It takes one Senator to make a hold work. It takes 41 Senators (in theory) to make a filibuster work. In practice, a single Senator merely has to declare he intends to filibuster a bill in the Senate and the bill is filibustered. The Senate does not actually carry out actual filibusters anymore, where people get up and talk for hours, and the Republican party has voted in virtual lockstep in the past decade or so, ensuring they always have the votes if it comes down to it (Democrats tend to be in constant disarray, cf. Joe Lieberman.)
Graph out the number of filibusters per Congress. They remain low for centuries, and then they suddenly skyrocket in the past decade, with pretty much every year shattering the previous record. The 111th Congress broke the record not even a year in. We've even seen the filibustering of bills everyone agrees on just to delay the introduction of other bills- for example, Republicans filibustered a defense spending bill just to delay debate on the health reform bill. The tactic of minority parties in the modern Senate is simply to delay and stop everything.
I'm glad he's doing this, but this exemplifies how insane Senate rules and traditions are - all it takes is one Senator to stop anything. It was bad enough when Senators had more discretion, but nowadays you have Senators putting holds on everything and filibustering every single bill that comes through the Senate. It's ridiculous.
And can you seriously tell me that you don't want to see an epic battle against a horde of Balrogs? Or an invasion of an armada so vast that the only way to defeat them is to crack the planet?
Or cool Elves! By the time of the Lord of the Rings, the only remaining Elves are the uncultured types (Legolas) and the aging hippies laying around and doing nothing but reminiscing about better days (Elrond and Galadriel). The Silmarillion is like, their Woodstock with fire and demons. Take Feanor, the greatest Elf ever to live. You know the Palantir? Those were like, one of his weekend projects he did when he got bored one day. When he wasn't making cool stuff, he was standing up to the Man. And by that, I mean when the most powerful god in Middle-Earth came knocking, the guy who could take on all the other gods alone in the beginning, the guy who kept Sauron around as a pet, Feanor slammed his door in the dude's face and told him to gtfo. This dude's last words were basically "DO IT BIG, GUYS. DO IT BIG."
And you know how all the Elves in LotR are goody-two-shoes pansies? Not in The Silmarillion. Do things like "the Kinslayings", "the Curse of the Noldor", the "Oath of Feanor", and "The Grinding Ice" sound like pansy crap to you? When these Elves showed up, the Big Bad had to invent dragons because Orcs were completely and utterly outmatched. When they saw Balrogs, these Elves didn't call out for Gandalf. Feanor took on multiple Balrogs and their troll-guard at once. Glorfindel - the same dude who got cut from the LotR movies - fights and kills a Balrog. And dragons, oh man, were there dragons. Smaug in the Hobbit is like a baby dragon. Ancalagon the Black crushed mountains (plural) when he fell from the skies.
The Silmarillion - if you take the time to get past Genesis, which is important backstory - is not a story for the faint of heart. It's full of incest, treachery, gods, treachery, and much more. You'll recognize a couple characters from the Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is a very, very intricate story, and it does take time to understand, but once you've got a grasp on it, it's pretty mindblowing.
Also, you get to see Sauron put to shame by a man, his girlfriend, and their loyal dog.
I was always under the impression that the hobbits were not so easily corrupted by the ring, because their race had never wielded rings of power nor had any made for them, unlike the elves, dwarves and men.
The lesser Rings weren't (exactly) related. It was apparently an innate property of Hobbits - even Gollum should have faded away a long time before the story began. Speculations on why the Hobbits should have such a property I think everyone else in this thread explained better than I could.
The Rings for the other races are an interesting question, though. The Elves alone made their three rings, so it's understandable they wouldn't corrupt the Elves, and there's no reason why the Ring of Power wouldn't corrupt Elves, especially High Elves like Galadriel. Men need no explanation. But Dwarves...we learn in the Lord of the Rings that Dwarves could not be corrupted by the rings Sauron gave them, and they would not fade away. The only thing Sauron could get them to do was inflame the Dwarves' natural greed for wealth, which Sauron could then manipulate (if he was lucky) to bring about their demise. But as far as we are told, it's a perfectly natural Dwarven greed, not the evil corrupting greed we would expect. So to what degree would Dwarves be affected by the One Ring, anyway? Unlike Elves and Men, Dwarves were designed by their creator Aule to specifically have a lot of endurance and incorruptibility. So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
I don't hate the movies - they definitely look cool and were cool to watch - but I strongly disagree that they captured the feel of the book. The book had completely different themes and characters that acted and felt much differently. There were some things changed just for cheap dramatic reasons - Treebeard was determined to march to Isenguard in the book, and he held an Entmoot to convince as many other Ents as possible to come along, which wasn't hard. As Treebeard explained, they all wanted to because of the terrible things Saruman had done, and the Ents felt like it was the last thing they could do for the world before they all fell into their tree-sleep. In the movie, the Ents say no, so Merry and Pippin have to resort to tricking Treebeard - supposedly the oldest and wisest guy alive - into going into a rage and unilaterally ordering the Ents to attack. That's the kind of thing that bothers people, I think. Elrond, Denethor, Faramir, and others get the same kind of treatment.
The Scouring of the Shire was a crucial part of the book. There were signs that something was amiss in The Shire from the beginning of the book, and Elrond wanted to send Merry and Pippin back from Rivendell to The Shire so that the Hobbits could be roused against the threat, and he is only convinced against his better judgment. In Lothlorien, Sam sees in Galadriel's mirror the destruction of The Shire and wants very badly to go back, but Galadriel explains that it's foolish to make decisions based on the mirror. When everyone arrives in Isenguard, they find Hobbit pipe-weed that Saruman has been importing on a large scale. At one point, Saruman warns the Hobbits that they should hurry back home, and Gandalf mentions more than once that Hobbits and The Shire, previously unknown to Sauron, are taking his full attention now. So in the end, the Hobbits and Gandalf return - but Gandalf leaves before they arrive in The Shire, because his work is done, and what remains is up to them to deal with (and Gandalf evidently knows something.) The Hobbits return to The Shire, drive out all the Men, and rebuild it as best they can - a work that is greatly aided by Galadriel's gift to Sam. But when they find out Saruman is behind it at all, Frodo forgives him and tells him to go on his way.
That's a very important part of the book. Despite everything Saruman had done, Frodo forgave him and wanted him to have another chance at redemption - and for Saruman, that was the worst fate imaginable. Of course, his chance didn't last too long since Wormtongue stabbed him in the back right afterwards.:) But The Scouring of the Shire wrapped up two big themes in the book. One, that there's a price to be paid if you go out and accomplish great things. The Hobbits as a whole saw The Shire ruined, but the fate of the whole world had rested on all the Hobbits going. If Merry had not gone, the Nazgul would have claimed many more victims. If Pippin had not looked into the Palantir, Gandalf might have been lost and Aragorn wouldn't have known he needed to lead the dead (which were harmless in the book; they could only instill great fear). If they both hadn't gone, the Ents might have been involved too late. If Sam had not gone, then Frodo would have failed. If Frodo didn't go, then, well. The Hobbits made a necessary sacrifice, even if they didn't know it at the time. This was also symbolized by Frodo's strange illnesses until he left for the West, and his inability to really enjoy life. The second one was of redemption and the growth of the Hobbits - even Saruman deserved a second chance.
You can say just as much about the other things that were left out or changed. Even Bombadil. If you've read the background materials on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, you know that Tolkien wrote, rewrote, rewrote, and rewrote every story he wrote, including Lord of the Rings, which took him over ten years to finish, and was only a side-story to his
Config (bookmark, settings, stored password, etc.) syncing, what Mozilla used to call Mesh, is now in the 4.0 beta. That's a feature I don't need or want.
Chrome and Opera have had the same feature for a while. Are they also bloated?
"Has features I don't want" is a funny definition of bloated anyway. Tons of people never use tabbed browsing - does that make all modern browsers bloated because that's a feature they don't need or want? Or are your needs the gold standard of bloatedness?
The syncing feature isn't even on by default, so I'm not even sure how it bothers you. I didn't even notice it was there until you posted that.
1) Mozilla are good at lying about benchmarks (actually, we already knew that, they've been claiming the next big firefox release would be faster than everything for a while now)
Well, the next Firefox beta does include a new Javascript JIT. But I'm sure that couldn't make any kind of difference. Mozilla is clearly just lying.
The current Firefox betas also include hardware acceleration - supposed to be enabled by default now, but I had to do it manually. That makes a huge difference on some jobs that completely blows non-HW accelerated browsers out of the water. Check out this, for example.
Well, Firefox's default behavior is to serve up your keystrokes to google as well, so I think the main point is that all three browsers' defaults aren't privacy friendly.
No, it isn't, unless you're typing in the search bar and not the location bar.
If the bill changed, then it wasn't the same bill. This has been tried in the courts; they have to make sure there are no differences other than trivial misspellings. Also, it's a revenue bill, because it includes a tax-- and shucks, I guess that's what their argument is for attempting reconciliation!
No, it doesn't.
All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
According to you, practically every bill passed in the last 200 years would be unconstitutional. Unless you're misunderstanding me -- what I am saying is that the House introduced a bill and passed it, the Senate took up the bill, amended it, and passed it, and then the House passed the amended bill because the House and the Senate must of course pass identical versions of the bill. Usually this is dealt with in a conference between the House and the Senate, but the Republicans blocked this route. Reconciliation, at any rate, is not a new or nefarious tactic -- both parties have done it all the time. There is also very strict limitations on what can be changed with reconciliation; only things exactly relating to the budget may be added or remove, as determined by the parliamentarian (neither Democrats nor Republicans get to decide all by themselves what is allowed under the Senate rules). There's nothing nefarious going on here. Indeed, the opposition to reconciliation completely baffles me. Don't you want the Cornhusker kickback removed?
The Constitution says that all bills must originate in the House. This bill actually originated in the Senate; therefore, it is unconstitutional. A silly technicality, I know.
First of all, no, the Constitution doesn't say that. It says all bills raising revenue must begin in the House -- which, in this case, is true. Second of all, the bill originated in the House, passed the House, was basically rewritten by the Senate, passed by the Senate with a supermajority, and then passed by the House again, and then signed by Obama.
It gives them power to do the Enumeration. It's not a catch-all to include non-Enumeration-related questions.
Sorry, but the Founding Fathers (you know, the guys who actually wrote the silly thing) and the Supreme Court disagree with your interpretation of the clause. I think they have slightly more authority on the subject than Slashdot commenters. Jefferson asked one question about slaves and then asked for a listing of the sex and color of all free persons in a household. The Supreme Court ruled time and again that the census did indeed have the power to ask more questions than "how many people are here."
point of information: if the House had passed the Senate bill verbatim there would be no need for a reconcilliation bill. there are differences between the two bills.
No, the bills were identical, but the House didn't like the Senate bill so they passed the Senate bill plus a reconciliation bill making changes. The Senate bill has been passed and signed into law. The reconciliation bill is still making it's way through Congress -- the Senate kicked it back to the House today because of some student loan provisions. Reconciliation doesn't actually have anything to do with bringing two different bills into line. The Wikipedia page describes it pretty well.
They asked for number of slaves in that census only because slaves were counted as 3/5 population for representative reasons.
Fortunately, since we no long have the institution of slavery, there should be less questions on it now than back then.
I don't think you read the questions. The 1790 includes a question on slaves and then questions on sex and race. Jefferson explicitly asked what race the free members of the household were. And we do, functionally, not have a whole lot of new questions. The new ones fall into two categories: 1) checking to make sure you gave the right number of people and 2) providing information the Census Bureau can use to contact you if they discover irregularities in your census form. Not that there's any reason we shouldn't have more questions, if we have a perfectly good use for them.
On your second point - Constitution trumps Title 13.
On your first point, we'll have to leave the interpretation of that up to the courts. Oh, wait - Already done, in response to this exact issue:
"Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by congress, possesses, or can be invested with, a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen." (05/26/1894, Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447, 479)
The Constitution explicitly says that the census is conducted in a manner determined by law, i.e., Title 13. What part of this do you not understand?
And how about instead of quoting irrelevant court cases willy-nilly, we actually look at Census-related court cases?
As early as 1870, the Supreme Court characterized as unquestionable the power of Congress to require both an enumeration and the collection of statistics in the census. The Legal Tender Cases, Tex.1870; 12 Wall., U.S., 457, 536, 20 L.Ed. 287. In 1901, a District Court said the Constitution's census clause (Art. 1, Sec. 2, Clause 3) is not limited to a headcount of the population and "does not prohibit the gathering of other statistics, if 'necessary and proper,' for the intelligent exercise of other powers enumerated in the constitution, and in such case there could be no objection to acquiring this information through the same machinery by which the population is enumerated." United States v. Moriarity, 106 F. 886, 891 (S.D.N.Y.1901).
The census does not violate the Fourth Amendment. Morales v. Daley, 116 F. Supp. 2d 801, 820 (S.D. Tex. 2000).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the District Court decision on October 10, 2001, 275 F.3d 45. The U.S. Supreme Court denied petition for writ of certiorari on February 19, 2002, 534 U.S. 1135. No published opinions were filed with these rulings.
These decisions are consistent with the Supreme Court's recent description of the census as the "linchpin of the federal statistical system... collecting data on the characteristics of individuals, households, and housing units throughout the country." Dept. of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives, 525 U.S. 316, 341 (1999).
The Supreme Court has said this radical libertarianism is wrong for hundreds of years. Thomas Jefferson said this radical libertiarianism is wrong by including questions related to sex, age, and race (not just slaves!) implicitly. The Constitution makes it clear with the "law directs" clause. Basically, it's as simple as you are totally wrong.
that went out the window a long time ago. Look at obamacare. that's now a law and the senate had no say in the matter. It's supposed to require a 2/3 majority in the senate according to the constitution. Right or wrong, it's wasn't passed by constitutionally mandated process.
Where in the Constitution does it say that it would have required a 2/3rds vote?
I'll give you a hint: it doesn't.
The Senate has arbitrary rules, decided by the Senate at the beginning of each term, that it takes 60 votes to cut off debate in the event of a filibuster. Here's a tip: the health care bill passed the Senate with 60 votes. The House then passed the Senate bill verbatim. Now they're passing a reconciliation bill, under Senate rules, that cannot be filibustered.
My biggest problem with the census is that the government is actively trying to include illegal immigrants in the process. My issue with that is that I don't want them counted. They have no right to vote and thus should have no influence on the number of congresscritters each state gets.
The Founding Fathers counted slaves (well, parts of them) and women in 1790. They didn't have the right to vote. We still count children. They don't have the right to vote. Of course, in the Founding Fathers' time, there was no such thing as s legal vs illegal immigrant yet, but immigrants were counted the same as citizens. The Census was intended to count everyone, whether they could vote or not.
Too bad Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution doesn't allow collecting that information - Or anything except for number of residents, and that established legal precedent (since 1894, and never reversed) expressly forbids the government collecting anything else under the guise of the "census".
Can you point me to where it says you can't do that? In fact, I'm going to go ahead and bold a sentence I don't think you read.
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the state of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.
According to you, every Census taken since 1790 was illegal. See my other post for the original 1790 census.
Says who? The US Constitution thats who says what the US Census is for.
Article 1, Section 2: "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
You want more data collected and used in different ways? Change the Constitution.
I wonder how the Founding Father's interpreted that? Well, let's see the questions that Thomas Jefferson asked on his 1790 census.
* Head of Household
* Number of Free White males of 16 years and upward
* Number of Free White males under 16 years
* Number of Free White females
* Number of All other free persons (by sex and color )
* Number of slaves
From here: http://www.gengateway.com/census/1790_census.htm. Hmm. I suspect Thomas Jefferson may have had a better idea of what the Constitution meant than the libertarian fanatics who suggest breaking the law (it is illegal not to answer every question on the Census, and wastes taxpayer money as they to hire more people to come to people's doors and find stuff out).
Just for comparison purposes, let's take a look at the 2010 short-form census that the vast majority of people are receiving.
How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010?
Were there any additional people staying here April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1?
Is this house, apartment, or mobile home: owned with mortgage, owned without mortgage, rented, occupied without rent?
What is your telephone number?
Please provide information for each person living here. Start with a person here who owns or rents this house, apartment, or mobile home. If the owner or renter lives somewhere else, start with any adult living here. This will be Person 1. What is Person 1's name?
What is Person 1's sex?
What is Person 1's age and Date of Birth?
Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin?
What is Person 1's race?
Does Person 1 sometimes live or stay somewhere else?
And that the bill in question is pretty much deficit-neutral only because it starts taxes immediately but delays benefits for 4 years? It's "deficit neutral" because it uses 10 years of taxes to pay for 6 years of benefits.
How do you explain the second ten year period, during which 1.2 trillion (quite a lot more) is cut from the deficit? Do you really think the CBO is that stupid?
On top of that, it does not say "you must buy it or we will provide it", rather it says "you must buy it or pay a fee (at some undetermined time of some undetermined amount)".
The fees are specified in the bill. They're not some magic number. The last thing I saw was beginning at $95 or 0.5% of your income, whichever is higher. It is phased in, so it increases over the next couple of years. Of course, most people will be covered by the employer mandate and won't have to purchase insurance themselves. Every employer with more than 50 employees must purchase health insurance for their employees. This all begins in 2014.
And on top of that there is nothing saying "we will ensure that you can afford to buy insurance" - the exchanges are not guaranteed to accomplish this.
I think you somehow missed out on the part where the government subsidizes the health insurance costs for everyone making under $88,000 a year, as well as the expansion of Medicaid to cover more people.
No. The only one that's really left appears to be the Third, which prevents the quartering of soldiers in private homes.
I know it's popular to think that the government is taking more and more of our rights away, but I don't see how that's the case. For example, in 2008, the Supreme Court dramatically broadened the scope of the Second Amendment to say that the federal government has virtually no power to institute any kind of gun control on federal property. This is obviously an increase in freedom over what had been settled law. The Supreme Court will soon be taking up the issue of whether or not state gun control is legal. I'd say our First Amendment rights have been greatly strengthened too over time. When John Adams was President, he arrested dozens of people for saying things he didn't like. Nowadays, we can say whatever we like about a President. Not only that, it's a lot easier to get an audience, thanks to the Internet. The list goes on and on.
Can you explain how, exactly, our freedoms are less than they formerly were?
This time it's going to be closed up, have a centralized app store that only sells approved products, and yet people are considering it newsworthy and even predict some success.
Predict some success? The Apple tablet has been a huge story even in the mainstream press for months and it's been nothing but fawning, salivating coverage about how this is the Next Big Thing. With all that advertising, I'm sure it's safe to say those predictions are right -- it's going to be a huge success, regardless of the factors you mention and regardless of whether it's actually good. I can't imagine any other company getting such adulatory coverage everywhere from the New York Times to Reuters to PC World for months about a product nobody even actually knows anything about.
Welcome back to 2008. There was major improvement in javascript engines during 2009 in all other browsers than IE and Firefox. Chrome and Opera have incredibly fast javascript renderers and they're pushing it even more in next Opera version.
Firefox 3.5 was released in June, with new Javascript improvements via Tracemonkey (a JIT compilation engine) that make it comparable with Chrome. I just tried out the demos and Firefox does not noticeable lag and it did not use more than 10% CPU, which is about the same as a normal Flash video for me.
Why shouldn't they oppose it? The Democrats aren't interested in meeting in the middle. They are interested in pushing their own agenda. The fact that they can't even convince the moderates in their own party to go along with some of the stuff they've tried to pass ought to tell you something. Mind you, this is exactly how the GOP operated when they had control, but the silence coming from the man who promised us a new kind of politics is deafening, isn't it?
Are you serious?
The Democrats have made concession after concession to the Republicans on every major bill they've tried to get through Congress, and the Republicans just move the goalposts. This is why we ended up with a watered-down, crap stimulus bill. This is why we're ending up with a watered-down, crap health reform bill. The Republicans are taking obstructionist tactics to new extremes, like "accidentally" losing their voting cards, and filibustering a defense slash war-funding bill in the hopes that the Senate won't even be able to debate the health insurance reform bill. Meanwhile, the Democrats refuse to use the options at their disposal, like reconciliation, to pass the health care bill without bipartisan support or a supermajority. Senator Baucus worked with Republicans for ages on his version of the health care bill, only for them to oppose it anyway. Republican Senators gleefully announce that they intend to break Obama and make health care his waterloo. Republicans previously for health care reform suddenly oppose it for nebulous reasons.
100% party unity is unrealistic for the Democrats on any issue, and the Democrats have 60 members in their caucus in the Senate, not 60 Democrats. Senator Lieberman lost his Democratic primary and garnered more Republican votes than his Democratic opponent, and also more than his Republican opponent. He opposes pretty much every big-ticket Democratic agenda item. That's hardly a party-line Democrat to begin with. Other Democrats are suggesting they will vote against the bill because of a lack of cost-control options like the public option (removed to appease Republicans, despite it's 60%+ support among the public), or because of compromises made to the Republicans, which have garnered no Republican votes and only weakened the bill.
The Republicans don't want to meet in the middle, and the Democrats are fools for trying to act bipartisan. All they get for it is Republicans shrilly insisting that the Democrats are bullying them around any time they want to pass any of the legislation they were elected to pass. The Republicans don't oppose the health care bill on ideological grounds. Plenty of Republicans have supported health care legislation more liberal than what's in the Senate today, such as, say, Richard Nixon. Mitt Romney imposed a very similar plan to the one in the Senate now while he was governor. And so on and so on and so on. It wasn't until the current cycle that Republicans became opposed to plans such as the one now before the Senate. The ideology behind conservatism didn't suddenly change. No, the Republicans made a political decision that it was in their best interest to do their best to attack and bring down any initiatives Obama came up with.
The Republicans aren't opposed to the health care reform bill for any other reason than they were determined to make the Democrats failures. And they're doing an excellent job of it.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes one Senator to make a hold work. It takes 41 Senators (in theory) to make a filibuster work. In practice, a single Senator merely has to declare he intends to filibuster a bill in the Senate and the bill is filibustered. The Senate does not actually carry out actual filibusters anymore, where people get up and talk for hours, and the Republican party has voted in virtual lockstep in the past decade or so, ensuring they always have the votes if it comes down to it (Democrats tend to be in constant disarray, cf. Joe Lieberman.)
Graph out the number of filibusters per Congress. They remain low for centuries, and then they suddenly skyrocket in the past decade, with pretty much every year shattering the previous record. The 111th Congress broke the record not even a year in. We've even seen the filibustering of bills everyone agrees on just to delay the introduction of other bills- for example, Republicans filibustered a defense spending bill just to delay debate on the health reform bill. The tactic of minority parties in the modern Senate is simply to delay and stop everything.
That's what I mean by the rules are insane.
I'm glad he's doing this, but this exemplifies how insane Senate rules and traditions are - all it takes is one Senator to stop anything. It was bad enough when Senators had more discretion, but nowadays you have Senators putting holds on everything and filibustering every single bill that comes through the Senate. It's ridiculous.
Or cool Elves! By the time of the Lord of the Rings, the only remaining Elves are the uncultured types (Legolas) and the aging hippies laying around and doing nothing but reminiscing about better days (Elrond and Galadriel). The Silmarillion is like, their Woodstock with fire and demons. Take Feanor, the greatest Elf ever to live. You know the Palantir? Those were like, one of his weekend projects he did when he got bored one day. When he wasn't making cool stuff, he was standing up to the Man. And by that, I mean when the most powerful god in Middle-Earth came knocking, the guy who could take on all the other gods alone in the beginning, the guy who kept Sauron around as a pet, Feanor slammed his door in the dude's face and told him to gtfo. This dude's last words were basically "DO IT BIG, GUYS. DO IT BIG."
And you know how all the Elves in LotR are goody-two-shoes pansies? Not in The Silmarillion. Do things like "the Kinslayings", "the Curse of the Noldor", the "Oath of Feanor", and "The Grinding Ice" sound like pansy crap to you? When these Elves showed up, the Big Bad had to invent dragons because Orcs were completely and utterly outmatched. When they saw Balrogs, these Elves didn't call out for Gandalf. Feanor took on multiple Balrogs and their troll-guard at once. Glorfindel - the same dude who got cut from the LotR movies - fights and kills a Balrog. And dragons, oh man, were there dragons. Smaug in the Hobbit is like a baby dragon. Ancalagon the Black crushed mountains (plural) when he fell from the skies.
The Silmarillion - if you take the time to get past Genesis, which is important backstory - is not a story for the faint of heart. It's full of incest, treachery, gods, treachery, and much more. You'll recognize a couple characters from the Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is a very, very intricate story, and it does take time to understand, but once you've got a grasp on it, it's pretty mindblowing.
Also, you get to see Sauron put to shame by a man, his girlfriend, and their loyal dog.
The lesser Rings weren't (exactly) related. It was apparently an innate property of Hobbits - even Gollum should have faded away a long time before the story began. Speculations on why the Hobbits should have such a property I think everyone else in this thread explained better than I could.
The Rings for the other races are an interesting question, though. The Elves alone made their three rings, so it's understandable they wouldn't corrupt the Elves, and there's no reason why the Ring of Power wouldn't corrupt Elves, especially High Elves like Galadriel. Men need no explanation. But Dwarves...we learn in the Lord of the Rings that Dwarves could not be corrupted by the rings Sauron gave them, and they would not fade away. The only thing Sauron could get them to do was inflame the Dwarves' natural greed for wealth, which Sauron could then manipulate (if he was lucky) to bring about their demise. But as far as we are told, it's a perfectly natural Dwarven greed, not the evil corrupting greed we would expect. So to what degree would Dwarves be affected by the One Ring, anyway? Unlike Elves and Men, Dwarves were designed by their creator Aule to specifically have a lot of endurance and incorruptibility. So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
I don't hate the movies - they definitely look cool and were cool to watch - but I strongly disagree that they captured the feel of the book. The book had completely different themes and characters that acted and felt much differently. There were some things changed just for cheap dramatic reasons - Treebeard was determined to march to Isenguard in the book, and he held an Entmoot to convince as many other Ents as possible to come along, which wasn't hard. As Treebeard explained, they all wanted to because of the terrible things Saruman had done, and the Ents felt like it was the last thing they could do for the world before they all fell into their tree-sleep. In the movie, the Ents say no, so Merry and Pippin have to resort to tricking Treebeard - supposedly the oldest and wisest guy alive - into going into a rage and unilaterally ordering the Ents to attack. That's the kind of thing that bothers people, I think. Elrond, Denethor, Faramir, and others get the same kind of treatment.
The Scouring of the Shire was a crucial part of the book. There were signs that something was amiss in The Shire from the beginning of the book, and Elrond wanted to send Merry and Pippin back from Rivendell to The Shire so that the Hobbits could be roused against the threat, and he is only convinced against his better judgment. In Lothlorien, Sam sees in Galadriel's mirror the destruction of The Shire and wants very badly to go back, but Galadriel explains that it's foolish to make decisions based on the mirror. When everyone arrives in Isenguard, they find Hobbit pipe-weed that Saruman has been importing on a large scale. At one point, Saruman warns the Hobbits that they should hurry back home, and Gandalf mentions more than once that Hobbits and The Shire, previously unknown to Sauron, are taking his full attention now. So in the end, the Hobbits and Gandalf return - but Gandalf leaves before they arrive in The Shire, because his work is done, and what remains is up to them to deal with (and Gandalf evidently knows something.) The Hobbits return to The Shire, drive out all the Men, and rebuild it as best they can - a work that is greatly aided by Galadriel's gift to Sam. But when they find out Saruman is behind it at all, Frodo forgives him and tells him to go on his way.
That's a very important part of the book. Despite everything Saruman had done, Frodo forgave him and wanted him to have another chance at redemption - and for Saruman, that was the worst fate imaginable. Of course, his chance didn't last too long since Wormtongue stabbed him in the back right afterwards. :) But The Scouring of the Shire wrapped up two big themes in the book. One, that there's a price to be paid if you go out and accomplish great things. The Hobbits as a whole saw The Shire ruined, but the fate of the whole world had rested on all the Hobbits going. If Merry had not gone, the Nazgul would have claimed many more victims. If Pippin had not looked into the Palantir, Gandalf might have been lost and Aragorn wouldn't have known he needed to lead the dead (which were harmless in the book; they could only instill great fear). If they both hadn't gone, the Ents might have been involved too late. If Sam had not gone, then Frodo would have failed. If Frodo didn't go, then, well. The Hobbits made a necessary sacrifice, even if they didn't know it at the time. This was also symbolized by Frodo's strange illnesses until he left for the West, and his inability to really enjoy life. The second one was of redemption and the growth of the Hobbits - even Saruman deserved a second chance.
You can say just as much about the other things that were left out or changed. Even Bombadil. If you've read the background materials on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, you know that Tolkien wrote, rewrote, rewrote, and rewrote every story he wrote, including Lord of the Rings, which took him over ten years to finish, and was only a side-story to his
Chrome and Opera have had the same feature for a while. Are they also bloated?
"Has features I don't want" is a funny definition of bloated anyway. Tons of people never use tabbed browsing - does that make all modern browsers bloated because that's a feature they don't need or want? Or are your needs the gold standard of bloatedness?
The syncing feature isn't even on by default, so I'm not even sure how it bothers you. I didn't even notice it was there until you posted that.
Well, the next Firefox beta does include a new Javascript JIT. But I'm sure that couldn't make any kind of difference. Mozilla is clearly just lying.
The current Firefox betas also include hardware acceleration - supposed to be enabled by default now, but I had to do it manually. That makes a huge difference on some jobs that completely blows non-HW accelerated browsers out of the water. Check out this, for example.
My problem with two letter words is when you have someone who abuses them, you quickly end up with a nigh-unplayable board.
No, it isn't, unless you're typing in the search bar and not the location bar.
No, it doesn't. All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
According to you, practically every bill passed in the last 200 years would be unconstitutional. Unless you're misunderstanding me -- what I am saying is that the House introduced a bill and passed it, the Senate took up the bill, amended it, and passed it, and then the House passed the amended bill because the House and the Senate must of course pass identical versions of the bill. Usually this is dealt with in a conference between the House and the Senate, but the Republicans blocked this route. Reconciliation, at any rate, is not a new or nefarious tactic -- both parties have done it all the time. There is also very strict limitations on what can be changed with reconciliation; only things exactly relating to the budget may be added or remove, as determined by the parliamentarian (neither Democrats nor Republicans get to decide all by themselves what is allowed under the Senate rules). There's nothing nefarious going on here. Indeed, the opposition to reconciliation completely baffles me. Don't you want the Cornhusker kickback removed?
First of all, no, the Constitution doesn't say that. It says all bills raising revenue must begin in the House -- which, in this case, is true. Second of all, the bill originated in the House, passed the House, was basically rewritten by the Senate, passed by the Senate with a supermajority, and then passed by the House again, and then signed by Obama.
Sorry, but the Founding Fathers (you know, the guys who actually wrote the silly thing) and the Supreme Court disagree with your interpretation of the clause. I think they have slightly more authority on the subject than Slashdot commenters. Jefferson asked one question about slaves and then asked for a listing of the sex and color of all free persons in a household. The Supreme Court ruled time and again that the census did indeed have the power to ask more questions than "how many people are here."
No, the bills were identical, but the House didn't like the Senate bill so they passed the Senate bill plus a reconciliation bill making changes. The Senate bill has been passed and signed into law. The reconciliation bill is still making it's way through Congress -- the Senate kicked it back to the House today because of some student loan provisions. Reconciliation doesn't actually have anything to do with bringing two different bills into line. The Wikipedia page describes it pretty well.
I don't think you read the questions. The 1790 includes a question on slaves and then questions on sex and race. Jefferson explicitly asked what race the free members of the household were. And we do, functionally, not have a whole lot of new questions. The new ones fall into two categories: 1) checking to make sure you gave the right number of people and 2) providing information the Census Bureau can use to contact you if they discover irregularities in your census form. Not that there's any reason we shouldn't have more questions, if we have a perfectly good use for them.
The Constitution explicitly says that the census is conducted in a manner determined by law, i.e., Title 13. What part of this do you not understand?
And how about instead of quoting irrelevant court cases willy-nilly, we actually look at Census-related court cases?
The census does not violate the Fourth Amendment. Morales v. Daley, 116 F. Supp. 2d 801, 820 (S.D. Tex. 2000).
The Supreme Court has said this radical libertarianism is wrong for hundreds of years. Thomas Jefferson said this radical libertiarianism is wrong by including questions related to sex, age, and race (not just slaves!) implicitly. The Constitution makes it clear with the "law directs" clause. Basically, it's as simple as you are totally wrong.
Where in the Constitution does it say that it would have required a 2/3rds vote?
I'll give you a hint: it doesn't.
The Senate has arbitrary rules, decided by the Senate at the beginning of each term, that it takes 60 votes to cut off debate in the event of a filibuster. Here's a tip: the health care bill passed the Senate with 60 votes. The House then passed the Senate bill verbatim. Now they're passing a reconciliation bill, under Senate rules, that cannot be filibustered.
The Founding Fathers counted slaves (well, parts of them) and women in 1790. They didn't have the right to vote. We still count children. They don't have the right to vote. Of course, in the Founding Fathers' time, there was no such thing as s legal vs illegal immigrant yet, but immigrants were counted the same as citizens. The Census was intended to count everyone, whether they could vote or not.
Can you point me to where it says you can't do that? In fact, I'm going to go ahead and bold a sentence I don't think you read.
According to you, every Census taken since 1790 was illegal. See my other post for the original 1790 census.
I wonder how the Founding Father's interpreted that? Well, let's see the questions that Thomas Jefferson asked on his 1790 census.
From here: http://www.gengateway.com/census/1790_census.htm. Hmm. I suspect Thomas Jefferson may have had a better idea of what the Constitution meant than the libertarian fanatics who suggest breaking the law (it is illegal not to answer every question on the Census, and wastes taxpayer money as they to hire more people to come to people's doors and find stuff out).
Just for comparison purposes, let's take a look at the 2010 short-form census that the vast majority of people are receiving.
, like the age and DoB one, are from the 1800 census. Others, like the naming question, are a later addition because it was found that asking for names helped people list the correct number of people. But all in all, it's pretty much the same census the Founding Father's took. You're also missing the "in such manner as they shall by law direct" clause. Sure sounds to me like Congress can direct the Census people to ask more and different questions according to the Constitution.
How do you explain the second ten year period, during which 1.2 trillion (quite a lot more) is cut from the deficit? Do you really think the CBO is that stupid?
The fees are specified in the bill. They're not some magic number. The last thing I saw was beginning at $95 or 0.5% of your income, whichever is higher. It is phased in, so it increases over the next couple of years. Of course, most people will be covered by the employer mandate and won't have to purchase insurance themselves. Every employer with more than 50 employees must purchase health insurance for their employees. This all begins in 2014.
I think you somehow missed out on the part where the government subsidizes the health insurance costs for everyone making under $88,000 a year, as well as the expansion of Medicaid to cover more people.
I know it's popular to think that the government is taking more and more of our rights away, but I don't see how that's the case. For example, in 2008, the Supreme Court dramatically broadened the scope of the Second Amendment to say that the federal government has virtually no power to institute any kind of gun control on federal property. This is obviously an increase in freedom over what had been settled law. The Supreme Court will soon be taking up the issue of whether or not state gun control is legal. I'd say our First Amendment rights have been greatly strengthened too over time. When John Adams was President, he arrested dozens of people for saying things he didn't like. Nowadays, we can say whatever we like about a President. Not only that, it's a lot easier to get an audience, thanks to the Internet. The list goes on and on.
Can you explain how, exactly, our freedoms are less than they formerly were?
Predict some success? The Apple tablet has been a huge story even in the mainstream press for months and it's been nothing but fawning, salivating coverage about how this is the Next Big Thing. With all that advertising, I'm sure it's safe to say those predictions are right -- it's going to be a huge success, regardless of the factors you mention and regardless of whether it's actually good. I can't imagine any other company getting such adulatory coverage everywhere from the New York Times to Reuters to PC World for months about a product nobody even actually knows anything about.
Firefox 3.5 was released in June, with new Javascript improvements via Tracemonkey (a JIT compilation engine) that make it comparable with Chrome. I just tried out the demos and Firefox does not noticeable lag and it did not use more than 10% CPU, which is about the same as a normal Flash video for me.
Are you serious?
The Democrats have made concession after concession to the Republicans on every major bill they've tried to get through Congress, and the Republicans just move the goalposts. This is why we ended up with a watered-down, crap stimulus bill. This is why we're ending up with a watered-down, crap health reform bill. The Republicans are taking obstructionist tactics to new extremes, like "accidentally" losing their voting cards, and filibustering a defense slash war-funding bill in the hopes that the Senate won't even be able to debate the health insurance reform bill. Meanwhile, the Democrats refuse to use the options at their disposal, like reconciliation, to pass the health care bill without bipartisan support or a supermajority. Senator Baucus worked with Republicans for ages on his version of the health care bill, only for them to oppose it anyway. Republican Senators gleefully announce that they intend to break Obama and make health care his waterloo. Republicans previously for health care reform suddenly oppose it for nebulous reasons.
100% party unity is unrealistic for the Democrats on any issue, and the Democrats have 60 members in their caucus in the Senate, not 60 Democrats. Senator Lieberman lost his Democratic primary and garnered more Republican votes than his Democratic opponent, and also more than his Republican opponent. He opposes pretty much every big-ticket Democratic agenda item. That's hardly a party-line Democrat to begin with. Other Democrats are suggesting they will vote against the bill because of a lack of cost-control options like the public option (removed to appease Republicans, despite it's 60%+ support among the public), or because of compromises made to the Republicans, which have garnered no Republican votes and only weakened the bill.
The Republicans don't want to meet in the middle, and the Democrats are fools for trying to act bipartisan. All they get for it is Republicans shrilly insisting that the Democrats are bullying them around any time they want to pass any of the legislation they were elected to pass. The Republicans don't oppose the health care bill on ideological grounds. Plenty of Republicans have supported health care legislation more liberal than what's in the Senate today, such as, say, Richard Nixon. Mitt Romney imposed a very similar plan to the one in the Senate now while he was governor. And so on and so on and so on. It wasn't until the current cycle that Republicans became opposed to plans such as the one now before the Senate. The ideology behind conservatism didn't suddenly change. No, the Republicans made a political decision that it was in their best interest to do their best to attack and bring down any initiatives Obama came up with.
The Republicans aren't opposed to the health care reform bill for any other reason than they were determined to make the Democrats failures. And they're doing an excellent job of it.