jcl
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Posts posted by jcl
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Senate Democrats are going to have to move forward on healthcare without a single Republican supporter after Sen. Olympia Snowe said Tuesday she could not back the Finance Committee’s bill.; Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) failed to win any Republican backer
Interesting tidbit a little further down:
Democrats control 59 seats in the Senate. Without a single Republican vote, they would be forced to advance healthcare using a budgetary maneuver that requires only a simple majority.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday that Democrats are prepared to use budget reconciliation as a last resort.
I wasn't aware of the budget reconciliation rules. The House rules are uninteresting but the Senate rules...
In the Senate, total debate on a reconciliation bill is limited to 20 hours [...] Motions and amendments may be offered and considered without debate at the end of this time period. [...] Furthermore, the Budget Act prevents reconciliation legislation from being filibustered on the Senate floor. -
I wish we could talk about health care reform in a meaningful way too. But as you know it's sometimes hard to get a word in edgewise amongst the screaming lunatic unhinged fringe. So sometimes we have to play their game just to regain some sense of sanity.
Uh huh. The funny thing about crazy people is that they often think they're perfectly sane.
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Yay! Joe Wilson! I wish we could talk about Joe Wilson all the time! He's soooo much more interesting than health care reform!
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Couldn't really explain this too well myself, so I did a quick Google:
Freepers are the creationists of political science. And biology.
There is something nonsensical about a political spectrum that spans the range between tyranny and ... tyranny. If one end of the spectrum is the home of tyranny, then shouldn't the opposite end of the spectrum be the home of liberty, tyranny's opposite?The first spectrum he presents is nonsensical because he interprets leftness and rightness as measures of tyrannicalness and because he omits ideologies that don't fit into that interpretation, such as (left and right) anarchism. The second spectrum is just a summary of how conservative libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives view the standard political spectrum.
Communism has its own political spectrum. At one extreme you have authoritarian communists like Stalin and at the other you have anarchist communists like Kropotkin. You could argue that authoritarian communism should be grouped with fascism due to the similarities between their political systems in practice (and despite the differences between their ideologies) but I don't think you can reasonably argue that 'moderate' communism and especially anarchist communism are even remotely similar to fascism.
The basic problem is that communism is primarily an economic ideology and fascism is primarily a political ideology. In order to compare the two you have to select a particular instance of communism with an associated political system, like Leninism or Maoism, and use it for your comparison. That comparison will only be valid for that particular form of communism.
(Going the other way doesn't work because fascism is associated with a very narrow range of economic systems. Just one if you accept the argument that the word fascism should only be used to refer to Italian fascism.)
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While that is technically true, many political scientists have abandoned the linear definitions of Communism and Fascism--with one on the far left and the other on the far right. Many have adopted an idea that the spectrum is more like a 'circle' in that if you go far left through Communism, you eventually start hitting ideals of Fascism. By this theory, the same applies for if you go far right.
Political spectra (circular or otherwise) are essentially functions that map ideologies onto points on a line. I can't think of any way to map communism and fascism near each other. On the capitalism-communism and authoritarian-communitarianism-individualism spectra I think communism wraps around to Christian conservatism or Christian democracy and on the authoritarian-anarchism spectrum it wraps around to libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. I have no idea what fascism might wrap around to.
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Well wasn't the vote basically along party lines?
So a Democrat siding with a South Carolina Racist is really unexpected.
Because of the South Carolina part, I assume.
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I think Barney Frank voting present is a bigger story. McDermott voting no is interesting too.
Good job working in Bush, by the way.
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I actually used to do that to floppies all the time
Me too. And if the covers broke I'd disassemble the disks.
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Who IS calling them by that name? That's not their official designation, is it -- God forbid? I see it in the press all the time, but I've never seen the term used elsewhere (besides historically).
The term seems to be beltway jargon. It's not part of the czars' official titles.
If there is a difference between past "advisors" and these "Czars," it would be what they are capable of doing on their own. Does the President simply ask them for advice? Do they simply publish policy papers? Or do they actually have powers that USED to be given ONLY to public servants vetted by Congress? Sounds like someone woke up, smelled the coffee, and decided to ask that important question.Most of the czars are diplomats, administrators, undersecretaries, and other civil servants. We know they can do. The rest seem to be advisers or assistants to the President or other officials. We don't exactly know what they can do but it wouldn't be hard to figure it out from their (real) titles.
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What about a Knoppix version run from CD? Can't be any worse than LoseMe, I mean WinMe.
Forgot about the live CD distros. Knoppix with LXDE and Opera might well work.
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well thanks for the suggestions. this computer has 112 mb ram and 900 mhz processor. most linux wants 128 mb ram. I haven't been able to get any linux loaded on it.
You'd need a really lightweight Linux environment. Ubuntu would be waaaay too heavy; the stupid little GNOME taskbar applets alone can eat 50 MiB (in fact, 47 MiB right now on my desktop). Unfortunately, I don't know of any 'user-friendly' distros that would be light enough. Xubuntu might work but I wouldn't bet on it.
Windows 2000 is still on extended support and your hardware exceeds the minimum requirements, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the money.
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This type of semantic nit-picking works on both sides of the political aisle.
It's not nitpicking. Socialism, social democracy, and liberalism are distinct ideologies. In much of the world they're represented by different political parties.
Almost any expert in almost any speciality will argue why their definition is the only one. It's a doomed argument, you can't stop words from eventually being co-opted by common useage. You. Can't. Stop. It.In common usage in the US, socialist is a derogatory term for a person on the left. It has no real definition. It's barely even a word.
The problem then is, if conservatives believe that Obama fits under the much more moderate definition of Socialism... then how is comparing him to Marx or Hitler applicable, let alone logical? You can't have your cake and eat it too.The comparisons of Obama to Hitler might be partly tit-for-tat for the comparisons of Bush to Hitler.
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What Americans* call "socialism" is closer to social democracy but probably to the right (that is, toward capitalism and classical liberalism) of standard social democracy. It's nowhere near real socialism.
Obama is probably a plain old liberal but it's hard to tell at this point.
* Socialist excepted, of course.
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Quote #3, I'll admit that is a little strange...
I don't think it's that strange. He isn't proposing changing the animal cruelty laws or granting animals additional rights, and while it would be unusual to give everyone standing to sue it wouldn't be unprecedented: I believe California allows third parties to sue employers for violations of state labor laws.
"[T]here should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, in scientific experiments, and in agriculture." ... I see no problem with this what-so-everYeah, I don't understand why they chose that quote. We already regulate the use animals in everything.
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The real story here is that someone managed to find an American socialist. I thought they were an urban myth.
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I think they'll be a little more careful with their appointments, but the initial problems won't soon go away; Inexperience on the National level (not knowing what would be unacceptable red flags for the American people), arrogance (f* the American people, we make the decisions), and their radical leftist past (some of the associations and flaws that are shocking to the American people are run-of-the-mill stuff to them -- or are even considered to be assets ).
I'm really tired of the American people being shocked by the mundane. Obama being a secret Muslim Trotskyist terrorist from Kenya who's planning to personally murder every senior citizen in the country would be shocking.0 Obama having leftists in his administration is not shocking. It's not even interesting. He's a farking Democrat. Who'd you expect to him to appoint, Pat Buchanan?1
0 And hilarious. I'd consider voting for him in 2012.
1 Throw in Buchanan and Obama's got my vote.
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We did have Guantanamo bay.
Gitmo is a bit small for a concentration camp. It's about the size of county jail.
Regardless, the improvement was that we didn't have concentration camps for Americans.
Oh... and The Patriot Act.The Sedition Act of 1918 made disloyal speech a federal crime.
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"And the Congress ought to initiate a thorough inquiry into the constitutionality of this practice which has spanned Republican and Democrat administrations."
Congress investigating questions of constitutionality. Sneer.
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Yep. President GW Bush pretty-much stomped all over your civil liberties during his 8 long years in office.
Not as much as usual. At least we didn't have concentration camps this time.
(Reason #721 for the US to avoid wars: not having concentration camps represents a marked improvement in wartime domestic policy.)
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The entire service costs the taxpayers dearly and I don't see this 3 mil "stimulating" anything.
It's stimulating the contractors and the hardware and software suppliers.
Who's gonna pay the ongoing costs of this program? It's sure not gonna increase revenue or ridership.If the city's site is accurate, ridership is increasing anyway. If the system is underutilized, increasing ridership shouldn't significantly increase costs. Yay, free money.
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Metro Transit's $3,155,510 portion of $55 million in federal stimulus money for Michigan public transportation was announced Friday.
The largest portion of the funds allocated to Kalamazoo will be used to hire consultants to design the local GPS system and to acquire the necessary hardware and software.
That doesn't seem too unreasonable. 75 GPS units, comms, computers, software, mapping, training, marketing, etc.
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The script is named eeeasy-scripts.sh. I assume that it changed in the April release and the article wasn't updated.
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They give similar steady responses. (42ms and 122-124 respectively). I don't think the ping response is a large enough amount of data to trigger the error.
Ping uses one small packet, so, yeah, if it's related to the size of transfer that probably won't trigger it.
One thing you might try: in Firefox browse to about:config and set network.http.keep-alive to false (you can use the filter field to find it quickly). That will (or should) force Firefox to use a fresh connection for each request instead of reusing connections. You might also reduce network.http.max-connections-per-server to 1. If that reduces or eliminates the partial page loads, it's likely that it is the size of the transfers that's the problem.
(But wait, you say, I would still be transferring the same amount of data. You're right. In fact, you'd be transferring more data. This is really a quick way to determine is there's something weird happening with TCP and a very stupid way to throttle Firefox. I have no idea why large transfers over single TCP connections specifically would cause problems but I have a router that seemingly exists just to prove that it can happen.)
If that is the problem... I dunno. I had a router that randomly dropped connections during large transfers because its MTU was too high for the network (never did figure out why it worked the most of the time), but I'd be surprised if your desktop and notebook were using different MTUs.
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Hmm, if Bill Clinton were still president do you think he would decide that Porn sites are critical infrastructure? Or just specific types of porn?
That is an excellent question that deserves an answer. I suggest that we immediately repeal the 22nd Amendment and reëlect Bill.
Please?
Is more meant to insure an unrestricted access rather than having congress determine that a no government employee should have access to a specific type of site, and thus block the Secretary from getting data which might alter his decision as to which networks are deserving of or in need of protection.Possibly. The problem is that "all relevant data" could include the data moving across the networks (to detect and analyze attacks, for example) and "any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access" could include all privacy and security laws except the Fourth Amendment.
(Fun question: if the President ordered the Secretary not to monitor a network, would that be considered a 'rule or policy restricting access' that the Secretary could disregard?)
Senate Releases Health Care Bill
in World and Politics
Posted
The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009 discussed by Connelly is one of the previous generation of health care bills. The Baucus bill is the America's Healthy Future Act of 2009.
Also, Connelly appears to be a twit. Third Amendment right to privacy. Heh.