"We avoid voter fraud by requiring verification of ones name, age and address."
Certainly that's the CONCEPT behind voter ID, but the reality is that voter fraud is easy, substantial, and sometimes decisive. For any election decided by less than 1% of the vote, voter fraud could easily have flipped the election.
No. Not only no, but HELL NO! Hollyweird will implode into its own singularity before that happens.
"Starship Troopers has been decried as promoting fascism and being racist in its creation of a society where democracy has been severely restricted..."
Democracy severely restricted? Nothing like that in the book; separate states have their own governments, and ANYBODY can get Federal citizenship by putting in a 2-year tour of Federal service. You can't buy a franchise, you have to EARN it - but it's open to EVERYONE. If you have one eye and one hand and an IQ of 80, they'll find something for you to do for two years.
This is actually known as "rent-seeking"; a businessman uses the power of government to attack other businesses. Because it's easier for a big business to get the government to attack small businesses (because small businesses don't have a gross of lawyers on retainer) than it is for the big business to actually do BUSINESS in an efficient way.
To paraphrase Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: "I'll believe that it's an emergency when the people who are TELLING me it's an emergency star ACTING like it's an emergency."
"Climate change" conferences have the unfortunate tenancies to be scheduled in far-flung exotic locations like Bali, rather than on Skype. When 500 environmental activists each charter THEIR OWN private jets to take them to their vacat/////conferences, they dump as much carbon into the air as hundreds of thousands of average citizens like me.
The fact is that there has been NO warming in the last 15 years, and the Earth is colder now than it was in 900, when Eric the Red named the place "Greenland" because it was green. The climate is always changing, in cycles that are a thousand years long. Al Gore (the failed preacher who has invented his own "religion" of Gaia worship) is like the mayfly trying to pass a law to ban summer.
The real problem is government itself. When the Federal government was small, it couldn't do too much damage, even when it was badly administered. Now that the Federal government is enormous, overarching and omnipotent, all of the nasty people want to take control of the Federal government and use it for their own purposes. And they do.
The solution is to reduce the size, cost and power of the Federal government. Never re-elect anybody; it takes some time for each generation of crooks to learn how to line their own pockets effectively. Impose term limits; for example, no person shall be allowed to run for any government office if more than 50% of his working lifetime has been spent working for the government. That would clear out the functionaries who have NEVER held a job - like Bernie Sanders.
It'll never happen; the people who would be affected are the very people who currently run things. It may take a second American Revolution.
It's not so much that "power corrupts"; it's that corruptible people are drawn to power. Reduce the power, and reduce the corruption.
Yes, and there has been plenty of FOOD for over a century. Since 1900, "famines" have been entirely politically generated. In Somalia, when the US and Europe sent food, the food would rot on the docks because the warlords were using all the trucks. When the USA and France sent the Army into Somalia, the warlords stole the food AND the trucks.
Oh, look, you've re-invented the "solar still", a WWII-era survival device that pilots would carry in their escape kits with the 1-man life raft. Inflate the balloon, add sea water, and drink distilled fresh water a few hours later. Dump the brine, add more sea water, and repeat. A few pilots survived for weeks in their rafts, eating sun-dried fish and drinking distilled water from their solar still balloons.
Yeah, but we at SlashDot are not getting big government grants to manufacture\\\\\\\\\ investigate the climate phenomena that everybody is so hysterical about. The Global Warmists _ARE_ getting multi-million dollar grants on how to prevent something that is not occurring, and if everybody turns around and says "Yeah, we can see that there's nothing going on here", then they lose their grants, and their rice bowls, and they'd have to come up with some OTHER scam to get the megabux of tax dollars that is the only thing standing between them and having to get "real jobs".
Balderdash. 180 years ago, the Earth was coming out of the abnormally cool period associated with the Dalton and Maunder Minimums. And based on the last couple of solar cycles, we're more likely to into another extended solar minimum, and experience markedly COOLER weather.
Warmer weather is associated with prosperity, while cooler weather is associated with famine and plague.
"Wo-o-o-o-w," 60-year old Uber driver Cynthia Ingram said. "We all knew it was coming. I just didn't expect it this soon."
She's 60 now? She'll be 70 before even a substantial number of autonomous taxis hit the street. It will certainly happen - autonomous vehicles will demolish the auto industries as well as the taxi industries, but it's not going to be overnight. The technology is still in its infancy.
I'm 66 now, and my car - probably the last car I'll ever buy - is 7 years old. I look forward to being able to summon a small autonomous vehicle to take me to the supermarket, and an hour later summon a larger vehicle to take me and my groceries home. Between that and Amazon Prime deliveries, I don't foresee a need for me to ever buy a new car again.
Correct; it was a Heathkit clock, and a fairly old one at that. The photos show a circuit board printed with "Micronta" which is a Tandy/Radio Shack trademark.
The only thing that most electronic voting systems "secure" is funding; lots and LOTS of money. The voting machines are trivially hackable, provide no possible way to do an audit trail, are quirky and failure prone, and HIDEOUSLY expensive.
We need to go back to paper ballots and require positive identification in order to vote. The only thing that the Democrats are trying to accomplish in opposing voter ID requirements is to encourage voter fraud.
Balderdash. With all the vulnerabilities of Hillary's 'server", and the 99+% probability that it has been routinely penetrated, _ANYBODY_ could have leaked her emails to Wikileaks.
On the other hand, _if_ it was the Russians, it's likely that Vlad Putin is simply trying to tighten the noose around Hillary's neck. I don't think he actually wants to hang her out to dry - she'll be much more useful as a "president on a string" where Putin can control her. The last thing in the world that Putin wants is some unpredictable "loose cannon" as the President of the United States.
Google's motto was once "Don't be evil." It now seems to be "Don't! Be evil!" If you don't have YOUR OWN backups, on servers that YOU control, then everything you do is subject to random, capricious, even malicious, deletion and unavailability. We'll never know if somebody at Google objected to his work, or if some rogue admin accidentally deleted it, or if it was corrupted in some file system problem. But anything that's in Blogger especially is ephemeral and subject to loss.
Amazon has an "unlimited" cloud storage plan that's not particularly expensive; and USB flash drives these days are remarkably affordable.
"Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong? " The answer to this question is invariably "Yes". Even if THIS PARTICULAR thing isn't entirely wrong, the fundamental "scientific method" ensures that there will ALWAYS be SOMETHING that's really wrong.
However, I've been pretty sure that most of the "multiverse/string theory" stuff has been fundamentally flawed because there is no actual DATA to support it. Mathematical models are fun and pretty, but they all rely on assumptions and simplifications, and we can never really know in advance that our assumptions and simplifications have any correspondence at all to "reality".
Absolutely. With a car of my own, I can choose at an moment to get up and drive to the doughnut shop (2 miles away) and come home with a tasty treat. (Yes, the Doughnut King in Citrus Heights, CA is open 24/7. GREAT doughnuts, too.) I can leave whenever I want, go where I choose and come come home at any time.
Of course, there's a price to be paid for convenience. It's in that BALANCE between convenience and cost that auto-driving cars and Uber will exist.
I think this is right. When self-driving cars merge with Lyft or Uber or Avis, then a lot of people won't need to own cars at all. Open your smartphone app and request a small car to drive you to the supermarket - and 90 minutes later, request a large car to take you and your groceries home. Or schedule a van to take the family across town to Grandma's house or across the country to go to Disneyland. And it would STILL probably be cheaper than buying a car and making payments + insurance + gas + maintenance (plus, in big cities, leasing garage space...).
Perhaps each car service will merge with a different car maker....
DOS-based programs probably don't have so many of the GUI-security flaws, and I've seen DOS-based programs run rings around their Windoze brethren.
Also, it's likely that the newer versions have substantially different database designs and requirements, and it would probably take months or years in effort to convert the existing data to the new version.
Change for the sake of change isn't always "progress".
If cancer is designed to clean the gene pool of defects, it's failing, because cancer attacks middle-aged and old people, AFTER their genes have already been passed along. I might accept this for childhood cancers that MIGHT terminate that genetic sequence. But most 40+ year olds have already had children if they were going to.
Slashdot Mirror
"We avoid voter fraud by requiring verification of ones name, age and address."
Certainly that's the CONCEPT behind voter ID, but the reality is that voter fraud is easy, substantial, and sometimes decisive. For any election decided by less than 1% of the vote, voter fraud could easily have flipped the election.
The Electoral College exists to prevent the dense population of a few big cities from overwhelming the votes of the countryfolk and farmers.
The original Starship Troopers movie had only ONE redeeming feature, after screwing up everything else in the book.
The one singular redeeming scene was the naked co-ed shower scene. That was it; NOTHING else in the movie was worth watching.
No. Not only no, but HELL NO! Hollyweird will implode into its own singularity before that happens.
"Starship Troopers has been decried as promoting fascism and being racist in its creation of a society where democracy has been severely restricted..."
Democracy severely restricted? Nothing like that in the book; separate states have their own governments, and ANYBODY can get Federal citizenship by putting in a 2-year tour of Federal service. You can't buy a franchise, you have to EARN it - but it's open to EVERYONE. If you have one eye and one hand and an IQ of 80, they'll find something for you to do for two years.
This is actually known as "rent-seeking"; a businessman uses the power of government to attack other businesses. Because it's easier for a big business to get the government to attack small businesses (because small businesses don't have a gross of lawyers on retainer) than it is for the big business to actually do BUSINESS in an efficient way.
To paraphrase Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: "I'll believe that it's an emergency when the people who are TELLING me it's an emergency star ACTING like it's an emergency."
"Climate change" conferences have the unfortunate tenancies to be scheduled in far-flung exotic locations like Bali, rather than on Skype. When 500 environmental activists each charter THEIR OWN private jets to take them to their vacat/////conferences, they dump as much carbon into the air as hundreds of thousands of average citizens like me.
The fact is that there has been NO warming in the last 15 years, and the Earth is colder now than it was in 900, when Eric the Red named the place "Greenland" because it was green. The climate is always changing, in cycles that are a thousand years long. Al Gore (the failed preacher who has invented his own "religion" of Gaia worship) is like the mayfly trying to pass a law to ban summer.
The real problem is government itself. When the Federal government was small, it couldn't do too much damage, even when it was badly administered. Now that the Federal government is enormous, overarching and omnipotent, all of the nasty people want to take control of the Federal government and use it for their own purposes. And they do.
The solution is to reduce the size, cost and power of the Federal government. Never re-elect anybody; it takes some time for each generation of crooks to learn how to line their own pockets effectively. Impose term limits; for example, no person shall be allowed to run for any government office if more than 50% of his working lifetime has been spent working for the government. That would clear out the functionaries who have NEVER held a job - like Bernie Sanders.
It'll never happen; the people who would be affected are the very people who currently run things. It may take a second American Revolution.
It's not so much that "power corrupts"; it's that corruptible people are drawn to power. Reduce the power, and reduce the corruption.
Cthulhu for President! Why vote for the LESSER Evil?
Trump is no conservative; he's a Democrat.
Hillary is no democrat; she's a fascist.
Sanders is a Socialist, so at least HE was honest about it.
Johnson is a liberal Republican, not a Libertarian.
NONE of them are or were running for the nominations of the proper party.
The Clinton Foundation gives away almost NO money; most of their expenses are reported to be for travel expenses for Bill, Hillary and Chelsea.
Yes, and there has been plenty of FOOD for over a century. Since 1900, "famines" have been entirely politically generated. In Somalia, when the US and Europe sent food, the food would rot on the docks because the warlords were using all the trucks. When the USA and France sent the Army into Somalia, the warlords stole the food AND the trucks.
SCRAPE the salt away? Nonsense, just rinse the device regularly with sea water.
Oh, look, you've re-invented the "solar still", a WWII-era survival device that pilots would carry in their escape kits with the 1-man life raft. Inflate the balloon, add sea water, and drink distilled fresh water a few hours later. Dump the brine, add more sea water, and repeat. A few pilots survived for weeks in their rafts, eating sun-dried fish and drinking distilled water from their solar still balloons.
Yeah, but we at SlashDot are not getting big government grants to manufacture\\\\\\\\\ investigate the climate phenomena that everybody is so hysterical about. The Global Warmists _ARE_ getting multi-million dollar grants on how to prevent something that is not occurring, and if everybody turns around and says "Yeah, we can see that there's nothing going on here", then they lose their grants, and their rice bowls, and they'd have to come up with some OTHER scam to get the megabux of tax dollars that is the only thing standing between them and having to get "real jobs".
Balderdash. 180 years ago, the Earth was coming out of the abnormally cool period associated with the Dalton and Maunder Minimums. And based on the last couple of solar cycles, we're more likely to into another extended solar minimum, and experience markedly COOLER weather.
Warmer weather is associated with prosperity, while cooler weather is associated with famine and plague.
"Wo-o-o-o-w," 60-year old Uber driver Cynthia Ingram said. "We all knew it was coming. I just didn't expect it this soon."
She's 60 now? She'll be 70 before even a substantial number of autonomous taxis hit the street. It will certainly happen - autonomous vehicles will demolish the auto industries as well as the taxi industries, but it's not going to be overnight. The technology is still in its infancy.
I'm 66 now, and my car - probably the last car I'll ever buy - is 7 years old. I look forward to being able to summon a small autonomous vehicle to take me to the supermarket, and an hour later summon a larger vehicle to take me and my groceries home. Between that and Amazon Prime deliveries, I don't foresee a need for me to ever buy a new car again.
Correct; it was a Heathkit clock, and a fairly old one at that. The photos show a circuit board printed with "Micronta" which is a Tandy/Radio Shack trademark.
The only thing that most electronic voting systems "secure" is funding; lots and LOTS of money. The voting machines are trivially hackable, provide no possible way to do an audit trail, are quirky and failure prone, and HIDEOUSLY expensive.
We need to go back to paper ballots and require positive identification in order to vote. The only thing that the Democrats are trying to accomplish in opposing voter ID requirements is to encourage voter fraud.
Balderdash. With all the vulnerabilities of Hillary's 'server", and the 99+% probability that it has been routinely penetrated, _ANYBODY_ could have leaked her emails to Wikileaks.
On the other hand, _if_ it was the Russians, it's likely that Vlad Putin is simply trying to tighten the noose around Hillary's neck. I don't think he actually wants to hang her out to dry - she'll be much more useful as a "president on a string" where Putin can control her. The last thing in the world that Putin wants is some unpredictable "loose cannon" as the President of the United States.
Google's motto was once "Don't be evil." It now seems to be "Don't! Be evil!" If you don't have YOUR OWN backups, on servers that YOU control, then everything you do is subject to random, capricious, even malicious, deletion and unavailability. We'll never know if somebody at Google objected to his work, or if some rogue admin accidentally deleted it, or if it was corrupted in some file system problem. But anything that's in Blogger especially is ephemeral and subject to loss.
Amazon has an "unlimited" cloud storage plan that's not particularly expensive; and USB flash drives these days are remarkably affordable.
Backups are good. Multiple backups are better.
"Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong? " The answer to this question is invariably "Yes". Even if THIS PARTICULAR thing isn't entirely wrong, the fundamental "scientific method" ensures that there will ALWAYS be SOMETHING that's really wrong.
However, I've been pretty sure that most of the "multiverse/string theory" stuff has been fundamentally flawed because there is no actual DATA to support it. Mathematical models are fun and pretty, but they all rely on assumptions and simplifications, and we can never really know in advance that our assumptions and simplifications have any correspondence at all to "reality".
"Is it really more convenient to own your own?"
Absolutely. With a car of my own, I can choose at an moment to get up and drive to the doughnut shop (2 miles away) and come home with a tasty treat. (Yes, the Doughnut King in Citrus Heights, CA is open 24/7. GREAT doughnuts, too.) I can leave whenever I want, go where I choose and come come home at any time.
Of course, there's a price to be paid for convenience. It's in that BALANCE between convenience and cost that auto-driving cars and Uber will exist.
I think this is right. When self-driving cars merge with Lyft or Uber or Avis, then a lot of people won't need to own cars at all. Open your smartphone app and request a small car to drive you to the supermarket - and 90 minutes later, request a large car to take you and your groceries home. Or schedule a van to take the family across town to Grandma's house or across the country to go to Disneyland. And it would STILL probably be cheaper than buying a car and making payments + insurance + gas + maintenance (plus, in big cities, leasing garage space...).
Perhaps each car service will merge with a different car maker....
DOS-based programs probably don't have so many of the GUI-security flaws, and I've seen DOS-based programs run rings around their Windoze brethren.
Also, it's likely that the newer versions have substantially different database designs and requirements, and it would probably take months or years in effort to convert the existing data to the new version.
Change for the sake of change isn't always "progress".
If cancer is designed to clean the gene pool of defects, it's failing, because cancer attacks middle-aged and old people, AFTER their genes have already been passed along. I might accept this for childhood cancers that MIGHT terminate that genetic sequence. But most 40+ year olds have already had children if they were going to.