Stats from the last congressional election:

o 14% approval rate -- that was a poll
o 94% re-election rate -- that was actual voters.
o In the same election, national turnout was 36.3%.

I think the advent of the net's new accessibility to information outside of the laundered and agitprop driven channels, the money-based reasoning of SCOTUS, the lobbyist factor, the obvious malfeasance of Fox news, MSNBC, the blatantly unconstitutional legislation coming out of congress... and so on... all combine to give a very large portion of the people who might otherwise vote a sense that the system is so massively corrupt that there just is no point to it.

When you ask them -- polling asks them -- they tell you that. That's why the 14% approval rate.

But the only people voting are the droolers who watch MSNBC and Fox. They're agenda- and plank-driven (abortion! guns! perverts! terrorists! taxes! etc.) and that's driving them to or from one party or the other. And *they* are controlling the narrative here; that's why the polls just aren't -- and won't be -- working in the current context.

It's just an idea. But the data is hard data. Something has to explain it. It's too skewed to be any kind of random happening.

I actually do vote, but I have to say, it's pretty damned fruitless. This is a red (very red) state, and so that's the way the pendulum swings here, regardless of how I vote. If I vote progressive on something, it's not going to happen. If I vote conservative on something, it would have happened any way. This is not encouraging.

The only thing less productive than voting for progressive ideas here is voting for a third party candidate. Neither one does any good at all in terms of biasing the political system, but at least the progressive vote isn't buried or simply not mentioned. Sneered at, I think might be the most accurate term around here, actually. But they at least talk about it.

Indeed. It's time to ban masturbation already.

Romney vs Obama is a single data point. Just because money didn't win that election, doesn't mean that money doesn't generally win elections.

What we do know is that 91% of the time, candidates who spend more win, at least for Congress. We don't know if there is a causal link, or it's just a correlation, and the real cause is something else. But to bring up Romney is completely disingenuous.

The last few years in this case is more like the last decade. Before JSON, there were (and are) XML-typed columns, and any decent RDBMS will let you use XQuery or similar to query on them directly within your SQL query (and will use special indices to optimize such queries). SQL/XML spec, that standardizes this, was published in 2003. Oracle shipped preliminary support of the then-draft spec in 2002; Microsoft shipped it in SQL Server 2005 in, well, 2005; and Postgres shipped it in 8.3 in 2008.

It's almost as if the writer doesn't understand what a relational database is.

The statute of limitations, so far as I understand it, is a limitation on how long prosecutors can wait to press charges. Maybe that's different in Sweden, but in general, I don't think it has anything to do with sentencing. Once you've been sentenced, even in absentia, there is no limit on the amount of time that the jurisdiction that convicted can take in trying to get you to carry out your sentence (ie. there are only two ways Roman Polanski can no longer be at least theoretically held to account; either he serves his sentence, or he dies).

It's absurd to say there's a statute of limitations on how long it takes to bring somebody into court. If that were the case, then someone charged with a crime who flees would be able to return to the jurisdiction that originally charged him when the limitation was up.

It's certainly useful when you're moving equipment or storage devices. Your complaint would apply to any encrypted storage system that mounted an encrypted file system; Bitlocker, Truecrypt, dmcrypt, etc.

I work for a company that does a lot of government contract work, and we are contractually bound in almost all cases to story certain kinds of confidential data on encrypted media. When using Linux servers, we usually use dmcrypt, but EXT4 encryption would be a nice option as well.

I mean the Amazon app store for Android, that is pre-installed on Kindle Fire, but can also be installed as an app on any Android device.

What about, say, Amazon Appstore?

Hence why I specifically said that the mandatory label should clearly state that they have no medical efficacy. I doubt they'd sell many "remedies" that way, but if they want to try, I don't see why not.

I would say that it should be allowed to be sold, but, like cigarettes, with a mandatory warning to the effect that it contains no chemicals other than water and has no medical efficacy. If people are still willing to buy it then, it's not fraud.

What should absolutely be forbidden is any spending of public funds on this stuff (which is the huge part of the controversy in UK, where NHS funds homeopathic treatments for patients).

The world is filled with religious people. You had better learn to live with them, and perhaps not put so much energy producing ever more hyperbolic strawmen, or perhaps you should flee society.

The Space Pope?

Frankly, I think we need the Hypnotoad.

And what you think matters because?