afraid of letting Obama get more power to control private companies

President Obama != the FCC. The FCC is an independent authority. It doesn't answer to any President, although it can be circumscribed by laws. The FCC is directed by five commissioners appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate for five-year terms, except when filling an unexpired term. The president designates one of the commissioners to serve as chairman. Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party. None of them may have a financial interest in any FCC-related business.

there is actually *no* prohibition [of blasphemy] in the Quran...
the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept.

Koran (4:89) - "They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper."

Is there some problem with the translation? Seems fairly clear to me.

That's not necessary. My backup is mounted read-only via nfs, and when I am running backups they are done by rsync via ssh. Actually I have two backups on two separate hosts and only one is nfs mounted, but that is a detail.

Bourne sh, POSIX sh, and bash globbing all suck because, while handy in very simple situations, they are not REs, not very versatile/capable, and not very intuitive. It's not that you CAN'T DO what you need to do; it's that you have to approach the problem uniquely.

To match via globbing any file or directory starting with one or more dots, but exclude dot and dot-dot standalone pseudo-links, I believe the most efficient recourse is the somewhat perverse:
ls -d1 .[^.]* ..?*

which is quite an indictment of obstinate design stupidity. REs are better, but still a minefield. The best I can come with using REs are:
ls -a | grep '^\..*[^.][^.]*$'
and the slightly more concise
ls -a | egrep '^\.+[^.]+$'

I will leave it as an exercise to ponder why you need the -d but not the -a in the first form, but must use the -a and NOT the -d in the last two forms. It's pretty disgusting when you work out EXACTLY how those options work. The -1 is not necessary in the second two cases because the pipeline magically changes the output format.

TrueOS is just FreeBSD with some very minor additional utilities thrown in - and no support for x86 32 bit.

Hopefully the Republican Congress will now find some balls and defund the EPA.

I happen to think the EPA needs some reigning-in in certain respects, but what's it like puffing on that crack pipe? Congress is not going to "defund" anything; most certainly nothing as widely supported as the EPA. Hoping that it will is dreaming a particularly STUPID fairy tale.

9 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas pollution is a bloody lot of greenhouse gas

Not nearly as significant as the remaining 91% of greenhouse gas emissions, eh?

Careful; you're effectively exploding some myths and fairy tales.

One more thing you didn't mention so I will. The EPA was not just enacted during Nixon's (R) tenure; it was PROPOSED by Nixon. Actually, the EPA was created by Executive Order, submitted to Congress (symbolically?) for approval, and approved.

Pendant watches are coming back :-)

As a one-time alleged reactionary, so far today, I'm either 100% with him, or 50-50. I completely agree with him on the internet; not so sure about this one, but I'm not close-minded. If the cost of compliance is not exorbitant, I suppose there is nothing wrong with this. At least it would reduce some blatant waste.

Oh come now. Lobbying is not about Joe Blow talking to his rep. In this case, Wikipedia hits the nail on the head. "Lobbying in the United States describes paid activity in which special interests hire well-connected professional advocates, often lawyers, to argue for specific legislation..." It's all about influence and skirting the rules with a wink and a nod. It's a BUSINESS, and it's dirty.

Letting some punk of a congressman drive an expensive car you provide and fuel is bribery. Treating him to dinner is bribery. Worming your way into his confidence with fake friendship and solicitude is a form of bribery too.

do you think that the NAACP, or the AARP, or the Sierra Club, or the NRA, or labor unions or other groups should be barred from taking their concerns to their elected representatives in a unified way

Yes, when "taking their concerns" is via highly sophisticated lobbying. Let the write letters and send emails like anybody else.

Here in Colorado diesel is still at 3/ gal.

Sigh. 3.80 on Cape Cod. Apparently just because they can.

We have proto-law in the form of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". So long as that provision is not amended via Constitutional process, do you see any wiggle room there? Hemming and hawing doesn't count.

As it stands, any Federal law whatsoever abridging freedom of speech in any manner is null and void on the face of it. But this in no way restricts the laws of individual states.

He's on the money, though, isn't he? Doesn't change the message.

and damn well the protection of free speech should mean that you can say anything you want without legal consequences

No it doesn't. If I publically incite/encourage harm against a group of people and they come to harm then I should face the consequences even if all I did was talk. If I was the cause of the harm then I'm responsible. You're free to say what you want but you're also responsible for what you say.

That has validity, so long as one understands that the crime of incitement is a very slippery slope. Objectively there is a huge fundamental difference between saying "jews are all evil bastards and all jews should be killed", and "faggots are disgusting" or "muslims are intolerant and dangerous". Anyone with a working sense of logic should agree that the first steps over the line and needs SOME sanction (exactly what sanction is saved for another discussion), and the others are nothing more than the expression of the right NOT TO LIKE.

There can be no guarantee that everybody likes everybody and everything, or even that nobody is allowed to express dislike or fear or disgust. Yet many such expressions have come to be regarded as "hate speech" against protected minorities, and prosecuted or suppressed as such by the force of the law.

Of course the goal of suppressing hate cannot be thus achieved at all. The only achievement is an atmosphere of repression.