Comment Re:The Internet is less free... in Brazil. (Score 1) 484
We're Number 1!
We're Number 1!
Our government is a balance. Legislative/Executive/Judicial, State/Fed. If individual states could undo any law, where is the balance there?
State/Fed balance was overturned with the 17th Amendment - the states were cut out of the deal.
A car payment is what keeps the middle class middle
Without a car payment I've also found that I don't "need" credit cards because my money going out is so much less than my money coming in.
How about running a SECURE system at home? simply having the PC with logins and auto lock-out would have stopped this idiot sociopath in his tracks.
The house was locked; You can't really get much more secure than that. The lock-out procedure on the house failed, again, can't fault the owner.
People love saying government is stupid and can never do anything right, but that's not true with everything. Currency is one example: there is enough political will and a real-world need to prevent counterfeiting (fraud). Government puts a good deal of effort into preventing counterfeiting, and the penalty is quite harsh and is well-enforced. While not 100% fraud-proof, they have done a pretty good job. I have not had a problem with being given counterfeit money recently, and I don't know of anyone who has.
The problem with counterfeiting money is that it causes people to lose confidence in the "value" of the money. They don't trust the money and it loses more value. Unfortunately, our government is now monetizing debt (just printing money) and people are now losing confidence in the dollar. As more people lose confidence in the dollar, the "value" is decreased. Our money is will soon get to the point that it doesn't make sense to counterfeit anymore. Perhaps many counterfeiters are already at that point and that is why you haven't been given counterfeit money...or maybe the counterfeit money is really good and you don't notice.
So if China was to try that as a precursor at an attack, it wouldn't do any good. We'd either already know about the attack, having seen the ships on the way, or it would be way too early, since the ships would take a long time to get here, and it would be back up by the time they got here.
Suppose China disabled the USA's electrical grid via physical attack. There would chaos - transportation shuts down, cities run out of food, medicine, etc. China then sends large scale military force over as a "peace keeping mission" to help rebuild infrastructure. Peace keeping force turns into occupation.
You don't have to pre-position troops to attack and the attack can be hidden.
http://onesecondafter.com/
A long while back, someone came in on Slashdot and claimed to have consulted/worked with the IRS, and described a security culture and tolerance for hair-trigger detection measures that would make any security fascist drool. So these problems would most likely be on a purely bureaucratic level, then?
So what you are saying is that some anonymous person posted on an internet forum claiming something that couldn't be verified (and then repeated by another anonymous person) and that this information could quite possibly be wrong? Well, I assure you that when I worked for NASA as an astronaut, nothing like that ever happened!
I've had to resort to publications from the federal reserve, blogs from economists, and my own education for anything descent.
If you truly want anything decent, I'd rely the education of others.
Everyone knows that the younger programmer spends WAY too much time on social networking web sites and twitter to actually write thousands of lines of code.
Some waste their time posting to slashdot also.
There is something special about old books...Fsck you DRM! You SUCK! The written word is to important to be censored!
The passage of time censors old books more more than DRM. How many physical originals of your prized first edition of Feynman Lecture on Physics volume 2 still exist? Yet, within a matter of seconds, I was able to find a digital copy.
Digital allows the written word to live forever.
What is it with conservatives alluding to the assassination of Obama and then trailing off? I've had extended family members do this repeatedly too. It's like they hope for it, but don't want to come out and actually say it.
If you would have read the whole post, it was about the possibility of McCain being assassinated and Palin becoming president.
There are no half-cookies. There are only cookies. Some are small; some are big. It's like saying there are half rocks....
It's like a car. Divide it in half and you get a Ford Pinto, not 2 half cars. This is because a car....
A boat floating in a harbor has some percentage of its total mass below the water. When the tide comes in, the boat rises up. When the tide goes out, the boat sinks back down. But there is no change in the amount of boat mass above and below the water! The only thing that affects whether the boat goes deeper into the water or not is if additional mass is added, removed, or a hole is punched in the bottom. Governments are well known for punching holes into the titanics of industry, though.
No, it's more like a car and the ISPs are the air pressure in the tire. As long as the tax lets out the same air pressure on all tires everything is ok, until they go flat and then the economy (the car body) can't move forward no matter how much gas (stimulus) you add to the tank (the bank accounts of politicians).
Where there's a will, there's a relative.