You obviously have not read much from Kos, DU, NYT, MSNBC, Journolist, Randi Rhodes, Ed Schultz, ANSWER, the protesters at the G8 meetings if you believe that. Were you aware of the Democratic Senators who rather than do their job of debating the issues just ran over the state line? Was that what they were elected to do? How about the Democratic representatives of the 111th Congress who believed that you had to pass the bills to see what was in them. How about the Democratic workers who made all those charges against Palin - the last count I saw was over 100 of which only 1 had any legitimacy at all. What do you think of "Teabaggers." Think that is a tolerant position? As to changing the rules of engagement, take a look at the Massachusetts method of replacing a senator. When they thought Sen Kerry might win in 2004 the rules were changed so that a Republican governor would not be able to name the replacement. When Sen Kennedy knew he was dying he got the rules changed right back because there was now a Democratic governor. Remember that when the rules in the national senate were changed so that 60% would be required rather than 67%? That was the Democrats who made the change because they thought they would not get 67% but they would get 60%. That was after Reagan was president. Bet they wished they had picked a different number in the 111th Congress. As to Walker, his previous job was as county executive of the Milwaukee County and he fought the unions there the whole time and validly so and was well know for doing just that. Whatever made anyone think he would not do the same as governor. He never promised not to fight the unions. I grew up in Ohio and Ohio is going through the same thing that Wisconsin is going through. I also live in NYC now and the teachers' unions here have ruined the schools. Right now there are more administrators in the city Dept of Education than there are teachers and that is because of the union.. There are over 2000 teachers that the city cannot fire even though they were such problem teachers and so inadequate that they were removed from teaching any classes. They are currently, because of the union, getting full pay for sitting in an office doing absolutely nothing. The city cannot fire them because of the union and the are such bad teachers that the city can't put them in classrooms because the parents will complain. Right now teachers in 24 states have no choice of whether to join a union or not. They are required to be union members because the state laws do not give them a right of refusal. And that is one of the things Walker is trying to do as is the new governor of Ohio and Indiana and New Jersey and many other states. The cost of the benefits that are paid for by the local school boards are totally out of line. The teachers can retire with full pay at the age of 55. Their pension is paid for by the state and local school board, all but 0.2% and they pay 5.6% of their medical insurance. If you include the benefits as part of the pay, and the local school boards have to do that to cover the payroll, then the average payroll cost of pay + benefits for the teachers in Wisconsin is close to $100K - and that is for 9 months work. The people who have to pay the taxes that fund these teachers do not even get close to that and also do not even get close to those benefits. In fact the retirement age for the rest of the population is being raised ever 3 years by half a year in order to get social security to where it is not 66-1/2 years of age. Yet the teachers can retire at age 55. And the unions want more and more added to the benefits. The latest claim of the unions is that they will agree to raising the cost of retirement and medical insurance but then the unions scurry around trying to cement contracts using the national headquarters lawyers to negotiate with the local school boards which are made up of average citizens who are part time members of the boards. How do you think that will work out. Full time lawyers on the union payroll against average citizens to negotiate a contract. Think the local taxpayer has a chance in hell of getting a good deal out of that situation? Think the lawyers give a damn about the property taxes and income taxes the citizens have to pay, especially in a bad economy? That is what this whole thing is all about. Trying to put an end to the whole bit of keeping on piling up entitlements and other contractual obligations and then raising the taxes to pay for it. Why do you think so many of the states are going under with their funding for what the legislature and unions have put in place. There needs to be a balance to this situation so that the private citizens and the public employees both have a shot at making a decent living with a decent future. Right now what we have is the private citizens vs the public employees and the public employee unions.

You really should read what you wrote there. You talk about Slashdot is the most non-partisan debates and then tell us that half of the readership is not North American and mostly to the left of the Democrat Party and that Dominant right -wwing politics is unlikely here. That just does not compute. As to the ground-swell in Wisconsin, check out the results of the election last November. A predominantly Democratic government on both the state and national level (the incumbent Democratic senator who had already served 3, I think, terms got voted out and the leadership and makeup of both houses of the legislature changed from Democratic to Republican as did the governorship. I call that a ground-swell. Check also that whole region which also changed from Democratic to Republican with only a couple of exceptions. That is also a groundswell. The national leadership of the House of Representatives changed from having enough Democrats in a majority to be able to pass bills without even asking the Republicans to the Republicans having enough members to do the same and the Senate also came close to switching from Democrat to Republican. Since there were more Republicans at risk in the senate this time that is also a groundswell and if it continues in 2012 there will be even more Republicans in the Senate. The number of governors changed from 20 to 30 for the Republicans and most of the state legislatures have also changed to Republican majorities. Also a huge groundswell That all seems to make Slashdot the one out of step with the public and the Guardian also out of step as well. What is strange about this all is that those things that were reprehensible when the previous administration did them seem to be just find and dandy with the media reporting now. The rewriting of history going on in the media is astounding. We read that Obama has a multilateral group in Libya while Bush did not in Iraq yet if you look Bush had 30 nations supporting him in Iraq while Obama has 15 in Libya for example. And the examples go on and on and on. Yet I keep reading that there is no bias in the MSM except for Fox News. Strange, that.

You are very wrong. The rule all along, including WW II and Korea, was that gays could be kicked out just for being gay. Why do you think so many people used that excuse to get released over the years. All DADT did was make it possible for gays to serve so long as they did not make it obvious that they were gay. The underlying rule was still if you were gay and found out, you could be kicked out. DADT meant that if you did not admit to being gay and they did not have concrete evidence of your being gay you could stay in. Now unless they have changed the UCMJ you are back to being kicked out for just being gay. Have not read the law to find out if they were smart enough to also change the UCMJ while they were repealing the DADT. I bet the senators don't know that either since it has become a practice of this congress and senate to pass it to find out what is in it. Stay tuned to hear them say that what was passed is not working the way they thought it would or they did not know that was in the bill. Queue the results of the Obamacare bill to see what I mean and the 1099 problem and the fact that Obama has had to put up waivers for all his pet unions so that they are not subject to Obamacare restrictions. Same could happen with this bill.

Actually it has been the rule for generations. It was actively pushed starting with Jimmy Carter. Bush and Reagan did nothing to change it and nothing to push it either. The problem now is that with DADT repealed the question becomes whether the UCMJ has been changed to get rid of the automatic policy of kicking gays out. Unless that is included in the law as passed then gays can be kicked out for just being gay. In fact DADT was put in place to short circuit that law so that gays could serve as long as they did not fall foul of DADT. Since DADT is gone now, then what happend to the UCMJ part of the problem.

tAnd you know this about purchasing a Bible how. I have seen nothing about their not complaining the government mandate with penalty for not purchasing something. The comment about running their mouths goes for almost everybody. People complain when it is their ox that is being gored. Always has been. Works for the right and the left both. They are challenging things in the law that should be challenged such as this requirement with penalty. They are probably not challenging other laws because of the cost of the challenging and the cost to them. In this case the costs make it worthwhile to challenge the law and there is also a very good chance that it will hold up. Certainly hope so. The law anyway is so badly written that when Ms Palin talks about what is in the law that is wrong the Dems either say nothing or tell us that is not how it was supposed to work. What we have is a law that was jury-rigged with all kinds of waivers and other garbage in it just to get it passed without regard for what the law actually did. The one that I expect to see challenged also is that ludicrous one about having to pop out a 1099 for everyone you spend $600 or more in a year. The cost to businesses and the cost of the IRS to try to handle the huge influx of 1099's when their computer systems are already so overburdened is ridiculous. Obviously nobody in the Congress writing this boondoggle of a bill ever thought through what the various parts mean and how they impinge on the public. And it does not even address the malpractice lawsuits and the trial lawyers. Just read today that a doctor has her annual premium doubled because of this POS legislation. Who do you think is going to pay for all these things. We are, the general public is going to get shafted by this horrible bill.

My one reason for not using Opera is that I cannot copy and paste from Opera to anywhere other than the Opera browser screens themselves. I cannot copy and paste to an email or a pdf document at all. If I could do that then I would be using Opera all the time.

I have twice which is why I am not using Arch now. I really liked the speed of it when it was working fine but when I had a couple of updates go bad and the second time it was because of a package that was accidentally placed in official when it should not have been, I stopped. They gave an explanation as to what would have to be done to get back and it didn't work so I loaded Linux Mint and kept chugging along.

I have had faster browsing times with Opera as well. My problem with Opera is that is not as usable as FF or Chrome. My biggest bugaboo with Opera is in trying to copy and paste from the window to my email so that I can send info to a friend. I do a lot of that and I cannot do it with Opera. It just will not copy and paste outside the browser itself. It works well from screen to screen within the browser but it just does not work from browser to message or anywhere else outside the browser itself. That makes it practically useless to me. Chrome and FF both do this very well. So long as I have relatively good speed and can copy and paste I am good to go, otherwise forget it. Used to have a problem with a lot of websites would not display correctly on Opera, especially if they were designed for IE but Opera seems to have solved that one in the latest release. This came up with real estate sites mostly that would not display the selection screen. Now if they just solve the copy and paste then I will bring it up as a potential for default browser.

And they give me a headache so I do whatever I need to do to keep away from them. Just do not like the light they produce. I don't care how cheap they get, they just are not the kind of light I prefer. Far too many negatives for me. Do not perform well when it is cold, the light is irritating, the material used to make them is dangerous to humans (we can't use lead or asbestos and yet we are supposed to use these lights that when broken are poisonous to humans and require special handling for disposal if you do it right. You can have them. I much prefer incandescent lights whether they are efficient or not.

Depends on the nature of the documentation Manning furnished Assange. If Manning produced the actual documents, then the intelligence community has a major problem on its hands. Theoretically once you sign for any documents (and in the JFK/LBJ days you had to sign for almost any documents you used in intelligence work) then you are responsible for whatever happens to it. If you cannot produce it when asked, then you can be charged with real crimes and go to jail. If the agency does not have an SOP to cover this situation, then the agency will be too busy doing a CYA operation and Congress should be looking into this toute suite. If he just told Assange what he saw and what he worked on, then two things come to mind. One is that the intelligence community can't do a whole lot about that; the other is that Assange is publishing s*it without proper documentation and he had better stay in Sweden because if he came to this country he could be charged big time and Manning is in trouble in either case. The intelligence group where Manning worked will be scrambling to fix the problem and won't have time to set up black ops against either of these creeps.

What do you think the intelligence services are doing out there. They have to have plans for almost any situation no matter how unlikely it is. When I was working with the people who prepared the Order of Battle documents (they figure what could happen and assign a likelihood range for it) we had to account for every troop of ours and every troop of a potential enemy and determine what plans the enemy could come up with and how to respond no matter how crazy it was. That does not mean that any action was taken, just that no matter what happened you needed to be ready for it and have plans set up for how to respond. After all, remember that the enemies we had in WW II are some of our closest allies now and some of our allies from then became our most deadly enemies. Why else would you need all these intelligence agencies.

My only problem is that when I have multiple windows open the far left window makes the buttons unreachable. Now to close the window I need to shift the window right and then close it. I see no god reason for changing it in the first place. Just a PITA where none was needed.

And when she as solicitor general tried a case at the SCOTUS she was so bad even the justices commented on what a lousy case she ran and how bad she was. Now she is on the court and we are stuck with her. As to Harriet Miers, she had years of experience as a successful lawyer and also was elected as president of the state Bar Association. Kagan couldn't even put together a case to go to court. Big difference. Miers was far more qualified than Kagan. Why Zero picked her rather than one of the other possibilities mentioned at the time who were far more qualified is a mystery.

I finally sent an email to Dell about their link to Ubuntu computers. I finally had to do a search for Ubuntu to even get to a page that was supposedly where to go to buy a Linux computer. When I got there every singly computer on that page had Windows installed and no mention of Ubuntu. There were no exceptions. This was right after I read the story about choose Windows because or Ubuntu if you are into open source programming. I decided to check out the Linux computers. Could not find any, even where Dell said there were Linux computers. No wonder nobody is buying Linux computers there. If you showed them, maybe you could sell them.

I just took a quick scan of the forum at FreeBSD. I last tried to install version 7.1 and when I got the response from the BSD people dropped the idea. I see that there were enough other people who complained that there was an update to version 7.2 that finally included the ATTANSIC/ATHEROS L1 in the hardware that would be accepted by FreeBSD. The initial release of 7.2 would still not accept the L1 but the update to that release made it work. Maybe I will give it another chance now but I no longer have the computer with the ATTANSIC L1. I have updated to a newer MB (Gigabyte UD2). Maybe BSD will accept that one.