then why the recent decision ... that allowed individuals to contribute directly to *all* candidates, with no overall cap on contributions?

Because it'a a SUPREME COURT decision. We have three branches of government and only two are elected.

The supremes are appointed, for life (subject only to impeachment for high crimes, like the president). They have no re-election issues and can vote their mind without affecting their own tenure.

The court has repeatedly struck down campaign spending restrictions, because they're limits, not just on free speech, but on the POLITICAL speech that is the reason it is an enumerated right in the first place.

But it takes a while for a law to produce enough damage to give someone standing to challenge it, and to bring it to the supremes, and then they rule narrowly. Then, once a piece is struck down, Congress just turns around and does another version of it to evade the details of that decision, and the cycle starts over.

There are under 700 people that hit the max last time around, do you seriously think that decision will benefit the grass roots? Sounds to me like it's aimed squarely at giving the oligarchs more influence.

Of course it's the rich are the first who are bit and who have the resources to bring the suit. That's part of why the limits end up off the rich (like Soros) first, while they're still hobbling everybody else.

It isn't just the limits themselves that are an issue. There's all the reporting requirements, publication requirements, time limits, and maze of details that make compliance hard.

It's hard for candidates: They need a substantial political machine right off the bat. Getting dinged for campaign finance violations is costly, may involve jail time, DOES involve court time, and produces publicity that tarnishes the candidate's image and hurts his chances in future elections. This gives the professional politicians, especially incumbents with the machine in place, a massive advantage over any grass-roots upstarts trying to replace them.

And it can bring on reprisals against donors - including carreer-killing or physical retaliation. Who contributed to what political campaigns is public record and searchable online. This is an invitation to people with opposing views to exert social pressure or take revenge. (Within the last couple weeks we saw the CEO of Netscape forced to resign by just such pressure, as a result of the McCain-Feingold reporting of a past political contribution to a "politically-incorrect" campaign.)

It's the exact opposite of a secret ballot, which is secret to prevent such reprisals so the vote can be cast in safety. Why should financial support be any different? Why would publishing the amount and beneficiary of each contributor's political contributions be any less of a bias on the political system than publishing the way each voter voted?

Further, risking a job is far more of a hardship for a little guy living hand-to-mouth than a rich executive with millions in the bank and a golden parachute. So it's another force to suppress grass-roots opinion in favor of those who are independently wealthy or well-off.

So if they say technology "is making" things worse, I assume they have videos from 10 or 20 years ago to compare to this new footage?

I've lived near and worked in SF and have plenty of experience ignoring the homeless. You just have to. As a friend of mine -- who has a degree in theology -- once said, "If I sold everything I owned and gave all the money to the homeless, the end result would be that there's one more homeless person in the world." I've given money to some and ignored others.

Homelessness is a very complex issue with many sides. Some people are homeless by choice, some due to losing a job/house/etc., some due to mental issues or addictions. Some are benign, some are dangerous. And the #1 issue for anyone who thinks homelessness can be easily "solved": Some would work if given the chance, some wouldn't.

> when one of the historic buildings burned down,
> they had almost daily coverage on the progress.

Wow. Must've taken a long time to burn down. :-)

"And just for fun, he says 'Get a job'"

That's just the way it is, some things will never change.

Do people REALLY still cling to the myth that the New York Times is not a left-wing newspaper? Puh-leez. We're adults here, people. In this day and age, we're still denying basic facts like this? You don't believe me, do you?

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.
--Source: The New York Times.

20 years at $50k is pretty reasonable. Now just quit charging things and you might actually have some money in 20 years.

FWIW, a republic CAN be a democracy. At least in principle, and if you aren't too picky about exact definitions. (I'm not asserting that the US states were ever more of a democracy than was classical Athens, however.)

The board fell behind on bugging folks on payments because the processing took a lot of time and our financial controller was buried in work. As I was saying elsewhere, it's a scaling problem.

No. It's a management problem when an organization takes on a role that it is not equipped to execute and is not part of the organization's primary mission. Furthermore, it is a management problem because the issue was allowed to fester for some time with little to no action (as the minutes show).

What's weird is that Intel was in the ARM business for a while, before selling XScale to Marvell in 2006, just as it was taking off. Maybe the prices were getting too competitive.

It will if you're using C or C++.

FWIW, *most* of the text I'm working with is ASCII-7, but some of it isn't. Short quotation in, e.g., Greek. I need to be able to count the chars, etc. Utf-32 is an immense waste of space...and I already expect to be doing a lot of paging because of excessive memory use.

except for the ... 3rd

Come to think of it, I recall that there was a case last year in Nevada over exactly that, I wonder how that went?

>> Black men can start by seriously trying to parent their
>> children instead of leaving them to be raised by single
>> mothers in broken homes in bad neighbourhoods.

> This is almost as laughable as "The poor just need to
> stop being poor, then they could afford health care."

Nothing wrong with most of that sentence -- "Black men can start by seriously trying to parent their children instead of leaving them to be raised by single mothers in broken homes." ("Broken home" in the figurative sense of "separated parents".) And hey, once you have the cost savings of living together, you can move somewhere better, thus taking care of the "in bad neighborhoods" part, too.

Work out, get some allies, and beat the ever-loving shit out of the bully. You'll get off easier.

That's obviously the school's lesson here.

There are no reliable metrics that indicate FOSS is safer. None.

Can you propose a metric that would compare the "safety" of FOSS versus closed-source/proprietary software?

(I thought not.)

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,

I'm curious about what "organized interest groups" were "controlled for". Did that include things like the AARP and the NRA, the two largest public pressure groups in the country? How about the various organizations called The Tea Party?

When a lot of people at the grass roots level want to redirect the government, they often join together and form orgizations to lobby for their interests. These groups are generally what gets things done. If the study counts such organizations as "organized interest groups" and subtracts their policy impact from the impact of the "Average American", it's no wonder the latter's impact is measured as " minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant".

Also: What counts as the policy desires of the "Average American"? Are they averaging out people with opposing oppinions on government policy?