As much as I would like McCain in 2008, I think his age and health problems (five years of torture doesn't make for a healthy body) will prevent it from happening.
Sadly, yes. And what a tragedy that was. I would gladly vote for McCain over Bush, Gore, or Kerry. I think (hope), though, that Rove's strategy has been much more obvious to the American people this year, and they will not be fooled again. Although the race is reported as being close right now, there are many factors beneficial to Kerry which are not being counted, like massive quantities of new voter registrations in Democratic areas and the fact that the challenger usually gains a few points on election day vs. polls immediately prior. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that Rove's ultra-negative campaign strategy is almost able to make up for four years of repeated failures.
Just because I feel the need to correct stupid misconceptions like this one when I see them quoted...
Yes, John Kerry voted for the $87 billion spending package before he voted against a later version of the bill. The version he voted for specified that the $20 billion for reconstruction should be a loan to Iraq, which they should easily have been able to pay back later with oil revenue. Later, the bill was modified to make the $20 billion into a gift rather than a loan. Seeing as how we're already running a huge deficit, Kerry voted against this version of the bill. His hope was, obviously, that the bill would be voted down and then modified back to the original version, so that he could then vote for it again. However, the bill passed even without his vote. (This is why a "NO" vote in the senate means nothing. Often senators vote against bills that they mostly support simply in the hopes of getting it back to the drawing board where the parts they don't support can be fixed.)
The Repbulicans know this. They are 100% aware that their using this as "proof" of "flip-flopping" is a huge distortion of the truth. So why do they continue to quote it?
Answer: They believe the ends (getting Bush elected) justify the means (lying to the American people). In fact, they believe this to such an extent that practically every point used against Kerry by the Bush campaign is exactly this sort of distortion. So, yes, hopefully America will teach Karl Rove a lesson next month: A campaign built mostly on lies and deception will not get you elected.
Hrm. There are many errors in this code, but they aren't ones that would favor any particular candidate. In fact, the code simply fails to function altogether.
The results array is not initialized, meaning there's no way to tell what the final totals will be from simply reading the code. Of course, that problem is made irrelevant by the fact that the code does not terminate in the first place. You see, read() returns 0 on EOF, but you seem to be expecting it to return EOF (-1).
Change "vote == EOF" to "vote == 0" and the program correctly terminates. Initialize the results array to zeros and you get a meaningful result. In this case, all votes are counted for "other", since the result of read() will be 0 at EOF and 1 all the rest of the time (indicating one byte was read). 1 is not equal to 'K', 'B', or 'N', so the vote goes to "other".
I think the objective was to create a program which secretly favors a particular candidate (either Bush or Kerry, not "other"), while returning believable results in the meantime.
Oh yeah... and if you ran it on a big-endian machine, Bush would end up with over 1.6 billion votes. Somehow I don't think that would go unnoticed either.;)
Name one way Kerry is more liberal than Kennedy. One way. Seriously. Just because Bush says he is does not make it fact. Kerry is pretty moderate; he's one of few Democrats that has consistently supported a balanced budget, for example.
Cutting taxes when you have a deficit is a stupid idea. The resulting rise in interest rates and inflation will hurt the economy more than the tax cut helps. Ask any economist. In fact, the resulting inflation from deficit spending will cancel out the savings you get from reduced taxes, so the tax cuts won't actually help you at all. Reducing spending to match tax cuts would be a great idea, but Bush's plans call for increased spending.
We would be stronger in Iraq if we had support from the world. If our cause is good, we should have been able to obtain such support. Bush, unfortunately, chose to snub the rest of the world, essentially telling them that we did not care what they thought, and that we would attack Iraq regardless. He went to the UN and asked for their help, but not before telling them that we weren't interested in their opinions. This is not the way to get world support. By doing this, he alienated our potential allies and undermined the effort. I strongly believe that the world could have been convinced to assist us in doing something about Iraq, but there is not even any way to know if I am right because Bush did not make the effort necessary to find out. His wreckless, arrogant cowboy diplomacy -- which you no doubt think of as "strength" -- has only served to turn the world against us.
The grandparent poster was likely Australian. You could have picked up on that if you had read the clues he gave at the beginning of his post.
Finally, I once again remind you that your sig is undeniably false. By choosing to retain it you are not only lying (I thought Christians believed that was a sin), but you are implying that there is no honest way to support your candidate. After all, if you could effectively support Bush with honesty, why would you choose to be dishonest? Just FYI.
I don't know why I bother writing this. The gaps in your reasoning are already so profound that I doubt any amount of reasoning on my part will affect your opinion. Oh well; now that it's written I might as well post.
Bush could have written his own responses. However, it is highly unlikely that he did. Frankly, the man has more important things to do. In a political campaign, any time you can get away with delegating such work to a subbordinate, not only will most politicians do it, but they should do it, in order to get as much done as possible.
I similarly highly doubt Kerry's responses were actually written by Kerry. (Although, I'd have to say, Kerry's responses seemed a lot less like canned statements copy-pasted from some collection.) Nader's responses could very well have been written by him as I imagine he doesn't have quite so much else to do with his time.
Dude. Even if you honestly haven't heard of Snopes (huh?)... Everyone and their mom has seen that list of quotes. Four years ago. Attributed to Al Gore. Or sometimes Bush. And even then everyone knew they were just old Quayle quotes, because everyone saw them years before that, AS QUAYLE QUOTES. I remember passing these things around in middle school in the mid-90's. As someone else already suggested, do a Google search for your own damned quote.
I honestly can't believe people are still attributing those quotes to whatever politician they don't like today, considering how many times the exact same quotes have gone around in previous elections.
If only there were some sort of visual stimuli -- say, something which appeals to our most basic primal instincts -- which could be stored on such a device, and subsequently accessed whenever one is bored and no one is watching. Alas, I am unable to imagine anything suitable. Perhaps one of my fellow Slashdotters has an idea?
Ban analogy. Moore could have invited Bush to appear in his movie and respond to allegations, but do you think Bush would have, or should have? Kerry obviously won't appear on the Sinclair "event". It would be idiotic for him to do so, as it would only make the program look more legitimate. The only reason he is being "invited" to appear is to fool people like you into thinking that Sinclair is trying to be "balanced". They aren't.
Oh, please. Sometimes, when people are angry, they make comments that aren't very well thought-out. To believe that this somehow implies that Kerry is going to abuse his power as president to hurt Sinclair is silly.
Also, I don't see CNN, ABC, or NBC airing Farenheight 9/11 during prime time.
The other files were placed in a directory created next to the html file, usually called "[web page name]_files". This is not a single file. FireFox 0.10.1 does not have a "save as single file" feature. MHT is an open format and people like me have been asking for it to be included in Mozilla for years.
perhaps because he was lucky enough to preside over a great economic boom that ended just as he was leaving office.
*sigh*
Clinton was not, by any means, "lucky" to have presided over that boom, and I'll tell you why.
Clinton came in during a mild recession. One thing he did early in his term in office was get congress to promise to balance the budget. In order to get Democrats to agree to this (traditionally Republicans were the ones wanting balanced budgets) he raised taxes for the upper class in the same bill. Republicans, of course, insisted that this was a horrible move and would greatly damage the economy according to supply-side economic theory (aka Reagonomics, tricle-down economics, voodoo economics).
Now, here's some basic economics for you: Deficit spending and taxation are pretty much the same thing. When you deficit spend, you add money to the economy, which devalues the money that's already there. The effect is that you are transferring wealth from the citizens to the government, just as you would through taxation.
As Alan Greenspan put it, "Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth." [1].
However, deficit spending hurts the economy far more than taxation. Pretend you are a wealthy individual looking to invest money. Say you narrowed it down to two options: You could lend money to someone with a great idea for a new business, or you could purchase property. Now, if inflation is likely to hit hard in the next few years, what would you do? Well, if you lend money to that guy, that money is going to be worth a lot less in a few years when he pays it back. But if you buy property, that property is only going to go up in value. So, you buy property.
Well, guess what? The economy booms when people are lending. Buying property does nothing for the economy.
Indeed, Clinton's elimination of the deficit led interest rates to drop to historic lows. In fact, simply the promise that the deficit would be eliminated caused people to start investing like crazy, which caused the economic boom, which itself helped eliminate the deficit. Circular logic? Reganomics seemed pretty circular, too, but Clintonomics actually worked.
And look what Bush has done. He gave us a massive tax cut, and is paying for it through deficit spending. He claims that his tax cuts will help the economy, but deficit spending hurts far more than tax cuts help. I'll grant you that the recession itself was not Bush's fault; the economy moves in cycles no matter what the government does. But Bush's policies are only making it worse.
Fiscal responsibility isn't just a happy thought. It's essential for a healthy economy.
(1) The IJG implementation is what I refer to as "libjpeg". I realize now that I spoke without really knowing what I was talking about, and probably shouldn't have made that post.
(2) However, I have yet to see any evidence that libjpeg actually had a flaw. When Netscape supposedly had the "same flaw", it was NOT in libjpeg's code, but in a piece of code they added. If you read this link in detail, you find this (emphasis mine):
"Netscape browsers use the Independent JPEG Group's decoder library for JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) files. However, they install a custom handler for processing the COM (comment) marker that stores the comment in memory rather than just skip it like the library would do. Unfortunately, the new handler doesn't check whether the length field is valid, and subtracts 2 from the encoded length to calculate the length of the comment itself. It then allocates memory for the comment (with one additional byte for its NUL termination) and goes into a loop to read the comment into that memory."
Microsoft apparently later made the same modification with the same mistake, being an easy mistake to make. Can you quote me any source that actually says libjpeg itself has a security hole?
According to the link the guy posted, Netscape was using a slightly modified libjpeg, and it was in their added code that the bug was found.
If libjpeg itself has a vulnerability, I would have expected to have heard about it, because that would be a serious problem and certainly not something that could be blamed on Microsoft. If I'm wrong please correct me.
A vulnerability in libjpeg would be a planet-killing event, akin to the Earth being hit by an asteroid the size of Texas. Yet, no vulnerability has been found in over six years since the last release, despite the source code being freely available. Too bad Microsoft apparently decided to write their own decoder.
They can't poll cell phones. It's illegal to use any automated dialing system to call a cell phone, or any other phone where the callee will have to pay for the call. (If a telemarketer calls your cell phone, press charges!)
That's not why the Gallup polls are screwed up, though. The Gallup polls are screwed up because they normalize for a population that is 40% Republican and 33% Democrat. Considering that the percentages were the opposite in the last two elections, this seems like a pretty big assumption on Gallup's part.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I would like McCain in 2008, I think his age and health problems (five years of torture doesn't make for a healthy body) will prevent it from happening.
Sadly, yes. And what a tragedy that was. I would gladly vote for McCain over Bush, Gore, or Kerry. I think (hope), though, that Rove's strategy has been much more obvious to the American people this year, and they will not be fooled again. Although the race is reported as being close right now, there are many factors beneficial to Kerry which are not being counted, like massive quantities of new voter registrations in Democratic areas and the fact that the challenger usually gains a few points on election day vs. polls immediately prior. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that Rove's ultra-negative campaign strategy is almost able to make up for four years of repeated failures.
Just because I feel the need to correct stupid misconceptions like this one when I see them quoted...
Yes, John Kerry voted for the $87 billion spending package before he voted against a later version of the bill. The version he voted for specified that the $20 billion for reconstruction should be a loan to Iraq, which they should easily have been able to pay back later with oil revenue. Later, the bill was modified to make the $20 billion into a gift rather than a loan. Seeing as how we're already running a huge deficit, Kerry voted against this version of the bill. His hope was, obviously, that the bill would be voted down and then modified back to the original version, so that he could then vote for it again. However, the bill passed even without his vote. (This is why a "NO" vote in the senate means nothing. Often senators vote against bills that they mostly support simply in the hopes of getting it back to the drawing board where the parts they don't support can be fixed.)
The Repbulicans know this. They are 100% aware that their using this as "proof" of "flip-flopping" is a huge distortion of the truth. So why do they continue to quote it?
Answer: They believe the ends (getting Bush elected) justify the means (lying to the American people). In fact, they believe this to such an extent that practically every point used against Kerry by the Bush campaign is exactly this sort of distortion. So, yes, hopefully America will teach Karl Rove a lesson next month: A campaign built mostly on lies and deception will not get you elected.
No.
Hrm. There are many errors in this code, but they aren't ones that would favor any particular candidate. In fact, the code simply fails to function altogether.
;)
The results array is not initialized, meaning there's no way to tell what the final totals will be from simply reading the code. Of course, that problem is made irrelevant by the fact that the code does not terminate in the first place. You see, read() returns 0 on EOF, but you seem to be expecting it to return EOF (-1).
Change "vote == EOF" to "vote == 0" and the program correctly terminates. Initialize the results array to zeros and you get a meaningful result. In this case, all votes are counted for "other", since the result of read() will be 0 at EOF and 1 all the rest of the time (indicating one byte was read). 1 is not equal to 'K', 'B', or 'N', so the vote goes to "other".
I think the objective was to create a program which secretly favors a particular candidate (either Bush or Kerry, not "other"), while returning believable results in the meantime.
Oh yeah... and if you ran it on a big-endian machine, Bush would end up with over 1.6 billion votes. Somehow I don't think that would go unnoticed either.
Did I miss anything?
Name one way Kerry is more liberal than Kennedy. One way. Seriously. Just because Bush says he is does not make it fact. Kerry is pretty moderate; he's one of few Democrats that has consistently supported a balanced budget, for example.
Cutting taxes when you have a deficit is a stupid idea. The resulting rise in interest rates and inflation will hurt the economy more than the tax cut helps. Ask any economist. In fact, the resulting inflation from deficit spending will cancel out the savings you get from reduced taxes, so the tax cuts won't actually help you at all. Reducing spending to match tax cuts would be a great idea, but Bush's plans call for increased spending.
We would be stronger in Iraq if we had support from the world. If our cause is good, we should have been able to obtain such support. Bush, unfortunately, chose to snub the rest of the world, essentially telling them that we did not care what they thought, and that we would attack Iraq regardless. He went to the UN and asked for their help, but not before telling them that we weren't interested in their opinions. This is not the way to get world support. By doing this, he alienated our potential allies and undermined the effort. I strongly believe that the world could have been convinced to assist us in doing something about Iraq, but there is not even any way to know if I am right because Bush did not make the effort necessary to find out. His wreckless, arrogant cowboy diplomacy -- which you no doubt think of as "strength" -- has only served to turn the world against us.
The grandparent poster was likely Australian. You could have picked up on that if you had read the clues he gave at the beginning of his post.
Finally, I once again remind you that your sig is undeniably false. By choosing to retain it you are not only lying (I thought Christians believed that was a sin), but you are implying that there is no honest way to support your candidate. After all, if you could effectively support Bush with honesty, why would you choose to be dishonest? Just FYI.
I don't know why I bother writing this. The gaps in your reasoning are already so profound that I doubt any amount of reasoning on my part will affect your opinion. Oh well; now that it's written I might as well post.
so-called truths which are usually distorted.
You mean like your sig, which I note you still haven't changed in the face of overwhelming evidence that Kerry did not say it?
Also note his e-mail address.
Bush could have written his own responses. However, it is highly unlikely that he did. Frankly, the man has more important things to do. In a political campaign, any time you can get away with delegating such work to a subbordinate, not only will most politicians do it, but they should do it, in order to get as much done as possible.
I similarly highly doubt Kerry's responses were actually written by Kerry. (Although, I'd have to say, Kerry's responses seemed a lot less like canned statements copy-pasted from some collection.) Nader's responses could very well have been written by him as I imagine he doesn't have quite so much else to do with his time.
Dude. Even if you honestly haven't heard of Snopes (huh?)... Everyone and their mom has seen that list of quotes. Four years ago. Attributed to Al Gore. Or sometimes Bush. And even then everyone knew they were just old Quayle quotes, because everyone saw them years before that, AS QUAYLE QUOTES. I remember passing these things around in middle school in the mid-90's. As someone else already suggested, do a Google search for your own damned quote.
I honestly can't believe people are still attributing those quotes to whatever politician they don't like today, considering how many times the exact same quotes have gone around in previous elections.
Also, get a browser than blocks pop-ups.
If only there were some sort of visual stimuli -- say, something which appeals to our most basic primal instincts -- which could be stored on such a device, and subsequently accessed whenever one is bored and no one is watching. Alas, I am unable to imagine anything suitable. Perhaps one of my fellow Slashdotters has an idea?
The hell? When did I say that I like Michael Moore?
Urg. Bad analogy. Not "ban".
Ban analogy. Moore could have invited Bush to appear in his movie and respond to allegations, but do you think Bush would have, or should have? Kerry obviously won't appear on the Sinclair "event". It would be idiotic for him to do so, as it would only make the program look more legitimate. The only reason he is being "invited" to appear is to fool people like you into thinking that Sinclair is trying to be "balanced". They aren't.
Oh, please. Sometimes, when people are angry, they make comments that aren't very well thought-out. To believe that this somehow implies that Kerry is going to abuse his power as president to hurt Sinclair is silly.
Also, I don't see CNN, ABC, or NBC airing Farenheight 9/11 during prime time.
Err...
The other files were placed in a directory created next to the html file, usually called "[web page name]_files". This is not a single file. FireFox 0.10.1 does not have a "save as single file" feature. MHT is an open format and people like me have been asking for it to be included in Mozilla for years.
And win Nobel prizes, apparently.
Sentience.
(I assume the question you intended to ask was, "When does a fetus gain human rights?")
perhaps because he was lucky enough to preside over a great economic boom that ended just as he was leaving office.
*sigh*
Clinton was not, by any means, "lucky" to have presided over that boom, and I'll tell you why.
Clinton came in during a mild recession. One thing he did early in his term in office was get congress to promise to balance the budget. In order to get Democrats to agree to this (traditionally Republicans were the ones wanting balanced budgets) he raised taxes for the upper class in the same bill. Republicans, of course, insisted that this was a horrible move and would greatly damage the economy according to supply-side economic theory (aka Reagonomics, tricle-down economics, voodoo economics).
Now, here's some basic economics for you: Deficit spending and taxation are pretty much the same thing. When you deficit spend, you add money to the economy, which devalues the money that's already there. The effect is that you are transferring wealth from the citizens to the government, just as you would through taxation.
As Alan Greenspan put it, "Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth." [1].
However, deficit spending hurts the economy far more than taxation. Pretend you are a wealthy individual looking to invest money. Say you narrowed it down to two options: You could lend money to someone with a great idea for a new business, or you could purchase property. Now, if inflation is likely to hit hard in the next few years, what would you do? Well, if you lend money to that guy, that money is going to be worth a lot less in a few years when he pays it back. But if you buy property, that property is only going to go up in value. So, you buy property.
Well, guess what? The economy booms when people are lending. Buying property does nothing for the economy.
Indeed, Clinton's elimination of the deficit led interest rates to drop to historic lows. In fact, simply the promise that the deficit would be eliminated caused people to start investing like crazy, which caused the economic boom, which itself helped eliminate the deficit. Circular logic? Reganomics seemed pretty circular, too, but Clintonomics actually worked.
And look what Bush has done. He gave us a massive tax cut, and is paying for it through deficit spending. He claims that his tax cuts will help the economy, but deficit spending hurts far more than tax cuts help. I'll grant you that the recession itself was not Bush's fault; the economy moves in cycles no matter what the government does. But Bush's policies are only making it worse.
Fiscal responsibility isn't just a happy thought. It's essential for a healthy economy.
OK, um.
(1) The IJG implementation is what I refer to as "libjpeg". I realize now that I spoke without really knowing what I was talking about, and probably shouldn't have made that post.
(2) However, I have yet to see any evidence that libjpeg actually had a flaw. When Netscape supposedly had the "same flaw", it was NOT in libjpeg's code, but in a piece of code they added. If you read this link in detail, you find this (emphasis mine):
"Netscape browsers use the Independent JPEG Group's decoder library for JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) files. However, they install a custom handler for processing the COM (comment) marker that stores the comment in memory rather than just skip it like the library would do. Unfortunately, the new handler doesn't check whether the length field is valid, and subtracts 2 from the encoded length to calculate the length of the comment itself. It then allocates memory for the comment (with one additional byte for its NUL termination) and goes into a loop to read the comment into that memory."
Microsoft apparently later made the same modification with the same mistake, being an easy mistake to make. Can you quote me any source that actually says libjpeg itself has a security hole?
According to the link the guy posted, Netscape was using a slightly modified libjpeg, and it was in their added code that the bug was found.
If libjpeg itself has a vulnerability, I would have expected to have heard about it, because that would be a serious problem and certainly not something that could be blamed on Microsoft. If I'm wrong please correct me.
A vulnerability in libjpeg would be a planet-killing event, akin to the Earth being hit by an asteroid the size of Texas. Yet, no vulnerability has been found in over six years since the last release, despite the source code being freely available. Too bad Microsoft apparently decided to write their own decoder.
So they could use in in the sauna, of course!
(That's sow-nah, not sah-nah!)
They can't poll cell phones. It's illegal to use any automated dialing system to call a cell phone, or any other phone where the callee will have to pay for the call. (If a telemarketer calls your cell phone, press charges!)
That's not why the Gallup polls are screwed up, though. The Gallup polls are screwed up because they normalize for a population that is 40% Republican and 33% Democrat. Considering that the percentages were the opposite in the last two elections, this seems like a pretty big assumption on Gallup's part.
More detail on both the cell phone issue and Gallup's strange assumptions can be found in the september 18th writeup at electoral-vote.com.