Jeremiah Cornelius posited:

No, no, no.

There's nothing past tense about it.

CrimsonAvenger admitted:

Wait ... you've run into SEVERAL people who knew someone named CrimsonAvenger?

eric conspiracy pointed out:

You are, of course, correct. I was thinking of James Madison. My error.

Piss-poor authority, especially given the page's unreadability without Javascript.

Try this one, instead:

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_history.html

Dcnjoe60 argued:

I don't disagree. However, in the case of Windows 95, people upgraded to new computers specifically so that they COULD run 95 - because it was so obviously and incontrovertibly superior to Win 3.x in so many ways. You may not recall, but 95 had the largest open beta test of any software product EVER to that time. Microsoft very wisely encouraged everyone who wanted to try it ahead of its release to download and install it - and people did, in droves.

When 95 was finally released, it set records for copies sold, not only pre-installed, but new orders and upgrades from 3.x. It was wildly popular, and it deserved to be wildly popular, because Microsoft did an excellent job of making it both fully-featured and highly-debugged upon release.

That, of course, was back when billg was running the company. After he left, and that MBA schmuck Ballmer took over, we got Vista and Windows 8, two pieces of OS shit so loose and stinky that they barely qualify as diarrhea.

MouseTheLuckyDog blathered:

You'e conflating the term "militant" with "military". The Boston Massacre (which turns out to have been no such thing - in actuality, the British soldiers were fired on from the crowd, which means they returned fire in self-defense - but the winners get to write the histories), known to the British as the Incident on King Street, occurred on March 5, 1770, when a detachment of eight British soldiers was sent to defend a sentry, Private Hugh White, who was surrounded by a mob of several hundred Bostonians, and was being subjected to insults and threats from its members. The soldiers formed a protective shield around White, and, on orders from their commander, Captain Thomas Preston, loaded their muskets. The mob's actions escalated to throwing objects, and daring the soldiers to fire. Richard Palmes, a local innkeeper, physically threatened Captain Preston with a club. One thrown object hit Private Hugh Montgomery hard enough to knock him off his feet. When Montgomery got back to his feet, he fired his musket into the crowd. No one was hit. However, Palmes further aggravated the situation by clubbing both Montgomery and Preston with his cudgel. Without orders or authorization, the other soldiers then fired into the mob, which promptly retreated.

After an overnight investigation, Preston and his detachment were all arrested - by the British military governor - the following morning. On the 17th, Preston, the eight men under his command, and four members of the mob who were alleged to have fired on the troops were all indicted for murder. Preston, defended by John Adams, with the assistance of Paul Revere (who drew a defense map of the scene, showing the position of the five fatalities in relation to that of the troops, a la CSI), was tried in late October, 1770 and acquitted on grounds that he had not ordered his men to fire. The eight soldiers under his command were tried separately in late November. Two of them were found guilty of manslaughter, because Adams convinced the jury that they had had good reason to feel their lives were in danger. The other six were found not guilty.

The four civilians were tried in December. One of the witnesses for the defense - a defendant's manservant - was found guilty of perjury. The four main defendants were acquitted.

The events of March 5, 1770 were skillfully exploited by Samuel Adams and his fellow separatists to help turn the tide of public opinion against British rule. Eventually, more than seven years after the so-called Boston Massacre (a phrase coined by Sam Adams), the colonies declared their independance, and the United States eventually won their independence from Britain.

John Adams, who successfully defended all the British soldiers involved in the incident against charges of murder, went on to write the U.S. Constitution, and become the second President of the United States.

dcnjoe60 averred:

Windows 3.0 was not a failure. In terms of both enthusiastic adoption by consumers, and financially for Microsoft, it was a major success. Yes, it was buggy. That didn't matter to the marketplace.

Likewise, Windows 95 was a major success for Microsoft, by the same metrics. It was, to borrow a term from a certain self-aggrandizing billionaire, HUGE, both in the corporate and consumer marketplaces.

But you're dead right about ME and Vista. People reacted to both as if they were dead rats - and rightly so. Dell even forced Microsoft to offer its corporate customers a downgrade path - buy a PC with Vista, get a license to replace the OS with XP for free.

jbolden blathered:

That Kool-Aid must be MIGHTY tasty. It sounds like you drained the whole pitcher.

Smoking marijuana is "incredibly devastating" ONLY to those who have been convicted for possessing it. (It's still a felony in a number of our more backward states, and in many countries - Singapore, I'm looking at YOU - elsewhere around the globe). Holland has demonstrated that, once it's decriminalized, even mainlining heroin is not especially devastating to anyone other than the user - and not necessarily even to him/her, if he/she doesn't share needles.

Crack and meth are another story, mostly because of the paranoiac effects of both the drugs themselves and of the prolonged sleep deprivation which accompanies their extreme abuse - but those effects, too, are enormously magnified SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE ILLEGAL.

The point is: the single greatest harm ANY illegal drug creates is the consequences of the user falling afoul of the criminal "justice" system. Make them all legal, cheap, and easily available to adults (so that nobody has to steal to afford them, and the excessive profits that are built into their price to compensate dealers for the risks involved in supplying them disappear), and any harm they may do declines to mere nuisance value.

Don't be a tool. And, for pity's sake, put down that pitcher.

dkleinsc protested:

I could not agree more.

And I didn't mean to imply any criticism of you or your post. It was more of a "me, too" kinda thing, only from the perspective of a mortgage industry outsider.

HornWumpus blathered:

You are absolutely wrong.

Everybody cared when the bubble popped for several reasons:

• The sudden disappearance of the market for real estate, and the revelation of the VAST oversupply in housing led to a host of foreclosures around the world. They, in turn, immediately reduced the value of all the homes in their neighborhoods, as did the general dilapidation of those neighborhoods, as banks were overwhelmed with foreclosed properties, and neglected maintenance on the homes they'd repossessed.
• The VAST majority of subprime mortgages wound up packaged as derivatives, which Wall Street (and its foreign equivalents) sold as gilt-edged securities. The revelation that they were, in fact, toxic "assets", nearly toppled the economy (and did, in fact, destroy Lehman Brothers). Apparently you weren't paying attention when the US Congress approved a $700 billion bailout for mortgage bankers UNDER GEORGE BUSH, with no disclosure requirement, and no conditions attached.
• The abrupt economic collapse led to banks simply sitting on another $700 billion in Congressionally-approved bailout funds UNDER BARACK OBAMA, rather than loaning that money to individuals and small business holders (i.e. - "Main Street"), which considerably worsened the economic crisis, as businesses, in particular, found themselves in a sudden cash crisis FOR WHICH THERE WAS NO BASIS - except the bankers' greed and stupidity.

And it was, indeed, speculators who were responsible for the VAST majority of subprime loans. If the mortgage industry is so determined to give you free money that they offer you 0% interest for the first six months of the loan, AND they're willing to roll all their fees into the mortgage, AND you're planning on unloading the house you buy in THREE months, AND the market demand is so high that, essentially, your investment sells the day you list it, why wouldn't you take their money? That is EXACTLY what happened, over and over again. To make matters worse, many speculators were able to leverage their ownership of houses (and, worse yet, condos) they had no intention of ever occupying by pledging their titles as collateral for additional loans - which permitted them to build little empires of subprime-mortgaged properties.

Granted, many of the houses these speculators bought were in poor neighborhoods. That doesn't mean it was poor people who bought them.

There are now DOZENS of high-rise condominium developments in various stages of completion in and around Las Vegas. Their occupancy rate runs around 10%, on average. There are still lots of new houses in the area that never saw an occupant. And there are LOTS of houses in poorer areas that turned over multiple times - and were never occupied.

You have NO idea what you are talking about.

And listening to Fox News is not improving your education, either.

dkleinsc claimed:

I saw the bubble in 2004.

My wife and I had just moved to Las Vegas - one of the housing bubble's domestic epicenters - and went looking for a house to buy. Nearly every property we saw had already been sold by the time the "for sale" sign went up on its lawn. Houses were selling for 20-40% over asking price within 45 minutes of appearing on the realty industry's MLS. Often, the same houses - having never been occupied by anyone other than a painting crew - would be back on the market three months later, for 50% more money. And would sell, again, in 45 minutes, for substantially more than their asking price.

We decided to bid on an FHA foreclosure property. The FHA brochure estimated its market value at $121K, so we put in a bid of $135K, just to be safe. It sold to a Mexican family that bid $179K.

That's when I told my wife, "This shows all the signs of a classic bubble market."

I was pretty sure it was a Vegas-only phenomenon, until I happened to talk to a friend of mine whose wife was trying to break into the travel-writing market. They'd recently returned from traveling the Mediterranean, and, when I told him about the crazy housing market in Las Vegas, he said, "It's not just Vegas. We were just in Bulgaria, and the Aegean coast there is completely lined with high-rise condo developments, in all stages of construction. And - we asked out of curiosity - they're all asking half a million dollars for a 1,200-square-foot condo on the 'Bulgarian Riviera'."

That's when I realized that the housing bubble was a global phenomenon - and that its collapse would be a world-wide catastrophe.

What I could not imagine at the time was that the epic level of irresponsibility I saw on the part of everyone from speculators (who, contrary to the blame-the-poor crowd, were the ones who were driving the demand), to mortgage bankers, to Wall Street derivatives brokers, to (especially!) regulators would continue unabated for FOUR MORE YEARS.

Needless to say, we did not buy a house in Vegas.

Greg01851 noted:

Yep. Important datum, that.

However ... since this announcement ONLY applies to 1-3 Earth-mass planets within .25 AU of G-type stars (because it's the result of occulation observations, and that's the limit of resolution for any current telescope), it says nothing whatsoever about Earth-ish planets that obit in the "Golidlocks zone". OTOH, I think it's not unreasonable to extrapolate that, if there're appropriately-sized worlds in too-close orbits around that high a proportion of G-type stars, there's a pretty good likelihood that there're just as many (or more) in the zone where life could evolve.

Perhaps we'll find out when/if the James Webb telescope is launched.

Exciting stuff, regardless.

ShanghaiBill persisted in missing the point, thusly:

Again: exactly which part of NOBODY IS ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE THE DENIERS was unclear to you?

The issue is whether THEIR SOURCES OF FUNDING SHOULD BE REVEALED.

My own, personal opinion is that they should.

Shanghai Bill insisted:

Again, in what way does requiring those who claim to be scientists disputing scientific consensus on a scientific basis to reveal the sources of their funding represents ANY infringement on their free speech?

The short answer is: it doesn't. The long answer is: the fact that the sources of funding for climate scientists who argue for anthropogenic global warming have ALL, ALWAYS been public knowledge, but the sources of funding for the scientists in denial have, in general, been kept purposefully opaque tends, quite rightly, to call into question the motive for their opposition to the consensus - while in no way denying them the right to hold, argue, and publish those opinions. Sure, they're free (under current law) to keep those sources secret - but, since the scientist-deniers' own identities are (necessarily) public knowledge, the presumption HAS to be that they're keeping the sources of their funding secret in order to conceal that their opinions are paid for by the very parties who stand most to benefit from their arguments contra the overwhelming scientific consensus.

In other words: they're trying to hide the fact that they're paid whores of the fossil fuel industry.

Again, no one's questioning their right to express their opinion. Not me, not anyone.

What's being questioned is their integrity - and it is completely legitimate to do so, so long as they refuse to reveal who's paying them to disagree.

ShanghaiBill somehow got modded to +4 Insightful for blathering:

Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase? The overwhelming majority of climate scientists who publish papers that conclude our climate is, in fact, changing (and that the change is largely or exclusively due to human-generated greenhouse gases) and the institutions for which they work make their sources of funding public. Why shouldn't the government require deniers - especially those specifically engaged in high-pressure lobbying of elected officials on the subject - to reveal where their financing comes from? Because they have some supposed divine right to anonymity?

Somehow the phrase "fair and balanced" springs instantly to mind ... and not in a good way.

Swampash blathered:

Compare the revenues Apple received on the Mac II with the revenues it's receiving ON THE MAC II now, Mr. Pathetic.