. We are at an impasse, it would seem, smart guy.
The appropriate response:
"So can we get that tap now?"
"No, it's privileged, based on other privileged stuff and legal opinions that I am not allowed to share with you, sorry."
And I gotta agree with the other posters who suggest you crawl in a dark hole in some other nation and die. As soon as possible. Trust me, I have a secrete warrant directing you to.
The "flashing neon sign" effect is unlikely without a malfunctioning LED control. While you refer to negligible startup and stop times, I don't think you understand just how small they are. Many dimmable LED lights don't actually dim the LED at all, instead they turn the LED on and off around a thousand times per second - much faster than the eye can distinguish.
I only meant that if one tried an overly simple motion-controlled lighting scheme, you could be turning the lights on and off all the time, irritating sleeping residents. I didn't mean to imply that I'd never seen a triac, SCR or FET in my life and that pulse width modulation was the tool of the devil. I've seen security lighting set up so poorly that it pops on every time a bunny hops by, then turns off 15 seconds later, making me wonder when Veronica Lake or Lauren Bacall was going to knock on the door. I really didn't intend to address the specifics of dimming at all in that short post, so I am glad that you pointed out the additional advantages of LED w.r.t. dimmability for the sake of discussion.
Also, both high pressure sodium and low pressure sodium lamps(2 most common street lamps) have a more pleasant spectrum on the eyes.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that low pressure sodium lamps have a pleasant spectrum before. Sure, the bright monochromatic yellow may be intriguing to look at, but the world it illuminates is a weird ghostly yellow and black landscape. In fact, they make a good total-color-blindness simulator. There's a reason that despite the power efficiency, low pressure sodium is used only for utility lighting, and it's the color rendering (that and the restart time).
With LED lighting, you could potentially save power by turning on full illumination only in areas in use, and keeping unoccupied outdoor areas much dimmer. LEDs can be turned on and off quickly, with negligible startup and restart times. I'm sure that would require careful planning for gradually lighting up an area to avoid dazzling pedestrians or drivers and not creating a flashing-neon-sign film noir effect for people sleeping indoors nearby, but there could be potential. An unused light turned off is very efficient.
Which people? At whose expense? Be specific.
Whoa, there! Shenanigans! You threw out the first generalized, nonspecific criticism:
The Perils of Pointless Innovation . . .|Where Have I seen this before?|Office Suites|And "progressive" politics.
You gotta be specific first -- you started it.
Stunt means to keep something small.
OK, so I was being generous to poor Herbert Hoover. The GDP was "depressed", "shrunk", "stifled", "stomped on" and "smashed". Then he went and pissed on it's grave. I was understating with "stunted".
But only slightly
So it's a "slight" difference when it's the difference in slope between "Normal" and "New Deal" but it's huge when it's the difference in slope pre- and post-rearmament?
If you remove the increase in slope following "Rearmament . . .", then the projected Real GDP line crosses the dotted line about mid-1943. As drawn, they intersect at about January 1942. That is not 10 years. My point stands: with or without rearmament, GDP growth in the New Deal years was greater than the "Full Normal GDP" growth. If you wish to argue just on the absolute value of GDP, which you appear to be, you can't just assume that the whole decline in the Hoover years somehow wouldn't have occurred if FDR weren't elected 4 years after the market crash.
I've read "How to Lie with Statistics". Everyone should. It makes it much easier to see through common "shifting base" tricks and slope sleight-of-hand.
The Great Depression lasted for 12 years. Pre-war deficit spending did nothing to bring the country out of depression. This graph [wikipedia.org] shows that what the New Deal did was stunt the economy at approx 25% of what it should have been.
You drew a completely unsupportable conclusion from that graph. The entire decline in GDP (plus some extra) occurs between "Depression Begins in US" and "FDR Takes Office". The slope of the GDP line between "FDR Takes Office" and "Rearmament Begins" is greater than the "Full Normal GDP" dotted line. Since it's going from "little" to "big", that means "growth". In the Hoover years, the GDP went from "big" to "little". This is the "stunting" or decline period. You can't blame FDR's starting point on the New Deal, due to the unidirectional nature of time as we know it. In other words, New Deal programs could only change the "future" rather than the "past" w.r.t. their own time frame.
You shouldn't have to calibrate per use. My phone is a touch screen device and I use it all day. Since I've bought it over a year ago it never lost its calibration.
As an engineering problem, your phone has several advantages over a touch-screen voting machine.
All these factors combine to give you much less "bang for your buck" in a voting machine than a phone. So when you ask,
How much do tax payers shell out for these pieces of shit? With that kind of cash floating around, and for something as important as voting, there shouldn't be stupid issues like this?
. . . you have to consider that these things are more costly than you think for a given quality of parts and design engineering. Also, the counties that buy the equipment have issues that are also as important as voting competing for funding. Many of these issues are more obvious every day, like fire and police protection, so it's hard to argue for extra expense for higher quality voting machines if it means one less fire truck.
Suggesting a calibrate per use is ignoring the root the problem.
You're right, but it's not just the calibration. I would argue that electronic voting machines as we know them today are just too expensive to design and build, and that the compromises we must make in quality and reliability to achieve affordability are too great.
Touch screens ARE analog devices and depending on technology may have to be calibrated. I'm sure that for a competitive bid situation they use the cheapest technology they can get away with. Does anyone know what ES&S are using?
They use commodity serial-interface touchscreens purchased through their Taiwanese parts suppliers. It's a transparent overlay on top of the LCD. ES&S uses a contractor with engineering in Kansas and Taiwan, a purchasing office in Taiwan and a factory in the Philippines. They don't do much of the actual engineering or coding themselves.
The touchscreen calibration routine runs once when the device is powered up and can be run again by anyone with the "supervisor ballot".
And Dreadneck, Smallpond and others are right, it is analog, and it can drift. The touchscreen and the display are separate components, and must be calibrated to work together. Changes in the environment like temperature can result in variation in the output from the touchscreen.
Holy crap! I just noticed the sidebars. "Transition to Black Rule in America"!!!!! "Kill Whitey: The Truth about Anti-White Hate Speech"!! You'd think I'd stumbled into a Texas GOP convention.
If the weight capacity isn't signifigantly more than the capacity of the human body, then what would be the point, aside from an interesting halloween costume?
Lots of people have lifting capacity less than an average human body due to disease, injury or age. These people might like to have jobs or pick up grandchildren.
One can only hope he's making bad arguments in a secret plot to get shot down by the courts while being able to look like he's "standing up against terrorism."
One can hope.
Sigh.
Relentless, uncompromising enforcement is one way to try to get rid of a bad law. I hope that's it, but I have my doubts, and I'll continue to complain.
This is in contrast to the new Republican approach of gleefully cheering that something bad is happening to our country, 'cause the "Evil Black One who Socializes our Business and eats Baby Jesuses" caused it -- "serves 'em right those durn libruls and homosexuals and Jews that done kilt our Savior!"
I didn't vote for him and predicted every dumb thing he has done. This guy is totally predictable. It is Clinton all over again. Hang on to your wallets!
Actually, it was pretty hard to hang on to my wallet in the Clinton years, what with all the money stuffed in it. If that's what I can expect, sign me up!
fascist control over private enterprise
suggests that someone, quite possibly "new Republicans"*, thinks that the term "fascist" means "even worser", rather than its more traditional definition. Private enterprise, especially politically well connected enterprises, flourished under fascist control in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 40s.
*new Republican: A person, most likely a Southerner, who has become a republican after 1968. Easily distinguished by puzzling distaste for Lincoln and use of old Dixiecrat rhetoric disguised with modern code phrases.
Can you get the terrorists to stop violating human rights?
Don't have to. Terrorism isn't all that big a deal. Got my magic rock.
It's not 2001 anymore. Can't you get used to the fact that "Terrorism" just isn't the baddest, worstest problem that the world is facing?
Let me ask you this - when do you feel it is appropriate to apologize for past foreign policy, if ever? (Not a loaded question - I'm genuinely curious...)
I would say it's appropriate when it was done in bad faith and resulted in worsened foreign relations.
Obama's pattern all through out his campaign was to charm and sweet-talk people into supporting him.
In his presidency he is following the same pattern of behaviour (sic): going around charming and sweet-talking people into supporting him.
His actions, however, do not match the talk.
Remember Bush in 2000? Gonna govern from the "Center"?
I assume you bashed Bush for the same thing. Cause it's always anti-American.
I am a little frightened by the willingness of most of you to accept this without any corroboration. Searching the web I find no real reporting on this just blogs already predisposed to an anti-lawenforcement bias. And these blogs are just linking to the original story. Not saying it didn't happen, things like this do sadly happen, but shouldn't we have a higher standard.. I mean this isn't digg.
It would be a little tedious to preface every post with "Assuming that what I read is true, then my opinion is . . ."
Amen to that! My rule is "Never Generalize". And it works in every situation.
The view that high cholesterol is bad, and saturated fats are always a no-no is, on closer examination [opednews.com] another example of problems being created out of nothing in order to sell more drugs.
Initially, the cholesterol/sat-fat hypothesis was driven almost entirely by the force of will and personality of Ancel Keys, long before big pharma cooked up anything to lower total cholesterol. I don't mean to imply that drug companies haven't been opportunistic about the situation once they had something to sell, though.
President Obama was unable to meet with Queen Elizabeth, since she passed away a while ago. Instead he met with HM Queen Elizabeth II. I know it sounds pedantic, but they are different people.
For reasons which you have already cited, it would be unlikely that anyone else would require clarification regarding which Queen Elizabeth was the subject of the article.
The problem has always been the ABC shows I like, such as Lost. They won't work under Linux . . .
They barely work under Windows. Every few weeks a Windows or Firefox update or a streaming change at ABC causes ABC's player to break in new ways. Which means I've gotta google the latest problem to fix my wife's computer so she can see her stories again. It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Not true. Deductions phase out as you make more money. As such, it is possible to have a $2000 increase in pay and lose enough deductions such that you wind up paying over $2000 more in taxes.
OK, That might be possible in particular cases. You also could get into trouble with the AMT. But neither of these arguments could be used against an across-the-board pay raise for an entire staff. That would require the employer to have extraordinary knowledge of every employee's tax situation and a great deal of coincidence.
At any rate, the OP said the excuse was that the extra pay would bump them into a higher bracket, not that it would cost them deductions. So I still think that if this really happened, the employees got the "song and dance".
Last year we had money left in the bank where I work. If the employees took anymore home in pay, it would have bumped us up a tax bracket and we would have made less after taxes. So what were our options?
I'm assuming you're in the US, or if not, somewhere else with progressive marginal income tax rates. If that is so, then it sounds like the folks where you work got suckered. Additional income would have only bumped some or all of the difference into another tax bracket. You'd still take home more if you got a raise/bonus/whatever. They also forgot other options like D) Paying the employees in the form of non-taxable benefits, like retirement plans and health coverage expansion.
More info on marginal tax rates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Year_2008_income_brackets_and_tax_rates