Not to mention the lack of 3g, the current cell technology. Whenever Apple jumps into a new market they seem to always go with last year's technology (or the year before's).
As for this article, iPhone based on nano? Ok, so what's the current iPhone based on? Nano: 4 and 8 gig models, flash-based, small form factor. iPhone: 4 and 8 gig models, flash-based, small form factor. So, what are they going to change to make it more like the nano? More scratchable screen?
Can you dual boot DNA? Like, you can be a human and then go to sleep and wake up a penguin? Hmm, perhaps you'd have to die first since that's the human equivalent of shutting down. Though maybe a soft restart would do, just get kicked in the head hard enough that it turns off for a bit and then reboots. Like a coma.
Although we now know that the CIA intelligence data was wrong, supporting the use of force was appropriate since, in 2003, we believed that the intelligence data was correct. Who is this "we"? You and Hillary? I sure didn't I thought the whole thing was fabricated. Now, I don't think that Hussein was a decent guy or anything, and I do think he should have been removed from power, but I think it would have been better doing it another way. Of course, I'm not sure what that other way might be. The most obvious (instigating and funding a revolution) hasn't worked since that's what put him in power in the first place (along with many other people we now consider our enemies).
If a nation with a leader making violent threats does have weapons of mass destruction, authorizing the use of military force against this nation is appropriate -- maybe, even, desirable. So, what you're saying here is that the terrorists were in the right in attacking the world trade center et al? The US is a nation with a leader who was making violent threats (and previous leaders had as well, and carried those threats out). The US has weapons of mass destruction. In fact, not only has the US been threatening direct action, and carrying out those threats, we've been using subversive tactics and fiddling with things in that area that really shouldn't be any of our business.
She correctly refuses to apologize for the vote. This is the point I agree with. Unless a politician actually believes they made a mistake they shouldn't say they did. What my problem with her is is that she wasn't one of the two or three that didn't vote for one of the worst (if not THE worst) attacks on the Bill of Rights, the USA PATRIOT Act. Really, this is the only difference I can see between Obama and Clinton.
Obviously Obama wasn't in Congress at the time to be able to vote for or against it. He's relatively new to the game. This could actually be good, instead of having a politician who has been beaten down and pulverized into the weak, cynical, corrupt ones we know and, apparently, love, we'd have one who still has hope in his hear, still idealistic. He still believes he can do something. He's relatively unspoiled by the political process. This is his biggest advantage over Clinton, in my opinion.
Of course, this is also why Republicans and other conservatives won't like him. Besides, since he's less likely to be bribable he's less likely to be liked by those who like to bribe, who are the ones with the real power.
Then again, he might be more appetizing to the Illuminati, so that might work in his favor. Then again Balmer being an obvious source of chaos that might be more appetizing too.
Of course, if Bush "discovers" another problem he could retain his power. If some "terrorist" or "foreign country" decides to nuke a US city he could get easily abusable emergency powers, and we, especially Germans and Jews, know where this leads. (I've been trying to avoid mentioning this, but there're just too many parallels to ignore)
How long before we move back to centralized servers? Where everyone's home computer is simply a thin client and there are several central servers which store all the programs and all your information (securely, of course)? All programs would be sold as services (which, to anyone who's read The Cathedral And The Bazaar knows is good for programmers and for customers). It would almost completely remove the need for portable storage (though I still think carrying around little spheres that contain petabytes of information would be cool). Downloads would be instantaneous since instead of just copying the file from one computer to the next you'd just be making a link to a file stored elsewhere on the server. There would be several servers around the globe to help relieve bandwidth issues. I would say that the servers would periodically update each other so they all contained the same information and would be connected as a true mesh topology so that if one went down your computing experience would be only slightly disrupted and slowed. No need to upgrade your computer any more, when things needed to be faster, have more storage or memory, the servers would be upgraded. If the thin clients needed to be updated they'd send you (or bring you and install) a new one since it's all just a service and you don't actually own the product, and because all software is a service you'd always have the latest version. You own all your information, obviously, and there'd have to be laws and such to protect that, nearly unbreakable encryption using a password (which would be the weakest link in the chain, as it should be).
Preferably there'd be more than one company to buy your service from, they'd all have the same information and be connected to the same network, but, like cell phones, would provide different extra services. Perhaps some of the options would be different underlying operating systems which really shouldn't make that much of a difference to the end user since all operating systems would have to be able to run the same software, but perhaps the operating systems might provide different features that are useful for different applications. You'd have your choice of window managers which could either be a choice at log in, or you pay for them with your service, meaning you choose one and you're stuck with it unless you want to pay more (this is more likely).
Obviously this wouldn't eliminate the need for commercial or open source products (or services, in this case), in fact, this might be something that a competitor would provide: cheaper service with open sourced, community made window managers and software. You'd still be able to get the commercial software if you absolutely needed it.
Your internet access, TV, phones(?), radio, etc. would all come on one bill. TV networks would be providing something similar to the software companies. You pay for the service provided by the TV networks and software companies, and you get access to all they have to offer (with the possibility of different packages). TV and radio would no longer need to be streaming information, you could pick and choose what program you wanted when.
In order to get radio into cars the internet would have to be a wireless one covering the globe, possibly with satellites getting to the places the cells can't (for whatever reason). This would also mean that there could be free-to-air services with advertising (or donation based PBS type networks). This would not be restricted to TV and Radio either, there could be advertising based free-to-use software (which could possibly include storage).
Since all the servers would have the same information whenever you logged in from anywhere else in the world your desktop would pop up, just as you left it at home, almost instantly. There could be roaming charges like cell phones if the company you pay is not available in the area you are.
There would have to be no restriction on who could provide a server. There could be provisions in the software to allow a server without e
Now, should I patent badly written, unreadable, non-commented code or well written, easily readable, non-commented code. The former would tend to happen more often, but the latter is more useful, and less likely to be challenged...
Oooh, hey, what about Hello World? Can I patent that? What about patenting the whole hello world type of program: A very short program, used to demonstrate the very basics of a programming language, usually used to initiate the teaching process often by displaying a few words or performing some other simple operation.
Oooh, hey, does anyone hold a patent for Hydrogen? A single proton orbited by a single electron, can be ionized. A similar atom is anti-hydrogen, a single anti-proton orbited by a single positron.
Crap, I forgot what an oxygen atom looks like... ooh, wait, I don't need to know: An Oxygen molecule consists of two oxygen atoms. Can be used in many chemical processes, combustion , oxidization, etc.
Chances are that you don't need to know this stuff, but it might be, and so we should have access to that information.
Perhaps the politician who keeps saying that we have to cut down on corn is eating a corn rich diet. If this were the case then you might not vote for that politician on the grounds that they are unlikely to follow through with their plans.
Same goes for other things. If they've got a significant investment in Acme Corp. then chances aren't good that they're going to want to make laws that hurt Acme.
I want to know if the politician who advocates for less oil use is driving a Hummer. I want to know if they're willing to let their children go to public schools.
If we can't actually read their minds then we have to be able to see what they're doing so we can attempt to figure out what's going through their heads.
To a certain extent that's true, but if that were totally the case then there would never have been a revolution. Black people would still be slaves. Actually, chances are that, if people were always as apathetic as they are now we never would have left Africa and we'd all be black... We'd all be living in grass huts and there would never be any wars of any kind.
I think there's always been the seed of apathy, but the last time it was this bad was the dark ages...
And it's really just happened fairly recently. Think about this: Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about whether he had extra-marital relations. Bush and his people have done far worse than that: making up evidence to get people to agree to wars. Using their power to get their businesses government contracts. They've spent months on arguing that a husband should not be allowed to take his permanently vegetative wife off life support. They've taken the bill of rights and wiped their collective asses with it. They've used loopholes to imprison people without due process (They're like POWs so they're not covered by the constitution, but since we're not at war with their governments they don't fall under the Geneva Conventions). And the most we've done is say "Hey, that's not quite right." Nobody with any kind of influence has even mentioned impeachment, you might say that the end of his term is only a couple years away, but remember when Clinton was impeached?
Why is it that since 9/11 people have been willing to lick their own asses if the government told them it'd make them safer from terrorists? Security theater is a rising problem all over the world and yet people just accept it. No liquids or gels? no problem, it makes us safer. No fingernail clippers, yeah, fine. These are all pointless. The only way you're going to have any kind of assurances that people aren't bringing anything dangerous on planes is if you strip them down, give everyone uniforms, keep them in quarantine for a week, not let them bring anything with them and chain them to the floor. Essentially it needs to be like a prisoner transport.
At what point does it get to be too much? At what point do people start revolting?
You're right, they're no more public events than sporting events, for which rebroadcast is strictly controlled.
At the same time, though, they really should be. The whole election process should be a public event. We should, if we wanted to, be able to look at exactly what's going on. We should know exactly who contributed to whom, we should have access to every recorded public appearances made by the candidates (political or otherwise, even if they're just sitting idly behind someone else making a speech). We should be able to know exactly who is involved with the ballots, who the people at the polling booths are, who they hand the ballot boxes to, where they go, who counts them, etc. We should definitely know what's going on inside the electronic voting machines.
What I want to know is not why all these things are being closed off, that's pretty obvious, people in power want to retain that power, they have a much easier time of it if people weren't watching their every move. No, what I want to know is why people aren't as outraged as they should be. Why has political dissent become labeled as "Anti-American"? Isn't that just about the most American thing you can do? Isn't that one of the founding principles? Isn't that how this country came to be in the first place? Why is it that people will get up and yell at their TVs when so-and-so is voted off the island or team A scores a touchdown but when they hear that yet another of our rights has been taken away all we hear is "sure, if it keeps us safe!" Are these people really willing to live in a police state with armed troops driving tanks down the street with orders to shoot anyone not wearing the proper clothes or out after curfew just so that they might be a little bit safer? Why is it that people will complain that things should be done about all this but aren't willing to get up and start it? (this particular one I'm currently guilty of)
What happened to us? Did they put something in the water supplies that make us more docile? Is it subliminal messaging on TVs? Perhaps it's the 60Hz AC that permeates the country? Maybe HAARP really does work and they've pointed it at us. I don't know what it is, but there's got to be some common link here, it can't be that we've all suddenly and independently lost interest in everything worthwhile.
They teach some pretty disturbing things already, ever read Poe? The Telltale Heart is one of the tamer things he wrote, though it's one of the most well known.
My personal favorite is The Cask of Amontillado. How f**king disturbing is that? From what I remember (I've only read it once) a guy leads his drunk so-called friend down into the deepest part of the crypts during Carnival, chains him to the wall and proceeds to build a wall around him while the guy has recovered from his drunken stupor and is screaming his head off... Yeah, I read that in school.
Is that ok because it's set in Italy? Hell, there's really not a whole lot in there that places it at any particular time, it could be present day with a few small changes.
Now, I actually can see what they were worried about if it had to do with going someplace and shooting people. But they shouldn't be jumping to conclusions, they should find out the intent of the paper, and possibly get the kid some counseling. Really, the problem here is knee jerk reactions and lack of free health care.
Imagine what could be if people who have issues (fantasizing about killing people, raping little girls and boys, etc) had easy access to free counseling. Even the cheap ones cost $50 - $75 per session, and people who end up doing these things are usually ones who can't afford much, don't have insurance, and really need the good doctors. Yeah, are some ways to get financial assistance from the government but it's extremely difficult and time consuming. Apparently the powers that be don't care about helping these people until they've gone and done something wrong. Then people have already been injured or killed. The people who did it have had a taste of it and are going to need much more serious counseling and they're in an environment which doesn't facilitate recovery. Now, not only are we paying for their counseling, we're paying for their room and board, and they're not even contributing to society (no job). Oh, and I almost forgot: there's always the death penalty instead of counseling, perhaps TPTB like killing people instead of trying to fix the problem (that's what I used to do in Sim City when I couldn't pay for fire departments, just bulldoze all the surrounding stuff and the fire won't spread).
I'd say it's sort of a cross between a museum, one of those sushi boat places, and the mail service, all done at light speed...
It's a museum in that it's got places for everything, different sections, and you can find just about anything. A sushi place in that things come in tiny packets, you don't get your whole order all at once. It's like the mail service in that, unlike the sushi places you don't usually see everyone else's stuff. Someone sorts all the little packets and sends them on to the next office.
So, it's like a sushi boat restaurant with many tracks. You write down your order, rip it into tiny pieces place each piece in a boat with the name of the chef it should go to. It heads down to the router who picks it up, along with the other hundred thousand or so boats that other people have sent, and sorts them into the proper tracks. It passes through several other routers until it reaches the chef. The chef then reassembles your order and makes it up, putting each piece on a separate boat with your table number on it. The pieces of sushi go back the same way your order did, possibly a different route if one of the routers is on a break or too busy. Finally they reach you and you collect all your boats and you've got your meal. If you've got several people at the table then you'd have mentioned that to the chef and he'd mark it as such so that when you get the boats you can divide it up properly.
I'll 1-Up you on that. I've got a 11 inch wide screen. There's the 2cm margin on the edges, and about an inch at the front for the mouse buttons (it's an eraserhead pointer). Really the only problem with the keyboard is the positions of the arrow keys, they're shoved up into where the right shift key is making the shift key the least wide key on the board (and making you hit the up arrow when you meant to hit the shift).
If it's Faps then that must have been some mighty bad chaps they had at the end... Either that or they were able to invent some extremely low friction lube...
Yeah, it was easier for me to crack Windows Genuine Advantage then it was to call up MS and get them to reactivate the license key printed on my sticker...
It's pretty well known that anti-piracy stuff doesn't stop pirates, it simply stops regular users. Great job guys, just wonderful. Now, if only someone like you was in power to be able to bring peace to the Middle East! Oh yeah, never mind.
I design my pages using strict xhtml. It makes things easier to read and understand (assuming you've inserted new lines and tabs). There's never any kind of formatting using tags, only CSS. I even try not to use the style attribute. The only kind of formatting I use is the and tags, which are more descriptions than formatters (it's up to the browser or other display device to determine how to display something as emphasized or strong, perhaps they're both the same, perhaps they're different colors, perhaps they're different sizes, usually they're italic and bold, but that's not always the case, and you design knowing that).
The perfect design is one where there are no #ids or.classes in the css file. You can swap the css file with another generic one and the page gets rearranged and styled properly. The file should also be able to be read top to bottom with it still being understood (for screen readers, and audio browsers).
The perfect designer knows that what they're writing in the css file is only a guideline of what they'd like the browser to do, knowing full well that it's going to do whatever it wants. They code the html file so that, even if a browser doesn't understand css it'll still read fine. The information is the more important part of the page, not the layout.
The local taxes have nothing to do with the federal government. The sales taxes exist for everyone, even people visiting from other countries. The social security stuff is something they pay in to in order to receive it back (or, at least, that's what's supposed to happen).
I believe Puerto Rico has had votes on whether they want to gain statehood, and they've always said no.
Three locally-authorized plebiscites have been held in recent decades to decide whether Puerto Rico should pursue independence, enhanced commonwealth status, or statehood. Narrow victories by commonwealth supporters over statehood advocates in the first two plebiscites and an unacceptable definition of Commonwealth by the pro statehood leadership on the ballots in the third has allowed the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States government to remain unchanged. In the latest status referendum of 1998, the "none of the above" option won over Statehood, a rejection by Commonwealthers of the definition of their status on the ballots, with 50.2% of the votes. Support for the pro-statehood party (Partido Nuevo Progresista or PNP) and the pro-commonwealth party (Partido Popular Democrático or PPD) remains about equal. The only registered independence party on the island, the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño or PIP, usually receives 3-5% of the electoral votes, though there are several smaller independence groups like the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Nationalist Party), el Movimiento Independentista Nacional Hostosiano (National Hostosian Independence Movement), and the Macheteros - Ejercito Popular Boricua (or Boricua Popular Army).
There doesn't seem to be much info on the taxation or citizenship of American Samoans on Wikipedia or the CIA World Factbook, I can only assume it's similar to Puerto Rico without the citizenship status...
I don't believe they pay federal income taxes in US territories. Local income, sales, and payroll* taxes, yeah, but not federal income. This is the case for all territories, including Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
* Social Security, etc. For which they benefit from.
Of course then you get into the whole problem of how does the program know it's the end of a sentance and not just an abbreviation Mr. Smartypants is a cool word isn't it?
(Heh, notice how I made "Mr" the end of the sentance and "Smartypants" the begining of a new one? That's what a program would assume if you made all periods (full stops) doublespaced. It's also why I think there needs to be double spaces after the end of a sentance.)
Yeah we insist on having UN oversight on voting in places like Iraq, but never here in the US. Dammit, I want to head to the polls and see a UN inspector standing outside...
No, really, I'm being serious, and while we're at it we should be forced to stop our aggressive behavior, if it were any other country we'd be in there going "Look, look Mommie, Iran's being mean!" Then, when Mommie UN either isn't looking or doesn't care (because the big brother US gives her big presents (and is permanently on the Security Council)) we go in and kick over sand castles and push them in the mud. Of course when I say "sand castles" I mean "cities" and when I say "kick over" I mean "bomb the f**k out of" and when I say "the mud" I mean "people defending their home towns" and when I say "push them in" I mean "bomb the f**k out of"...
Slashdot Mirror
I know they'd never do anything like filtering out sites or artificially placing a limit on someone's download speed...
Not to mention the lack of 3g, the current cell technology. Whenever Apple jumps into a new market they seem to always go with last year's technology (or the year before's).
As for this article, iPhone based on nano? Ok, so what's the current iPhone based on? Nano: 4 and 8 gig models, flash-based, small form factor. iPhone: 4 and 8 gig models, flash-based, small form factor. So, what are they going to change to make it more like the nano? More scratchable screen?
According to carbon dating this guy died next year...
...can it run Linux?
Can you dual boot DNA? Like, you can be a human and then go to sleep and wake up a penguin? Hmm, perhaps you'd have to die first since that's the human equivalent of shutting down. Though maybe a soft restart would do, just get kicked in the head hard enough that it turns off for a bit and then reboots. Like a coma.
Coma: Nature's fsck.
Obviously Obama wasn't in Congress at the time to be able to vote for or against it. He's relatively new to the game. This could actually be good, instead of having a politician who has been beaten down and pulverized into the weak, cynical, corrupt ones we know and, apparently, love, we'd have one who still has hope in his hear, still idealistic. He still believes he can do something. He's relatively unspoiled by the political process. This is his biggest advantage over Clinton, in my opinion.
Of course, this is also why Republicans and other conservatives won't like him. Besides, since he's less likely to be bribable he's less likely to be liked by those who like to bribe, who are the ones with the real power.
Then again, he might be more appetizing to the Illuminati, so that might work in his favor. Then again Balmer being an obvious source of chaos that might be more appetizing too.
Of course, if Bush "discovers" another problem he could retain his power. If some "terrorist" or "foreign country" decides to nuke a US city he could get easily abusable emergency powers, and we, especially Germans and Jews, know where this leads. (I've been trying to avoid mentioning this, but there're just too many parallels to ignore)
How long before we move back to centralized servers? Where everyone's home computer is simply a thin client and there are several central servers which store all the programs and all your information (securely, of course)? All programs would be sold as services (which, to anyone who's read The Cathedral And The Bazaar knows is good for programmers and for customers). It would almost completely remove the need for portable storage (though I still think carrying around little spheres that contain petabytes of information would be cool). Downloads would be instantaneous since instead of just copying the file from one computer to the next you'd just be making a link to a file stored elsewhere on the server. There would be several servers around the globe to help relieve bandwidth issues. I would say that the servers would periodically update each other so they all contained the same information and would be connected as a true mesh topology so that if one went down your computing experience would be only slightly disrupted and slowed. No need to upgrade your computer any more, when things needed to be faster, have more storage or memory, the servers would be upgraded. If the thin clients needed to be updated they'd send you (or bring you and install) a new one since it's all just a service and you don't actually own the product, and because all software is a service you'd always have the latest version. You own all your information, obviously, and there'd have to be laws and such to protect that, nearly unbreakable encryption using a password (which would be the weakest link in the chain, as it should be).
Preferably there'd be more than one company to buy your service from, they'd all have the same information and be connected to the same network, but, like cell phones, would provide different extra services. Perhaps some of the options would be different underlying operating systems which really shouldn't make that much of a difference to the end user since all operating systems would have to be able to run the same software, but perhaps the operating systems might provide different features that are useful for different applications. You'd have your choice of window managers which could either be a choice at log in, or you pay for them with your service, meaning you choose one and you're stuck with it unless you want to pay more (this is more likely).
Obviously this wouldn't eliminate the need for commercial or open source products (or services, in this case), in fact, this might be something that a competitor would provide: cheaper service with open sourced, community made window managers and software. You'd still be able to get the commercial software if you absolutely needed it.
Your internet access, TV, phones(?), radio, etc. would all come on one bill. TV networks would be providing something similar to the software companies. You pay for the service provided by the TV networks and software companies, and you get access to all they have to offer (with the possibility of different packages). TV and radio would no longer need to be streaming information, you could pick and choose what program you wanted when.
In order to get radio into cars the internet would have to be a wireless one covering the globe, possibly with satellites getting to the places the cells can't (for whatever reason). This would also mean that there could be free-to-air services with advertising (or donation based PBS type networks). This would not be restricted to TV and Radio either, there could be advertising based free-to-use software (which could possibly include storage).
Since all the servers would have the same information whenever you logged in from anywhere else in the world your desktop would pop up, just as you left it at home, almost instantly. There could be roaming charges like cell phones if the company you pay is not available in the area you are.
There would have to be no restriction on who could provide a server. There could be provisions in the software to allow a server without e
Now, should I patent badly written, unreadable, non-commented code or well written, easily readable, non-commented code. The former would tend to happen more often, but the latter is more useful, and less likely to be challenged...
Oooh, hey, what about Hello World? Can I patent that? What about patenting the whole hello world type of program: A very short program, used to demonstrate the very basics of a programming language, usually used to initiate the teaching process often by displaying a few words or performing some other simple operation.
Oooh, hey, does anyone hold a patent for Hydrogen? A single proton orbited by a single electron, can be ionized. A similar atom is anti-hydrogen, a single anti-proton orbited by a single positron.
Crap, I forgot what an oxygen atom looks like... ooh, wait, I don't need to know: An Oxygen molecule consists of two oxygen atoms. Can be used in many chemical processes, combustion , oxidization, etc.
Blue sky on Mars? That's a new one...
Chances are that you don't need to know this stuff, but it might be, and so we should have access to that information.
Perhaps the politician who keeps saying that we have to cut down on corn is eating a corn rich diet. If this were the case then you might not vote for that politician on the grounds that they are unlikely to follow through with their plans.
Same goes for other things. If they've got a significant investment in Acme Corp. then chances aren't good that they're going to want to make laws that hurt Acme.
I want to know if the politician who advocates for less oil use is driving a Hummer. I want to know if they're willing to let their children go to public schools.
If we can't actually read their minds then we have to be able to see what they're doing so we can attempt to figure out what's going through their heads.
To a certain extent that's true, but if that were totally the case then there would never have been a revolution. Black people would still be slaves. Actually, chances are that, if people were always as apathetic as they are now we never would have left Africa and we'd all be black... We'd all be living in grass huts and there would never be any wars of any kind.
I think there's always been the seed of apathy, but the last time it was this bad was the dark ages...
And it's really just happened fairly recently. Think about this: Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about whether he had extra-marital relations. Bush and his people have done far worse than that: making up evidence to get people to agree to wars. Using their power to get their businesses government contracts. They've spent months on arguing that a husband should not be allowed to take his permanently vegetative wife off life support. They've taken the bill of rights and wiped their collective asses with it. They've used loopholes to imprison people without due process (They're like POWs so they're not covered by the constitution, but since we're not at war with their governments they don't fall under the Geneva Conventions). And the most we've done is say "Hey, that's not quite right." Nobody with any kind of influence has even mentioned impeachment, you might say that the end of his term is only a couple years away, but remember when Clinton was impeached?
Why is it that since 9/11 people have been willing to lick their own asses if the government told them it'd make them safer from terrorists? Security theater is a rising problem all over the world and yet people just accept it. No liquids or gels? no problem, it makes us safer. No fingernail clippers, yeah, fine. These are all pointless. The only way you're going to have any kind of assurances that people aren't bringing anything dangerous on planes is if you strip them down, give everyone uniforms, keep them in quarantine for a week, not let them bring anything with them and chain them to the floor. Essentially it needs to be like a prisoner transport.
At what point does it get to be too much? At what point do people start revolting?
You're right, they're no more public events than sporting events, for which rebroadcast is strictly controlled.
At the same time, though, they really should be. The whole election process should be a public event. We should, if we wanted to, be able to look at exactly what's going on. We should know exactly who contributed to whom, we should have access to every recorded public appearances made by the candidates (political or otherwise, even if they're just sitting idly behind someone else making a speech). We should be able to know exactly who is involved with the ballots, who the people at the polling booths are, who they hand the ballot boxes to, where they go, who counts them, etc. We should definitely know what's going on inside the electronic voting machines.
What I want to know is not why all these things are being closed off, that's pretty obvious, people in power want to retain that power, they have a much easier time of it if people weren't watching their every move. No, what I want to know is why people aren't as outraged as they should be. Why has political dissent become labeled as "Anti-American"? Isn't that just about the most American thing you can do? Isn't that one of the founding principles? Isn't that how this country came to be in the first place? Why is it that people will get up and yell at their TVs when so-and-so is voted off the island or team A scores a touchdown but when they hear that yet another of our rights has been taken away all we hear is "sure, if it keeps us safe!" Are these people really willing to live in a police state with armed troops driving tanks down the street with orders to shoot anyone not wearing the proper clothes or out after curfew just so that they might be a little bit safer? Why is it that people will complain that things should be done about all this but aren't willing to get up and start it? (this particular one I'm currently guilty of)
What happened to us? Did they put something in the water supplies that make us more docile? Is it subliminal messaging on TVs? Perhaps it's the 60Hz AC that permeates the country? Maybe HAARP really does work and they've pointed it at us. I don't know what it is, but there's got to be some common link here, it can't be that we've all suddenly and independently lost interest in everything worthwhile.
They teach some pretty disturbing things already, ever read Poe? The Telltale Heart is one of the tamer things he wrote, though it's one of the most well known.
My personal favorite is The Cask of Amontillado. How f**king disturbing is that? From what I remember (I've only read it once) a guy leads his drunk so-called friend down into the deepest part of the crypts during Carnival, chains him to the wall and proceeds to build a wall around him while the guy has recovered from his drunken stupor and is screaming his head off... Yeah, I read that in school.
Is that ok because it's set in Italy? Hell, there's really not a whole lot in there that places it at any particular time, it could be present day with a few small changes.
Now, I actually can see what they were worried about if it had to do with going someplace and shooting people. But they shouldn't be jumping to conclusions, they should find out the intent of the paper, and possibly get the kid some counseling. Really, the problem here is knee jerk reactions and lack of free health care.
Imagine what could be if people who have issues (fantasizing about killing people, raping little girls and boys, etc) had easy access to free counseling. Even the cheap ones cost $50 - $75 per session, and people who end up doing these things are usually ones who can't afford much, don't have insurance, and really need the good doctors. Yeah, are some ways to get financial assistance from the government but it's extremely difficult and time consuming. Apparently the powers that be don't care about helping these people until they've gone and done something wrong. Then people have already been injured or killed. The people who did it have had a taste of it and are going to need much more serious counseling and they're in an environment which doesn't facilitate recovery. Now, not only are we paying for their counseling, we're paying for their room and board, and they're not even contributing to society (no job). Oh, and I almost forgot: there's always the death penalty instead of counseling, perhaps TPTB like killing people instead of trying to fix the problem (that's what I used to do in Sim City when I couldn't pay for fire departments, just bulldoze all the surrounding stuff and the fire won't spread).
Yeah, our country's system sucks.
I'd say it's sort of a cross between a museum, one of those sushi boat places, and the mail service, all done at light speed...
It's a museum in that it's got places for everything, different sections, and you can find just about anything. A sushi place in that things come in tiny packets, you don't get your whole order all at once. It's like the mail service in that, unlike the sushi places you don't usually see everyone else's stuff. Someone sorts all the little packets and sends them on to the next office.
So, it's like a sushi boat restaurant with many tracks. You write down your order, rip it into tiny pieces place each piece in a boat with the name of the chef it should go to. It heads down to the router who picks it up, along with the other hundred thousand or so boats that other people have sent, and sorts them into the proper tracks. It passes through several other routers until it reaches the chef. The chef then reassembles your order and makes it up, putting each piece on a separate boat with your table number on it. The pieces of sushi go back the same way your order did, possibly a different route if one of the routers is on a break or too busy. Finally they reach you and you collect all your boats and you've got your meal. If you've got several people at the table then you'd have mentioned that to the chef and he'd mark it as such so that when you get the boats you can divide it up properly.
I'll 1-Up you on that. I've got a 11 inch wide screen. There's the 2cm margin on the edges, and about an inch at the front for the mouse buttons (it's an eraserhead pointer). Really the only problem with the keyboard is the positions of the arrow keys, they're shoved up into where the right shift key is making the shift key the least wide key on the board (and making you hit the up arrow when you meant to hit the shift).
No, see, you're just a figment of my imagination. You don't exist until I observe you. Or in this case, your post...
I am the center of the universe.
Light? Sound? Processor cycles? Faps?
If it's Faps then that must have been some mighty bad chaps they had at the end... Either that or they were able to invent some extremely low friction lube...
Yeah, it was easier for me to crack Windows Genuine Advantage then it was to call up MS and get them to reactivate the license key printed on my sticker...
It's pretty well known that anti-piracy stuff doesn't stop pirates, it simply stops regular users. Great job guys, just wonderful. Now, if only someone like you was in power to be able to bring peace to the Middle East! Oh yeah, never mind.
D'oh! I forgot that it reads tags as tags and doesn't display them verbatum, oops.
I design my pages using strict xhtml. It makes things easier to read and understand (assuming you've inserted new lines and tabs). There's never any kind of formatting using tags, only CSS. I even try not to use the style attribute. The only kind of formatting I use is the and tags, which are more descriptions than formatters (it's up to the browser or other display device to determine how to display something as emphasized or strong, perhaps they're both the same, perhaps they're different colors, perhaps they're different sizes, usually they're italic and bold, but that's not always the case, and you design knowing that).
.classes in the css file. You can swap the css file with another generic one and the page gets rearranged and styled properly. The file should also be able to be read top to bottom with it still being understood (for screen readers, and audio browsers).
The perfect design is one where there are no #ids or
The perfect designer knows that what they're writing in the css file is only a guideline of what they'd like the browser to do, knowing full well that it's going to do whatever it wants. They code the html file so that, even if a browser doesn't understand css it'll still read fine. The information is the more important part of the page, not the layout.
I believe Puerto Rico has had votes on whether they want to gain statehood, and they've always said no.
From the Puerto Rico Wikipedia article:
There doesn't seem to be much info on the taxation or citizenship of American Samoans on Wikipedia or the CIA World Factbook, I can only assume it's similar to Puerto Rico without the citizenship status...
I don't believe they pay federal income taxes in US territories. Local income, sales, and payroll* taxes, yeah, but not federal income. This is the case for all territories, including Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
* Social Security, etc. For which they benefit from.
Like, you have to get a bee license to transfer one across state lines in some places (I hear an Eric the Half a bee song coming on...)
Of course then you get into the whole problem of how does the program know it's the end of a sentance and not just an abbreviation Mr. Smartypants is a cool word isn't it?
(Heh, notice how I made "Mr" the end of the sentance and "Smartypants" the begining of a new one? That's what a program would assume if you made all periods (full stops) doublespaced. It's also why I think there needs to be double spaces after the end of a sentance.)
Yeah we insist on having UN oversight on voting in places like Iraq, but never here in the US. Dammit, I want to head to the polls and see a UN inspector standing outside...
No, really, I'm being serious, and while we're at it we should be forced to stop our aggressive behavior, if it were any other country we'd be in there going "Look, look Mommie, Iran's being mean!" Then, when Mommie UN either isn't looking or doesn't care (because the big brother US gives her big presents (and is permanently on the Security Council)) we go in and kick over sand castles and push them in the mud. Of course when I say "sand castles" I mean "cities" and when I say "kick over" I mean "bomb the f**k out of" and when I say "the mud" I mean "people defending their home towns" and when I say "push them in" I mean "bomb the f**k out of"...