The problem with your line of thought is that its logical conclusion is that money has to keep moving in order to be useful, which is exactly what got us into this whole mess.
If by "this whole mess" you mean the entire progress of the world economy since the invention of currency, you are correct; money exists in the particular forms it has throughout history precisely because it is useful to the extent it efficiently keeps moving, which is why, all other things (security, reliability, etc.) being equal, and even to an extent when those other things favor the opposite result somewhat, forms that are more flexible to create and more easy to move always displace, in practical use, those which are less flexible to create and less easy to move. There's a reason light, high-value, metals became the ultimate in commodity money, a reason commodity money was displaced by representative money (in the form of tokens, paper money, and notations of account) and why even that was displaced by fiat money (in the same forms, and most recently particularly in electronic notations of account.)
If a corporation is big enough and has good enough credit, they can issue corporate paper, at a lower interest rate, instead of paying interest to a bank.
Banks are middlemen. They take money from their depositors and lend it to borrowers, taking a cut out of the middle (actually, they devise a wide range of charges on both ends, but that's what if simplifies to.)
Commercial paper can bypass the middleman to an extent (there are financial services firms that act as middlemen here, but the overall cut they take isn't, in the end, as much as a bank takes between its borrowers and its depositors.)
That's not what a.25% interest rate means. It means that a dollar a year from now is.25% away from being worth the same as a dollar today.
It doesn't mean that, either; the fed funds rate might rationally be expected to have some loose correlation with the value of the dollar over time, but its not the same thing. It relates to how many future dollars someone privileged to borrow at the fed funds rate must sacrifice to get a current dollar, not what the dollar will be worth at the time that bill is due.
(Of course, for anyone to borrow at that rate, the borrower must expect that the expected return of what they can do with the dollar exceeds the interest rate by enough to compensate for the risk of failure, but that's about return, not value of the final dollar.)
The dollar is now less than 0.25% away from being free (i.o.w. worthless) money.
A fed funds rate near 0% doesn't mean the dollar is near worthless, it just means that borrowing them has a low nominal cost for those who can borrow at that rate. (Usually, this would mean even a lower real cost, as well, but not in the case of deflation, and the perceived cost could by higher than the nominal cost if deflation is feared/expected, even if it didn't occur; expectation of deflation would also explain otherwise irrational results like the recent dip in short-term T-bill returns into negative territory, meaning that people were actually willing to pay to lend the US government money rather than expecting a positive nominal return for such lending.)
Its not emergent behavior of computer systems. Its the exact same kind of behavior markets have displayed without computers.
Sure, things haven't been this bad recently, so some elements of it are new, at least in the short term, and the details change always. But none of the big picture stuff has much to do with computers, fundamentally. Economic markets are vastly interconnected because their substantive outputs and inputs (not just data outputs and inputs of the computer systems currently used as tools in managing them) are directly linked.
Blaming computers is about as justified as blaming witches.
The proposal is to de facto abolish the electoral college by having states pass laws dictating that their electors votes match the popular vote--meaning that if a state has 100 electors, and the winner gets 60% of the popular vote, then 60 electors vote for the winner and 40 for the loser. It's not the case that all the state electors vote for the winner, giving him or her a unanimous victory in the electoral college.
Wrong. The proposal, the National Popular Vote, is essentially exactly what GP describes. One might legitimately dispute GPs characterization of which states are likely to pass the proposal, but GPs characterization of what the proposal is.
1. Naturalized citizens are not natural-born citizens.
True.
2. Citizenship by birthright does not guarantee natural-born citizenship.
Debatable, and insufficiently defined. Citizenship by Constitutional birthright undisputably is natural-born citizenship, citizenship by statutory birthright may or may not be (that's the principle area of dispute among serious scholars.)
The founders looked to what they considered the laws of nature when establishing the founding document.
That depends what you consider the founding document. There is some evidence of appeal to "laws of nature" in the Declaration of Independence, which is certainly a founding document of the United States of America, but there is certainly no such appeal in the Constitution (another "founding document"). The Constitution was written as a pragmatic legal document to address the manifest practical shortfalls in the preceding Articles of Confederation (yet another "founding document" of the USofA).
4. A natural-born citizen is one that following the rules of nature (at the time of the Constitution) would be considered a US citizen.
This interpretation is downright bizarre. The phrase "natural-born citizen" was a common legal term of art prior to the Constitution, and certainly did not mean "a citizen following the rules of nature", whatever that might be supposed to mean, it meant, in the English tradition, a citizen born within the allegiance of the sovereign, a category almost precisely coextensive with the 14th Amendment "born within the US and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", and which might equivalently (at the time of writing) be framed as "a citizen by right of birth, rather than by naturalization".
The modern debate is, for the most part, between which of those two originally equivalent interpretations controls as the two diverge, particularly, in the light of statutory birthright citizenship conferred by Congress.
5. People can be born in the US, but due to the laws of man, rather than the laws of nature are citizens (slaves born before 1866).
This makes no sense, and the example doesn't clarify it. What are you trying to say.
If you wish to read the article which had helped lead me to my conclusion it's here.
I should have known better than to follow that link. I'll never get that wasted time back.
But the fact remains that many states force electoral college members to cast their votes in favor of the candidate they are meant to support.
No, many states have laws on the books which require electoral college members to do so. None of them actually force them to cast their votes in any way, any more than states with unconstitutional and unenforceable anti-miscegenation laws still on the books force people not to marry people of different races.
Second, no the United States did not occupy foreign territory. The U.S. actually OWNED the "canal zone", according to the treaty between the U.S. and Panama.
The US owned the Canal Zone but it was never part of the US; there are numerous court rulings on this. The distinction has substantial Constitutional significance (and not just as regards birthright citizenship). As far as citizesnship goes, there is a reason that there is a special retroactive law (see 8 USC 1403, and the associated notes) passed in 1952 granting citizenship to people born to US citizen parents in the Canal Zone.
If the 14th Amendment established natural-born citizen status, then Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bill Richardson would be eligible to become POTUS, as they are naturalized citizens, however we know this is not the case. The 14th Amendment uses the qualification "All persons born or naturalized in the United States". We know that a naturalized citizen cannot become POTUS, so axiomatically the other qualifier cannot be assumed to define a natural-born citizen.
This doesn't follow, and the use of "axiomatically" here makes no sense. Clearly, a naturalized citizen is not a natural-born citizen, but it does not follow from the other category, that of citizens born in the United States, is not equivalent to that of "natural born citizens". In fact, that's one of the two legally credible arguments.
The counterargument is that the "natural born citizen", in Article II, clearly predates Amendment XIV and should not be viewed in terms of its categories, but in terms of the meaning of the term in context at the time Article II was written (and thus in light of colonial and British use of the term). The argument proceeds that the term refers to citizenship by right of birth in law, and is not limited to the Constitutional birthright citizenship established by Amendment XIV (but since the Constitution is clearly law, encompasses it.) Thus, contrary to your argument, the two main legal positions are either that "natural born citizen" is exactly the same as Amendment XIV's citizens born in the United States (that all citizens that are not "naturalized" in Amendment XIV are "natural born" in the sense of Article II), or that natural born citizens extends into Amendment XIV's "naturalized" citizens to include citizens who are not born in the United States but have citizenship by right of birth under statute law as well as those that do so under the Constitution (i.e., people born outside of the US in circumstances that Congress has determined merit citizenship, like children of US citizens.)
An individual being a citizen by no act of law is one that early publicists agreed upon, which actually meshes very nicely with the founders, since they had a deep respect for the laws of nature.
No, in fact, that makes no sense, since no one can be a citizen of the United States other than by an act of law, either the Constitution or the statute law. Citizenship is a product of laws, not a natural state.
Regarding Tuan Anh Nguyen v. INS Nguyen's mother was Vietnamese while his father was the American citizen. The case made it to the SCOTUS and it was a 5-4 ruling to deny him citizenship. Title 8, Chapter 12, Subchapter III, Part I, Section 1409 of the US code defines what children born out of wedlock to only 1 parent of American citizenship qualify for Section 1401, which defines nationality and citizenship (again not natural-born citizen). You can read it yourself, but it is extremely father centric.
It puts all kinds of qualifiers on when a person born out of wedlock to a US-citizen father becomes a citizen, requirements that do not exist for children of a citizen mother.
What is interesting about that case is that it was initially decided in the Fifth Circuit, and the case was that section 1401 was discriminatory based on sex, this was decided not to be so.
Wrong, it was held to be legitimate sex-based discrimination, rather than the impermissible kind. It clearly on its face discriminates based on sex, and the court did not rule that it does not.
Further, the discrimination at issue is the reverse of what you seem to portray: it was challenged because it made it harder for children of US fathers to establish citizenship than the near automatic qualification for children of US mothers. From the text of the decision:
"The statutory distinction relevant in this case, then, is that 1409(a)
The U.S. is a Repulic, it doesn't claim to be a pure Democracy.
I'm not sure what a "Repulic" is, but the US is, notionally, an (indirect or representative) democracy and a (federal) republic. "Republic" and "Democracy" are not opposing concepts; they are, nearly, orthogonal.
You can be a representative democracy without being a republic (example, Canada, which is a constitutional monarchy as well as a representative democracy), and you can be republic without being a democracy, even a representative one (example, Saddam Hussein's Iraq).
If it is before inauguration, Congress would choose the next President.
Not quite.
If happened before the counting of electoral votes (not the inauguration), Congress could rule that enough of the votes were irregularly given (because the candidate voted for was dead) that there was no electoral majority, and then the House would elect a President (with one vote per state, not per member) and the Senate would elect a Vice President. They could also let the votes stand, which would have the same effect as if the event happened after the counting of the electoral votes in Congress.
Assuming the electoral vote stands, then when Bush and Cheney's terms ended, the Presidency and Vice Presidency would stand vacant, the Speaker of the House at that time would assume the Presidency. As President, the former Speaker could then appoint a Vice President who would need to be confirmed by both Houses of Congress before taking office. See the Title III, Section 9 of the United States Code, and the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
To be honest, I don't know how they would reconcile that, but its obvious you can't be born in a country that didn't exist yet. Seeing as you have to be 35, and the USC was ratified in 1791, and 1791 - 1776 = 15 years, the no one would have qualified, unless you considered people living here at the time or the revolution as "natural born," which is what I assume happened.
You could assume, or you could just read the friggin' Constitution, its not that long. The relevant part of Article II:
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
Many states have laws that prevent that from happening.
It is, at best, dubious whether state laws purporting to govern how electors cast their votes are any more enforceable, under the Constitution, than state laws directing their Senators on how to vote would be. States (or, specifically, state legislature) are empowered to decide how electors shall be chosen, but in no place are they authorized to direct their votes.
AFAIK, McCain's citizenship was initially also questioned, but was resolved within a week when the McCain campaign released all relevant documents.
This is false. Like Obama, McCain was challenged (since he wasn't actually born in the US, does not have Constitutional birthright citizenship, and is only arguably a citizen-by-right-of-birth due to retroactive legislation passed after he was born) in court, and the challenge thrown out by a federal trial court for lack of standing for those bringing the case. I believe the dismissal was appealed, but the issue is now moot.
The difference between McCain and Obama is that in Obama's case the law is not in dispute, the facts are in dispute and all of the official documents produced are on Obama's side. In McCain's case the facts were not in dispute, the law was in dispute, and what little precedent there is not particularly favorable to McCain.
According to Obama's Kenyan Grandmother, and the Kenyan government, he was born in Kenya. Multiple other sources point to two different Hawaiian hospitals, and the campaign-supplied certificate has serious questions as to its provenance.
The campaign-supplied certificate has been confirmed by the state government that issued it, and has even been confirmed as genuine by a number of right-wing websites. There is no serious dispute about its provenance.
The circumstances of his mother's precise status (wherever he happened to be born) and her ability to legally transfer citizenship to her son based on the law at the time of his birth, are certainly muddled.
Since he is documented as born in the US and there is no credible challenge to that, and the US Constitution makes any person born in the US a citizen, his mother's "ability to legally transfer citizenship" is a non-issue; it would only be an issue if he was born outside of the US.
Subsequent questions of his claimed citizenship also shadow the discussion
Subsequent questions of his claimed citizenship would be irrelevant to the question of whether or not he is a natural born citizen of the United States, even if they had any validity.
Are you paying attention to what has happened in "gun-free zones" and in cities with more restrictions on gun control in the US? Crime is higher than in cities and areas with gun control, as a general rule.
This claim is the central theme of John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" and it is, at best, debatable. The Wikipedia page on Lott's book isn't a bad starting point on the controversy.
Another point - conceal-carry owners typically have better criminal records than the police.
Even if true, this is quite likely a product of restrictive laws on granting concealed carry permits, rather than an argument for loosening those laws.
Yeah, it may mean their vote "counts more," but direct democracy, particularly when dealing with such a large population who is getting more and more uneducated about politics, and who is apt to fall for some of the semi-demogoguery from both sides (Obama's campaign to the masses was woefully short on substance, and about all anyone on the street was able to say was "change.")
I think you forgot something in this sentence -- like everything but the subject and a bunch of parenthetical phrases that apply to it. You were clearly going to say something about direct democracy, but electing an official by popular vote isn't direct democracy, its part of the basic process of a representative democracy. Direct democracy is when you don't have elected officials to make decisions, and the public votes directly on public decisions. What you are presenting isn't an alternative to direct democracy it is an alternative to representative democracy with officials elected by equal suffrage and a representative model where certain citizens are privileged.
You also make a mistake in casting the system as advantaging "rural" popuilations at the expense of "major population centers"; it gives an advantage to small states at the expense of large states. California, while it also contains major population centers, has a rural population larger than that of Idaho or Nebraska or the Dakotas (together), and that population is disadvantaged by systems which overrepresent small states; Rhode Island has no rural population and is advantaged by a system which overrepresents small states.
Frankly, what I would like to see, and what has even LESS chance to get set in than getting rid of the electoral college, is a test that must be taken when one votes that has basic principles of civics.
Poll tests have been done before (as part of Jim Crow). You are hopefully correct that they are less likely to be revived than the electoral college is to be eliminated.
I'm sorry to say that running Linux on a laptop has some serious problems, always has, and I suspect, always will. It's nothing that a seasoned Linux power user can't fix but for the average person it's not something you want to mess with. There are almost always problems with video, wireless, sound and suspend/resume.
I've never had many problems with my old Toshiba laptop since I ditched XP on it and put Kubuntu on it; video, wireless, and sound all worked without problems under 7.10; suspend/resume was iffy, but then it booted fast enough that I didn't mind shutdown/startup instead of suspend/resume. Under 8.04, it Just Works. Better than Windows did on the same machine, in fact.
Power Point is also really annoying, and that can't easily be fixed by LaTeX.
It can easily be replaced with LaTeX with appropriate packages (e.g., beamer), though at least half of the problem with PowerPoint is with the people making the presentations (which LaTeX will not fix) rather than problems with the software (many of which LaTeX can address.)
If I were a "Quant" I would want to take books with equations on the road with me.
Sure, but probably in PDF or some other e-book format, not a word processor format unless you were writing such a book, and for some reason didn't have recourse to something more suited to such a task than most word processors, like, say, LaTeX.
Where the things get even more interesting is that the Ruby community is interested in using Parrot as their main VM.
Well, its a diverse community, and there's probably at least one person in it interested in that, but the main interest, as far as anyone is looking at replacing the new-as-primary VM (YARV) used in Ruby 1.9 with anything else as the "main VM" for Ruby seems to be Rubinius (which even some of the YARV folks have said is the way of the future for Ruby), and aside from YARV and Rubinius, most of the work on Ruby-on-some-VM is on JRuby for the JVM.
AFAIK, Cardinal -- the main Ruby-on-Parrot project -- is mostly dead and has been so for months if not years. It certainly doesn't seem to be a major focus of the Ruby community.
So Parrot would also cure Ruby's problem at the same time.
AFAICT, the big areas for improvement in Ruby's library support come from the JRuby team, both in JRuby itself and its Java integration, and in the Ruby-FFI library that came out of the JRuby team but is available for the other major Ruby implementations, which streamlines direct calls to external (principally, C) libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
If by "this whole mess" you mean the entire progress of the world economy since the invention of currency, you are correct; money exists in the particular forms it has throughout history precisely because it is useful to the extent it efficiently keeps moving, which is why, all other things (security, reliability, etc.) being equal, and even to an extent when those other things favor the opposite result somewhat, forms that are more flexible to create and more easy to move always displace, in practical use, those which are less flexible to create and less easy to move. There's a reason light, high-value, metals became the ultimate in commodity money, a reason commodity money was displaced by representative money (in the form of tokens, paper money, and notations of account) and why even that was displaced by fiat money (in the same forms, and most recently particularly in electronic notations of account.)
Banks are middlemen. They take money from their depositors and lend it to borrowers, taking a cut out of the middle (actually, they devise a wide range of charges on both ends, but that's what if simplifies to.)
Commercial paper can bypass the middleman to an extent (there are financial services firms that act as middlemen here, but the overall cut they take isn't, in the end, as much as a bank takes between its borrowers and its depositors.)
Many parts "is" zero-sum? Name, say, three parts that are zero-sum. Or even constant-sum.
It doesn't mean that, either; the fed funds rate might rationally be expected to have some loose correlation with the value of the dollar over time, but its not the same thing. It relates to how many future dollars someone privileged to borrow at the fed funds rate must sacrifice to get a current dollar, not what the dollar will be worth at the time that bill is due.
(Of course, for anyone to borrow at that rate, the borrower must expect that the expected return of what they can do with the dollar exceeds the interest rate by enough to compensate for the risk of failure, but that's about return, not value of the final dollar.)
A fed funds rate near 0% doesn't mean the dollar is near worthless, it just means that borrowing them has a low nominal cost for those who can borrow at that rate. (Usually, this would mean even a lower real cost, as well, but not in the case of deflation, and the perceived cost could by higher than the nominal cost if deflation is feared/expected, even if it didn't occur; expectation of deflation would also explain otherwise irrational results like the recent dip in short-term T-bill returns into negative territory, meaning that people were actually willing to pay to lend the US government money rather than expecting a positive nominal return for such lending.)
Its not emergent behavior of computer systems. Its the exact same kind of behavior markets have displayed without computers.
Sure, things haven't been this bad recently, so some elements of it are new, at least in the short term, and the details change always. But none of the big picture stuff has much to do with computers, fundamentally. Economic markets are vastly interconnected because their substantive outputs and inputs (not just data outputs and inputs of the computer systems currently used as tools in managing them) are directly linked.
Blaming computers is about as justified as blaming witches.
...involves at a minimum two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer.
Wrong. The proposal, the National Popular Vote, is essentially exactly what GP describes. One might legitimately dispute GPs characterization of which states are likely to pass the proposal, but GPs characterization of what the proposal is.
True.
Debatable, and insufficiently defined. Citizenship by Constitutional birthright undisputably is natural-born citizenship, citizenship by statutory birthright may or may not be (that's the principle area of dispute among serious scholars.)
That depends what you consider the founding document. There is some evidence of appeal to "laws of nature" in the Declaration of Independence, which is certainly a founding document of the United States of America, but there is certainly no such appeal in the Constitution (another "founding document"). The Constitution was written as a pragmatic legal document to address the manifest practical shortfalls in the preceding Articles of Confederation (yet another "founding document" of the USofA).
This interpretation is downright bizarre. The phrase "natural-born citizen" was a common legal term of art prior to the Constitution, and certainly did not mean "a citizen following the rules of nature", whatever that might be supposed to mean, it meant, in the English tradition, a citizen born within the allegiance of the sovereign, a category almost precisely coextensive with the 14th Amendment "born within the US and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", and which might equivalently (at the time of writing) be framed as "a citizen by right of birth, rather than by naturalization".
The modern debate is, for the most part, between which of those two originally equivalent interpretations controls as the two diverge, particularly, in the light of statutory birthright citizenship conferred by Congress.
This makes no sense, and the example doesn't clarify it. What are you trying to say.
I should have known better than to follow that link. I'll never get that wasted time back.
No, many states have laws on the books which require electoral college members to do so. None of them actually force them to cast their votes in any way, any more than states with unconstitutional and unenforceable anti-miscegenation laws still on the books force people not to marry people of different races.
The US owned the Canal Zone but it was never part of the US; there are numerous court rulings on this. The distinction has substantial Constitutional significance (and not just as regards birthright citizenship). As far as citizesnship goes, there is a reason that there is a special retroactive law (see 8 USC 1403, and the associated notes) passed in 1952 granting citizenship to people born to US citizen parents in the Canal Zone.
This doesn't follow, and the use of "axiomatically" here makes no sense. Clearly, a naturalized citizen is not a natural-born citizen, but it does not follow from the other category, that of citizens born in the United States, is not equivalent to that of "natural born citizens". In fact, that's one of the two legally credible arguments.
The counterargument is that the "natural born citizen", in Article II, clearly predates Amendment XIV and should not be viewed in terms of its categories, but in terms of the meaning of the term in context at the time Article II was written (and thus in light of colonial and British use of the term). The argument proceeds that the term refers to citizenship by right of birth in law, and is not limited to the Constitutional birthright citizenship established by Amendment XIV (but since the Constitution is clearly law, encompasses it.) Thus, contrary to your argument, the two main legal positions are either that "natural born citizen" is exactly the same as Amendment XIV's citizens born in the United States (that all citizens that are not "naturalized" in Amendment XIV are "natural born" in the sense of Article II), or that natural born citizens extends into Amendment XIV's "naturalized" citizens to include citizens who are not born in the United States but have citizenship by right of birth under statute law as well as those that do so under the Constitution (i.e., people born outside of the US in circumstances that Congress has determined merit citizenship, like children of US citizens.)
No, in fact, that makes no sense, since no one can be a citizen of the United States other than by an act of law, either the Constitution or the statute law. Citizenship is a product of laws, not a natural state.
It puts all kinds of qualifiers on when a person born out of wedlock to a US-citizen father becomes a citizen, requirements that do not exist for children of a citizen mother.
Wrong, it was held to be legitimate sex-based discrimination, rather than the impermissible kind. It clearly on its face discriminates based on sex, and the court did not rule that it does not.
Further, the discrimination at issue is the reverse of what you seem to portray: it was challenged because it made it harder for children of US fathers to establish citizenship than the near automatic qualification for children of US mothers. From the text of the decision:
"The statutory distinction relevant in this case, then, is that 1409(a)
I'm not sure what a "Repulic" is, but the US is, notionally, an (indirect or representative) democracy and a (federal) republic. "Republic" and "Democracy" are not opposing concepts; they are, nearly, orthogonal.
You can be a representative democracy without being a republic (example, Canada, which is a constitutional monarchy as well as a representative democracy), and you can be republic without being a democracy, even a representative one (example, Saddam Hussein's Iraq).
Not quite.
If happened before the counting of electoral votes (not the inauguration), Congress could rule that enough of the votes were irregularly given (because the candidate voted for was dead) that there was no electoral majority, and then the House would elect a President (with one vote per state, not per member) and the Senate would elect a Vice President. They could also let the votes stand, which would have the same effect as if the event happened after the counting of the electoral votes in Congress.
Assuming the electoral vote stands, then when Bush and Cheney's terms ended, the Presidency and Vice Presidency would stand vacant, the Speaker of the House at that time would assume the Presidency. As President, the former Speaker could then appoint a Vice President who would need to be confirmed by both Houses of Congress before taking office. See the Title III, Section 9 of the United States Code, and the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
You could assume, or you could just read the friggin' Constitution, its not that long. The relevant part of Article II:
It is, at best, dubious whether state laws purporting to govern how electors cast their votes are any more enforceable, under the Constitution, than state laws directing their Senators on how to vote would be. States (or, specifically, state legislature) are empowered to decide how electors shall be chosen, but in no place are they authorized to direct their votes.
This is false. Like Obama, McCain was challenged (since he wasn't actually born in the US, does not have Constitutional birthright citizenship, and is only arguably a citizen-by-right-of-birth due to retroactive legislation passed after he was born) in court, and the challenge thrown out by a federal trial court for lack of standing for those bringing the case. I believe the dismissal was appealed, but the issue is now moot.
The difference between McCain and Obama is that in Obama's case the law is not in dispute, the facts are in dispute and all of the official documents produced are on Obama's side. In McCain's case the facts were not in dispute, the law was in dispute, and what little precedent there is not particularly favorable to McCain.
The campaign-supplied certificate has been confirmed by the state government that issued it, and has even been confirmed as genuine by a number of right-wing websites. There is no serious dispute about its provenance.
Since he is documented as born in the US and there is no credible challenge to that, and the US Constitution makes any person born in the US a citizen, his mother's "ability to legally transfer citizenship" is a non-issue; it would only be an issue if he was born outside of the US.
Subsequent questions of his claimed citizenship would be irrelevant to the question of whether or not he is a natural born citizen of the United States, even if they had any validity.
This claim is the central theme of John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" and it is, at best, debatable. The Wikipedia page on Lott's book isn't a bad starting point on the controversy.
Even if true, this is quite likely a product of restrictive laws on granting concealed carry permits, rather than an argument for loosening those laws.
I think you forgot something in this sentence -- like everything but the subject and a bunch of parenthetical phrases that apply to it. You were clearly going to say something about direct democracy, but electing an official by popular vote isn't direct democracy, its part of the basic process of a representative democracy. Direct democracy is when you don't have elected officials to make decisions, and the public votes directly on public decisions. What you are presenting isn't an alternative to direct democracy it is an alternative to representative democracy with officials elected by equal suffrage and a representative model where certain citizens are privileged.
You also make a mistake in casting the system as advantaging "rural" popuilations at the expense of "major population centers"; it gives an advantage to small states at the expense of large states. California, while it also contains major population centers, has a rural population larger than that of Idaho or Nebraska or the Dakotas (together), and that population is disadvantaged by systems which overrepresent small states; Rhode Island has no rural population and is advantaged by a system which overrepresents small states.
Poll tests have been done before (as part of Jim Crow). You are hopefully correct that they are less likely to be revived than the electoral college is to be eliminated.
I've never had many problems with my old Toshiba laptop since I ditched XP on it and put Kubuntu on it; video, wireless, and sound all worked without problems under 7.10; suspend/resume was iffy, but then it booted fast enough that I didn't mind shutdown/startup instead of suspend/resume. Under 8.04, it Just Works. Better than Windows did on the same machine, in fact.
Since they existed.
So what? Sure, netbooks are cheaper luxury products now than similar size, useful PCs were in the past. They are still luxury products.
It can easily be replaced with LaTeX with appropriate packages (e.g., beamer), though at least half of the problem with PowerPoint is with the people making the presentations (which LaTeX will not fix) rather than problems with the software (many of which LaTeX can address.)
Sure, but probably in PDF or some other e-book format, not a word processor format unless you were writing such a book, and for some reason didn't have recourse to something more suited to such a task than most word processors, like, say, LaTeX.
Yeah, though Ruby 1.9.1 is only getting a release candidate on Christmas, with the final release planned for January 25.
Well, its a diverse community, and there's probably at least one person in it interested in that, but the main interest, as far as anyone is looking at replacing the new-as-primary VM (YARV) used in Ruby 1.9 with anything else as the "main VM" for Ruby seems to be Rubinius (which even some of the YARV folks have said is the way of the future for Ruby), and aside from YARV and Rubinius, most of the work on Ruby-on-some-VM is on JRuby for the JVM.
AFAIK, Cardinal -- the main Ruby-on-Parrot project -- is mostly dead and has been so for months if not years. It certainly doesn't seem to be a major focus of the Ruby community.
AFAICT, the big areas for improvement in Ruby's library support come from the JRuby team, both in JRuby itself and its Java integration, and in the Ruby-FFI library that came out of the JRuby team but is available for the other major Ruby implementations, which streamlines direct calls to external (principally, C) libraries.