Or I know he's a lot more popular than Congress! And that is who he has to be at odds with.

He's more popular than W was at this point, too, by 4 points. Maybe I did read the numbers after all.

Nixon was at 24% approval

A judge doesn't have to make a perfect ruling, just one that is probably correct.

That was my point. They don't work for him, they work for the Federal Government. Much about their employment is regulated directly by Congress, including their budget. A President can fire a department head, but then what? That might actually not matter at all to the section heads within the NSA. The political leadership comes and goes, but the rest of the organization is self-managing. The Director of the NSA might in fact not be able to run around snapping his fingers and cause the desired effect. They manage their own budget on a blank check from Congress.

Obviously the departments that are overseen more directly by members of the Cabinet then the President has extensive access and generally better control. Except of course Law Enforcement which is all delegated as per post-Watergate rules.

Something else you might not have considered, when you fire the Director, then the Deputy Director takes over. The Director is a military position; the Deputy Director is required to be a civilian. This guarantees that it will be a "career professional" from inside the organization, but who can't be appointed as Director. This means if you fire the Director, the short term effect is turn full control over to the organization. And then the replacement has to be formally Nominated and then Confirmed by the Senate. Whoever you just fired had connections in the Senate to have gotten confirmed in the first place. So firing him upsets those people. So the replacement will likely be further from the President than whoever he fired, because he'll have a weakened hand in confirmation.

Also, the NSA is military, which means most of the President's staff don't have any say at all. Most of what the President wants to get done has to be done directly, and through the Secretary of Defense. And then most of the workers are actually civilians, so he can't give them orders as Commander in Chief. And the Secretary of Defense mostly has to go through the command structure.

Civics is actually interesting to learn about. There are real reasons it is structured the way it is.

If there's one thing Mars doesn't have enough of, it's Legos.

I thought it was Moms it was out of? Better idea, though: let's find some of the A/C's here and see if they fit.

And supposedly it is no faster than a real computer. What gives?

It's hard to say because it's all "secret sauce" (so everybody just plunks their heels down on some position rather than admit "I don't know") but one thing that's interesting to me is that a handful of blokes out of Canada appear to have built a computer that's about as fast as a Xeon that Intel needed a few billion dollars, thousands of people, and forty years experience to create.

And that was their first commercial version. Maybe somebody will rip one apart and find out it says "Xeon 2650" on the inside, but until that happens I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because they seem to have at least one fairly remarkable accomplishment under their belts.

If the Google guys buy the upgrade, I'd be willing to bet five bucks that it's real, just very early in the development cycle still.

So, assuming he wasn't already dead, technically he didn't die in the Tesla.

Musk can still say, "no Tesla owner has ever died driving one of our vehicles," too, because he wasn't an owner, he was a thief.

Every bureaucracy tries to expand itself, you know that. Rather than actually get the bandwidth to schools that they need (200Kbps per student or so, ballpark) to support real telelearning, which is hard to do (but arguably within FCC purview), especially given the extensive number of rural schools, they lean towards something easy - buying access points, to hook up to their too-slow Internet link because every agency has to be seen "doing something".

One burst from one location in the sky, then weeks or months later, another burst from another location in the sky. I don't think a pattern recognition algorithm is going to help you much.

At the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution [wikipedia.org], 90% of American's supported deeper involvement.

At the time, the American people were being lied into supporting a war, so it's hard to take that number seriously as an indication of truth.

The Maddox fired on ghost ships (RADAR errors) and the Johnson administration explained it as "another attack", insisted the NVA fired first, and sold this as evidence of a pattern of aggressive behavior that had to be dealt with.

50,000 Americans died fighting a boogey man, and killed many more innocents than that. But the MIC profited handsomely, just as Eisenhower had predicted.

The NSA's report was only declassified after the Bush Administration lied Americans into war in 2003, but now we have two documented examples of being lied into war by the USG. It's no wonder that they didn't bother seeking any authorizations for any of the subsequent wars in the Middle East or Africa.

If dead people can vote, they can go to war also.

It certainly cuts out the expensive, wasteful, inhumane middle part of the usual arrangement.

Curiously, 17 of their husbands died in battle after being drafted past the age of 90 . . .

hawk

>up and thought 2-digit years would be enough,

When economists actually looked at the *data* for the "Y2K problem," they found that it would have cost, in discounted real dollars, three times as much to prevent the problem as it would have to avoid . . .

doc hawk, economist

My Uncle looked at his draft number, and enlisted (more control over assignment).

He was right.

My grandmother forwarded his induction notice to him in Viet Nam.

He had the cook lay down, poured catchup over his head[1], and stood with his foot on the cook--and sent the picture back, from Viet Nam, to the draft board.

hawk

[1] Kind of silly to worry about color for a B&W picture . . .