If you don't think there are mainstream republicans who don't believe in evolution...
I didn't say that. I said that I don't know any, personally. Which is another way of saying that all of the Republicans I peronsally know understand evolution. They are also all highly annoyed by the attention that the religious crazies get, and thus by the pandering that candidates do. Just as I imagine that many Democrats are annoyed by their candidates' slavish pandering to MoveOn.org's more rabid loons. It's the same sort of thing.
Well, that explains why Republicans don't believe in evolution; it occurs too slowly for them to notice
You know, the funny thing is that I don't personally actually KNOW any Republicans that don't consider evolution to be an obvious, plain-as-day fact. It's possible that you're confusing "Republicans" with "religious crazies." Much like many people confuse "Democrats" with, say, "Communists" or "Wiccans" or something else that suggests you're painting with the wrong-sized brush. I'm neither, by the way, and know plenty of people in each party, none of which fit any of those fringier-extremes.
But all that being said, let's see if I can properly take your bait...
"Well! That explains why Democrats can't seem to stay on the same side of an issue long enough to be credible - they're 'evolving' too quickly to form principles!"
So don't tell me that enjoyment of an 'illegal' substance has somehow turned me into a vegetable and hurt my chances to be a productive person
Gee, it's almost like I didn't say that, isn't it! Because I wasn't talking about YOU. I'm talking about exactly what you KNOW I'm talking about. It's not, in general, a motivating thing to consume. It impacts different people in different ways, much like alchohol. There's ample evidence that, among (especially) kids who smoke it regularly, it can dramatically impact cognitive development, memory, and more. Out of curiosity, at what age will your kid start smoking it? Have you settled on that yet?
Your original post, however, seemed to imply that the only possible way Diebold could achieve such a request was through a rediculous amount of manhours and attending every single council meeting, which is false.
No, my original post spoke to the issue at hand, here. The people USING THE MACHINES decided it was time to send them back to Diebold, where - as always - they are wiped. The decision about when the local election board, in the context of how well-settled a given election/issue is or is not, considers it safe to blow away the auditable voting records as recorded in the machines is a user/management decision. It has nothing to do with the hardware vendor. The implication that Diebold should have stopped them from doing so implies that they should be in on the decision-making process. That process occurs locally, and is the responsibility of the election boards that (happen to have) purchased/rented Diebold's equipment, as opposed to some other vendor or technology. Unless Diebold is involved in a given district's decisions about when - for a given specific locale and election cycle - to pack up and ship the gear back for record-nuking, then you can't blame THEM for that district's decisions. And if you WANT them in that decision-making process, then you have to speak to the issue of having the vendor involved in election policy. Which is nonsense.
You'd be surprised at the number of the worlds brightest minds (surely brighter than yours) who smoke pot and / or support reform.
What's frustrating is how much brighter still many of them would be if they didn't (they'd probably even remember to use an apostrophe in that form of the word "worlds"). Also frustrating that some people whose minds are still very much in developmental stages (say, teenagers) hear comments like that and treat it like an endorsement of impairing themselves when they have no idea of the actual consequences or physiology, and the long term impact on their cognitive skills. Do I care as much about some luke-warm kid amounting to somewhat less than he might have? I suppose. Probably not as much as I care about the costs we all pay - in cash and otherwise - for kids that end up a train wreck, medically, from meth or some opiate or another.
The illegality of Cannabis is one of the greatest fraud of our time.
No, I'm pretty sure there's no fraud involved. It actually IS illegal. You have not been defrauded, the laws actually are as written. Or is that not what you actually meant?
Perhaps it will seem more important when the medicine you have been prescribed becomes unavailable
Nah. This will still be funny.
Because no matter how pious the Nausea Consortium sounds, this is mostly about the non-nauseated (if still frequently nauseating) people who've decided that lowering their IQ with weed is worth it for whatever enjoyment they get out of it, and they want it to be treated like carrots, or lemons, or something else nutritious from the produce stand. So, grandstanding (and squabbling over losing a voting intiative) over making pot more readily available, and noticing that the most vocal proponents you catch at a pro-"medicine" event or protest all appear to have the name "Dude" is going to continue, indeed, to be funny.
And they can build voting machines that way too, if their customers ask for them. Again, that's a policy and procurement issue at the election board level. If the election board can't imagine that they want a particular feature, despite years, now, of experience on the part of voters and media coverage galore, then who exactly are you saying should be making those decisions? The equipment vendor? And when the equipment vendor is the one telling election boards what their policies should be, how do you address all of the shrill people who scream that Diebold is running the elections?
It won't do jack shit for their reputation, and that of their machines. All anyone will know is that this election had to be redone, Diebold could have prevented that, and if they'd used paper ballots, it wouldn't have had to be redone.
So, you're in favor of the equipment vendor actually having a hand in the policies and practices of running the elections themselves? This is exactly the sort of thing that people have been screaming about - too MUCH influence by the hardware vendor.
Again, shame on Diebold for not having a fscking clue how to make and sell their product.
Except, they made it just fine (it did just what it was asked to do), and they sold it just fine, too. You seem to be suggesting that they should have their own people sitting in election board offices, monitoring the ups and downs of a political process at the local level, and consulting on how the local election board should carry on with the daily activities that they are paid to conduct. Is it your perception that part of Diebold's sales cycle and contract with the entities that use their gear is that they should be on call to direct those districts/states/municipalities/counties in making election process decisions - relative to local statutes and election rules and particular events - about when and how in-machine data should be handled after the election is over? Was that part of the sale - such relatively open-ended consulting services? How many election board meetings should thousands of Diebold employees attend in order to save people from themselves? How many tinfoil-hat conspiracy nuts would then see their involvment in such proceedings to be just another case of elections being 'stolen' by whoever it is they hate that week? Can't have it both ways.
the corporations seem to win no matter what you do
You'd think that Frito-Lay would be all over this initiative. And Dominos. While it may be hard to re-muster the Stoner Caucus to do this all over again, perhaps the Munchie Cartel can pick up the slack.
California. *sigh*
There's plenty of reasons to re-invent electronically-assisted voting (I like the also-spits-out-paper variation, myself), but it really doesn't help the cause when - to a casual newsreader - an important test case seems to be about weed.
Actually, I had a rather easy time of it... Every fanatical faction, be it christian, jewish, islamic, or hindu, has their own share of nut jobs.
So, just to be clear, you're comparing stats on violence that has occurred in the name of Christian wackadoo-ness since 1976 with parts of the world where worse happens in the name of religion on many afternoons. It's not necessarily that the wackadoo Islamists are more wackadoo than the crazy Christians... it's that the Allah-wants-me-to-kill-you crowd frequently operates in a climate/culture where their BS is allowed to go on either through passive endorsement or out of fear by the locals.
Candidly, this is a lot like the incomprehensible "Stop Snitchin'" insanity that has now become fashionable enough to be printed on t-shirts on sidewalks in the very urban areas where not "snitching" is exactly why they're all scared to death of the thugs that operate with impunity. If there really IS a wider Muslim culture that doesn't think women should be killed for teaching their daughters to read, then that wider Muslim culture needs to make it impossible for the Taliban to ever again gain traction, or for the Wahabbists spread their poison. Absent functioning, non-corrupt, constitutional democracy in those areas, the un-snitched-upon Islamo-thugs will always prevail over their more meek cousins. That there even is a parallel between what's behind so much of the violence in the middle east and the anatomy of the minor thugocracies that rule some poor urban areas in the US is pretty horrific, actually. But it's the same things in play.
And since it's so politically incorrect to actually identify those things for what they are (let alone make a comparison between some New Jersey neighborhoods and some Baghdad neighborhoods, despite the sometimes equal levels of violence), no one talks about the underlying causes. And of course, New Jersey isn't sitting on giant oil reserves, or looking like a tempting enough puppet state for New York that NY is sending explosives and fighters in to keep things as destabilized as possible, and couching that in all in religious terms.
Tell that to folks who got on the secret police no fly list, obviously from their political views.
Hmmm. Except, people with down right insane political views, from all over the spectrum, get to hop on planes all the time. Domestic flights, international travel, you name it. Failure to cite specifics, and posting as an anonymous coward, is classic FUD, and actually undermines whatever agenda it is you think you're serving.
I suggest you spend a few evenings and go back and peruse the YRO section again
A virtual library of tinfoil-lined nonsense, most of the time. And when it's not, it's shrilly whined about completely out of context. The conspiracy kooks eat that stuff up. Before it was modern tech being arrayed against them, it was sorcerers invoking demons and having them followed by pixies. Not too much about the human psyche has changed in the last few thousand years, but we do have some nice new shiny demons to pin the fantasies on. But most of the time, as you obviously know, it's people with their own political agenda spinning this stuff into a frenzy that they think serves their own purposes. What they don't realize is that when they cultivate an atmosphere of irrational fear and distrust like that, it perists when their own favorite people happen to be in charge, too.
Peacefully assembling on the street and silently carrying a sign to be read by the commander-in-thief is, I guess, considered non-peaceful.
Um, except people do it all the time, and CAN do it all the time. Unless their purpose is, in doing so, to block streets from being used by other people, or to get another event shut down by making it impossible to conduct it - which, of course, is actually those people looking to suppress someone ELSE'S rights to assembly and speech. You can walk outside right now with your sign. You can wander into DC and sit right on the grass right next to the UFO cultists, the Jesus freaks, the there-should-be-no-international-trade kooks, and everyone else that are there right now, this morning. Go on! Have a good day doing it - because you'll just be one more person doing more of the same. But you won't because you know that those amateur theatrics actually do your cause more harm than good.
You want to impact the perceptions of the people who actually vote and have a hand in policy matters in a country of three hundred million freakin' people? Have a valid point, and use the tools of communication that actually speak to the people you're trying to influence. Beating drums in the middle of the street and chaining yourself and your friends between light poles to prevent people from attending an event you don't like is just vanity and, ironically, a vain attempt to shout down someone else's gathering. Be careful about advocating for the "right" to block other people from assembling when they organize an event and gather to speak, because then you're also advocating for the rights of someone else to block, disrupt, and shout down your OWN gathering. Is that how you see free speech? The person best able to disrupt someone else's event "wins?"
And you're muttering a platitude without actually addressing the substance of what I said.
So: what is preventing you from renting out a convention center the week after the person you'd like to shout down did? In the same given calender year, you see facilities like that rented out and used by goups that are complete, idealogically polar opposites. Both of their views get tons of air time and converage. And both events get to proceed without being shut down by the fire marshal because the building's entrances and road approaches aren't clogged with people who are there to suppress the speech of the people holding the event.
If you've got a THIRD point of view (relative to two in that example), then that facility gets used once again, in the same way, with exactly the same protections for your speech and assembly rights.
I'm not in denial, you're just being a drama queen and don't want to acknowledge that you CAN say your mind any time you want. You just want to have the right to shut down someone else's ability to do so when it suits you. That's intellectual cowardice.
Go ahead an book a large municipal facility for a political event of your own liking. You will ALSO have the zoning rules and law enforcement working to make sure that YOUR supporters and attendees get safe access to the place, that emergency vehicles aren't blocked from using the streets, and so on. EVERYBODY gets the same protection as they exercise their rights to assembly and freedom of speech. You can stand on any street corner you want any time and say whatever you want. What you can't do is chain yourself and your giant puppet to a traffic light and set props on fire in the middle of a street that you haven't got the permit to shut down. You want to shout down someone who's having a formal event? Have your OWN formal event, and you'll see that no one with giant flaming puppets gets to shout you down, either. The First Amendment is being protected when groups assembling to have an event are allowed to actually HAVE that event. If you want to have an event that's just chaos in street, well... have one, then. But if a more civil group wants to book a convention center to pat each other on the back about their stance on abortion, or global warming, or boosting international trade, or stopping international trade, then LET them. If the only way you think you can counter someone else's ideas is to scream at them while blocking the street used to access the facility, perhaps you need to re-evaluate the credibility of your position and re-think who it is you're trying to please and persuade with your theatrics.
In the meantime, enjoy your right to have your OWN event, unmolested by ME, any time you want. Because you CAN.
Gods-damned fundamentalists getting books banned
And what a shock: no books are "banned." They're simply not included in a curriculum, or chosen to be purchased by tax dollars to be stocked on a shelf at a school. And the moment that the judgement about WHICH books fall into that category becomes absurd (say, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, for example), the idiots on the school board get to hear all about it as they lose their next election in their locale. And when fundie twits get all hopped up about evolution and try to influence what science texts have to say about it, they're generally shamed right out of their jobs, which is exactly what should happen, and the courts tend to nicely mop up after those really bad policies/decisions. Once again, we're not talking about the government "censoring" anything, here.
Oppose the censorship that is inflicted upon us NOW
Which censorship is that, exactly, anyway? You certainly seem able to say whatever you'd like here, without fear of political actions being taken against you. Now, certainly there are plenty of university professors that don't want to hear certain perspectives in their classrooms (or have to grade papers expressing them), and there are workplaces where some actions and attitudes simply aren't tolerated... but there is no central authority preventing you from dealing with those situations yourself (if by no other means, then by simply choosing another school or job). I don't have to listen to what you have to say, but that's not the same as censorship. And I can't call up the government and have you silenced (which WOULD be such).
A safe would be a good investment, most are fire proof which is important too.
Yes, but let's not forget that what we're dealing with here is a forced entry into a place where the robbers were waiving knives in the staff's faces. Nothing makes a knife waive faster than when it's accompanied by the phrase (how ever you say it in Spanish), "I know you know how to open this safe, so get to it..."
If Coppola can't afford the bandwith to push to an off-site storage service, I don't know who can.
the plant software should be operating in a vacuum bubble
The problem is that they can't. If you think back to some of the more recent spectacular blackouts, you'll recall that the reason they were so far-reaching was that the networked systems that allow the generation and distribution systems (often run halfway across the continent by different parties/agencies) to talk to each other and properly duck out of the way or isolate themselves from damaging surges and faults... weren't fast enough or well-enough tuned to prevent the problem. Big, multi-state/province blackouts can only be prevented when the whole system IS internetworked. Now, does that call for the construction of a completely separate, ultra-high-performance network spanning thousands of miles and thousands of nodes? Yes. Or, it could call for using VPNs over the existing internet, but with better-than-the-banks-use stuff at each node to authenticate legit traffic and perform intrusion detection.
This is just as true of systems that could end up backwashing sewage into drinking water (which has happened), monkeying with natural gas pipelining hardware, or even handling traffic control devices right at the time that you're trying to evacuate a city for some reason.
Fantastically expensive. And the money just hasn't been spent well enough or often enough yet. And, we've still got lots of Cold War-era control systems out there. I think this is more about practices than it is about the plumbing, per se.
No nerdly discussion about the history of money would be complete without a slavish recommendation to read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Which, indeed, one should. ADHD raised-on-MTV types needn't bother, but it's pure gold. (+5 self-referental humor!)
but it's not going to happen out of the goodness of the hearts of the ISP
And why should it? So, out of whose hearts/pockets to you suggest that it SHOULD happen?
87% of Americans live within a 20 mile radius of a major urban hub
And it still costs a fortune to run fiber more than a few hundred yards. And the laws of physics mean that DSL doesn't get you anywhere close to that 20-miles-away guy. So there is a MUCH larger layer of infrastructure that has to flow out, mile by mile, all the way through those hundreds of square miles around that "hub." The guy who is 15 miles away from an urban center might as well be 1000 miles away, infrastructure-wise. If you can't make a compelling case for someone who is only going to be able to charge $40/month to string up service that it will cost them many thousands to deploy, and you don't want to have the government do it, then there really aren't many options.
Why stack more taxes on top of that?
We're not disagreeing about that. I'm trying to point out that unless someone personally pays for it, or a company finds it worth investing in, only taxes will get it done... or, it can just WAIT. Which is exactly the current situation. Can't have it both (or all three) ways.
It's one of many downsides to living in the middle of nowhere, but that option is not available to said farmer, and that's a sad state of affairs for residents of America.
Of course the option is available. Right now. Today. Someone just needs to write the check. The repeaters are off-the-shelf, fiber can be pulled, microwaves work... it's only money. So: whose money? You can't lament that he doesn't have a cheap option while pretending that a rural user in Korea got the same service without paying so much. SOMEONE paid so much. We just don't socialize it as much here, and so the costs are clearer, and you have to make more of a commitment if you want it. Or, be patient while more easily deployed solutions evolve. It's not a condemnation of the US that it's hard to get broadband to show up in a sparsely populated fringe suburb when the suburb itself is bigger than many of the entire countries that are contributing to your statistics.
That'd be like paying a toll to ford a river when everyone else in the free world is using a 10-lane highway free of charge!
Yes, 10-lane highways are COMPLETELY free of charge. Other than the billions each year that it costs to build and maintain them, which come out of tolls and taxes.
What lessons can we learn from, let's say, the UK - where 94% of the population at least has the OPTION of broadband connectivity?
Hmmm, let's see. Perhaps we could learn the lesson that the UK is geographically a very different, and much smaller place? And that population densities are different, and that the number of miles of copper to get to a small rural household in Nebraska are very different than outsite, say, Glasgow?
What are you saying, here... that we should all pay more taxes to subsidize the building of networks out to very remote rural areas - at the cost of many thousands of dollars per household, and then hand that infrastructure over to private operators? Or are you saying that the government should collect taxes from city dwellers to run fiber out to rural folks, and then the government itself should be the ISP? Rather than drawing poor comparisons to places that aren't demographically or topographically at all similar, why not say what it is you think should actually be done to get broadband to someone that is 20 miles down the road in the middle of a cornfield without that person having to actually pay for that service's existence?
Or, maybe you should cite some stats on how rural Siberians and Laplanders are getting THEIR broadband? Or ranchers in the middle of Patagonia?
If you fight to keep the special treatment of internet companies over brick-and-mortar companies, you are no better than the vested special interests that you often criticize.
Yeesh. As has already been pointed out to you, this isn't about sales taxes on the goods that happen to be ordered online. This is about taxing the service you're buying which connects you to the internet. Much like your cable and phone services are already being taxed.
That being said: A small mom-and-pop retailer that takes an order over the phone, or through the mail, or by fax, or off of an auction site, or from their own web site is - JUST LIKE AMAZON - not obligated to collect and remit sales tax if they happen to ship out of state. Conversely, companies like Amazon DO have to collect and remit sales tax if they're shipping into a state where they have a business presence. So, if Amazon operates a warehouse/distribution center in Maryland, then they're on the hook to remit Maryland sales tax on any orders they ship to Maryland addresses.
Very large companies, increasingly, DO have offices, operations, or other "nexus" in more than one state, and are increasingly on the hook to collect such taxes for those state governments. Further, you've got places like California, which has been known to lean on out-of-state retailers to remit CA sales tax whether they have a presence there or not. Their leverage? The tell retailers that if they don't, they'll be blacklisted from any purchasing done by any agency of the CA state government. And while that may not matter to Uncle-Jim's-Fly-Rods-dot-com in Idaho, it definitely matters to retailers that sell office supplies, truck fleet parts, computer hardware, etc. It hits big companies, and the mom-and-pops the same way.
Your example of the diner is a particularly bad one. There is no un-taxed competition shipping competing omlettes and cups of hot coffee in from out of state. If your point is that there are large businesses (in other lines of work) making money by doing business with the residents of a given state, and not collecting sales tax... remember that it's the CONSUMER'S responsibility to pay sales and use taxes on stuff they buy from out of state. Don't like that the sale isn't taxed up front? Don't sweat it... it's the people who live in YOUR state that are then supposed to pay those taxes on the goods they buy from out of state. Otherwise, you've got businesses that aren't even IN your state having to do insane amounts of paperwork with your state government. Some states have sales tax rates that vary by zip code, and which depend on the type of goods being purchased, and which change seasonally. Should every retailer in every state have to keep track of, and remit all of that nonsense to every other state government around the country? Or should your fellow state citizens simply pay up when they buy something big ticket from out of state?
And lastly: how about simply making your state a more attractive place from which to OPERATE a large retailer? That way you get WAY more cash flow into the state coffers... income taxes on the employees, corporate incomes and real-estate taxes, taxes on all of the services and utilities that the company uses in the state, taxes on all of the services and items that the employees consume in that state, taxes on the incomes of all of the third-party vendors and service providers that support the company in your state. What you SHOULD be doing is asking your legislators to find ways to make your local infrastructure and circumstances very attractive to the next Amazon.
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If you don't think there are mainstream republicans who don't believe in evolution...
I didn't say that. I said that I don't know any, personally. Which is another way of saying that all of the Republicans I peronsally know understand evolution. They are also all highly annoyed by the attention that the religious crazies get, and thus by the pandering that candidates do. Just as I imagine that many Democrats are annoyed by their candidates' slavish pandering to MoveOn.org's more rabid loons. It's the same sort of thing.
Well, that explains why Republicans don't believe in evolution; it occurs too slowly for them to notice
You know, the funny thing is that I don't personally actually KNOW any Republicans that don't consider evolution to be an obvious, plain-as-day fact. It's possible that you're confusing "Republicans" with "religious crazies." Much like many people confuse "Democrats" with, say, "Communists" or "Wiccans" or something else that suggests you're painting with the wrong-sized brush. I'm neither, by the way, and know plenty of people in each party, none of which fit any of those fringier-extremes.
But all that being said, let's see if I can properly take your bait...
"Well! That explains why Democrats can't seem to stay on the same side of an issue long enough to be credible - they're 'evolving' too quickly to form principles!"
There. Is that what you were hoping for? Yeesh.
So don't tell me that enjoyment of an 'illegal' substance has somehow turned me into a vegetable and hurt my chances to be a productive person
Gee, it's almost like I didn't say that, isn't it! Because I wasn't talking about YOU. I'm talking about exactly what you KNOW I'm talking about. It's not, in general, a motivating thing to consume. It impacts different people in different ways, much like alchohol. There's ample evidence that, among (especially) kids who smoke it regularly, it can dramatically impact cognitive development, memory, and more. Out of curiosity, at what age will your kid start smoking it? Have you settled on that yet?
Your original post, however, seemed to imply that the only possible way Diebold could achieve such a request was through a rediculous amount of manhours and attending every single council meeting, which is false.
No, my original post spoke to the issue at hand, here. The people USING THE MACHINES decided it was time to send them back to Diebold, where - as always - they are wiped. The decision about when the local election board, in the context of how well-settled a given election/issue is or is not, considers it safe to blow away the auditable voting records as recorded in the machines is a user/management decision. It has nothing to do with the hardware vendor. The implication that Diebold should have stopped them from doing so implies that they should be in on the decision-making process. That process occurs locally, and is the responsibility of the election boards that (happen to have) purchased/rented Diebold's equipment, as opposed to some other vendor or technology. Unless Diebold is involved in a given district's decisions about when - for a given specific locale and election cycle - to pack up and ship the gear back for record-nuking, then you can't blame THEM for that district's decisions. And if you WANT them in that decision-making process, then you have to speak to the issue of having the vendor involved in election policy. Which is nonsense.
You'd be surprised at the number of the worlds brightest minds (surely brighter than yours) who smoke pot and / or support reform.
What's frustrating is how much brighter still many of them would be if they didn't (they'd probably even remember to use an apostrophe in that form of the word "worlds"). Also frustrating that some people whose minds are still very much in developmental stages (say, teenagers) hear comments like that and treat it like an endorsement of impairing themselves when they have no idea of the actual consequences or physiology, and the long term impact on their cognitive skills. Do I care as much about some luke-warm kid amounting to somewhat less than he might have? I suppose. Probably not as much as I care about the costs we all pay - in cash and otherwise - for kids that end up a train wreck, medically, from meth or some opiate or another.
The illegality of Cannabis is one of the greatest fraud of our time.
No, I'm pretty sure there's no fraud involved. It actually IS illegal. You have not been defrauded, the laws actually are as written. Or is that not what you actually meant?
Perhaps it will seem more important when the medicine you have been prescribed becomes unavailable
Nah. This will still be funny.
Because no matter how pious the Nausea Consortium sounds, this is mostly about the non-nauseated (if still frequently nauseating) people who've decided that lowering their IQ with weed is worth it for whatever enjoyment they get out of it, and they want it to be treated like carrots, or lemons, or something else nutritious from the produce stand. So, grandstanding (and squabbling over losing a voting intiative) over making pot more readily available, and noticing that the most vocal proponents you catch at a pro-"medicine" event or protest all appear to have the name "Dude" is going to continue, indeed, to be funny.
Diebold creates ATMs with paper trails.
And they can build voting machines that way too, if their customers ask for them. Again, that's a policy and procurement issue at the election board level. If the election board can't imagine that they want a particular feature, despite years, now, of experience on the part of voters and media coverage galore, then who exactly are you saying should be making those decisions? The equipment vendor? And when the equipment vendor is the one telling election boards what their policies should be, how do you address all of the shrill people who scream that Diebold is running the elections?
It won't do jack shit for their reputation, and that of their machines. All anyone will know is that this election had to be redone, Diebold could have prevented that, and if they'd used paper ballots, it wouldn't have had to be redone.
So, you're in favor of the equipment vendor actually having a hand in the policies and practices of running the elections themselves? This is exactly the sort of thing that people have been screaming about - too MUCH influence by the hardware vendor.
Again, shame on Diebold for not having a fscking clue how to make and sell their product.
Except, they made it just fine (it did just what it was asked to do), and they sold it just fine, too. You seem to be suggesting that they should have their own people sitting in election board offices, monitoring the ups and downs of a political process at the local level, and consulting on how the local election board should carry on with the daily activities that they are paid to conduct. Is it your perception that part of Diebold's sales cycle and contract with the entities that use their gear is that they should be on call to direct those districts/states/municipalities/counties in making election process decisions - relative to local statutes and election rules and particular events - about when and how in-machine data should be handled after the election is over? Was that part of the sale - such relatively open-ended consulting services? How many election board meetings should thousands of Diebold employees attend in order to save people from themselves? How many tinfoil-hat conspiracy nuts would then see their involvment in such proceedings to be just another case of elections being 'stolen' by whoever it is they hate that week? Can't have it both ways.
the corporations seem to win no matter what you do
You'd think that Frito-Lay would be all over this initiative. And Dominos. While it may be hard to re-muster the Stoner Caucus to do this all over again, perhaps the Munchie Cartel can pick up the slack.
California. *sigh*
There's plenty of reasons to re-invent electronically-assisted voting (I like the also-spits-out-paper variation, myself), but it really doesn't help the cause when - to a casual newsreader - an important test case seems to be about weed.
Actually, I had a rather easy time of it ... Every fanatical faction, be it christian, jewish, islamic, or hindu, has their own share of nut jobs.
So, just to be clear, you're comparing stats on violence that has occurred in the name of Christian wackadoo-ness since 1976 with parts of the world where worse happens in the name of religion on many afternoons. It's not necessarily that the wackadoo Islamists are more wackadoo than the crazy Christians... it's that the Allah-wants-me-to-kill-you crowd frequently operates in a climate/culture where their BS is allowed to go on either through passive endorsement or out of fear by the locals.
Candidly, this is a lot like the incomprehensible "Stop Snitchin'" insanity that has now become fashionable enough to be printed on t-shirts on sidewalks in the very urban areas where not "snitching" is exactly why they're all scared to death of the thugs that operate with impunity. If there really IS a wider Muslim culture that doesn't think women should be killed for teaching their daughters to read, then that wider Muslim culture needs to make it impossible for the Taliban to ever again gain traction, or for the Wahabbists spread their poison. Absent functioning, non-corrupt, constitutional democracy in those areas, the un-snitched-upon Islamo-thugs will always prevail over their more meek cousins. That there even is a parallel between what's behind so much of the violence in the middle east and the anatomy of the minor thugocracies that rule some poor urban areas in the US is pretty horrific, actually. But it's the same things in play.
And since it's so politically incorrect to actually identify those things for what they are (let alone make a comparison between some New Jersey neighborhoods and some Baghdad neighborhoods, despite the sometimes equal levels of violence), no one talks about the underlying causes. And of course, New Jersey isn't sitting on giant oil reserves, or looking like a tempting enough puppet state for New York that NY is sending explosives and fighters in to keep things as destabilized as possible, and couching that in all in religious terms.
I am censored by the state.
And yet here you are talking, right now.
was followed by undercover police
You probably didn't even notice the black helicopters, I'll bet!
Tell that to folks who got on the secret police no fly list, obviously from their political views.
Hmmm. Except, people with down right insane political views, from all over the spectrum, get to hop on planes all the time. Domestic flights, international travel, you name it. Failure to cite specifics, and posting as an anonymous coward, is classic FUD, and actually undermines whatever agenda it is you think you're serving.
I suggest you spend a few evenings and go back and peruse the YRO section again
A virtual library of tinfoil-lined nonsense, most of the time. And when it's not, it's shrilly whined about completely out of context. The conspiracy kooks eat that stuff up. Before it was modern tech being arrayed against them, it was sorcerers invoking demons and having them followed by pixies. Not too much about the human psyche has changed in the last few thousand years, but we do have some nice new shiny demons to pin the fantasies on. But most of the time, as you obviously know, it's people with their own political agenda spinning this stuff into a frenzy that they think serves their own purposes. What they don't realize is that when they cultivate an atmosphere of irrational fear and distrust like that, it perists when their own favorite people happen to be in charge, too.
Peacefully assembling on the street and silently carrying a sign to be read by the commander-in-thief is, I guess, considered non-peaceful.
Um, except people do it all the time, and CAN do it all the time. Unless their purpose is, in doing so, to block streets from being used by other people, or to get another event shut down by making it impossible to conduct it - which, of course, is actually those people looking to suppress someone ELSE'S rights to assembly and speech. You can walk outside right now with your sign. You can wander into DC and sit right on the grass right next to the UFO cultists, the Jesus freaks, the there-should-be-no-international-trade kooks, and everyone else that are there right now, this morning. Go on! Have a good day doing it - because you'll just be one more person doing more of the same. But you won't because you know that those amateur theatrics actually do your cause more harm than good.
You want to impact the perceptions of the people who actually vote and have a hand in policy matters in a country of three hundred million freakin' people? Have a valid point, and use the tools of communication that actually speak to the people you're trying to influence. Beating drums in the middle of the street and chaining yourself and your friends between light poles to prevent people from attending an event you don't like is just vanity and, ironically, a vain attempt to shout down someone else's gathering. Be careful about advocating for the "right" to block other people from assembling when they organize an event and gather to speak, because then you're also advocating for the rights of someone else to block, disrupt, and shout down your OWN gathering. Is that how you see free speech? The person best able to disrupt someone else's event "wins?"
You're in denial.
And you're muttering a platitude without actually addressing the substance of what I said.
So: what is preventing you from renting out a convention center the week after the person you'd like to shout down did? In the same given calender year, you see facilities like that rented out and used by goups that are complete, idealogically polar opposites. Both of their views get tons of air time and converage. And both events get to proceed without being shut down by the fire marshal because the building's entrances and road approaches aren't clogged with people who are there to suppress the speech of the people holding the event.
If you've got a THIRD point of view (relative to two in that example), then that facility gets used once again, in the same way, with exactly the same protections for your speech and assembly rights.
I'm not in denial, you're just being a drama queen and don't want to acknowledge that you CAN say your mind any time you want. You just want to have the right to shut down someone else's ability to do so when it suits you. That's intellectual cowardice.
"Free speech zones" for one thing
You've got that exactly, perfectly backwards.
Go ahead an book a large municipal facility for a political event of your own liking. You will ALSO have the zoning rules and law enforcement working to make sure that YOUR supporters and attendees get safe access to the place, that emergency vehicles aren't blocked from using the streets, and so on. EVERYBODY gets the same protection as they exercise their rights to assembly and freedom of speech. You can stand on any street corner you want any time and say whatever you want. What you can't do is chain yourself and your giant puppet to a traffic light and set props on fire in the middle of a street that you haven't got the permit to shut down. You want to shout down someone who's having a formal event? Have your OWN formal event, and you'll see that no one with giant flaming puppets gets to shout you down, either. The First Amendment is being protected when groups assembling to have an event are allowed to actually HAVE that event. If you want to have an event that's just chaos in street, well... have one, then. But if a more civil group wants to book a convention center to pat each other on the back about their stance on abortion, or global warming, or boosting international trade, or stopping international trade, then LET them. If the only way you think you can counter someone else's ideas is to scream at them while blocking the street used to access the facility, perhaps you need to re-evaluate the credibility of your position and re-think who it is you're trying to please and persuade with your theatrics.
In the meantime, enjoy your right to have your OWN event, unmolested by ME, any time you want. Because you CAN.
Gods-damned fundamentalists getting books banned
And what a shock: no books are "banned." They're simply not included in a curriculum, or chosen to be purchased by tax dollars to be stocked on a shelf at a school. And the moment that the judgement about WHICH books fall into that category becomes absurd (say, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, for example), the idiots on the school board get to hear all about it as they lose their next election in their locale. And when fundie twits get all hopped up about evolution and try to influence what science texts have to say about it, they're generally shamed right out of their jobs, which is exactly what should happen, and the courts tend to nicely mop up after those really bad policies/decisions. Once again, we're not talking about the government "censoring" anything, here.
Oppose the censorship that is inflicted upon us NOW
Which censorship is that, exactly, anyway? You certainly seem able to say whatever you'd like here, without fear of political actions being taken against you. Now, certainly there are plenty of university professors that don't want to hear certain perspectives in their classrooms (or have to grade papers expressing them), and there are workplaces where some actions and attitudes simply aren't tolerated... but there is no central authority preventing you from dealing with those situations yourself (if by no other means, then by simply choosing another school or job). I don't have to listen to what you have to say, but that's not the same as censorship. And I can't call up the government and have you silenced (which WOULD be such).
A safe would be a good investment, most are fire proof which is important too.
Yes, but let's not forget that what we're dealing with here is a forced entry into a place where the robbers were waiving knives in the staff's faces. Nothing makes a knife waive faster than when it's accompanied by the phrase (how ever you say it in Spanish), "I know you know how to open this safe, so get to it..."
If Coppola can't afford the bandwith to push to an off-site storage service, I don't know who can.
the plant software should be operating in a vacuum bubble
The problem is that they can't. If you think back to some of the more recent spectacular blackouts, you'll recall that the reason they were so far-reaching was that the networked systems that allow the generation and distribution systems (often run halfway across the continent by different parties/agencies) to talk to each other and properly duck out of the way or isolate themselves from damaging surges and faults... weren't fast enough or well-enough tuned to prevent the problem. Big, multi-state/province blackouts can only be prevented when the whole system IS internetworked. Now, does that call for the construction of a completely separate, ultra-high-performance network spanning thousands of miles and thousands of nodes? Yes. Or, it could call for using VPNs over the existing internet, but with better-than-the-banks-use stuff at each node to authenticate legit traffic and perform intrusion detection.
This is just as true of systems that could end up backwashing sewage into drinking water (which has happened), monkeying with natural gas pipelining hardware, or even handling traffic control devices right at the time that you're trying to evacuate a city for some reason.
Fantastically expensive. And the money just hasn't been spent well enough or often enough yet. And, we've still got lots of Cold War-era control systems out there. I think this is more about practices than it is about the plumbing, per se.
Also, in the olden dayf, why is S so very often replaced by f? WTF is that?
At that time, it wasn't unusual to write the long medial "s" as an "f". Somewhat randomly, here's some quick reading on the subject .
No nerdly discussion about the history of money would be complete without a slavish recommendation to read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Which, indeed, one should. ADHD raised-on-MTV types needn't bother, but it's pure gold. (+5 self-referental humor!)
but it's not going to happen out of the goodness of the hearts of the ISP
And why should it? So, out of whose hearts/pockets to you suggest that it SHOULD happen?
87% of Americans live within a 20 mile radius of a major urban hub
And it still costs a fortune to run fiber more than a few hundred yards. And the laws of physics mean that DSL doesn't get you anywhere close to that 20-miles-away guy. So there is a MUCH larger layer of infrastructure that has to flow out, mile by mile, all the way through those hundreds of square miles around that "hub." The guy who is 15 miles away from an urban center might as well be 1000 miles away, infrastructure-wise. If you can't make a compelling case for someone who is only going to be able to charge $40/month to string up service that it will cost them many thousands to deploy, and you don't want to have the government do it, then there really aren't many options.
Why stack more taxes on top of that?
We're not disagreeing about that. I'm trying to point out that unless someone personally pays for it, or a company finds it worth investing in, only taxes will get it done... or, it can just WAIT. Which is exactly the current situation. Can't have it both (or all three) ways.
It's one of many downsides to living in the middle of nowhere, but that option is not available to said farmer, and that's a sad state of affairs for residents of America.
Of course the option is available. Right now. Today. Someone just needs to write the check. The repeaters are off-the-shelf, fiber can be pulled, microwaves work... it's only money. So: whose money? You can't lament that he doesn't have a cheap option while pretending that a rural user in Korea got the same service without paying so much. SOMEONE paid so much. We just don't socialize it as much here, and so the costs are clearer, and you have to make more of a commitment if you want it. Or, be patient while more easily deployed solutions evolve. It's not a condemnation of the US that it's hard to get broadband to show up in a sparsely populated fringe suburb when the suburb itself is bigger than many of the entire countries that are contributing to your statistics.
That'd be like paying a toll to ford a river when everyone else in the free world is using a 10-lane highway free of charge!
Yes, 10-lane highways are COMPLETELY free of charge. Other than the billions each year that it costs to build and maintain them, which come out of tolls and taxes.
What lessons can we learn from, let's say, the UK - where 94% of the population at least has the OPTION of broadband connectivity?
Hmmm, let's see. Perhaps we could learn the lesson that the UK is geographically a very different, and much smaller place? And that population densities are different, and that the number of miles of copper to get to a small rural household in Nebraska are very different than outsite, say, Glasgow?
What are you saying, here... that we should all pay more taxes to subsidize the building of networks out to very remote rural areas - at the cost of many thousands of dollars per household, and then hand that infrastructure over to private operators? Or are you saying that the government should collect taxes from city dwellers to run fiber out to rural folks, and then the government itself should be the ISP? Rather than drawing poor comparisons to places that aren't demographically or topographically at all similar, why not say what it is you think should actually be done to get broadband to someone that is 20 miles down the road in the middle of a cornfield without that person having to actually pay for that service's existence?
Or, maybe you should cite some stats on how rural Siberians and Laplanders are getting THEIR broadband? Or ranchers in the middle of Patagonia?
If you fight to keep the special treatment of internet companies over brick-and-mortar companies, you are no better than the vested special interests that you often criticize.
Yeesh. As has already been pointed out to you, this isn't about sales taxes on the goods that happen to be ordered online. This is about taxing the service you're buying which connects you to the internet. Much like your cable and phone services are already being taxed.
That being said: A small mom-and-pop retailer that takes an order over the phone, or through the mail, or by fax, or off of an auction site, or from their own web site is - JUST LIKE AMAZON - not obligated to collect and remit sales tax if they happen to ship out of state. Conversely, companies like Amazon DO have to collect and remit sales tax if they're shipping into a state where they have a business presence. So, if Amazon operates a warehouse/distribution center in Maryland, then they're on the hook to remit Maryland sales tax on any orders they ship to Maryland addresses.
Very large companies, increasingly, DO have offices, operations, or other "nexus" in more than one state, and are increasingly on the hook to collect such taxes for those state governments. Further, you've got places like California, which has been known to lean on out-of-state retailers to remit CA sales tax whether they have a presence there or not. Their leverage? The tell retailers that if they don't, they'll be blacklisted from any purchasing done by any agency of the CA state government. And while that may not matter to Uncle-Jim's-Fly-Rods-dot-com in Idaho, it definitely matters to retailers that sell office supplies, truck fleet parts, computer hardware, etc. It hits big companies, and the mom-and-pops the same way.
Your example of the diner is a particularly bad one. There is no un-taxed competition shipping competing omlettes and cups of hot coffee in from out of state. If your point is that there are large businesses (in other lines of work) making money by doing business with the residents of a given state, and not collecting sales tax... remember that it's the CONSUMER'S responsibility to pay sales and use taxes on stuff they buy from out of state. Don't like that the sale isn't taxed up front? Don't sweat it... it's the people who live in YOUR state that are then supposed to pay those taxes on the goods they buy from out of state. Otherwise, you've got businesses that aren't even IN your state having to do insane amounts of paperwork with your state government. Some states have sales tax rates that vary by zip code, and which depend on the type of goods being purchased, and which change seasonally. Should every retailer in every state have to keep track of, and remit all of that nonsense to every other state government around the country? Or should your fellow state citizens simply pay up when they buy something big ticket from out of state?
And lastly: how about simply making your state a more attractive place from which to OPERATE a large retailer? That way you get WAY more cash flow into the state coffers... income taxes on the employees, corporate incomes and real-estate taxes, taxes on all of the services and utilities that the company uses in the state, taxes on all of the services and items that the employees consume in that state, taxes on the incomes of all of the third-party vendors and service providers that support the company in your state. What you SHOULD be doing is asking your legislators to find ways to make your local infrastructure and circumstances very attractive to the next Amazon.
>>I'm sure there was inter-witch-doctor FUD in neolithic times.
And you have personal experience to back this up?
Why yes, yes I do. Some of my relatives are neolithic witch doctors, you insensitive clod.