I use Putty plenty, but I haven't had a time yet where I have needed to use it on a new system and needed root access on the system I am logging in to. If I'm using it on a new box, I am logging in with my usual non-root account on my remote system. How exactly would they use that to gain root access?

What they advocated for, and what they actually did, were two very different things. I'm talking about the budget proposals that they actually signed into law (in the case of Obama) or voted for (in the case of Pelosi). These were really not even close to reflections of what they said they were campaigning for. Even more so, they resulted in higher government handouts to wall street and the military-industrial complex than the GOP presidents had ever dared dream for, and larger tax cuts to the wealthy as well. The cherry on the sundae comes in the continued dismantling of workers' rights.

Another way to put it in perspective is to look for any bill that Obama signed that Reagan, Bush, or Bush Jr. would not have signed. I can't find a single one.

Really? Obama has signed into law - including during the time when Pelosi was leading the house - bills that Reagan and both Presidents Bush could have only dreamed of. Under Obama - regardless of who controlled either chamber of congress - we saw huge tax cuts to the wealthy, and continued marginalization of the middle and lower classes.

Essentially, while the GOP was marching further to the right, the democrats decided it would be a good idea to follow.

... you buy a gun, and you become a republican. That's been the cycle for a long time. Yeah, lots of republicans have croaked lately but they're being replaced by democrats shifting over.

Besides, as we've seen the last 6 years there isn't much difference between the two. One party is right-wing, and the other is 1 order of magnitude further to the right. Either way the republicans and their supporters win.

And how exactly do you propose to lock a dish onto a single satellite when they're moving around like that? Or is the idea to have enough of them out there that you don't need to lock onto a single bird, just have one in range?

Either way, it sounds expensive. Launching 7000 satellites isn't cheap, plus you have to have them reboosted constantly (500 mi is not a very high orbit, though it's better than the ISS) somehow. Unless they think they're going to get a ton of subscribers (and their system will actually be able to handle them all), it's not going to be economically feasible. Remember, they tried almost exactly this not that long ago with the Iridium satellite-phone system. It was a complete failure, and while it's still in use, the company that built and launched the satellites went out of business and it all had to be sold to another company for pennies on the dollar; they kept it going because their start-up costs were so low and they didn't have much of an investment to recoup. That doesn't sound like a good business plan to me. The only commercial satellite services that have been successful have been ones using GEO satellites, like DirecTV, since you can just launch one or two satellites and get coverage of the whole USA and not have to worry about boosting or replacing it frequently. GPS has been successful, but it wasn't commercial at all (the government does it for military purposes; we're just all benefiting from it), and even it only has a few dozen satellites.

Not a surprise that I raise an actual concern and you reply with a conspiracy. Obviously the constant flow of time in this corner of the universe is not important in the context of trying to banish people with the wrong consonant after their name from Washington.

You will likely claim I am being pedantic about an unimportant detail, but this does matter in this case. The first attack started a bit before 4am Washington time. Hillary gave her response the following day. The question then is how much time elapsed between when she would have received this information and when she gave her speech to the press.

Had she waited longer to give that speech, you would be bitching that she was waffling and ineffective. Instead she took what she thought to be the most credible intelligence at the time and spoke about it.

And hell, it's not like we wasted 6 trillion dollars and over three thousand American lives on the mistake.

We've learned from other bridge collapses in the past that it is more important to place - or relieve - blame after the collapse than it is to actually do something about it. Will the satellites speed up that process as well?

We already have satellite internet. Go to hughesnet.com and check it out for yourself.

The problem with it is that the ping times are terrible. There's nothing that can be done about that unless you figure out how to communicate faster-than-light, because radio waves take a certain amount of time to travel to a geosynchronous satellite and back. You could stick satellites in lower orbits, but then they won't stay there long without boosting, and more importantly, you can't fix a satellite dish on them because they're constantly moving across the sky, just like the ISS does. Only GEO orbits allow you to fix a dish on a satellite and not need to move it.

How did he violate his oath? He was supposed to uphold the US Constitution, is he not? His state's anti-gay law was unconstitutional, so he had every right to refuse to enforce it.

If his state passed a law banning Catholicism, do you think he should be bound to enforce that one too, even though it's obviously and clearly in violation of the First Amendment?

Unless, of course, you're talking about Andrew "Dice" Clay, right? Really, can you be more up-market than him?

That said, I've been around here a lot less in the past few weeks. I get more useful and current tech news through google news and if I want to know what conservatives are yelling in an echo chamber I can witness that through other places as well. The utility of this site is dwindling rapidly.

I recall someone posted the directions for how to make sudafed from crystal meth. Being as the latter is easier to buy than the former, you could start with that. For obvious reasons I'm not going to search for that method myself.

I don't recall if you get drain cleaner back out of it or not, though.

How would they restrict them to something that someone with enough money couldn't buy their way around? Being as the drug cartels have no shortage of money, it seems like a pointless move.

I'm pretty sure they own more than this crappy site, so I'd say no :)

That said, it also reminded me of DHL, which left me thinking it was a crappy web site associated with a third-rate courier service.

To the conservative majority here on slashdot, few things are scarier than the notion of something evolving. They are extremely selective about acknowledging changes to the constitution as being valid at all - notice their new war on the 17th amendment as one example - even when they are ratified by congress through the proscribed methods for amending the constitution. The idea that the constitution could itself evolve is nothing short of heresy for them.