I did. All of the rebuttals I found, and I believe all that you cited, are prior to a lot of follow-up and counter-responses from the swift boaters during the august-october timeframe. I was unable to readily find any follow-up rebuttals to the stuff they published during that timeframe.
what's happening to him as a low key Swift-boating (like what they did to Kerry)
Do you know of a good site debunking the swift boat stuff?
A friend of mine works for the production company that was hired to do the swift-boat commercials and has consquently been 100% brain-washed into believing them (they were quite liberal with the kool-aid it seems). Now that the election is long over, nobody seems interested in following up on all the hue and cry - but if someone has done a good job (not just another partisan hack job, but from the left instead of the right)I would really appreciate a pointer to it.
> Bribes are not speech Considering McCain-Feingold, that is far from clear.
I think the problem here is the implementation. Like most laws, it is flawed. I would not be surprised to learn that somewhere along the line from being just a bill to becoming a law it was deliberately made flawed by someone with an interest in the status quo.
But the fundamental concept that that bribes are not speech is sound - don't let that part get lost in the noise here. When it comes time for McCain-Feingold II, we should be pushing for it to fix the problems from the first round and not just repeal the entire effort.
I have all those cards, but no company has my info.
If you have paid with a credit card in conjunction with the tracker card, there is a fair chance that your personal info has been correlated with your tracker card. It doesn't even require the complicity of the credit card issuer -- only that you have given that information to another merchant in conjunction with using your credit card and that both the grocery and the other merchant use the same data aggregation service.
"This would be a significant chunk of change," said Hayes Ledford, the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerces director of public affairs.
That pretty much seems to say it all when public officials view taxation as "significant chunks of change", rather than the basis for sustaining government and infrastructure.
You might have a point if he actually was a public official. The chamber of commerce is a business organization, not an arm of the government. Their purpose is to help each other out, which sometimes includes lobbying the state, but that does not make any of them "public officials."
Its almost impossible to get warrnts sufficient in scope and speed to follow across several media forms without going outside the bounds of the FIS
More bullshit.
The FISA warrants can be made retroactive within 72 hours. That means go ahead and wiretap the motherfucker anywhichway you want. Just make sure you get clearance afterwards.
You had pride in your country at age 5 when Reagan left office? Wow, that's impressive!
I was 7 when the Shaw was overthrown. My peer-group was rabidly patriotic, as only simple minds can be, we constantly joked about the "Ayatollah Homo-meni" and made other such childish jokes, that we really didn't even understand. From age 5-10 or so is when most kid's brains are at the point in development where they are super-fascist.
So, yes it is easy to believe that a 5 year old had pride, even hyper-jingoistic pride, in his country at the age of 5.
Odds are it costs twice as much as its corn-syrup and diet competitors, just for the cost of sugar alone! Where's the freedom, both for the business and the consumer?
Interesting. For what it is worth, the Hawaiian sugar cane business has been decimated, all the large suger cane plantations went out of business during the 90s - prior to that it was a major cash crop there (the most profitable one was and still is pakalolo). So, somehow the price supports were not enough for that portion of the industry.
But just recently the right of privacy seems to be implicit to your freedom of speech. With freedom of speech (At least the American ideal) you should be able to state your views without getting arrested for it. But it doesn't state that you can say it without anyone knowing that you said it.
I guess it all depends on your definition of "just recently" - anonymous speech has been a core part of America since before the USA even had a constitution.
Of course it isn't just Americans who know that freedom of speech must include freedom of anonymous speech, Europeans have been practicing for at least as long, here is but a small sampling of famous anonymous writers:
Voltaire was really Francois Marie Arouet George Sand was really Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin George Eliot was really Mary Ann Evans Charles Lamb would often use the pen name "Elia" Charles Dickens used the pen name "Boz"
Some firms like to provide free chair massages to their technical staff, particularly the ones who work the support lines. Take your company to the next level - include a "happy ending" with each massage.
After all your clients are the real whores, you need to balance out the corporate karma and employ the kind of whores that actually make people happy.
Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way.
I think it is pretty easy to measure:
1) What ISA's a compiler supports 2) How Free the source code for the compiler is.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
I dunno since ZFS is not mentioned once in the document on the other end of the link you posted. Even if it is released, it will be under the CDDL which makes it of little value to anyone other than the people who are chained to sun anyway.
I'm a long time user of Solaris all the way back to 2.5.1 and SunOS before that as well as UNIX on Apollo systems, SGI systems and a whole lot of Fortran IV number crunching on IBM 3090 mainframes back in the day.
For a guy who claims to have been around a while you sure make a lot of hyperbolic claims and misleading remarks - if it quacks like a fanboy...
All you really need is a device (RFID?) that is tied into the odometer that records how many miles you have travelled whenever you enter or leave the state.
How is this better than my proposal?
It costs more, a lot more, because of the mandatory requirement to outfit all vehicles with this "device" as well as the almost impossible task of outfitting all border crossings with the complementary device plus the maintenance and up-keep of all devices installed.
The point in my original post is that "close enough" is more than "good enough" when it comes to collecting road use taxes. Thus there is no point in spending public money on any new gadgetry at all. Instead, keep the money that would have been spent and use it to reduce the cost of road upkeep.
Why bother? As stated previously in this discussion (and as I have believed for a long time) the gasoline tax effectively accomplishes the same thing, and has the added benefit of rewarding (or maybe just not punishing) those who drive fuel efficient vehicles).
Gas tax has the characteristic of rewarding those who drive gasoline-efficient vehicles, but not necessarily all around efficient vehicles. As the GP post said, these schemes are being driven by the expectation that alternative-fuel vehicles will become popular enough that the gas tax will no longer be sufficient.
It's going to be GPS. Anything else requires a more elaborate infrastructure.
That's only true if you believe that the government must precisely measure and collect road taxes. If we all take a step back and consider just how fucked up government budgets are, it should become obvious that accurate measurement of road use is not going to benefit the state because any level of accuracy will be quickly lost in the chaotic noise of the overall system of government budgeting.
So, instad of coming up with some super-elaborate, fascist's wet-dream to measure and collect the exact road use tax down to the penny, how about we just stick to basic measurements:
1) The odometer Pay a road use tax that is based on odometer readings when you get your car's yearly inspection or registration renewal.
2) Average traffic flow between states Bordering states can fairly easily estimate average daily traffic flow across their boarders, they use that information to negotiate sharing ratios between states for the collected road-use taxes.
There - problem solved in a fashion that is more than "good enough" with minimal cost overhead and minimal loss of privacy.
If it turns out that a state is not getting enough compensation to cover road upkeep, then they can raise the road use tax rate and possibly renegotiate the sharing ratios with their neighbors until their road maintenace costs are appropriately covered.
Only the big car/people tracking corps will lose out because there will be no reason to pay them (waste) barrels of federal pork to implement a piece of big brother. Oh, and the GPS receiver makers will also lose out on an otherwise captive market (you know their CEO's are spooging over the thought of forcing all cars to incorporate at least one GPS receiver).
I'm a programmer! I make triple the national average salary,
You hit the nail on the head there. Forget H1-B visas, this stuff is being researched so that they can make more of us to bring our wages down and put us back into the underclass.
By large" is already showing that there is an erosion.
I see no sign that those instigating the fight over ICANN would erode less, and lots to suggest the contrary.
Ultimatly though it were the courts who upheld it, not the politicians.
I don't think that makes any difference. The judicial branch is 1/3rd of the US government and it is basically their job to overrule the legislative branch when they get out of hand.
No I do agree, but limiting hate speech is in my eyes not something that is preventing political speech.
Then we most definitely disagree because "hate" speech is about as purely political as speech can get - it is a direct complaint or characterization about a sub-group of society that the speaker dislikes.
You cannot scream "Fire" in a crowded theater either, even the US Supreme Court acknowledges that there are limits on free speech.
That's a false analogy unless you claim that "hate" speech is a direct incitement to violence, and even then it would have problems passing muster before the 1st amendment. The history of "hate" speech censorship is that the censored expressions are far from direct calls for violence - for example the recent incident in singapore with respect to 3 bloggers posting "hate" speech about muslims.
The difference, as I see it, is that in Europe there are clearer guidelines about what is valid and what isn't. That doesn't mean there is outright censorship.
Clear guidelines doesn't make them any less censorial, just more formal. The rules in countries like Germany and France that gag talk by nazi's are clearly designed to prevent the return of the nazi party, a political party. Big surprise, they don't seem to be working.
The point I was merely driving home is that there is no absolut freedom, it always requires a limit to some degree or the other.
1) That may be true in meatspace, but I think it has yet to be proven for cyberspace. Yelling "fire" on the internet isn't going to cause people to trample each other in a rush to log off. Since by its nature, people will have to consider and deliberate over any expression made on the net, the main justification for the "fire in the a theatre" type of censorship is reduced, if not wholy eliminated.
2) It wasn't just EU countries pulling for the change, China, Libya and Iran were all in there hoping make changes that better suit their not-free-speech agendas.
Continuing to run your mouth and argue your point simply marks you as a self-important fuckwit.
And yet, not only has the +5 rating of his first post survived at least one negative rating so far, his bizarre rationalization for ignoring the obvious meaning of an extremely common turn of phrase is at +4 and climbing.
Perhaps his posts tweak some sort of nerdly need for precision in language (not that his use of language is particularly precise either) that resonates with slashdotters.
Because it means that by and large, the 1st ammendment has been upheld in the areas of the internet pertinent to the discussion, against pressure by those with money and a sticks up their asses to corrupt it.
Here's a question: Does it matter who does the censoring? In the EU you have anti hate laws that prevent certain forms of Speech, in the US you have things like the DMCA that prevent other things.
I'm going to make a judgement call here and say that political speech is the most important form of speech. Perhaps you disagree, but when all is said and done, I'll take censorship of the discussion of copy-prevention circumvention over censorship of political beliefs because without political speech you can't undo DMCA-style censorship, but talking about copying DVDs will do little to relieve political censorship.
Are you seriously saying that it would be non-corrupt for a business to consistently short-change their customers as a matter of policy?
No, that's what you are saying.
I am saying that in the current market, vendors routinely do not make an effort to look out for the interests of their customers. This lack of effort manifests at all levels of transactions - from deliberately choosing to not fix poorly designed systems that tend to cause errors in the vendor's favor (how many customer service voice-mail systems have you encountered that seem to be designed like a maze?) to understaffing the customer service desks in store, to advertising price-after-rebate as the sale price, the list goes on and on.
As long as the market is willing to accept vendors that as a matter of policy put their interests ahead of their customers, then there is clearly no moral obligation that customers do anything different in return.
If you think the US Government is any less corrupt than any similar size organization you live in a dream world, just look at current US politics.
In this case, the US has done a pretty good job of upholding their rhetoric regarding freedom of expression and the internet. It hasn't been perfect, but it has been a heck of a lot better than most of the countries who were big pushers of this new shared goverance plan.
I am in no way a US nationalist, but in this specific case I believe that any change coming from this specific EU effort would have been a loss for free speech on the net.
Ask yourself this: Last time you were given incorrect change in your favour, did you correct that mistake or did you just pocket the difference and thought: "Suckers"? If people are tempted by change to be dishonest why would they suddenly become more honest when the payoff is a lot bigger?
There is a latin saying which fully describes the way most large corporations treat their customers in the USA, "Caveat Emptor" -- buyer beware. The case you describe is a natural response to that attitude on the part of those large retail corporations, I like to call it "Caveat Vendor" -- seller beware. Because turnabout is always fair play, I see no substance in your charge that caveat vendor behavior is dishonest or corrupt.
Slashdot Mirror
JFGI
I did. All of the rebuttals I found, and I believe all that you cited, are prior to a lot of follow-up and counter-responses from the swift boaters during the august-october timeframe. I was unable to readily find any follow-up rebuttals to the stuff they published during that timeframe.
what's happening to him as a low key Swift-boating (like what they did to Kerry)
Do you know of a good site debunking the swift boat stuff?
A friend of mine works for the production company that was hired to do the swift-boat commercials and has consquently been 100% brain-washed into believing them (they were quite liberal with the kool-aid it seems). Now that the election is long over, nobody seems interested in following up on all the hue and cry - but if someone has done a good job (not just another partisan hack job, but from the left instead of the right)I would really appreciate a pointer to it.
> Bribes are not speech
Considering McCain-Feingold, that is far from clear.
I think the problem here is the implementation. Like most laws, it is flawed. I would not be surprised to learn that somewhere along the line from being just a bill to becoming a law it was deliberately made flawed by someone with an interest in the status quo.
But the fundamental concept that that bribes are not speech is sound - don't let that part get lost in the noise here. When it comes time for McCain-Feingold II, we should be pushing for it to fix the problems from the first round and not just repeal the entire effort.
I have all those cards, but no company has my info.
If you have paid with a credit card in conjunction with the tracker card, there is a fair chance that your personal info has been correlated with your tracker card. It doesn't even require the complicity of the credit card issuer -- only that you have given that information to another merchant in conjunction with using your credit card and that both the grocery and the other merchant use the same data aggregation service.
That pretty much seems to say it all when public officials view taxation as "significant chunks of change", rather than the basis for sustaining government and infrastructure.
You might have a point if he actually was a public official. The chamber of commerce is a business organization, not an arm of the government. Their purpose is to help each other out, which sometimes includes lobbying the state, but that does not make any of them "public officials."
Its almost impossible to get warrnts sufficient in scope and speed to follow across several media forms without going outside the bounds of the FIS
More bullshit.
The FISA warrants can be made retroactive within 72 hours. That means go ahead and wiretap the motherfucker anywhichway you want. Just make sure you get clearance afterwards.
I'm not an apologist as much as a realist
Hardly.
You had pride in your country at age 5 when Reagan left office? Wow, that's impressive!
I was 7 when the Shaw was overthrown. My peer-group was rabidly patriotic, as only simple minds can be, we constantly joked about the "Ayatollah Homo-meni" and made other such childish jokes, that we really didn't even understand. From age 5-10 or so is when most kid's brains are at the point in development where they are super-fascist.
So, yes it is easy to believe that a 5 year old had pride, even hyper-jingoistic pride, in his country at the age of 5.
Odds are it costs twice as much as its corn-syrup and diet competitors, just for the cost of sugar alone! Where's the freedom, both for the business and the consumer?
Interesting. For what it is worth, the Hawaiian sugar cane business has been decimated, all the large suger cane plantations went out of business during the 90s - prior to that it was a major cash crop there (the most profitable one was and still is pakalolo). So, somehow the price supports were not enough for that portion of the industry.
Did anyone else read that title as:
"Ham Nears Mars Orbit 45 Million Miles From Earth"
I thought it was going to a story about Piiiigs in Spaaaaace!
Old school unix is #### - they didn't have control keys back then.
But just recently the right of privacy seems to be implicit to your freedom of speech. With freedom of speech (At least the American ideal) you should be able to state your views without getting arrested for it. But it doesn't state that you can say it without anyone knowing that you said it.
I guess it all depends on your definition of "just recently" - anonymous speech has been a core part of America since before the USA even had a constitution.
Of course it isn't just Americans who know that freedom of speech must include freedom of anonymous speech, Europeans have been practicing for at least as long, here is but a small sampling of famous anonymous writers:
Voltaire was really Francois Marie Arouet
George Sand was really Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin
George Eliot was really Mary Ann Evans
Charles Lamb would often use the pen name "Elia"
Charles Dickens used the pen name "Boz"
Some firms like to provide free chair massages to their technical staff, particularly the ones who work the support lines. Take your company to the next level - include a "happy ending" with each massage.
After all your clients are the real whores, you need to balance out the corporate karma and employ the kind of whores that actually make people happy.
Economics is money based not morale.
You have zero clue as to what "economics" is. Here's a hint -- it is a social science, i.e. a science that studies human behavior.
I don't work on economics, I work in what I feel is right.
Wow, you were able to contradict yourself without even starting a new sentence.
I pledge allegiance to no fags and
The United State of Kansas which passed the ban
one discrimination under design
with intelligence but no egalitarianism for all.
Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way.
I think it is pretty easy to measure:
1) What ISA's a compiler supports
2) How Free the source code for the compiler is.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
I dunno since ZFS is not mentioned once in the document on the other end of the link you posted. Even if it is released, it will be under the CDDL which makes it of little value to anyone other than the people who are chained to sun anyway.
I'm a long time user of Solaris all the way back to 2.5.1 and SunOS before that as well as UNIX on Apollo systems, SGI systems and a whole lot of Fortran IV number crunching on IBM 3090 mainframes back in the day.
For a guy who claims to have been around a while you sure make a lot of hyperbolic claims and misleading remarks - if it quacks like a fanboy...
All you really need is a device (RFID?) that is tied into the odometer that records how many miles you have travelled whenever you enter or leave the state.
How is this better than my proposal?
It costs more, a lot more, because of the mandatory requirement to outfit all vehicles with this "device" as well as the almost impossible task of outfitting all border crossings with the complementary device plus the maintenance and up-keep of all devices installed.
The point in my original post is that "close enough" is more than "good enough" when it comes to collecting road use taxes. Thus there is no point in spending public money on any new gadgetry at all. Instead, keep the money that would have been spent and use it to reduce the cost of road upkeep.
Why bother? As stated previously in this discussion (and as I have believed for a long time) the gasoline tax effectively accomplishes the same thing, and has the added benefit of rewarding (or maybe just not punishing) those who drive fuel efficient vehicles).
Gas tax has the characteristic of rewarding those who drive gasoline-efficient vehicles, but not necessarily all around efficient vehicles. As the GP post said, these schemes are being driven by the expectation that alternative-fuel vehicles will become popular enough that the gas tax will no longer be sufficient.
It's going to be GPS. Anything else requires a more elaborate infrastructure.
That's only true if you believe that the government must precisely measure and collect road taxes. If we all take a step back and consider just how fucked up government budgets are, it should become obvious that accurate measurement of road use is not going to benefit the state because any level of accuracy will be quickly lost in the chaotic noise of the overall system of government budgeting.
So, instad of coming up with some super-elaborate, fascist's wet-dream to measure and collect the exact road use tax down to the penny, how about we just stick to basic measurements:
1) The odometer
Pay a road use tax that is based on odometer readings when you get your car's yearly inspection or registration renewal.
2) Average traffic flow between states
Bordering states can fairly easily estimate average daily traffic flow across their boarders, they use that information to negotiate sharing ratios between states for the collected road-use taxes.
There - problem solved in a fashion that is more than "good enough" with minimal cost overhead and minimal loss of privacy.
If it turns out that a state is not getting enough compensation to cover road upkeep, then they can raise the road use tax rate and possibly renegotiate the sharing ratios with their neighbors until their road maintenace costs are appropriately covered.
Only the big car/people tracking corps will lose out because there will be no reason to pay them (waste) barrels of federal pork to implement a piece of big brother. Oh, and the GPS receiver makers will also lose out on an otherwise captive market (you know their CEO's are spooging over the thought of forcing all cars to incorporate at least one GPS receiver).
I'm a programmer! I make triple the national average salary,
You hit the nail on the head there. Forget H1-B visas, this stuff is being researched so that they can make more of us to bring our wages down and put us back into the underclass.
By large" is already showing that there is an erosion.
I see no sign that those instigating the fight over ICANN would erode less, and lots to suggest the contrary.
Ultimatly though it were the courts who upheld it, not the politicians.
I don't think that makes any difference. The judicial branch is 1/3rd of the US government and it is basically their job to overrule the legislative branch when they get out of hand.
No I do agree, but limiting hate speech is in my eyes not something that is preventing political speech.
Then we most definitely disagree because "hate" speech is about as purely political as speech can get - it is a direct complaint or characterization about a sub-group of society that the speaker dislikes.
You cannot scream "Fire" in a crowded theater either, even the US Supreme Court acknowledges that there are limits on free speech.
That's a false analogy unless you claim that "hate" speech is a direct incitement to violence, and even then it would have problems passing muster before the 1st amendment. The history of "hate" speech censorship is that the censored expressions are far from direct calls for violence - for example the recent incident in singapore with respect to 3 bloggers posting "hate" speech about muslims.
The difference, as I see it, is that in Europe there are clearer guidelines about what is valid and what isn't. That doesn't mean there is outright censorship.
Clear guidelines doesn't make them any less censorial, just more formal. The rules in countries like Germany and France that gag talk by nazi's are clearly designed to prevent the return of the nazi party, a political party. Big surprise, they don't seem to be working.
The point I was merely driving home is that there is no absolut freedom, it always requires a limit to some degree or the other.
1) That may be true in meatspace, but I think it has yet to be proven for cyberspace. Yelling "fire" on the internet isn't going to cause people to trample each other in a rush to log off. Since by its nature, people will have to consider and deliberate over any expression made on the net, the main justification for the "fire in the a theatre" type of censorship is reduced, if not wholy eliminated.
2) It wasn't just EU countries pulling for the change, China, Libya and Iran were all in there hoping make changes that better suit their not-free-speech agendas.
Continuing to run your mouth and argue your point simply marks you as a self-important fuckwit.
And yet, not only has the +5 rating of his first post survived at least one negative rating so far, his bizarre rationalization for ignoring the obvious meaning of an extremely common turn of phrase is at +4 and climbing.
Perhaps his posts tweak some sort of nerdly need for precision in language (not that his use of language is particularly precise either) that resonates with slashdotters.
And this has to do with corruption what?
Because it means that by and large, the 1st ammendment has been upheld in the areas of the internet pertinent to the discussion, against pressure by those with money and a sticks up their asses to corrupt it.
Here's a question: Does it matter who does the censoring? In the EU you have anti hate laws that prevent certain forms of Speech, in the US you have things like the DMCA that prevent other things.
I'm going to make a judgement call here and say that political speech is the most important form of speech. Perhaps you disagree, but when all is said and done, I'll take censorship of the discussion of copy-prevention circumvention over censorship of political beliefs because without political speech you can't undo DMCA-style censorship, but talking about copying DVDs will do little to relieve political censorship.
Are you seriously saying that it would be non-corrupt for a business to consistently short-change their customers as a matter of policy?
No, that's what you are saying.
I am saying that in the current market, vendors routinely do not make an effort to look out for the interests of their customers. This lack of effort manifests at all levels of transactions - from deliberately choosing to not fix poorly designed systems that tend to cause errors in the vendor's favor (how many customer service voice-mail systems have you encountered that seem to be designed like a maze?) to understaffing the customer service desks in store, to advertising price-after-rebate as the sale price, the list goes on and on.
As long as the market is willing to accept vendors that as a matter of policy put their interests ahead of their customers, then there is clearly no moral obligation that customers do anything different in return.
If you think the US Government is any less corrupt than any similar size organization you live in a dream world, just look at current US politics.
In this case, the US has done a pretty good job of upholding their rhetoric regarding freedom of expression and the internet. It hasn't been perfect, but it has been a heck of a lot better than most of the countries who were big pushers of this new shared goverance plan.
I am in no way a US nationalist, but in this specific case I believe that any change coming from this specific EU effort would have been a loss for free speech on the net.
Ask yourself this: Last time you were given incorrect change in your favour, did you correct that mistake or did you just pocket the difference and thought: "Suckers"? If people are tempted by change to be dishonest why would they suddenly become more honest when the payoff is a lot bigger?
There is a latin saying which fully describes the way most large corporations treat their customers in the USA, "Caveat Emptor" -- buyer beware. The case you describe is a natural response to that attitude on the part of those large retail corporations, I like to call it "Caveat Vendor" -- seller beware. Because turnabout is always fair play, I see no substance in your charge that caveat vendor behavior is dishonest or corrupt.