No, Avast ye scurvy viruses, dammit! Not everything that looks vaguely latin should be pluralized with an i, and most certainly nothing should be pluralized by changing the word-final "us" to "ii"! You're just a dumbass trying to look educated, and failing miserably. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/virus
I propose we foil the wet blankets, such as the parent, by referring to the singular as a "virius" instead of a "virus." These are the battles upon which the evolution of language is based!
Thomas Jefferson said, "If we are faithful to our country, if we acquiesce, with good will, in the decisions of the majority, and the nation moves in mass in the same direction, although it may not be that which every individual thinks best, we have nothing to fear from any quarter." Something also tells me that, unlike in 2005, the minority will not be protesting the inauguration of the choice of the majority.
I walk in, on my lunch break, to cast a vote towards the popular vote as I know where I live it counts for nothing.
What is with this idea that if you vote along with the majority your vote counts for something, and if you vote along with the minority it counts for nothing? Are you feeling that if the election goes your way, you somehow did that? 'Cause you didn't. It would have gone the same way if you hadn't voted. Unless the candidate wins by 1, your vote is equally significant/insignificant whether you vote with the minority or majority.
I guess this psychological phenomenon of thinking the vote is more meaningful if you vote for the winner is the reason why the press pushes poll results when their candidate is ahead, and tries to make it sound as much as possible like a foregone conclusion that their guy is going to win.
2. Convince the majority of the armed forces of the country that their is an EASIER, CHEAPER, less DANGEROUS way to remove the current political leader than starting a revolution.
80% of the armed forces are strongly Republican, so voting could be rationally suggested to do no such thing, except when Republicans are elected.
(No, it won't work if the country is spit geographically and the minority knows it will never convince the majority of their point of view, but it will work for 90% of the problems like say a moronic Republican government that destroys the economy, the environment, the international ties, etc.)
Uh huh. The moronic Democrats who believe that the moronic Republicans destroyed the economy, environment and international ties, believed it just as much in the last election as they did in this one. So voting doesn't do that either.
All voting does is establish rule by propaganda. In a given election cycle, power is gained by whoever has the best propaganda, combined with the most money to spread it, combined with the most cooperation from "news" organizations. Thinking people, being always a small minority, have no role in the system unless they themselves become propagandists.
Next to each name is a circle. You place an x in the circle for the candidate of your choice... Why do you need electronic voting or voting machines or anything else besides a paper ballot and a pencil. I'm honestly curious why this wouldn't work in the US.
1) Electronic tallying eliminates the errors introduced by hand-counting, giving a more accurate result. 2) Assuming you have to pay all the counters, electronic systems are cheaper. 3) Fraud prevention: i) Counting fraud far more difficult, as any such attempts would be apparent in the source code, ii) Audit trails can be provided in electronic systems, which are not possible if all the voting information is stored only in crates of paper ballots. In the latter systems, merely swapping out a real crate of ballots for a fraudulent one without being noticed is all it would take to perpetrate a massive fraud, and there's no audit trail to reveal that anything is amiss.
Why should you be confused? When you have a problem domain that encompasses strict accuracy, strict accountability, a strict audit trail, strict legal requirements, etc... etc... How could you possibly believe it could be anything other than hard?
Any securities trading software, as just one example, has all those requirements. I've personally developed several systems with many if not all of those requirements, though not on the same scale as a voting system. It is NOT hard... you just have to get the right people working on it.
The hardest part is not the voting technology. The hardest part is determining who is eligible to vote in the first place. My impression is that currently every unique name and address provided on a registration form is a potential vote, regardless of whether they all represent unique individuals or not. There would be some resistance to using SS#s to verify voter status, but I think it would be a step in the right direction. Biometrics could also work, but there would probably be even more resistance there. Heck, even the dyed purple fingers of the Afghanistan and Iraq elections provides more protection against multiple voting than anything we have in the US.
Since that would not be accepted as proof, what exactly do you suggest WOULD prove (and be repeateable) that God exists ?
The strongest proofs possible for anything are the proofs that are directly and internally perceived, followed by things directly deducible from those. Anything that makes use of the physical senses is reliant on an added layer of interpretation and is therefore susceptible to illusion and resulting fallacy. For example, with "I think therefore I am," "I think" is directly perceived, and "I am is deduced from it." Similarly the fundamentals of logic and mathematics are a common direct perception of the (sane) human mind, and all of mathematics is deduced from those fundamentals. (It remains a problem for some people that there is nothing prior from which we can deduce the fundamentals of mathematics.)
For some people, things such as "God is present with me" and "God is good" is perceived as directly as "I think" is perceived by others. For them, things perceived by means of the physical senses are things that are to be reconciled with the former things, which constitute stronger proofs. Of course, those who don't share those perceptions, discount them in others, maybe even claiming they are not proofs at all. For still others, they elevate impressions from the senses, or even societal norms of thought, as if they were proofs, and even deny things that they can directly perceive, such as "I think," calling thought an illusion.
If you don't have a permit to leave something in a public place, it's nothing but trash. That said, the neanderthal assholes who post them might not be aware of that.
I might be behind on my paleoanthropology, but were the Neanderthals big on lawn-sign marketing?
People can't walk on top of water without cheating.
No one can ascend to the heavens without cheating by using technology.
Uh, you do realize that just stating those things don't constitute proof, right? You'll find that the New Testament documents those things happening. You can say it's all lies. But it's silly to say you've proven it by never having seen those things happen.
Omniscience isn't possible given the speed of "c".
The same goes for omnipresence and omnipotence.
Omnipotence also violates the second law of thermodynamics.
The list goes on and on and on. So many scientific theories and laws of mother nature provide direct testable evidence that no gods are possible in objective reality.
You may need to recheck your scientific theories. Not one of them comes close to including the scope of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, or any other concept of God. Scientific theories pertain to the natural world -- space, time, and the things within it. Wherever the concept of God is, (or the concept of Tao which is similar) it is a concept of that which transcends time and space, yet is present within it. There is no area of scientific investigation that has touched on these things or is capable of doing so.
Newton proves that it's not possible for a human being to jump from the Earth to the Moon without the aid of technology.
...uh, I guess you could say that he correctly theorized the amount of impulse that would be required to propel someone there, less atmospheric effects. Not sure what that has to do with God. Maybe you're thinking of Revelation, in which John saw a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon at her feet, and think that Newton disproves this! That would certainly be news to Newton! Maybe you need to take Visions 101.
You seem to claim a certain of knowledge of the non-existence of the soul; and a certainty that life and consciousness, and thus the afterlife is an illusion. Where does your certainty come from? It seems like you are the one engaging in a faith-based delusion of imagined knowledge.
You even express anger at a God that you claim to be certain doesn't exist. Somewhere, a psychotherapist is salivating at the idea of getting you on the couch.
There's a Secretary of Treasury because there's a Treasury Department. There's a Treasury Department because it is a necessary role for the Federal Government to establish, print, and maintain a legal tender for use within the United States and for exports of our products, as per the United States Constitution. There is no even remotely equivalent use or need for the federal government's role in evaluating technology. As for spending my tax dollars to pay someone's salary year after year, just to say "tech is important enough for that"... that's the kind of thinking that leads to violent overthrow of governments.
You think a single person can decide the technological needs of every federal agency? You think they're just not centralized enough? The NSA builds their own supercomputers for pete's sake. The agencies of the federal government have ZERO need for a new agency to come along and tell them what technologies to use.
Isn't it time we had someone in charge of evaluating new technologies who actually KNOWS how computers work, rather than having to refer to the opinions of out of touch people who still struggle with their VCR flashing 12:00 over and over since 1986?
Why should there be someone in government in charge of evaluating new technologies???
Well honestly what can you expect, when the last band of idiots was allowed to run up a 7 trillion dollar deficit? SOMEONE is going to have to pay that off.
I've got news for you. The idiots who ran up a 7 trillion dollar deficit are still in power.
You're really more afraid of Obama in the White House than you are of an Islamic terrorist? Really? Can I ask why?
Er... because one more lunatic Supreme Court Justice will do more damage and more lasting damage to America than all the world's chemical and biological weapons put together?
Just watched Obama's victory speech on the BBC, he namechecked Lincoln and derided Wall Street. If this is anything other than empty rhetoric he's not going to last a year.
Yes, his, "if we learned anything from the financial crisis, it's that wall street cannot thrive while main street suffers" left me more than a little concerned... Okay, I guess he didn't learn anything from the financial crisis. But as a Republican, I very much appreciated his repeated references and quotes of Lincoln, who after all played a larger role in moving the country towards being able to have a black president than anyone since. I've heard blacks many times express their belief that there would never be a black president, at least in their lifetimes, and I've always known they were wrong. And seeing their reaction today, I'm happy for them that now they know better. I can't help wonder, though, what the reaction would be if a black Republican had been first. The normal response is, "oh, he's not really black, he's a Republican."
I'm scared now, as I was when Clinton was elected, but it is much different -- Obama is no Clinton. To all appearances at least, Obama is a man of character. The danger isn't in the public getting hoodwinked and subverted; the danger is in him doing the things he promised to do. That's a better kind of danger, I guess. I will be cautiously optimistic that his talk of compromise and reconciliation is not empty words. But most of all I will place my hope in the Republican minority, that they will stand ready to filibuster their butts off to prevent another LBJ administration. They know that, while the American people voted for Obama for a number of reasons, a desire for socialism, more handouts to the poor, and more penalizing the rich, were not among them. I know the American people well enough to know that if they find the Republican minority to be the last line of defense between themselves and significantly increased socialism or government meddling in their economic lives, 2010 will be another 1994.
Residents of Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Marshall Islands do not pay federal income tax. They do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes but they are also eligible for benefits from those programs. To have representation in Congress (relevant to "taxation without representation"), those territories would need to petition for statehood. Puerto Rico, in particular, has consistently voted not to do so.
Moreover, if they wanted independence, all they have to do is vote for it. By their own decision Puerto Rico is under the US criminal law system and military protection, but under their own independent civil law system.
You should be asking, "Should I make architectural decisions before or after I collect all the requirements." But you know the answer to that one.
A more experienced engineer would have dug for requirements early, planned for some creep, and would have warned the manager that the risk of starting before the thing is properly speced is that all work might have to be thrown away.
I disagree. An experienced engineer would know that he never has all the requirements, and the no spec ever encapsulates every real need that will be realized. Therefore, every project must be built with the assumption of future change and growth.
The is exactly the problem of the overuse of frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. They too frequently introduce unnecessary complexity and limitations.
Since the 1970s, nearly 75 percent of the frogs and other amphibians of La Selva Biological Station in Braulio Carrillo National Park in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica have died, perhaps due to global warming.
And perhaps due to a major meteorite impact that happened to go unnoticed.
If they could have justified it, why didn't they just push the law through Senate et all first? It's not like they have had that much difficutly in pushing through lots of crappy laws.
If he already has the authority under the Constitution, why the hell would he want some lower law added to redundantly give him authority he already has? It's clear why the Congress would want that -- to shore up the their unconstitutional power grabs of the past. But the President has the responsibility to be a counterbalance to power grabs by the other branches.
FISA was a failure on several levels. 1) It established a unnecessarily high threshold of evidence required for federal agents to obtain a wiretap. One can argue about what the proper threshold should be, but these restrictions were directly tied to the intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to happen. 2) To the degree that it is applied to constitutional executive authority, FISA was, and is, unconstitutional.
Dude, you just fucked up. Cuba's health system is the best in "Latin" America, and is in many ways better then the USA's. Tell me how that is a failure?
There are literally two MRI machines in all of Cuba. And unless you are a high official, you will never see the inside of either one of them. They are supposedly good at training doctors. But God help you if you actually have a condition that needs some sort of technology for diagnosis or treatment. No... there is NO way in which Cuba's health care is better than the USA's.
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I propose we foil the wet blankets, such as the parent, by referring to the singular as a "virius" instead of a "virus." These are the battles upon which the evolution of language is based!
Thomas Jefferson said, "If we are faithful to our country, if we acquiesce, with good will, in the decisions of the majority, and the nation moves in mass in the same direction, although it may not be that which every individual thinks best, we have nothing to fear from any quarter." Something also tells me that, unlike in 2005, the minority will not be protesting the inauguration of the choice of the majority.
What is with this idea that if you vote along with the majority your vote counts for something, and if you vote along with the minority it counts for nothing? Are you feeling that if the election goes your way, you somehow did that? 'Cause you didn't. It would have gone the same way if you hadn't voted. Unless the candidate wins by 1, your vote is equally significant/insignificant whether you vote with the minority or majority.
I guess this psychological phenomenon of thinking the vote is more meaningful if you vote for the winner is the reason why the press pushes poll results when their candidate is ahead, and tries to make it sound as much as possible like a foregone conclusion that their guy is going to win.
80% of the armed forces are strongly Republican, so voting could be rationally suggested to do no such thing, except when Republicans are elected.
Uh huh. The moronic Democrats who believe that the moronic Republicans destroyed the economy, environment and international ties, believed it just as much in the last election as they did in this one. So voting doesn't do that either.
All voting does is establish rule by propaganda. In a given election cycle, power is gained by whoever has the best propaganda, combined with the most money to spread it, combined with the most cooperation from "news" organizations. Thinking people, being always a small minority, have no role in the system unless they themselves become propagandists.
1) Electronic tallying eliminates the errors introduced by hand-counting, giving a more accurate result. 2) Assuming you have to pay all the counters, electronic systems are cheaper. 3) Fraud prevention: i) Counting fraud far more difficult, as any such attempts would be apparent in the source code, ii) Audit trails can be provided in electronic systems, which are not possible if all the voting information is stored only in crates of paper ballots. In the latter systems, merely swapping out a real crate of ballots for a fraudulent one without being noticed is all it would take to perpetrate a massive fraud, and there's no audit trail to reveal that anything is amiss.
Any securities trading software, as just one example, has all those requirements. I've personally developed several systems with many if not all of those requirements, though not on the same scale as a voting system. It is NOT hard... you just have to get the right people working on it.
The hardest part is not the voting technology. The hardest part is determining who is eligible to vote in the first place. My impression is that currently every unique name and address provided on a registration form is a potential vote, regardless of whether they all represent unique individuals or not. There would be some resistance to using SS#s to verify voter status, but I think it would be a step in the right direction. Biometrics could also work, but there would probably be even more resistance there. Heck, even the dyed purple fingers of the Afghanistan and Iraq elections provides more protection against multiple voting than anything we have in the US.
The strongest proofs possible for anything are the proofs that are directly and internally perceived, followed by things directly deducible from those. Anything that makes use of the physical senses is reliant on an added layer of interpretation and is therefore susceptible to illusion and resulting fallacy. For example, with "I think therefore I am," "I think" is directly perceived, and "I am is deduced from it." Similarly the fundamentals of logic and mathematics are a common direct perception of the (sane) human mind, and all of mathematics is deduced from those fundamentals. (It remains a problem for some people that there is nothing prior from which we can deduce the fundamentals of mathematics.)
For some people, things such as "God is present with me" and "God is good" is perceived as directly as "I think" is perceived by others. For them, things perceived by means of the physical senses are things that are to be reconciled with the former things, which constitute stronger proofs. Of course, those who don't share those perceptions, discount them in others, maybe even claiming they are not proofs at all. For still others, they elevate impressions from the senses, or even societal norms of thought, as if they were proofs, and even deny things that they can directly perceive, such as "I think," calling thought an illusion.
What?! I hadn't realized the human race had officially speciated by operating system!
I might be behind on my paleoanthropology, but were the Neanderthals big on lawn-sign marketing?
Uh, you do realize that just stating those things don't constitute proof, right? You'll find that the New Testament documents those things happening. You can say it's all lies. But it's silly to say you've proven it by never having seen those things happen.
You may need to recheck your scientific theories. Not one of them comes close to including the scope of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, or any other concept of God. Scientific theories pertain to the natural world -- space, time, and the things within it. Wherever the concept of God is, (or the concept of Tao which is similar) it is a concept of that which transcends time and space, yet is present within it. There is no area of scientific investigation that has touched on these things or is capable of doing so.
You seem to claim a certain of knowledge of the non-existence of the soul; and a certainty that life and consciousness, and thus the afterlife is an illusion. Where does your certainty come from? It seems like you are the one engaging in a faith-based delusion of imagined knowledge.
You even express anger at a God that you claim to be certain doesn't exist. Somewhere, a psychotherapist is salivating at the idea of getting you on the couch.
I don't get it. Pascal didn't believe of the silliness of "picking the right religion."
There's a Secretary of Treasury because there's a Treasury Department. There's a Treasury Department because it is a necessary role for the Federal Government to establish, print, and maintain a legal tender for use within the United States and for exports of our products, as per the United States Constitution. There is no even remotely equivalent use or need for the federal government's role in evaluating technology. As for spending my tax dollars to pay someone's salary year after year, just to say "tech is important enough for that"... that's the kind of thinking that leads to violent overthrow of governments.
You double-dolt.
You think a single person can decide the technological needs of every federal agency? You think they're just not centralized enough? The NSA builds their own supercomputers for pete's sake. The agencies of the federal government have ZERO need for a new agency to come along and tell them what technologies to use.
Why should there be someone in government in charge of evaluating new technologies???
I've got news for you. The idiots who ran up a 7 trillion dollar deficit are still in power.
Er... because one more lunatic Supreme Court Justice will do more damage and more lasting damage to America than all the world's chemical and biological weapons put together?
Yes, his, "if we learned anything from the financial crisis, it's that wall street cannot thrive while main street suffers" left me more than a little concerned... Okay, I guess he didn't learn anything from the financial crisis. But as a Republican, I very much appreciated his repeated references and quotes of Lincoln, who after all played a larger role in moving the country towards being able to have a black president than anyone since. I've heard blacks many times express their belief that there would never be a black president, at least in their lifetimes, and I've always known they were wrong. And seeing their reaction today, I'm happy for them that now they know better. I can't help wonder, though, what the reaction would be if a black Republican had been first. The normal response is, "oh, he's not really black, he's a Republican."
I'm scared now, as I was when Clinton was elected, but it is much different -- Obama is no Clinton. To all appearances at least, Obama is a man of character. The danger isn't in the public getting hoodwinked and subverted; the danger is in him doing the things he promised to do. That's a better kind of danger, I guess. I will be cautiously optimistic that his talk of compromise and reconciliation is not empty words. But most of all I will place my hope in the Republican minority, that they will stand ready to filibuster their butts off to prevent another LBJ administration. They know that, while the American people voted for Obama for a number of reasons, a desire for socialism, more handouts to the poor, and more penalizing the rich, were not among them. I know the American people well enough to know that if they find the Republican minority to be the last line of defense between themselves and significantly increased socialism or government meddling in their economic lives, 2010 will be another 1994.
Moreover, if they wanted independence, all they have to do is vote for it. By their own decision Puerto Rico is under the US criminal law system and military protection, but under their own independent civil law system.
Note to self: When invading Switzerland, hold the copper-armored vehicles in reserve.
Amen, brother. And be sure to document your work.
I disagree. An experienced engineer would know that he never has all the requirements, and the no spec ever encapsulates every real need that will be realized. Therefore, every project must be built with the assumption of future change and growth.
The is exactly the problem of the overuse of frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. They too frequently introduce unnecessary complexity and limitations.
And perhaps due to a major meteorite impact that happened to go unnoticed.
If he already has the authority under the Constitution, why the hell would he want some lower law added to redundantly give him authority he already has? It's clear why the Congress would want that -- to shore up the their unconstitutional power grabs of the past. But the President has the responsibility to be a counterbalance to power grabs by the other branches.
FISA was a failure on several levels. 1) It established a unnecessarily high threshold of evidence required for federal agents to obtain a wiretap. One can argue about what the proper threshold should be, but these restrictions were directly tied to the intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to happen. 2) To the degree that it is applied to constitutional executive authority, FISA was, and is, unconstitutional.
There are literally two MRI machines in all of Cuba. And unless you are a high official, you will never see the inside of either one of them. They are supposedly good at training doctors. But God help you if you actually have a condition that needs some sort of technology for diagnosis or treatment. No... there is NO way in which Cuba's health care is better than the USA's.