Seems like the administration was running arms/missiles to Syria via Turkey from Benghazi, which US Ambassador. Stevens brokered. To tie up loose ends, they arranged to have Stevens sent to Benghazi with little security or protection on 9/11 when attacks were likely and left him to die.

Unfortunately for them, this has been picked up and is getting attention. Cue these other scandals (IRS/AP) which they calculated would distract attention from Benghazi. Unfortunately again, for them, instead of distracting from Benghazi, it has morphed in public perception into a "Trifecta of Corruption" in which these individual scandals are reinforcing the others and attracting magnitudes more attention to all the scandals.

People on both sides of the political spectrum are starting to agree, and that spells big trouble for them, and I include the "mainstream"/"old guard" core Republicans. Division is what keeps *both* parties in power...while taking ever more power and freedom from us.

Strat

...That having all these distributed and location-tracked radiation detectors monitored by authorities (I have serious doubts about the government/DHS allowing anything like full and complete public access to the hit-location data) makes this effectively a very powerful tool for tracking individuals/objects/papers/etc of interest to the authorities by simply "tagging", in any number of ways and methods, whatever they want to track with a radioactive substance...liquid, powder, spray, dart, added to food/drink, etc etc.

No wrapping one's head in a damp towel. Better get your ass to Mars!

Strat

It's also against the law for the IRS to selectively harass people & organizations based on politics/ideology, too.

That's why the people who wrote the US Constitution put strict limits on government power. They understood that any power government has which is possible to abuse as such *will* eventually be used to attack political/ideological opponents to the incumbent political/ideological powers regardless of any restrictions.

This administration in particular has already thoroughly demonstrated an almost complete disregard for the Rule of Law, innocent lives, and individual freedom in pursuit of their political & ideological agendas (Fast & Furious, Benghazi missile-running-to-Syrian-rebels/Muslim Brotherhood cover-up, AP/Congressional phone record seizures, IRS political/ideological-based targeting, etc etc etc).

What makes you think they'd suddenly change? Or is the (Stockholm) Force strong with you?

Strat

>> Even better, the IRS official that was in charge of the office targeting individuals and groups for IRS harassment that politically/ideologically oppose this administration has just been put in charge of the IRS's Obamacare office. Better hope your health remains good if you speak out against the government.

Do you have sources for this please?

Ask and you shall receive.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/irs-official-in-charge-during-tea-party-targeting-now-runs-health-care-office/

Strat

The US has not had anything even close to a "free market" for decades. Particularly regarding anything related to healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

The good news, however, is that there should be no worries about medical records being leaked and/or used against individuals or organizations since the IRS will keep those safe for all of us. They're so eager to begin, they simply walked in and seized without explanation approximately *sixty million* medical records in California that are reported to contain every California State Judge as well as many top Hollywood/media/news execs.

Even better, the IRS official that was in charge of the office targeting individuals and groups for IRS harassment that politically/ideologically oppose this administration has just been put in charge of the IRS's Obamacare office. Better hope your health remains good if you speak out against the government.

Maybe we can get the DoJ to seize the IRS's phone records to find out why, since the DoJ seems to be seizing phone records from everyone else these days, including the AP and phone records from the House of Representatives press gallery which journalists often use to call Congresspeople in their offices.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Strat

I've done this more than once without the need to reinstall (With both Vista and W7). You just re-activate. I do believe I was kinda lucky, but the "technical problem" that usually causes a BSOD (the disk driver or the graphics driver barfing up on initialization) is mostly solved on the latest versions of Windows. And it has everything to do with drivers. The new driver model allows for core drivers to die without bringing down the whole system. I'm not saying it will work everytime, but its not the dreadful experience it was with XP.

Progressives being in control of these cities for decades is WHY their economies have been devastated and gangs & drugs and the violence that follows them are out of control. All gun control does in these cities is assure the victims are defenseless. Most deadly assaults are over in less than a minute, and average police response time is about 8 minutes. They show up in time to draw the chalk outlines and fill out reports. Legislating away the *means* of self-defense is indistinguishable from outlawing self-defense.

If guns are the problem, why aren't there mass murders at NRA conventions and gun shows? I was on my school rifle team and nobody thought anything of a kid bringing his newly-acquired semi-automatic rifle in to school and showing it off to buddies by the student lockers in the main hallway between classes, with students and teachers crowding the hall. The only questions asked were what it cost and have they had a chance to shoot it yet. Nobody was shot. Nobody was panicking.

All the recent mass shootings that are being used as reasons for additional gun restrictions share a common type of location. They all occurred in "gun-free zones" where the criminal was assured of zero opposition.

The US War Against Drugs and the earlier alcohol Prohibition disaster has proven that prohibition does not work. Attempting the same foolishness with guns in the US would result in much worse violence, crime, and government corruption than both those failed policies combined.

The KKK and Southern Democrats tried for decades to keep blacks from owning firearms. Are you saying that you agree with the KKK and want to reverse decades of progress in civil rights for blacks...and everyone else as well? The KKK's hate seems rather limited compared with those who wish everyone suffer under Jim Crow laws making possessing the means for self-defense a crime.

Strat

This is actually a good point. Upto Vista, this was a big issue. With Windows Vista (mostly due to hybrid/userland drivers), this started to be possible, or at least with greater success rates. But yes, it is usually way easier in Linux, even when some incompatibility arises.

So how much more is 9 than 5? 80%?

So, ICS should work without a problem in my 2.2 system? Because it doesn't. And my 2.2 is not even 4 years old.

Well, either the system is designed with a long-term maintenance cycle or isn't. Most Linux distros aren't, period. Most userland apps from 10 years ago won't even run on a modern system without recompiling. I'm actually a huge fan of FreeBSD and OpenBSD - I can pick a 10 year old FreeBSD system and upgrade it to the most stable version without (mostly) no issues. I'll probably have problems doing the same on a 2 year old OpenBSD system. That is also ok, some operating systems require a reinstall to truely work properly. And a ton of software changes - the configuration files change, the syntax changes, shared libraries are different, etc. There is nothing wrong with that - its just the way it is.

Did you tried it? Windows 8 actually runs better than XP on not-so-old hardware. I have a 6 year old laptop with it, and works quite well. And I can run 10 or 15 year old apps without a problem. If I really need XP, thats fine - I can even run a virtualized version of it. The release cycle for Windows is different than for Linux. Microsoft needs to make shure it doesn't break compatibility with most of the huge application catalog available. Linux has a different development pace, different priorities, and it is used on an ecosystem where most of the important stuff can be recompiled, and/or are provided by the companies that drive the change in kernel (Oracle, IBM, Redhat, etc). Long-term compatibility isn't a priority - at all. But there are a lot of users for which long-term compatibility is important. Denying it is just stupid.

Actually, they do. Some of the system drivers are developed with the hardware manufacturer, but others are basically developed by Microsoft. I'm talking about system drivers, the ones that work out-of-the-box, not the ones you install yourself. For those, ATI and Nvidia _also_ write them for Linux, and most of the time they still are a big pile of stinking poo.

No, they're not. I'm not a driver programmer, but you have tons of examples. Have a look at multiple non-compatible USB stacks in 2.4 kernel. Have a look in syscall changes between 2.4 and 2.6. Have a look at some sort of sound support API. Or 3D acceleration. Or true userland drivers. Or can just assign privileges to devices to a random list of people. The list goes on and on. Every OS out there has its quirks.

The binary blobs are there because the kernel developers allows them to be. There is no pressure over the manufacturers to release actual stable working drivers. And guess what? Those blobs also exist in Windows. And the hardware works.

I think having morons as elected officials is more harmful than having kids.

Agreed. While definitely something needs to be banned, I can't make my mind on what to ban. Suggestions?
(grin)

"First, kill all the lawyers." - Ye olde English playwright dude.

Seeing as how the federal government bureaucracy including the Executive branch is chock-full of lawyers, as are most (I believe) in Congress, I should wonder if some of Nostradamus' DNA was possibly included in Shakespeare's family tree.

Strat

If you remove the crime numbers from Progressive Democrat-controlled major cities with the strictest gun control laws like Chicago, NYC, etc, the US crime rate is one of the lowest.

Keeping crime and criminals in check requires cooperation and action from both police and citizens. Disarming half the crime-fighting force does not help reduce crime. It not only requires a much larger and more brutal law enforcement arm to maintain order, It turns that disarmed half into helpless victims and erodes trust, legitimacy, and respect for the government and for police, as well as reducing citizen cooperation with police. It promotes increasing hostility by citizens towards police and the government.

This is the reality for the US and it's society & culture. Maybe gun control works in Australia or the UK. If they're happy, that's great. Different solutions to fit different nations and cultures. It's not just gun control. What works in N. Korea wouldn't work in the UK. What works in France wouldn't work in China. Rinse and repeat for other nations/cultures and various laws/policies/etc. This is true for a large number of things including gun control.

Do you think gay marriage would work in Saudi Arabia? Do you think a death penalty for being LGBT would work in the US/UK? Same thing for gun laws seeking a national database/registration and outright bans in the US. It would take an extremely intrusive, controlling, brutal, and tyrannical police state to have any hope of even beginning to enforce such bans/restrictions in the US. Many millions would die.

Strat

You are. PC-BSD's pbi format does exactly the same (http://www.pcbsd.org/en/package-management/), it is not a novel idea - at all. And as many other comments point out, other platforms do it too.

Good for you. The same could be said about any software tool, really. But in the real world, some companies have hundreds-of-pages catalogues that need to be produced in multiple languages, often with different product sets, but with the same layout. And with correct color accuraccy (eg. converting RGB -> CMYK and having a proper preview on a calibrated setup). And InDesign does all that, and reading from your XML. Or from the ERP solution that has product images and is able to generate both end-user catalogs and technical catalogs from the product datasheet on the database. I'd say if you spend more than 10h tweaking any other system to do the same, you are starting to lose money - it is cheaper to just do it in InDesign - and (usually) easier to maintain and upgrade.

Try Corel PhotoPaint. Photoshop CS6 is awesome, but CS5/5.5 was a big pile of unstable poo (at least in Windows). And many of the features Photoshop users rave about were already existing in PhotoPaint for years - eg. vector layers, vector masks, smart objects, etc. And color workflow is actually sane. For simpler RGB works, you can do sane image editing with Paint Shop Pro (and actually work with big-ass images like panoramas) at a fraction of the price.

Never heard of it, googled it and seems to be Mac-only. My previous Corel suggestion is probably useless to you :)