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User: ChristTrekker

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  1. if it were me, I'd impeach judges on Resolution To Impeach VP Cheney Submitted · · Score: 1

    Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy, to be precise. Kelo was a complete travesty, and it's just the tip of the iceberg with these five. The judicial branch needs to be reined in.

  2. just say NO (to term limits, and bad politicians) on Resolution To Impeach VP Cheney Submitted · · Score: 1

    Term limits are built in...they are called elections. Don't like the bum? Vote against him.

    What we really need is voting reform. There are more than two positions on any given topic. We need to open up the debate to more points of view, and make it easier for these "third parties" to have an impact. How often have you heard it said (or said it yourself) that you're voting for the "lesser of two evils"? Why do we persist in voting for something we disagree with? That should indicate the system itself is fundamentally broken. Still, the fault is our own for not doing something about it.

    Term limits are arbitrary, and would work against the honest hard-working decent office-holders too. Not that there are many of those, but hey! Implementing term limits is nothing but a band-aid on a broken system that needs to be fixed.

    The way I see it, you waste your vote if you don't vote third party. I, for one, don't want more of the same ol', same ol' "politics as usual". I bet you don't, either.

  3. Help Make Camino Suck Less on Help Make Firefox On Mac Suck Less · · Score: 1

    After reading some of the responses here, I think the question needs to be turned around. What really needs to be done is to incorporate some of the useful FF features into Camino. If I could use FF extensions in Camino, I'd be a Camino user in a heartbeat.

  4. messy Michi on An iPod For Every Kid In Michigan · · Score: 1

    Michigan is a mess in general. This particular problem is just a good illustration of the problem of government education as a whole, as you point out.

  5. people still use powerpoint? on PowerPoint Bad For Learning · · Score: 1

    I make web pages, with a "slideshow" stylesheet that works well with OperaShow. I like to have the thing online when I do my presentation. The last page displays the URL it is at. Anyone can come back to it any time they want to. This way I don't have to bother with distributing hard copies or emailing soft copies.

  6. Re:Planetary Orbit? on Tatooine's Double-Sunset a Common Sight · · Score: 1

    The Alpha Cen (medium separation) and 40 Eri (wide separation) articles are interesting introductions to this.

  7. second Xming on Do You Get a UNIX Workstation at Work? · · Score: 1

    Definitely the way to go if you're stuck with a Windows desktop but need X apps. Free, easy to set up, can run as a service in the task tray at login, rock solid for me.

  8. not about crime on Mind How You Walk - Someone is Watching · · Score: 1

    It's never been about reducing crime. It's always been about maintaining/increasing control. This is true of surveillance; it is true of gun control. Remove the rights of the citizenry, or restrict them to the point where it becomes a nuisance to exercise them, and you can reap the benefits of governing a nation of sheeple.

  9. Re:Another case of academia vs. the real world on Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It? · · Score: 1

    Maybe you should just get out of bed earlier in the morning on your own. My kids are small, and this time shift totally screws with their nap and bed times relative to the clock, which is what we parents have to live by. It can be hard enough to get kids on a manageable schedule without being yanked around twice a year for no good reason.

    Nothing prevents companies from saying "Our summer hours from $DateX to $DateY will be 7-4". If it saves energy (i.e. money), you'd think they'd do this willingly. No more timekeeping hassles, worrying about being out of sync if the computers glitch, forgetting to set the clock and being late/early, etc.

  10. Re:The police are not there to protect the citizen on Couple Who Catch Cop Speeding Could Face Charges · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Have you heard of democracy and the court system?

    Have you ever heard of limited government? Any government, even a democratic one, will tend to grow to suit its own needs. (People discover they can vote themselves money out of the public treasury, and then vote to rob their richer neighbors so the public treasury has more money for them. This is merely one illustration.) The founders of the U.S. understood this, and wrote a Constitution that (in theory) strictly limited the government's powers.

  11. completely avoidable problem on 'Daylight Savings Bugs' Loom · · Score: 1

    The worst part is that this is completely avoidable. The US didn't have to change its DST rules. All this busywork and patching and fixing was created by legislation. Thanks alot for all the lost productivity, Washington...

    DST is pointless, anyway. Let's eliminate it. If there's really such a big advantage to starting and ending the workday an hour sooner, won't smart businesses do it on their own for the giant savings they'll get? But since we all have to be forced into it, I'm guessing the advantage is negligible. How much does the lost productivity of missed meetings on the two changeover days, and the money wasted on accidents caused by sleepy drivers, factor into those benefit calculations, hmmmm?

  12. Re:It almost doesn't matter what percentage... on Accurate Browser Statistics? · · Score: 1

    Maybe not, but it is a decent simulation of their experience for the sighted person. Whatever you see in Lynx is what they will hear. Pare your site down to text only - that's what aural browsers (and Lynx) do.

  13. Re:NASA Simulator for a water world on Ocean Planets on the Brink of Detection · · Score: 1

    I was going to ask the very same thing. I want to model Mars with more water!

  14. Re:I don't get it. on Maine Rejects Federally Mandated ID Cards · · Score: 1

    You agree to watch your neighbor's house while on vacation because he'll do the same for you when you're away. You both benefit from cooperation. That's general welfare.

  15. Re:I don't get it. on Maine Rejects Federally Mandated ID Cards · · Score: 1

    But that's the problem...they are not general welfare. They are welfare specific to the people receiving the aid. The military provides general welfare - being defended from outside attacks benefits everyone equally. Those other things, they benefit only specific classes of people.

  16. Re:I don't get it. on Maine Rejects Federally Mandated ID Cards · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are those who say that the states didn't ratify the amendments. But when the Civil War is still in the memory of most of the people alive then, who is going to argue when the FedGov says that's how it's gonna be? Standing up against the FedGov has a way of being hazardous to your health.

    Honestly, I don't see any rationale for ratifying the 16th. It just makes no sense. The FedGov simply wanted more money. They'd been trying to impose direct taxation for several decades, but the courts had always intervened.

    The 17th was purportedly to correct a procedural problem that occurred when Senate vacancies would go unfilled because of partisan squabbling in the state legislatures. It seemed unfair to let a state be underrepresented in the Senate, so direct election (to bypass the legislature) seemed the best answer. (Remember that the populist movement was in full swing in the early 20th c.) A better solution would have been to expand the governors' power of recess appointment, to allow him to do so if the legislature didn't take decisive action within X number of days (while in session), and have that temporary senator hold the position until the legislature did get off its butt. So to correct a relatively minor procedural problem, they broke one of the three crucial balance systems built into the FedGov. No small wonder that power has been lopsided ever since. And small hope of ever undoing it, because most people simply can't comprehend that you have less sway over your Senator when you elect him directly - when your direct constituency is millions of people, can you hear any one particular voice? Heck, even congressional districts have gotten way too large since they froze the House at 435. By the original reckoning we'd need 10k representatives!

  17. MicklePickle... on What Bizarre IT Setups Have You Seen? · · Score: 1

    ...let me introduce you to the Shark Tank.

  18. PICS, one better on The NSFW HTML Attribute · · Score: 1

    PICS was a great idea, but it trusts the site owner to honestly rate his own content. That's not going to happen when there is financial (or other) incentive not to.

    What we need is a similar standardized way for decentralized third parties to rate sites. Not a central third party, like a ratings board. Not a kludgish way, like this nsfw tag. A generalized standard like PICS that can be used to create multiple rating systems, applied by any joe making a link, which can then be picked up by Google and "averaged" a la PageRank. How well it works is then up to how diligent people are at supplying this microcontent.

    Then you deal with the problem of link spammers putting tons of incorrect microcontent in their links. But Google seems to do a fairly good job of weeding through the tons of bad macrocontent currently used to give false impressions, so I assume those guys will find a solution.

    Alternatively, your browser could look up third-party ratings which are maintained at a centralized location. Think del.icio.us, but with everyone using a standard set of tags to rate sites on various attributes. You still have to deal with the same problem of bot accounts created just to give false ratings though.

  19. Re:XFCE: Still too heavy. on Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst? · · Score: 1

    Ever tried EDE? In my (limited) experience it is even lighter than Xfce, but there aren't many apps using its toolkit, so you don't get the benefit of shared libs like you do with gtk apps in Xfce. But building an environment piece-wise like you're doing is another option.

  20. Re:Huh? on Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst? · · Score: 1

    I agree about GNUstep. I'd like to see more options and more innovation in the Unix desktop scene. I'd be thrilled if the toolkits simply supported an option to hand off the application menus to the wm in a standardized way, so that a Mac-like menubar could be done.

  21. common menu format on Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst? · · Score: 1

    So all we really need is a common menu format, so that all the WMs can point to the same file(s). Isn't freedesktop.org working on a spec for that? What's happening with it?

  22. Re:hard money == no inflation == no problem on Melting Coins Now Illegal In the U.S. · · Score: 1

    See news and links at 1 and 2

  23. Re:hard money == no inflation == no problem on Melting Coins Now Illegal In the U.S. · · Score: 1

    Read the book. The Depression was a result of the Fed's bungling. The US was very prosperous in the 19th century. The US currently has negotiators in China trying to convince them not to dump their dollars on the market lest the value plummet and send us into a depression deeper than the 30s.

  24. no hard currency on Melting Coins Now Illegal In the U.S. · · Score: 1
    a physical object of known value

    How does that hold up in the face of inflation? If the face value of the coin reflected the vaule of its material, I'd agree with you. But since the US economy is not currently based on "hard" currency, I don't think there is a good solution. We can push the problem off a few years is all.

  25. hard money == no inflation == no problem on Melting Coins Now Illegal In the U.S. · · Score: 1

    The Constitution authorizes the government to mint, not print, money for a reason: paper money is worthless. A fiat currency doesn't represent value, it represents debt. It's only worth anything as long as people have confidence in it. Gold has intrinsic value based on its scarcity and usefulness.

    Get rid of the Federal Reserve and bring back hard money, I say. I, for one, would welcome the end of inflation. I'd love to be able to stick $10 in a mattress, come back in 20 years, and have the same purchasing power as I had before. That's simple and intuitive. If the Fed can rob your money of its value, it is robbing you! Paper money is just a scheme for legalized theft.