And read my comment. I said that legislation would be passed based on social norms and fincially insensed people. We've already seen this happen time and time again. There is nothing radical about this statement.
I also said that such legislation would hopefully be kept in check by public elections and the judicial branch. Which once again, we have seen over and over through out history. Sometimes for better, some times for worse. But it is how our system works.
Common sense, an educated consumer and political base, and a fair and honest media industry are the bane of the "slippery slope".
Perhaps I should have spoken more clearly. It is a slippery slope as we could easly go that route, but I am hopeful and expecting that our voting public will limit the adaptation of such norms and legislation.
I would like to point out though, that every example I listed as part of the "slippery slope" has already been implimented, practiced, and even discussed on slash dot. Would you even flinch if you met a parolee with a GPS bracelet? What if the police put a GPS unit on your car with out a warent?
some people believe if we allow gays to marry, we also have to accept pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, polygamy...
Not I. My bone to pick is that right now Men and Women have different rights in the US. Not gays. All men have one set of rights. All women have another set of rights. Therefore, if we correct the differences in rights, any one subject to the US/States constitutions can have a legally binding marriage with any other person subject to the US/States constitutions.
Pedophilia is explicitly illegal, and that legality is applied equally regardless of gender. Beastiality is explicitly illegal (in most states), and that legality is applied equally regardless of gender. etc... etc... etc...
Either men and women are equal under the eyes of the law, or they are not. Currently, they are not.
or howabout: if we try to control assault weapons in the usa, the government is inevitably going to take away all guns in the usa
Again, not I. It's a moot point now. Regardless of what firearms I may or may not possess, the State and Federal government control such a superior force, that the 2nd amendment is largely worthless at this point.
or: if we teach evolution in schools, soon everyone will be a godless atheist
Yet again, not I. I'm already and agnostic married to an atheist. And I fully intend on educating my son on as many religious studies as he is interested in learning about. Religion is an intensely personal decision, and as such almost all schools and the vast majority of churches utterly lack the ability to truly connect a person to a spiritual truth. So why teach something the wrong way in public schools?
you believe if we accept child tracking by gps, we're on an unstoppable slippery slope into a black hole of everyone being tracked by gps
You sure like making assumptions about what I'm thinking, but yet again, you are wrong.
I said that such ideas can lead to social acceptance and generational gaps. Life styles change from generation to generation. Some of that is due to technology, and some of it is due to social norms. This tidbit introduces both of those forces of social change to bear together.
Will it be a slippery slope? Maybe. Will someone manage to get a law passed resulting in large sums of money trading hands based on this technology? Probably. Will the Supreme Court and election seasons keep the abuse of this technology largely in check? Hopefully.
Is it something I am going to lose sleep over tonight? Not in the least. It is something though, that I will keep an eye on from a legislative point of view and would likely write my senator about if any bills start showing up dealing with additional monitoring.
There is a huge difference between speculating about the future, being mindful of the risks, and taking appropriate action in response, and fear mongering.
For example, if I had said:
On September 11th we learned just how important it is to be free of these types of tracking devices. These vile devices empowered the terrorists to target innocent people. And the price of 9/11 was too high for us to bear again. We must prevent these terrorist devices from destroying our civil liberties at all costs. If we let the 9/11 like attacks on or freedoms to persist, they will absolutely bring about another bubble and bust on Wall Street. Crushing Main street just like someone crashed a plane into it. Only an America hater would buy one of these!
Now THAT would be fear mongering. Or a Dick Cheney speech. One or the other./shrug
I think the issue is less of a "Government will..." and more of a "Society will..."
Government is an echo of society with a number of players sticking their fingers in to turn a profit. So while this one girl's experiences won't likely change the government, it will lead to a generational gap in the social norms of human tracking.
If she is okay with it, and 20 some years down the she has a couple of kids heading to school, will she think back to her own tracking and figure it's a good idea for her kids? She propagates the idea to some of her friends, and you go from having 1 girl tracked, to a dozen kids tracked. And every year the idea spreads and with every generation it becomes more ubiquitous.
Until eventually, there is just enough social acceptability for the idea that a few cunning businessmen with political connections manage to get laws passed. Think of the children! All safely tracked by Acme child trackers. And of course Acme is turning a huge profit thanks to the government contracts, and they are donating handsomely to the senators that supported them.
Sure, it will just start with young kids. Then tweens and teens. Then parolees. Then registered sex offenders. Then habitual non-violent criminals. Then speeders. Slowly but surely, their use will become more and more wide spread.
These are interesting times we live in.
As for the OP, I'd say teach your daughter her home address, and help her memorize her bus number. All schools have spikes in kids on the wrong buses at the start of new class cycles. After a week, most kids will have their numbers memorized and they will know a few of the kids that they ride the bus with and it won't be an issue. At least, not until this fall when they start up with the regular school year and new bus routes come out.
Same here, I rebuild every other year and give my 1-year-old PC to my wife. We keep the same cases (I hand made a wood case that is built into my desk), peripherals, and monitors. So I just pick up a new mother board, memory, CPU, and graphics card. Every once and a while a new hard drive. $500 gets me a bitching machine.
You hit it, the cooling is for breaks and tires, as well as down pressure.
Every once and a while in the NASCAR races they'll show you a camera view from inside the wheel well. You can see when the driver hits the breaks the rotors literally become red-hot from the friction of trying to slow the car down.
Now imagine that same situation, with wider tires and faster speeds on tracks with significantly more braking.
Odds are though, that the frame they are starting with is from some company that produces frames for indy or some other circuit cars. Just as the Tesla Roadster is actually a Lotus frame and body. So the cooling requirements will likely vary significantly from the function of the imaged vehicle.
-Rick
Re:Brazilian Ethanol [Re:Don't blame me]
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Correct, but how many of GM/Fords US brand "Flex Fuel" vehicles have forced induction?
Most of them rely on fuel mappings, spark timing, and (some of them) valve timing. So even if they maintain the correct Air:Fuel mixture, they have no means of increasing compression to improve efficiency.
In vehicles designed to run on Ethanol, it's not a bad fuel. But in the current crop of US Flex Fuel vehicles, we're left with crappy designs that get mediocre gas mileage and horrendous Ethanol mileage.
Correct, so go pick your bone with Wikipedia, Wired, Boston Globe, Global Security, FAS, or any of the hundreds of other sites, organizations, and government departments that have long since been confirming the existance of such a facility.
Accusing me of confirming such a facility's existance would be akin to faulting someone for admiting to knowing of a certain formerly top secret military installation in southern Nevada not far from Las Vegas.
I ate that apple. Some of the best and worst times of my life. Some of the best and worst of society are contained in there.
Now, what exactly did I give away? That I was assigned to a unit? That we would be stationed at a facility? That's hardly telling anything of merit.
The facility had been (when I was in) top secret. While I was in the Corps, I was aware of civilian delivers to the facility. Since I have left active duty, I have learned that the facility I would have been working at has been declassified.
zOMG, string me up like a traitor for leaking vague references to a facility that is no longer top secret and has had it's location plastered on the front page of/.
I tell ya what, go down to your local recruiter and join up. You appear to hold Marines in quite high regard, so why not be all you can be? I can assure you, surviving even just a 4 year tour will be far more rewarding to your life than any amount of keyboard jockeying.
No joke, I was assigned to a tactical response unit while I was in the Marine Corps. I can't discuss much of the specifics, but we would get locked up in a highly secure facility just out side of Washington in case of an "emergency". The existence of the facility at the time was considered top secret.
Unfortunately, the local staff would often order out for food, and have it delivered.
So the secret wasn't all that secret, and is even less so now, seeing as how/. is posting about it.
So I follow the link and think, hey this is pretty cool. I grab some screen shots of my apps and run them through. Unsurprisingly, some old VB6 crap I'm still maintaining was scoring in the 5-10% range. The newer Web and Silverlight apps I've been working on are all over from 30%-70%. I'm thinking this software is pretty cool and we could use it to get rapid feedback on different layouts and styles.
So I send the link to one of my co-workers. He brings it up and posts a screen shot of his web site. We start talking about how we could use it and how it works. And we wind up with a little impromptu meeting at his cubicle. 5 people huddled around his desk checking out the rating system.
And then we hit the home page, were recent highly rated photo thumbnails are shown. And what do we see?
Some lady, buck naked, leaning on her shoulder blades, twisted up like a pretzel shooting an anal douche fountain a few feet into the air.
And that is why you never trust a machine to rate user submitted images.
I find it a bit ironic that a publicly posted essay on the evils of patents is footnoted by an explicit definition of copy rights and an additional copy right notice.
For someone who was so outspoken on opposing intellectual property, it intrigues me that his estate manager is exerting his intellectual property rights after his death.
My last experience in front of a judge in Wisconsin resulted in a very similar deferal for the state. When presented with applicable state statutes the Judge told me that he was unfamiliar with those laws (that I had faxed him as part of my arguement weeks before the trial) and due to his lack of knowledge he was going to side with the state.
He was rather chipper when he then told me I was free to hire a lawyer and appeal his decision.
Unfortunately, paying a lawyer $2500+ to get the state to drop a $1700 penalty was a bit further than I was willing to go for moral justice.
Actually FMA/FRE combined represented less than 20% of the subprime mortgage industry in 2006. I don't have the citation handy, but I can dig it up later. They were both to some extent regulated by the federal goverment on their actions in the sub-prime market. The rest of the banks in to top 20 subprime lenders list, were not controled under the same regulations, and were free to lend to unqualified buyers.
The problem was worsened by the removal of the glass-spiegleman act. Which had prevent private lending banks from working as investment banks. With that law out of the way, it allowed the private banks to utilize CDOs to securitize these sub-prime mortgages. And that's where the over leveraging really ballooned.
If it hadn't been for the excessive leveraging by other banks leading to a boom and bust of the housing market, FMA/FRE would have likely been just fine. Sure, they may have had some lean times, but nothing like what we saw as the market plumetted.
Do me a favor, take a political science 101 course. You can probably squeeze one in through night courses at your local community college or via any number of online offerings for relatively little cash.
Until you complete it, please, don't speak about such things.
I don't think name calling should be illegal either you illiterate humunculous. If that infantile jar of rotting grape fruit you are claiming to be your brain could keep up, you would see that I am all for the ability to call some one like you, of lessor stock, a cod sucking gutter slut.
That said. If I were to continuously do so, knowing that you were mentally unstable or knowing that my actions were having a destabilizing effect on your psyche, then it should be up to a Jury to decide if you are responsible.
Or would you like to claim "free speech" while screaming "FIRE!" at the back of crowded theaters?
If your actions, even just verbal actions, result in the death of another, why shouldn't you be held accountable?
instead of reducing the number of rights people have, we increase the responsibility that they must take for exercising those rights?
You want to cyber bully some one, go for it. But if that person commits suicide due to your actions, we'll hold you accountable for it.
Same with gun laws. You want a full auto machine gun? Go for it! You screw up with a gun, and we'll destroy your life.
Instead of teaching people not to do things, we should be teaching them that there are repercussions to the acts that they take. You have the freedom to f' up. But with that freedom comes the personal responsibility to not f'up.
Not that I saw. I remember seeing an explicit "Make IE8 your default browser?" dialogue show up. I'm not sure about XP, but on Vista 64, it behaived exactly as I expected it to and did not change any settings that I didn't tell it explicitly to do.
I would disagree with your first statements, that extremists have taken over either party.
I think that the Republican party has been pushing moderates out of their camp, and thus it is trending in the direction of extremism, but they still have a long way to go and plenty of time to come to their senses. As for the Democrats, comparing them to the Socialist movement is a huge leap. Heck, most "moderate" governments in the industrialized world see the US Democrat party as largely conservative (and thus the reason why people in the US joke about Europe being full of Communists). The left most mainstream Democrats are a hair left of the national center. The right most of mainstream Democrats are largely inline with the national center. Sure, there are left wing extremists in the Democrat party, but they have little to no influence on the party and are largely marginalized.
And I partially agree with your second statement. While the Republican base is shrinking, those who leave the party will go elsewhere. To the Democrats, one of the smaller 3rd parties, or off to start a new political party. I have no doubt though, that the marginalization of the Republican party will provide a fair bit of recruiting sources for right wing extremist groups.
One thing that has really confused me is the reaction on both sides to the Senator Spector move.
By switching to the D's they gain (with Franken) their magic 60 votes (which the reasoning for aggravates me to no end, I think Reed and Peloci have done more to create the schism in Congress than any Republican). So that on the surface looks bad for Republicans.
But look at the underlying currents and bigger picture. In the 2010 election, if Spector runs as a Republican, he will lose the primary. The Republican who beats him will lose in the general election though. So Penn would wind up with a more liberal Democrat as its representative.
Instead, Penn will wind up with the exact same representative. One who had been a moderate Republican. Sure, for issues he isn't really vested in, Spector will probably continue to vote party lines, only now that party line is the Democrats, but anything that he is vested in, just like when he had an 'R' next to his name, he will continue to vote in his best interests. But with out the filibusterer, his vote wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway.
On the bright side for the Republicans though, Spector is on numerous boards and there are rumors that he's going to get into some more key positions as the newest Democrat in the Senate. It is likely that in those boards he will act is a very conservative way. Meaning that the outcome from those boards will be something closer to the likings of the Republicans than if the Democrats had put a more liberal Senator in his seat.
So the Republicans lose the quasi-filibuster, but they gain a strong conservative voice within the opposition.
Dems get past Reed's asstarded filibuster rules, but they lose a lot of their left moving momentum (which is probably actually good for them)
The difference is that our religions went through the Enlightenment and now even the shrinking percentage of our people who take their religion seriously ignore most of the less tolerant bits. They on the other hand haven't had their "Enlightenment" yet and they actually believe their religion.
I would recommend actually reading about history, perhaps you could stop by your local library and see what you could find on the history of Islam. But incase you are to embarased to be seen holding such a book, you could just hit up the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age for the highlights.
Please name me a 'tolerant' or 'moderate' majority Muslim population
There are no perfect examples. No country, regardless of ruling format nor primary religion is completely clean. But the majority citizens of both Turkey and Iran are good and tolerant people. Sure, they have extremist and social fringe groups, but so do we here in the US. So I doubt any country, even the US would fullfil your requirements.
The President, with the concurrence of a majority of Congress plus a majority of the American people believed opening a new front in Iraq (barring Saddam suddenly deciding to comply with the UN Resolutions that were the Casus Beli) was a prudent course of action.
Due to political manuevering, an amazing misinformation campaign, lies, decete, and an all round disregard for human life, American security, and the future of our economy. NOT going into war would have save thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, Trillions of dollars, and not have resulted in the gross growth of Presidential powers and government spending.
Strange meaning of silenced you have. There were months you couldn't turn on a Sunday talking heads show without that asshat showing up.
Here's the problem. You asked me to provide the name of someone who had been silenced by the government. If they had been successfully silenced by the government, then no one would know about it. If they had been unsuccessfully silenced by the government then they wouldn't have been silenced. So there is no way to fullfil your requirements. What we can say is that Wilson had irrifutable proof that some of the evidence being used by the administration to justify the war was false. At the time he was trying to go public with it, the Bush administration went out of its way to discredit him and make his, and his wife's life hell. The real bastardization of it was that those talking heads on TV were talking almost exclusively about Plame being outted and were completely skipping the root cause of the story that the evidence for which the war was based on was factually untrue.
Oh course not. KSM is a high ranking member of a terrorist organization we are at war with who was (rightly) thought to possess actionable intelligence.
Sure, and by using torture to question him, we gained some actionable intelligence and a whole lot of crap. And of that actionable intelligence, we could have likely gotten the same information, with out comprimizing our morals, through traditional skilled interrogation and investigation.
His children (unless they are old enough to be in the family business) are not. Not attacking innocent civilians on purpose is a core idea of civilized warfare.
Ahh, but KSM was not involved in a war, he was a terrorist, so he is, as you have stated, not protected by the Geneva convention, nor are his family or friends. We're already suspending our moral beliefs, so there is no limit to what we can do to this guy and his family. Which is why it scared the shit out of me when I read the white house memo about using family torture as a means of interrogation. Yes, the Bush Administration released memos describing the use of a pin vice on a ch
Slashdot Mirror
And read my comment. I said that legislation would be passed based on social norms and fincially insensed people. We've already seen this happen time and time again. There is nothing radical about this statement.
I also said that such legislation would hopefully be kept in check by public elections and the judicial branch. Which once again, we have seen over and over through out history. Sometimes for better, some times for worse. But it is how our system works.
Common sense, an educated consumer and political base, and a fair and honest media industry are the bane of the "slippery slope".
Perhaps I should have spoken more clearly. It is a slippery slope as we could easly go that route, but I am hopeful and expecting that our voting public will limit the adaptation of such norms and legislation.
I would like to point out though, that every example I listed as part of the "slippery slope" has already been implimented, practiced, and even discussed on slash dot. Would you even flinch if you met a parolee with a GPS bracelet? What if the police put a GPS unit on your car with out a warent?
-Rick
doh! good catch. I even wrote it down correctly before I posted. I think it's time to call it a day.
-Rick
some people believe if we allow gays to marry, we also have to accept pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, polygamy...
Not I. My bone to pick is that right now Men and Women have different rights in the US. Not gays. All men have one set of rights. All women have another set of rights. Therefore, if we correct the differences in rights, any one subject to the US/States constitutions can have a legally binding marriage with any other person subject to the US/States constitutions.
Pedophilia is explicitly illegal, and that legality is applied equally regardless of gender.
Beastiality is explicitly illegal (in most states), and that legality is applied equally regardless of gender.
etc...
etc...
etc...
Either men and women are equal under the eyes of the law, or they are not. Currently, they are not.
or howabout: if we try to control assault weapons in the usa, the government is inevitably going to take away all guns in the usa
Again, not I. It's a moot point now. Regardless of what firearms I may or may not possess, the State and Federal government control such a superior force, that the 2nd amendment is largely worthless at this point.
or: if we teach evolution in schools, soon everyone will be a godless atheist
Yet again, not I. I'm already and agnostic married to an atheist. And I fully intend on educating my son on as many religious studies as he is interested in learning about. Religion is an intensely personal decision, and as such almost all schools and the vast majority of churches utterly lack the ability to truly connect a person to a spiritual truth. So why teach something the wrong way in public schools?
you believe if we accept child tracking by gps, we're on an unstoppable slippery slope into a black hole of everyone being tracked by gps
You sure like making assumptions about what I'm thinking, but yet again, you are wrong.
I said that such ideas can lead to social acceptance and generational gaps. Life styles change from generation to generation. Some of that is due to technology, and some of it is due to social norms. This tidbit introduces both of those forces of social change to bear together.
Will it be a slippery slope? Maybe. Will someone manage to get a law passed resulting in large sums of money trading hands based on this technology? Probably. Will the Supreme Court and election seasons keep the abuse of this technology largely in check? Hopefully.
Is it something I am going to lose sleep over tonight? Not in the least. It is something though, that I will keep an eye on from a legislative point of view and would likely write my senator about if any bills start showing up dealing with additional monitoring.
There is a huge difference between speculating about the future, being mindful of the risks, and taking appropriate action in response, and fear mongering.
For example, if I had said:
On September 11th we learned just how important it is to be free of these types of tracking devices. These vile devices empowered the terrorists to target innocent people. And the price of 9/11 was too high for us to bear again. We must prevent these terrorist devices from destroying our civil liberties at all costs. If we let the 9/11 like attacks on or freedoms to persist, they will absolutely bring about another bubble and bust on Wall Street. Crushing Main street just like someone crashed a plane into it. Only an America hater would buy one of these!
Now THAT would be fear mongering. Or a Dick Cheney speech. One or the other. /shrug
-Rick
If my math is correct (and it is a BIG if) it's only the equivalent of like 370 watt/hr.
-Rick
I think the issue is less of a "Government will..." and more of a "Society will..."
Government is an echo of society with a number of players sticking their fingers in to turn a profit. So while this one girl's experiences won't likely change the government, it will lead to a generational gap in the social norms of human tracking.
If she is okay with it, and 20 some years down the she has a couple of kids heading to school, will she think back to her own tracking and figure it's a good idea for her kids? She propagates the idea to some of her friends, and you go from having 1 girl tracked, to a dozen kids tracked. And every year the idea spreads and with every generation it becomes more ubiquitous.
Until eventually, there is just enough social acceptability for the idea that a few cunning businessmen with political connections manage to get laws passed. Think of the children! All safely tracked by Acme child trackers. And of course Acme is turning a huge profit thanks to the government contracts, and they are donating handsomely to the senators that supported them.
Sure, it will just start with young kids. Then tweens and teens. Then parolees. Then registered sex offenders. Then habitual non-violent criminals. Then speeders. Slowly but surely, their use will become more and more wide spread.
These are interesting times we live in.
As for the OP, I'd say teach your daughter her home address, and help her memorize her bus number. All schools have spikes in kids on the wrong buses at the start of new class cycles. After a week, most kids will have their numbers memorized and they will know a few of the kids that they ride the bus with and it won't be an issue. At least, not until this fall when they start up with the regular school year and new bus routes come out.
-Rick
Same here, I rebuild every other year and give my 1-year-old PC to my wife. We keep the same cases (I hand made a wood case that is built into my desk), peripherals, and monitors. So I just pick up a new mother board, memory, CPU, and graphics card. Every once and a while a new hard drive. $500 gets me a bitching machine.
-Ric
You hit it, the cooling is for breaks and tires, as well as down pressure.
Every once and a while in the NASCAR races they'll show you a camera view from inside the wheel well. You can see when the driver hits the breaks the rotors literally become red-hot from the friction of trying to slow the car down.
Now imagine that same situation, with wider tires and faster speeds on tracks with significantly more braking.
Odds are though, that the frame they are starting with is from some company that produces frames for indy or some other circuit cars. Just as the Tesla Roadster is actually a Lotus frame and body. So the cooling requirements will likely vary significantly from the function of the imaged vehicle.
-Rick
Correct, but how many of GM/Fords US brand "Flex Fuel" vehicles have forced induction?
Most of them rely on fuel mappings, spark timing, and (some of them) valve timing. So even if they maintain the correct Air:Fuel mixture, they have no means of increasing compression to improve efficiency.
In vehicles designed to run on Ethanol, it's not a bad fuel. But in the current crop of US Flex Fuel vehicles, we're left with crappy designs that get mediocre gas mileage and horrendous Ethanol mileage.
-Rick
E85 and GM's Flex Fuel is a joke.
You need to either run E95+ in an engine designed to run on Ethanol, or you should run E10 or less in an engine designed to run on gas.
Ethanol has it's downsides, but if you drive a vehicle designed for it, it isn't as bad as the article makes it sound.
Flex Fuel though is a pile of shit. As usual, GM spent more money on advertising their Flex Fuel program than they did on actually implementing it.
To rule ethanol out completely is idiotic, almost as much so as forcing people who have vehicles not designed to run on ethanol to fuel up on E15.
-Rick
Yes, but then they would have to hire editors to clean up the summaries, verify links, and check for duplicate stories.
-Rick
Correct, so go pick your bone with Wikipedia, Wired, Boston Globe, Global Security, FAS, or any of the hundreds of other sites, organizations, and government departments that have long since been confirming the existance of such a facility.
Accusing me of confirming such a facility's existance would be akin to faulting someone for admiting to knowing of a certain formerly top secret military installation in southern Nevada not far from Las Vegas.
-Rick
My subtle attempt at military humor was not lost ;)
As for being a department of the Navy, that is correct.
We are the Mens department.
-Rick
I ate that apple. Some of the best and worst times of my life. Some of the best and worst of society are contained in there.
Now, what exactly did I give away? That I was assigned to a unit? That we would be stationed at a facility? That's hardly telling anything of merit.
The facility had been (when I was in) top secret. While I was in the Corps, I was aware of civilian delivers to the facility. Since I have left active duty, I have learned that the facility I would have been working at has been declassified.
zOMG, string me up like a traitor for leaking vague references to a facility that is no longer top secret and has had it's location plastered on the front page of /.
I tell ya what, go down to your local recruiter and join up. You appear to hold Marines in quite high regard, so why not be all you can be? I can assure you, surviving even just a 4 year tour will be far more rewarding to your life than any amount of keyboard jockeying.
-Rick
Ask the pizza delivery drivers.
No joke, I was assigned to a tactical response unit while I was in the Marine Corps. I can't discuss much of the specifics, but we would get locked up in a highly secure facility just out side of Washington in case of an "emergency". The existence of the facility at the time was considered top secret.
Unfortunately, the local staff would often order out for food, and have it delivered.
So the secret wasn't all that secret, and is even less so now, seeing as how /. is posting about it.
-Rick
So I follow the link and think, hey this is pretty cool. I grab some screen shots of my apps and run them through. Unsurprisingly, some old VB6 crap I'm still maintaining was scoring in the 5-10% range. The newer Web and Silverlight apps I've been working on are all over from 30%-70%. I'm thinking this software is pretty cool and we could use it to get rapid feedback on different layouts and styles.
So I send the link to one of my co-workers. He brings it up and posts a screen shot of his web site. We start talking about how we could use it and how it works. And we wind up with a little impromptu meeting at his cubicle. 5 people huddled around his desk checking out the rating system.
And then we hit the home page, were recent highly rated photo thumbnails are shown. And what do we see?
Some lady, buck naked, leaning on her shoulder blades, twisted up like a pretzel shooting an anal douche fountain a few feet into the air.
And that is why you never trust a machine to rate user submitted images.
-Rick
I find it a bit ironic that a publicly posted essay on the evils of patents is footnoted by an explicit definition of copy rights and an additional copy right notice.
For someone who was so outspoken on opposing intellectual property, it intrigues me that his estate manager is exerting his intellectual property rights after his death.
-Rick
My last experience in front of a judge in Wisconsin resulted in a very similar deferal for the state. When presented with applicable state statutes the Judge told me that he was unfamiliar with those laws (that I had faxed him as part of my arguement weeks before the trial) and due to his lack of knowledge he was going to side with the state.
He was rather chipper when he then told me I was free to hire a lawyer and appeal his decision.
Unfortunately, paying a lawyer $2500+ to get the state to drop a $1700 penalty was a bit further than I was willing to go for moral justice.
-Rick
Actually FMA/FRE combined represented less than 20% of the subprime mortgage industry in 2006. I don't have the citation handy, but I can dig it up later. They were both to some extent regulated by the federal goverment on their actions in the sub-prime market. The rest of the banks in to top 20 subprime lenders list, were not controled under the same regulations, and were free to lend to unqualified buyers.
The problem was worsened by the removal of the glass-spiegleman act. Which had prevent private lending banks from working as investment banks. With that law out of the way, it allowed the private banks to utilize CDOs to securitize these sub-prime mortgages. And that's where the over leveraging really ballooned.
If it hadn't been for the excessive leveraging by other banks leading to a boom and bust of the housing market, FMA/FRE would have likely been just fine. Sure, they may have had some lean times, but nothing like what we saw as the market plumetted.
-Rick
Do me a favor, take a political science 101 course. You can probably squeeze one in through night courses at your local community college or via any number of online offerings for relatively little cash.
Until you complete it, please, don't speak about such things.
-Rick
I don't think name calling should be illegal either you illiterate humunculous. If that infantile jar of rotting grape fruit you are claiming to be your brain could keep up, you would see that I am all for the ability to call some one like you, of lessor stock, a cod sucking gutter slut.
That said. If I were to continuously do so, knowing that you were mentally unstable or knowing that my actions were having a destabilizing effect on your psyche, then it should be up to a Jury to decide if you are responsible.
Or would you like to claim "free speech" while screaming "FIRE!" at the back of crowded theaters?
If your actions, even just verbal actions, result in the death of another, why shouldn't you be held accountable?
-Rick
So where were your outcries over the last 8 years as we were being driven into a fascist police state?
Do you even understand the concepts that you are touting? Or are you just spewing Savage drivel?
-Rick
instead of reducing the number of rights people have, we increase the responsibility that they must take for exercising those rights?
You want to cyber bully some one, go for it. But if that person commits suicide due to your actions, we'll hold you accountable for it.
Same with gun laws. You want a full auto machine gun? Go for it! You screw up with a gun, and we'll destroy your life.
Instead of teaching people not to do things, we should be teaching them that there are repercussions to the acts that they take. You have the freedom to f' up. But with that freedom comes the personal responsibility to not f'up.
-Rick
Not that I saw. I remember seeing an explicit "Make IE8 your default browser?" dialogue show up. I'm not sure about XP, but on Vista 64, it behaived exactly as I expected it to and did not change any settings that I didn't tell it explicitly to do.
-Rick
I would disagree with your first statements, that extremists have taken over either party.
I think that the Republican party has been pushing moderates out of their camp, and thus it is trending in the direction of extremism, but they still have a long way to go and plenty of time to come to their senses. As for the Democrats, comparing them to the Socialist movement is a huge leap. Heck, most "moderate" governments in the industrialized world see the US Democrat party as largely conservative (and thus the reason why people in the US joke about Europe being full of Communists). The left most mainstream Democrats are a hair left of the national center. The right most of mainstream Democrats are largely inline with the national center. Sure, there are left wing extremists in the Democrat party, but they have little to no influence on the party and are largely marginalized.
And I partially agree with your second statement. While the Republican base is shrinking, those who leave the party will go elsewhere. To the Democrats, one of the smaller 3rd parties, or off to start a new political party. I have no doubt though, that the marginalization of the Republican party will provide a fair bit of recruiting sources for right wing extremist groups.
One thing that has really confused me is the reaction on both sides to the Senator Spector move.
By switching to the D's they gain (with Franken) their magic 60 votes (which the reasoning for aggravates me to no end, I think Reed and Peloci have done more to create the schism in Congress than any Republican). So that on the surface looks bad for Republicans.
But look at the underlying currents and bigger picture. In the 2010 election, if Spector runs as a Republican, he will lose the primary. The Republican who beats him will lose in the general election though. So Penn would wind up with a more liberal Democrat as its representative.
Instead, Penn will wind up with the exact same representative. One who had been a moderate Republican. Sure, for issues he isn't really vested in, Spector will probably continue to vote party lines, only now that party line is the Democrats, but anything that he is vested in, just like when he had an 'R' next to his name, he will continue to vote in his best interests. But with out the filibusterer, his vote wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway.
On the bright side for the Republicans though, Spector is on numerous boards and there are rumors that he's going to get into some more key positions as the newest Democrat in the Senate. It is likely that in those boards he will act is a very conservative way. Meaning that the outcome from those boards will be something closer to the likings of the Republicans than if the Democrats had put a more liberal Senator in his seat.
So the Republicans lose the quasi-filibuster, but they gain a strong conservative voice within the opposition.
Dems get past Reed's asstarded filibuster rules, but they lose a lot of their left moving momentum (which is probably actually good for them)
Doesn't seem like that bad of a trade off, IMO.
-Rick
The difference is that our religions went through the Enlightenment and now even the shrinking percentage of our people who take their religion seriously ignore most of the less tolerant bits. They on the other hand haven't had their "Enlightenment" yet and they actually believe their religion.
I would recommend actually reading about history, perhaps you could stop by your local library and see what you could find on the history of Islam. But incase you are to embarased to be seen holding such a book, you could just hit up the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age for the highlights.
Please name me a 'tolerant' or 'moderate' majority Muslim population
There are no perfect examples. No country, regardless of ruling format nor primary religion is completely clean. But the majority citizens of both Turkey and Iran are good and tolerant people. Sure, they have extremist and social fringe groups, but so do we here in the US. So I doubt any country, even the US would fullfil your requirements.
The President, with the concurrence of a majority of Congress plus a majority of the American people believed opening a new front in Iraq (barring Saddam suddenly deciding to comply with the UN Resolutions that were the Casus Beli) was a prudent course of action.
Due to political manuevering, an amazing misinformation campaign, lies, decete, and an all round disregard for human life, American security, and the future of our economy. NOT going into war would have save thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, Trillions of dollars, and not have resulted in the gross growth of Presidential powers and government spending.
Strange meaning of silenced you have. There were months you couldn't turn on a Sunday talking heads show without that asshat showing up.
Here's the problem. You asked me to provide the name of someone who had been silenced by the government. If they had been successfully silenced by the government, then no one would know about it. If they had been unsuccessfully silenced by the government then they wouldn't have been silenced. So there is no way to fullfil your requirements. What we can say is that Wilson had irrifutable proof that some of the evidence being used by the administration to justify the war was false. At the time he was trying to go public with it, the Bush administration went out of its way to discredit him and make his, and his wife's life hell. The real bastardization of it was that those talking heads on TV were talking almost exclusively about Plame being outted and were completely skipping the root cause of the story that the evidence for which the war was based on was factually untrue.
Oh course not. KSM is a high ranking member of a terrorist organization we are at war with who was (rightly) thought to possess actionable intelligence.
Sure, and by using torture to question him, we gained some actionable intelligence and a whole lot of crap. And of that actionable intelligence, we could have likely gotten the same information, with out comprimizing our morals, through traditional skilled interrogation and investigation.
His children (unless they are old enough to be in the family business) are not. Not attacking innocent civilians on purpose is a core idea of civilized warfare.
Ahh, but KSM was not involved in a war, he was a terrorist, so he is, as you have stated, not protected by the Geneva convention, nor are his family or friends. We're already suspending our moral beliefs, so there is no limit to what we can do to this guy and his family. Which is why it scared the shit out of me when I read the white house memo about using family torture as a means of interrogation. Yes, the Bush Administration released memos describing the use of a pin vice on a ch