I thought "hybrids" referred to cars that use mixed
energy sources, such as gas/electric, or diesel/electric.
This car seems to run on electricity only, so why is it called a hybrid?
Spot checking N% of precincts as you suggest sounds good to me. How will these checks be implemented across the country? Could a Federal election rule be made to force all states to perform a check? If so, would states have the freedom to decide the process for performing a check? Were it left to the individual states, would state governments vote to make spot checks mandatory in every election, or would the checks be required only when a losing candidate challenges the results?
Geez, you don't have very much imagination, do you? Say the percentage is 5%; For each state, you randomly pick 1 out of every 20 polls (which is trivially easy; have two lottery type machines each filled with balls from 000 to 999, a ball drops from each machine, and that is used as the seed number for a random number generator. Repeat for each state.) For federal elections, I would say the federal government gets to set the rules. And if the feds do set such rules, do you think most state voters would accept anything less in their state elections?
And what of the candidates? Should a candidate be trusted with the right to not challenge? Some candidates will accept results out of the spirit of good sportsmanship, but if since we are talking about the will of the people here, maybe a candidate should never be trusted to speak on behalf of voters, even those who supported him/her.
Here in Canada, there are mandatory recounts if the margin of victory is less than 0.1% of valid votes cast (i.e. doesn't include spoiled ballots, etc.). In addition, anyone - not just the candidate - is free to demand a recount without specific evidence of wrongdoing. Also note in Canada, the results announced on election day are "preliminary results". Over the next seven days, the votes are recounted by non-partisan members of Elections Canada, usually with "scrutineers" from each party present to accept or challenge the validity of any particular ballot. Once these recounts are done, the "official" results are published. I vaguely recall one instance where the official result changed the preliminary result (i.e. the defeated candidate on election day actually won the riding), but I can't remember when.
Slipping on the tin foil hat for a moment... If what we fear is voting machine software which will change or drop votes, then we must also fear that the paper trail can be forged by that same software; telling the voter one thing, but telling election officials another. This assumes that any recount would be made by analysing a printed record of votes taken from the machine by the election officials, and not by going around the community and collecting printed reciepts voters leave the polls with.
But the whole idea of the printed paper trail is that the printed paper is given to the voter, who then confirms that it registered the candidate he voted for. That paper is then dropped in a sealed box, which is only opened if a recount is requested. Are you suggesting that the voting machine would use some form of disappearing and appearing ink to change the paper trail? If not, please outline *exactly how* a machine which registered the vote electronically, printed that vote for the voter, who reviews it personally to ensure it's correct, and then deposits said vote into a sealed ballot box, could be "fixed"? Your idea of having the voter take his receipt home with him is the most ridiculous solution I've ever heard.
I watch a lot of poker on TV, and I'm constantly amazed at how
often Daniel Negrenau can call his opponent's hole cards correctly.
In a magazine profile, the writer played heads-up with Daniel for
two hours. After the first half hour, Daniel was calling the writer's
hole cards with astonishing accuracy.
You may not want to use the term psychology to describe this skill,
but millions will disagree with you.
Lets pretend its some vending machine full of chips. You put $1, and it says "$10" up top. So you hit "coin return" and it spits out $10 worth of change. So you realize this is awesome, and put that $10 back in and hit the coin return to get even more money, and you keep going until its empty of all its change. That's perfectly reasonable? You had no nefarious intent, and thought it was functioning as intended.
Nope, I'd just figure this is my payback for all the times I've put my dollar into pop or candy machines, or my $5 into change machines, and got nothing back - no soda, no chocolate bar, no quarters. There's never anyone there to complain to, and of course, phoning the number on the machine (assuming there is one, and that you have pen and paper handy) means you'll have to send in a claim, which means a stamp, which means to get your $1 back will take a bunch of your time and $0.50 for a letter. Which means, of course, most people don't bother, and the vending machine owner gets the windfall profit. So I don't have any sympathy for them when the mistake is in my favour; they don't give a crap when I lose out, so why should I give a crap when they do?
Take the "Make millions in real estate" category. It works... in fact, it's so rock-stupidly simple that TLC has shows about it now with people who really have no business in real estate somehow managing not to lose money. Sure, most of those people are only making $100K-$200K per year at it, but they don't do it for a living.
So, why don't these millionaire-author guys keep doing it? Because it's hard work all the time. Books, OTOH, are hard work for the time taken to research, write, and promote it.... but if it's a hit, it brings in money for years while you're.... that's right! Making more money using your system! Or not... nothing wrong with cashing in for a while, or maybe, like you said, the bottom has dropped out of the market they're pimping.
In fact, you can usually tell when the bottom is about to drop out of a market when the books (and the hotel seminars, and the late night infomercials) begin to heat up. When the bottom fell out of the stock market in 2001 (after everyone in 2000 was urging you to load up on tech stocks on margin), and Alan Greenspan began to lower interest rates and inject liquidity into the US economy, smart guys began to buy and flip housing. You buy one place with $5k down, flip it in two months for a $15k profit, then buy three places with $5k down, flip those a few months later, etc. As interest rates kept falling, this was a very profitable strategy. But interest rates have bottomed out recently, and the poor saps who bought houses with little or no down and adjustable rate mortgages are shortly about to find out that they can't make their new payments. New fed chair Ben Bernanke, testifying before congress's Banking Committee yesterday, said there's a potential loss of $100 billion on so-called "sub-prime" mortgages (i.e. mortgages to people with "shaky" credit), and there's an even greater potential loss on more solid loans where the owners are going to find their ARM's reset. On a $500,000 home, a 4% interest rate is $20,000 a year in interest. But, with the 10-year rate pushing 5% right now, those ARM's are going to cost $25,000 a year in interest. That's another $400/month people are going to have to find, and for a lot of them, they're not going to be able to do it, and they'll be forced to sell.
But guess who'll be there to buy those homes at fire-sale prices? That's right - the same hucksters who told them to buy houses "with no money down!" in the first place. The cycle repeats every 7-8 years.
I'm Canadian, but we often travel to the US for vacations. We bought a pair of Virgin phones for $10 each in the US, so that my wife and I can communicate with each other when we split up for shopping or skiing or whatever. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than the roaming charges and high per minute charges my Canadian phone provider charges if I use my Canadian phone in the US.
I have a fairly new Nokia which came with a lot of bells and whistles - camera, MP3, FM radio - which I don't use. Since I'd been with the same carrier for three years, they offered me the phone for free if I signed on for another two years. My big beef is even though the screen is quite large, you can't adjust the font size, and the font is just too small for my aging eyes to read. I only need glasses to read small print, so using the phone often means fumbling in my jacket for my glasses' case, putting them on, and then doing whatever it was I wanted. I would gladly give up the MP3 and radio and camera if they would just let me make the font 12 pts instead of 8.
With software it is running on a near infinite combination of machines that are anywhere from barely capable to super charged overclocking wetdreams.
Oh, foo. Every piece of packaged software I buy states the minimum configuration required to install and run the program. Now I might understand that there could be problems if the package requires, say, 512k RAM, and you have 1 MB RAM on your system, but you're trying to keep 6 Firefox windows open, background print a 50-page Word document, keep Excel, Powerpoint, and Access open, and chat with your buddy on IM all at the same time. But then again, you can have trouble keeping your car running in -30 temperatures on icy roads during a blizzard. I doubt most of the people who are having these troubles are overloading their systems; it sounds more like typical M$ bugs.
Most of the sugar we use in the US is not cane sugar at all. The primary sugar in processed foods here is made from corn (high fructose corn syrup) which is the main reason why our soda tastes like crap compared to soda bottled in Mexico where they use cane.
This is true, but the reason for the switch from cane sugar to HFCS was the increase in sugar prices due to the strength of the sugar lobby.
Before this, and the reason that cane sugar is largely absent from our diet in the US, is that the sugar beet industry lobbied to legislate it that way. What most Americans identify as "sugar" is actually made from beets.
Interesting, in that according to the UNFAO statistics (www.fao.org/es/ess/top/commodity.html), the US produced more sugar cane in 2005 than it did sugar beets. However, the 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act (FSRI) Act reinstated allotments. Beet sugar is allotted 54.35 percent of expected domestic consumption and cane sugar is allotted 45.65 percent. So, it's pretty close to half and half beet and cane, and that's just on domestic production. The US remains the world's largest importer of cane sugar from other nations, despite high tariffs.
More interesting facts about the politics of sugar are at: www.opensecrets.org/pubs/cashingin_sugar/sugar02.h tml
The original article was in "Psychology Today", entitled "Ten Outrageous Facts about men and women", which included such gems as why men prefer blondes and women with big breasts. You can find it at "psychologytoday.com".
Mod parent up. I've worked with both CS and IT people, and while it's true that there are many IT people who couldn't code their way past "Hello, world", I've met CS people who couldn't tell you why a star-wired hub configuration is more robust than a linear bus, or what route diversity is, or even why route diversity is important. To me, the difference between the two disciplines is like the difference between surgeons and internists. They both need to know a little about each other's line of work, but I don't want an internist performing a cardiac bypass, and I don't want a surgeon monitoring my diabetes. But both are valuable disciplines, as are CS and IT.
The biggest difference I've seen is CS people generally get buried inside firms, while IT people as they advance almost inevitably get involved in either the purchase or sale of new hardware. Since these are big ticket items, if you're the buyer, you're going to get wined, dined, and taken to golf and sporting events. If you're the vendor, you're going to wine, dine, and take the client to golf and sporting events. I think there's just a little jealousy from CS folks about this process.
Hey, there are a lot of Canadians who are pissed at the way our country
is being run. We supposedly elected a Conservative government, but the
only Conservative policy they're sticking to is keeping troops in Afghanistan;
other than that, they've morphed into the Liberal party.
And for Americans who don't know, the Liberal party was found to be complicit
in a scheme where advertising dollars were funneled to Liberal-friendly firms,
who then turned around and kicked back millions of dollars to fund the Liberals'
election campaign. This is far, far worse than Watergate, but nothing happened
to then PM Jean Chretien; in fact, he was just invested in the "Order of Canada"
supposedly our highest civilian honour.
So don't for a moment think you're alone in despair regarding your government; I
daresay there are millions around the world who feel the same way.
It was the old people playing videogames for the first times in their lives. It was the parents, gaming with their kids. It was the kids, getting off the couch and jumping around.
Spot on. My two girls, 10 and 13, got a Wii about 3 weeks ago. They will play for two or three hours at a stretch, and yes, they jump and shout and twirl, and generally have a great time. They have plenty of games for their computers, but they rarely play those anymore; they prefer the interaction the Wii gives them.
And I've enjoyed playing with them as well. The sports pack is fun, and I've even tried Mario Party Pack 8.
The girls are already planning "Wii" parties for their friends; I doubt our machine will be gathering dust any time soon.
Aren't there much bigger fish to fry, like... I don't know... The Air Force?
Well, since powered flight was still 100 years into the future, the Founding Fathers would have had to be excellent soothsayers to provide for an Air Force. However, Section 8 of Article 1 of your Constitution *DOES* provide for the establishment of a Navy, and unlike the Armies, there is no two-year term of limitations. The Air Force is nothing more than the logical extension of the Navy due to new technology.
Now, if you want to complain about something that is truly perverting the American economy, why don't you complain about the completely unconstitutional Federal Reserve?
Step 7: Make it illegal to enter any federal building, register a car, withdraw funds from a bank without such a card
Um, so how do you get such a card in the first place without entering a federal building? I'm Canadian, but I worked in Detroit for two years. I had to go to a fed building (this was long before 9/11) where I was wanded and marched through a metal detector, just to get my SSN. And I had to set up a bank account for my pay deposit before I even got my SSN.
You can read about rider bills on wikipedia if you want.
Too bad I can't find a link, but the late, lamented National Lampoon had an article in the 1970's "How a bill becomes law", which demonstrated the rider process. IIRC, the bill in question was "Let's kill all the negroes!", and the rider was "Homos too!".
Of course, the last time that things got to that point was when the states decided that they needed to make some small tweaks to the Articles of Confederation, in order to make a more perfect union
A passport is required to go to Canada now? Is that a Canadian or a US requirement? The last tyme I went to Canada I just showed my driver's license, then again that was a month before 911.
No, no, and no! Canada does not require US citizens to have passports to enter Canada; in fact, Canada has been fighting the US-created proposal for a number of years. Canadians know that there are many, many Americans who don't have passports, and that requiring one to enter Canada would just kill our cross-border tourist industry. However, *America* is requiring US citizens to have passports to re-enter the US, although this requirement is being fought by border states such as Michigan, Washington, Maine, etc. Enforcement is not yet absolute; I hear from friends who only showed their drivers' license to get back into the US. Border state senators are trying to develop a compromise document more secure than a driver's license, but less stringent to get than a passport. I haven't heard whether there has been any progress on this initiative.
And that, my friend, is why Ronald Reagan was the best president ever.
He knew well the dangers of the metric system, that the metric system is, in fact, the tool of the devil.
Don't know that I'd agree with either assessment, but I'm pretty sure part of Pierre Trudeau's agenda in forcing a change to metric in Canada was to mask the rampant inflation of his government. Today, stores in Canada are free to display prices in Imperial units as well as metric, but in Trudeau's time, stores were *FORBIDDEN* to display Imperial units. This left a bunch of puzzled housewives trying to figure out if $6.55/kilo was more or less than the $1.99/lb they used to pay for pork chops, etc. This is especially true in gasoline - when I started pumping gas as a kid, it was $0.54 Cdn per Imperial gallon. Today, it's $1.03/litre in Toronto, which works out to $4.69 per Imperial gallon. Since most people are clueless, they don't recognize the magnitude of the increase.
Of course, the other part of his agenda was to wipe out as many of Canada's historic ties to Britain as possible. He changed the name of our national holiday (imagine if Clinton had tried to change "Independence Day" to "America Day" - impeachment for sure), he changed the words of our national anthem, and in his mad lust to "repatriate" our constitution, he agreed to one with a hole big enough to drive a truck through (any federal or provincial government can override any constitutional right by a simple majority vote).
Just saw an interview with Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment division of MS, on CNBC. Even though the original sales estimate was 13-15 million units, they are not going to meet the downgraded target of 12 million units; 11.6 million seems to be the upper estimate.
Bach did not deny the warranty costs; however, he countered that the number of games per console for Xbox was higher than for any other system, and that even though MS is projected to lose another $315 million this year, he insists the system will be profitable "next year".
Meanwhile, on a personal note, my daughters (10 and 13) got a Wii system last week. They couldn't be happier, and frankly, neither could I. The system is quite amazing to use, and the games are not the "bang bang kill kill" stuff that seem to permeate the Xbox/PS3 world. And, while picking up a copy of Super Mario party pack at Wal-Mart Wednesday, four people approached the clerk asking if there were any Wii systems available. "No", "No", "No", and "No" were her replies. Meanwhile, stacks of Xbox's and PS-3's teetered ominously in the background..
et's see. IAMNAM, and so I don't remember my math too well but for positive values of X and Y, X-Y is less than X+Y. Did I get that right? I could be wrong about that. But, it seems, based on this hazy recollection, that reducing our emissions will be better for the climate than increasing them.
Oh, I agree with your math as far as emissions go. If we were just being asked to reduce our carbon footprints (e.g. Al Gore's house), I'd be all for it. But that's not what Kyoto's about; it's about sending billions of dollars from countries like Canada to 3rd world dictatorships to buy "credits". And the targets were conveniently set so as to be nearly unmeetable, especially when Canada keeps its immigration doors wide open. Tell me how you're supposed to decrease your carbon use when you add nearly 1% to your population each year. This is unlike European countries where their populations are declining.
Personally, I've given up my car (I live just north of Toronto), and now use my bike and public transit to get around. It's less convenient, takes longer, and is not substantially cheaper, but I don't have an argument with the idea that we should all try to use a little less. I've replaced most of my bulbs with flourescents instead of incandenscents, I rarely use the BBQ anymore, and I'm trying to teach my kids to turn lights, TV's, etc., off when they leave the room. But I'll be damned if my taxes are going to up by 15% so we can send a billion dollars to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe so he can continue his reign of terror. And I think that was the OP's point - AGW in and of itself is no reason for a sudden transfer of billions to corrupt dictatorships; there must be better ways.
But, hey, if you want to lose your job because your company can't afford to buy credits, you go ahead.
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I thought "hybrids" referred to cars that use mixed energy sources, such as gas/electric, or diesel/electric. This car seems to run on electricity only, so why is it called a hybrid?
Geez, you don't have very much imagination, do you? Say the percentage is 5%; For each state, you randomly pick 1 out of every 20 polls (which is trivially easy; have two lottery type machines each filled with balls from 000 to 999, a ball drops from each machine, and that is used as the seed number for a random number generator. Repeat for each state.) For federal elections, I would say the federal government gets to set the rules. And if the feds do set such rules, do you think most state voters would accept anything less in their state elections?
And what of the candidates? Should a candidate be trusted with the right to not challenge? Some candidates will accept results out of the spirit of good sportsmanship, but if since we are talking about the will of the people here, maybe a candidate should never be trusted to speak on behalf of voters, even those who supported him/her.
Here in Canada, there are mandatory recounts if the margin of victory is less than 0.1% of valid votes cast (i.e. doesn't include spoiled ballots, etc.). In addition, anyone - not just the candidate - is free to demand a recount without specific evidence of wrongdoing. Also note in Canada, the results announced on election day are "preliminary results". Over the next seven days, the votes are recounted by non-partisan members of Elections Canada, usually with "scrutineers" from each party present to accept or challenge the validity of any particular ballot. Once these recounts are done, the "official" results are published. I vaguely recall one instance where the official result changed the preliminary result (i.e. the defeated candidate on election day actually won the riding), but I can't remember when.
Slipping on the tin foil hat for a moment... If what we fear is voting machine software which will change or drop votes, then we must also fear that the paper trail can be forged by that same software; telling the voter one thing, but telling election officials another. This assumes that any recount would be made by analysing a printed record of votes taken from the machine by the election officials, and not by going around the community and collecting printed reciepts voters leave the polls with.
But the whole idea of the printed paper trail is that the printed paper is given to the voter, who then confirms that it registered the candidate he voted for. That paper is then dropped in a sealed box, which is only opened if a recount is requested. Are you suggesting that the voting machine would use some form of disappearing and appearing ink to change the paper trail? If not, please outline *exactly how* a machine which registered the vote electronically, printed that vote for the voter, who reviews it personally to ensure it's correct, and then deposits said vote into a sealed ballot box, could be "fixed"? Your idea of having the voter take his receipt home with him is the most ridiculous solution I've ever heard.
Common sense and judicial decisions regarding patent trolls are like matter and anti-matter; they can't exist in the same universe.
In a magazine profile, the writer played heads-up with Daniel for two hours. After the first half hour, Daniel was calling the writer's hole cards with astonishing accuracy.
You may not want to use the term psychology to describe this skill, but millions will disagree with you.
Nope, I'd just figure this is my payback for all the times I've put my dollar into pop or candy machines, or my $5 into change machines, and got nothing back - no soda, no chocolate bar, no quarters. There's never anyone there to complain to, and of course, phoning the number on the machine (assuming there is one, and that you have pen and paper handy) means you'll have to send in a claim, which means a stamp, which means to get your $1 back will take a bunch of your time and $0.50 for a letter. Which means, of course, most people don't bother, and the vending machine owner gets the windfall profit. So I don't have any sympathy for them when the mistake is in my favour; they don't give a crap when I lose out, so why should I give a crap when they do?
So, why don't these millionaire-author guys keep doing it? Because it's hard work all the time. Books, OTOH, are hard work for the time taken to research, write, and promote it.... but if it's a hit, it brings in money for years while you're.... that's right! Making more money using your system! Or not... nothing wrong with cashing in for a while, or maybe, like you said, the bottom has dropped out of the market they're pimping.
In fact, you can usually tell when the bottom is about to drop out of a market when the books (and the hotel seminars, and the late night infomercials) begin to heat up. When the bottom fell out of the stock market in 2001 (after everyone in 2000 was urging you to load up on tech stocks on margin), and Alan Greenspan began to lower interest rates and inject liquidity into the US economy, smart guys began to buy and flip housing. You buy one place with $5k down, flip it in two months for a $15k profit, then buy three places with $5k down, flip those a few months later, etc. As interest rates kept falling, this was a very profitable strategy. But interest rates have bottomed out recently, and the poor saps who bought houses with little or no down and adjustable rate mortgages are shortly about to find out that they can't make their new payments. New fed chair Ben Bernanke, testifying before congress's Banking Committee yesterday, said there's a potential loss of $100 billion on so-called "sub-prime" mortgages (i.e. mortgages to people with "shaky" credit), and there's an even greater potential loss on more solid loans where the owners are going to find their ARM's reset. On a $500,000 home, a 4% interest rate is $20,000 a year in interest. But, with the 10-year rate pushing 5% right now, those ARM's are going to cost $25,000 a year in interest. That's another $400/month people are going to have to find, and for a lot of them, they're not going to be able to do it, and they'll be forced to sell.
But guess who'll be there to buy those homes at fire-sale prices? That's right - the same hucksters who told them to buy houses "with no money down!" in the first place. The cycle repeats every 7-8 years.
I'm Canadian, but we often travel to the US for vacations. We bought a pair of Virgin phones for $10 each in the US, so that my wife and I can communicate with each other when we split up for shopping or skiing or whatever. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than the roaming charges and high per minute charges my Canadian phone provider charges if I use my Canadian phone in the US.
I have a fairly new Nokia which came with a lot of bells and whistles - camera, MP3, FM radio - which I don't use. Since I'd been with the same carrier for three years, they offered me the phone for free if I signed on for another two years. My big beef is even though the screen is quite large, you can't adjust the font size, and the font is just too small for my aging eyes to read. I only need glasses to read small print, so using the phone often means fumbling in my jacket for my glasses' case, putting them on, and then doing whatever it was I wanted. I would gladly give up the MP3 and radio and camera if they would just let me make the font 12 pts instead of 8.
Oh, foo. Every piece of packaged software I buy states the minimum configuration required to install and run the program. Now I might understand that there could be problems if the package requires, say, 512k RAM, and you have 1 MB RAM on your system, but you're trying to keep 6 Firefox windows open, background print a 50-page Word document, keep Excel, Powerpoint, and Access open, and chat with your buddy on IM all at the same time. But then again, you can have trouble keeping your car running in -30 temperatures on icy roads during a blizzard. I doubt most of the people who are having these troubles are overloading their systems; it sounds more like typical M$ bugs.
This is true, but the reason for the switch from cane sugar to HFCS was the increase in sugar prices due to the strength of the sugar lobby.
Before this, and the reason that cane sugar is largely absent from our diet in the US, is that the sugar beet industry lobbied to legislate it that way. What most Americans identify as "sugar" is actually made from beets.
Interesting, in that according to the UNFAO statistics (www.fao.org/es/ess/top/commodity.html), the US produced more sugar cane in 2005 than it did sugar beets. However, the 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act (FSRI) Act reinstated allotments. Beet sugar is allotted 54.35 percent of expected domestic consumption and cane sugar is allotted 45.65 percent. So, it's pretty close to half and half beet and cane, and that's just on domestic production. The US remains the world's largest importer of cane sugar from other nations, despite high tariffs.
More interesting facts about the politics of sugar are at: www.opensecrets.org/pubs/cashingin_sugar/sugar02.h tml
The original article was in "Psychology Today", entitled "Ten Outrageous Facts about men and women", which included such gems as why men prefer blondes and women with big breasts. You can find it at "psychologytoday.com".
The biggest difference I've seen is CS people generally get buried inside firms, while IT people as they advance almost inevitably get involved in either the purchase or sale of new hardware. Since these are big ticket items, if you're the buyer, you're going to get wined, dined, and taken to golf and sporting events. If you're the vendor, you're going to wine, dine, and take the client to golf and sporting events. I think there's just a little jealousy from CS folks about this process.
And for Americans who don't know, the Liberal party was found to be complicit in a scheme where advertising dollars were funneled to Liberal-friendly firms, who then turned around and kicked back millions of dollars to fund the Liberals' election campaign. This is far, far worse than Watergate, but nothing happened to then PM Jean Chretien; in fact, he was just invested in the "Order of Canada" supposedly our highest civilian honour.
So don't for a moment think you're alone in despair regarding your government; I daresay there are millions around the world who feel the same way.
Spot on. My two girls, 10 and 13, got a Wii about 3 weeks ago. They will play for two or three hours at a stretch, and yes, they jump and shout and twirl, and generally have a great time. They have plenty of games for their computers, but they rarely play those anymore; they prefer the interaction the Wii gives them.
And I've enjoyed playing with them as well. The sports pack is fun, and I've even tried Mario Party Pack 8.
The girls are already planning "Wii" parties for their friends; I doubt our machine will be gathering dust any time soon.
Well, since powered flight was still 100 years into the future, the Founding Fathers would have had to be excellent soothsayers to provide for an Air Force. However, Section 8 of Article 1 of your Constitution *DOES* provide for the establishment of a Navy, and unlike the Armies, there is no two-year term of limitations. The Air Force is nothing more than the logical extension of the Navy due to new technology.
Now, if you want to complain about something that is truly perverting the American economy, why don't you complain about the completely unconstitutional Federal Reserve?
Um, so how do you get such a card in the first place without entering a federal building? I'm Canadian, but I worked in Detroit for two years. I had to go to a fed building (this was long before 9/11) where I was wanded and marched through a metal detector, just to get my SSN. And I had to set up a bank account for my pay deposit before I even got my SSN.
At any rate, don't forget your 27B/6.
Too bad I can't find a link, but the late, lamented National Lampoon had an article in the 1970's "How a bill becomes law", which demonstrated the rider process. IIRC, the bill in question was "Let's kill all the negroes!", and the rider was "Homos too!".
Um, you do remember the ERA, don't you?
No, no, and no! Canada does not require US citizens to have passports to enter Canada; in fact, Canada has been fighting the US-created proposal for a number of years. Canadians know that there are many, many Americans who don't have passports, and that requiring one to enter Canada would just kill our cross-border tourist industry. However, *America* is requiring US citizens to have passports to re-enter the US, although this requirement is being fought by border states such as Michigan, Washington, Maine, etc. Enforcement is not yet absolute; I hear from friends who only showed their drivers' license to get back into the US. Border state senators are trying to develop a compromise document more secure than a driver's license, but less stringent to get than a passport. I haven't heard whether there has been any progress on this initiative.
Don't know that I'd agree with either assessment, but I'm pretty sure part of Pierre Trudeau's agenda in forcing a change to metric in Canada was to mask the rampant inflation of his government. Today, stores in Canada are free to display prices in Imperial units as well as metric, but in Trudeau's time, stores were *FORBIDDEN* to display Imperial units. This left a bunch of puzzled housewives trying to figure out if $6.55/kilo was more or less than the $1.99/lb they used to pay for pork chops, etc. This is especially true in gasoline - when I started pumping gas as a kid, it was $0.54 Cdn per Imperial gallon. Today, it's $1.03/litre in Toronto, which works out to $4.69 per Imperial gallon. Since most people are clueless, they don't recognize the magnitude of the increase.
Of course, the other part of his agenda was to wipe out as many of Canada's historic ties to Britain as possible. He changed the name of our national holiday (imagine if Clinton had tried to change "Independence Day" to "America Day" - impeachment for sure), he changed the words of our national anthem, and in his mad lust to "repatriate" our constitution, he agreed to one with a hole big enough to drive a truck through (any federal or provincial government can override any constitutional right by a simple majority vote).
In Korea, we saw 200 mL cans.
And yes, only old people were drinking from them.
mmmm.... beef tendon pho... (drools)
Bach did not deny the warranty costs; however, he countered that the number of games per console for Xbox was higher than for any other system, and that even though MS is projected to lose another $315 million this year, he insists the system will be profitable "next year".
Meanwhile, on a personal note, my daughters (10 and 13) got a Wii system last week. They couldn't be happier, and frankly, neither could I. The system is quite amazing to use, and the games are not the "bang bang kill kill" stuff that seem to permeate the Xbox/PS3 world. And, while picking up a copy of Super Mario party pack at Wal-Mart Wednesday, four people approached the clerk asking if there were any Wii systems available. "No", "No", "No", and "No" were her replies. Meanwhile, stacks of Xbox's and PS-3's teetered ominously in the background..
Wait a minute.. wasn't this article posted by the Luddite Times?
Oh, I agree with your math as far as emissions go. If we were just being asked to reduce our carbon footprints (e.g. Al Gore's house), I'd be all for it. But that's not what Kyoto's about; it's about sending billions of dollars from countries like Canada to 3rd world dictatorships to buy "credits". And the targets were conveniently set so as to be nearly unmeetable, especially when Canada keeps its immigration doors wide open. Tell me how you're supposed to decrease your carbon use when you add nearly 1% to your population each year. This is unlike European countries where their populations are declining.
Personally, I've given up my car (I live just north of Toronto), and now use my bike and public transit to get around. It's less convenient, takes longer, and is not substantially cheaper, but I don't have an argument with the idea that we should all try to use a little less. I've replaced most of my bulbs with flourescents instead of incandenscents, I rarely use the BBQ anymore, and I'm trying to teach my kids to turn lights, TV's, etc., off when they leave the room. But I'll be damned if my taxes are going to up by 15% so we can send a billion dollars to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe so he can continue his reign of terror. And I think that was the OP's point - AGW in and of itself is no reason for a sudden transfer of billions to corrupt dictatorships; there must be better ways.
But, hey, if you want to lose your job because your company can't afford to buy credits, you go ahead.