Haha thought it was going to die quick!vBut yes i did i dislike that very much!
Its only because of that fake bit of emotion and the woman vote. I still think its pointless because the Republicans always find a way to win the election, even if they get dead people to vote for them. 
Im one of those dead voters...Sorry Republican...HEHE
The problem with politics is that its always a choice between 2 evils. The people who might actually make a difference are usually in the partys that have no hope of being elected.
Bitch Hillary or Barack or Hick-a-bee or McCain out all you want, just know it won't matter who you "elect" to rule you because you're going to get screwed either way. The only difference is whether they look you in the face while screwing you and tell you it's for your own good and will protect you from "turrsts" or promise to end the screwing while they screw you even harder as soon as your back is turned.
Sorry for the delay in the response Uhh Shotglass WTF are you on?
What in the hell did I put in my post that made you think I was some sort a xenophobe? And what kinda nonsense post was that?
You know, personally, I could care less if y'all have gun laws or not wherever you live at. That's your business.... Oh wait a minute. It was the immigration thingee wasn't it? I had to be totally un-pc and bring THAT up. Is that it? Geesh. HELLO!!! Uh there's alot of immigration occurring into some of the western nations. And where I live there's alot ... ALOT of immigrants, both legal AND illegal all around me. So I know wtf I'm talking about. A couple a years ago these gang bangers shot up a safe house for illegals cause they wasn't getting their cut. that was about three blocks from here.
In BROAD DAYLIGHT.
@ hankstar. Your country gets weed from there, you don't think there's guns coming from indonesia as well?
All I know, is where I live I hear gunshots constantly, When I was a kid, even though there wasn't a Concealed weapons permit, the laws were waayy more lenient, I didn't hear gunshots when I was kid. You can have all the gun restrictions you want, but I'm pretty sure that in a few years there will be people in Antwerp, In Auckland, In wherever that will be hearing gunshots like what I do.
Gun Bans or not and for Lord knows what reasons. Only at least I got a chance to defend myself.
Here in Texas there was a guy that went nuts and killed 22 people in a restaurant. The survivors complained that due to restrictions on carrying their guns (some travelers had some and had to leave them in their cars) They couldn't defend themselves. If just ONE of them had access to a firearm, the death toll could've been much lower. Since the concealed law was passed, there hasn't been any noticable drop in crime IMO, but there has been a BIG increase in people surviving attacks on them.
So you can throw all you statistics and criticisms and whatever to the wind, I'll have a hand gun thank you very much, until they pry it from my dead hand.
Ok sorry for the gun rant, Presidents...
What's up with Hillary crying? Do you think it was a calculated trick?
Richardson bailed (like he ever had a chance... Paula Abdul had a better chance than he did)
And is it me? Or does it seem like the Republicans are really trying hard to put Ron Paul out? Not that He's going to get the nomination,
but it shows that more and more Americans are getting sick of the same ol same ol crap and I think if he goes Independent, He could get on the ballot and if not win, at least be a guage to show how many of us are discontent with the current crop of crooks.
What in the hell did I put in my post that made you think I was some sort a xenophobe? And what kinda nonsense post was that?
You know, personally, I could care less if y'all have gun laws or not wherever you live at. That's your business.... Oh wait a minute. It was the immigration thingee wasn't it? I had to be totally un-pc and bring THAT up. Is that it? Geesh. HELLO!!! Uh there's alot of immigration occurring into some of the western nations. And where I live there's alot ... ALOT of immigrants, both legal AND illegal all around me. So I know wtf I'm talking about. A couple a years ago these gang bangers shot up a safe house for illegals cause they wasn't getting their cut. that was about three blocks from here.
In BROAD DAYLIGHT.
@ hankstar. Your country gets weed from there, you don't think there's guns coming from indonesia as well?
All I know, is where I live I hear gunshots constantly, When I was a kid, even though there wasn't a Concealed weapons permit, the laws were waayy more lenient, I didn't hear gunshots when I was kid. You can have all the gun restrictions you want, but I'm pretty sure that in a few years there will be people in Antwerp, In Auckland, In wherever that will be hearing gunshots like what I do.
Gun Bans or not and for Lord knows what reasons. Only at least I got a chance to defend myself.
Here in Texas there was a guy that went nuts and killed 22 people in a restaurant. The survivors complained that due to restrictions on carrying their guns (some travelers had some and had to leave them in their cars) They couldn't defend themselves. If just ONE of them had access to a firearm, the death toll could've been much lower. Since the concealed law was passed, there hasn't been any noticable drop in crime IMO, but there has been a BIG increase in people surviving attacks on them.
So you can throw all you statistics and criticisms and whatever to the wind, I'll have a hand gun thank you very much, until they pry it from my dead hand.
Ok sorry for the gun rant, Presidents...
What's up with Hillary crying? Do you think it was a calculated trick?
Richardson bailed (like he ever had a chance... Paula Abdul had a better chance than he did)
And is it me? Or does it seem like the Republicans are really trying hard to put Ron Paul out? Not that He's going to get the nomination,
but it shows that more and more Americans are getting sick of the same ol same ol crap and I think if he goes Independent, He could get on the ballot and if not win, at least be a guage to show how many of us are discontent with the current crop of crooks.
We mostly grow our own weed in Oz, Racer. Importing it is a colossal waste of time and money and besides, it's always more rewarding to consume something you've grown with your own two hands. Support your community - buy local!
Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Antarctica, Mars doesn't matter where the guns are from. There will always be a black market for everything. But the harsh gun laws we have here are a big disincentive for acquiring illegal weapons. Committing your average 7/11 stickup with a legal weapon is bad enough, you might get a handful of years inside; do the same crime with an assault rifle and it becomes Federal and you get a few more years slapped on you for your firearms offenses.
About that Texas restaurant killer: did he own his guns legally? Did he buy them at home or travel to a state with relaxed gun laws? Did he buy them on the black market? Had he ever been charged with or convicted of firearms offenses or violent crimes before or did he have a history of mental health problems?
The "if only we had our guns on us when that guy went psycho" argument always has to be challenged by asking questions like "where and how did that psycho get his guns and was there any kind of law, restriction or procedure that could have prevented him - or anyone - getting those weapons in the first place?"
Next we should remember that it obviously isn't the gun's fault how it gets used, and ask "what, if anything, could have prevented this guy's meltdown?" A thorough look at his history may be able to spot turning points in his life where he could've been helped, or at least stopped before he went too far. It's far too simplistic to just throw guns at a gun problem. If the problem is lots of people getting shot, I fail to see how adding more guns even begins to address it.
Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Antarctica, Mars doesn't matter where the guns are from. There will always be a black market for everything. But the harsh gun laws we have here are a big disincentive for acquiring illegal weapons. Committing your average 7/11 stickup with a legal weapon is bad enough, you might get a handful of years inside; do the same crime with an assault rifle and it becomes Federal and you get a few more years slapped on you for your firearms offenses.
About that Texas restaurant killer: did he own his guns legally? Did he buy them at home or travel to a state with relaxed gun laws? Did he buy them on the black market? Had he ever been charged with or convicted of firearms offenses or violent crimes before or did he have a history of mental health problems?
The "if only we had our guns on us when that guy went psycho" argument always has to be challenged by asking questions like "where and how did that psycho get his guns and was there any kind of law, restriction or procedure that could have prevented him - or anyone - getting those weapons in the first place?"
Next we should remember that it obviously isn't the gun's fault how it gets used, and ask "what, if anything, could have prevented this guy's meltdown?" A thorough look at his history may be able to spot turning points in his life where he could've been helped, or at least stopped before he went too far. It's far too simplistic to just throw guns at a gun problem. If the problem is lots of people getting shot, I fail to see how adding more guns even begins to address it.
you mean other than that:
?
keep in mind that i live in a country which invites everyone and their grandmother to immigrate out of fear to look like the place this country was some 70 years ago if they didnt (unless youre actually educated and from india of course but thats a different matter)
additionally i live in a country that neighbours the ex ussr territory so there quite a bit of russian mafia influence here
surprisingly enough i can still walk the streets at night in areas where lots of immigrants live without hearing a gunfire every 2 seconds
the approriate response to your nonsense?
youre talking about declining morals which isnt happening in the old world from what i can tell as someone who lives there
and you do so from your vista on a place that never had time to develop any of its own
just think of the great number of highly influential american philosophers ... oh wait no there arent any
or the vast number of americans who shaped religious beliefs without resorting to bullshitting while looking into a hat
as cue ball and you showed in a rather impressive fashion youre still stuck in the wild west thinking that fear of guns in the only way to deal with strangers
Moving away from nasty politics.
A Diebold Voting machine can be hacked in less than a minute. Discuss.
A Diebold Voting machine can be hacked in less than a minute. Discuss.
Not much discussion needed there - yes it can 
US voters would be done a huge favour if the whole country switched to a uniform paper-based voting system (or at least used secure machines that leave verifiable paper records). Right now every state (afaik - and perhaps each district) negotiates its own contracts with voting machine providers, which leaves the system wide open for cronyism and abuse (Florida 2000 anyone?). The purging of voter rolls (usually in conspicuously Democratic districts) is another topic but it ties in very neatly with the machine scam that's been perpetrated on Americans for years now.
I just don't see what's wrong with a paper ballot and a pencil - other than it's unhackable, which obviously is a bad idea if you're a Republican politician or electoral official. They're also dirt cheap and easy to produce which would take many from overt criminals like Diebold. If the US government (and government, not just today's, although they have benefited more from electoral shenanigans than any in living memory) were actually serious about democracy (like they say they were when they cluster-bomb neighbourhoods in order to spread it) they would take meaningful steps to ensure electoral fairness & accountability in all areas of the country, including a national, uniform, verifiable voting system which eliminated, as far as is practical, the kind of basically criminal activity that's been inflicted on Americans since 2000.
And we're back to nasty politics
As if there's another kind anyway.
US voters would be done a huge favour if the whole country switched to a uniform paper-based voting system (or at least used secure machines that leave verifiable paper records). Right now every state (afaik - and perhaps each district) negotiates its own contracts with voting machine providers, which leaves the system wide open for cronyism and abuse (Florida 2000 anyone?). The purging of voter rolls (usually in conspicuously Democratic districts) is another topic but it ties in very neatly with the machine scam that's been perpetrated on Americans for years now.I just don't see what's wrong with a paper ballot and a pencil - other than it's unhackable, which obviously is a bad idea if you're a Republican politician or electoral official. They're also dirt cheap and easy to produce which would take many from overt criminals like Diebold. If the US government (and government, not just today's, although they have benefited more from electoral shenanigans than any in living memory) were actually serious about democracy (like they say they were when they cluster-bomb neighbourhoods in order to spread it) they would take meaningful steps to ensure electoral fairness & accountability in all areas of the country, including a national, uniform, verifiable voting system which eliminated, as far as is practical, the kind of basically criminal activity that's been inflicted on Americans since 2000.
And we're back to nasty politics
As if there's another kind anyway.
Congratulations ... new sig!
Ahhh...
In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
Guess (or google) who?
Geez, the guy in the background has sniffed too much coke.
(I'll listen to it lately however.)
Incidentally, we now know it snows in Hell.
(I'll listen to it lately however.)
Incidentally, we now know it snows in Hell.
I'm guessing it's either an ironic quote from a career politician, possibly a PM or president, or it's from someone I'd probably like to meet in real life A commentator like HL Mencken, RG Ingersoll or Mark Twain ...I'm a monomaniac. George Orwell. And I'd guess you'd probably liked to meet him in real life, if it could have been possible. I would have liked it.
Nice :up: All hail Orwell!
I wonder if he'd be pleased on an egotistical level that he was pretty much right about politics, media and propaganda or utterly horrified to find that the human race hasn't progressed very much (and has become worse in a lot of areas) since his time...
I wonder if he'd be pleased on an egotistical level that he was pretty much right about politics, media and propaganda or utterly horrified to find that the human race hasn't progressed very much (and has become worse in a lot of areas) since his time...
Another famous political quote....who was it? hands up class!
I don't know... it could be Cheney for me 
Edit: I think that Orwell would be disgusted, he was a man that backed up his words and his political thought with strong actions. Even the most questionable actions of his are consistent with the development of his philosophy and he didn't have a 'me first' attitude, so overall he'd have preferred a different evolution.
Re-edit: I watched the l33t King's vid. The expression is rather simplistic (not that I would do better in spoken language anyway), but the content is correct.
Edit: I think that Orwell would be disgusted, he was a man that backed up his words and his political thought with strong actions. Even the most questionable actions of his are consistent with the development of his philosophy and he didn't have a 'me first' attitude, so overall he'd have preferred a different evolution.
Re-edit: I watched the l33t King's vid. The expression is rather simplistic (not that I would do better in spoken language anyway), but the content is correct.
Well, the fact that the internet exists in the form that it does suggests pretty heavily that he was atleast wrong about the media part (everything passes through the Ministry of Truth). But yeah, with regards to the politics and the propaganda side of the media I'd say he was pretty much spot on.
My musing there was sort of rhetorical, I'm sure George would be horrified that he was right - or more likely sad that not enough people tried hard enough to stop it. But then he probably wouldn't be surprised at that, as the foundations were being laid during his own lifetime.
While Minitruth certainly doesn't exist right now (not as a large monolithic beauracratic entity anyway), there are certainly filters in place in all mainstream media outlets which ensure that viewpoints of power take precedence over anything that actually happens or matters. Orwell certainly wouldn't see a mirror image of his writings if he were alive today but he'd be having some pretty eerie deja vu
While Minitruth certainly doesn't exist right now (not as a large monolithic beauracratic entity anyway), there are certainly filters in place in all mainstream media outlets which ensure that viewpoints of power take precedence over anything that actually happens or matters. Orwell certainly wouldn't see a mirror image of his writings if he were alive today but he'd be having some pretty eerie deja vu
Electrik Kar, that's true to some extent, but we should distinguish what's happening on a mass scale and what happens on an individual basis, and a global view suggests that Orwell is still right because people are lazy on subjects they aren't interested in, even when those subjects have a much deeper influence on their life than they can comprehend.
Orwell wrote his books to bring particular issues under the spotlight; on some of those issues he succeeded. Yet, when Huxley claimed that his Brave New World was a more accurate hypothesis he was right: it's easier to convince and dumb down people than to force their brain into oblivion. In this respect 1984 is a less accurate black Utopia than the Brave New World. Let's remind that both books are however intended not as a depiction of truth, but as harsh warnings.
Jumping back to the real world, the Internet has had an impact on availability of information, but there are still huge visibility issues caused by the lazyness I talked about.
The l33t King's opinional video linked by Gabkicks is interesting since that guy has a strong opinion about YouTube manipulating the videos to give better visibility to some and hide others. Confusing availability and visibility these days is easy, and no matter what we may think about the availability of news on the Internet, I can also see an unacceptable degree of manipulation, and there are a lot of people who are so lazy they think that a vote is just a way to delegate powers.
I don't think so. I think that a vote is also an assumption of responsibility in backing someone, or at least I'd feel that way if I backed - for instance - Bush. I prefer to be an independent thinker, with all my limits, and so I always look for something different than what's usually proposed by media and popular taste since they are no indication of quality. That's, incidentally, the way I've come to know LFS when I became more interested in simulators.
Edit: Hankstar, your rethorical question was however meaningful since there can be a certain amount of self-complacency in one's predictions. On Mission Accomplished day I wrote in my blog that the war wasn't over, it yet had to start. Okay, it was easy, but I have been proven right along with a lot of people who had much less information about Iraq at hand than the US Government did. Being right doesn't make me happy, though. It's simply a matter of fact, just as the ugliness of truth was a matter of fact for Orwell. In this case I would have preferred to be right and happy, just as Orwell, and he acted to achieve that result.
Orwell wrote his books to bring particular issues under the spotlight; on some of those issues he succeeded. Yet, when Huxley claimed that his Brave New World was a more accurate hypothesis he was right: it's easier to convince and dumb down people than to force their brain into oblivion. In this respect 1984 is a less accurate black Utopia than the Brave New World. Let's remind that both books are however intended not as a depiction of truth, but as harsh warnings.
Jumping back to the real world, the Internet has had an impact on availability of information, but there are still huge visibility issues caused by the lazyness I talked about.
The l33t King's opinional video linked by Gabkicks is interesting since that guy has a strong opinion about YouTube manipulating the videos to give better visibility to some and hide others. Confusing availability and visibility these days is easy, and no matter what we may think about the availability of news on the Internet, I can also see an unacceptable degree of manipulation, and there are a lot of people who are so lazy they think that a vote is just a way to delegate powers.
I don't think so. I think that a vote is also an assumption of responsibility in backing someone, or at least I'd feel that way if I backed - for instance - Bush. I prefer to be an independent thinker, with all my limits, and so I always look for something different than what's usually proposed by media and popular taste since they are no indication of quality. That's, incidentally, the way I've come to know LFS when I became more interested in simulators.
Edit: Hankstar, your rethorical question was however meaningful since there can be a certain amount of self-complacency in one's predictions. On Mission Accomplished day I wrote in my blog that the war wasn't over, it yet had to start. Okay, it was easy, but I have been proven right along with a lot of people who had much less information about Iraq at hand than the US Government did. Being right doesn't make me happy, though. It's simply a matter of fact, just as the ugliness of truth was a matter of fact for Orwell. In this case I would have preferred to be right and happy, just as Orwell, and he acted to achieve that result.
I had a similar feeling of inevitable dread watching Bush strut around that carrier in his flight suit, smirking like he was playing as Han Solo in some ****ing playground. I - hell, anyone with any common goddam sense knew there were years left in this ridiculous adventure and it made me sick to know that Shrub was telling a bald-face lie to his entire armed forces and six billion other people - and it made me even sicker that enough people were swallowing to allow it to continue.
That same premonition-like feeling cropped up a couple of years ago when Shrub first mentioned Iran and it's not going away ...
That same premonition-like feeling cropped up a couple of years ago when Shrub first mentioned Iran and it's not going away ...
I got the same feeling holed up in a tiny claustrophobic cabin in Tassie where my friend and I were holidaying picking apples. We basically had our tiny telly, clothes, and a giant bag of potatos (plus some meager rations the salvos). Every channel at the time was tuned to Bush's ugly mug, and if that became intolerable, and it frequently was, we could switch from war updates to the childrens channel. It was really surreal... knowing that this guy was going to drag us all into a war. It was like... welcome to the 21st Century. We've learnt nothing.
I'm sure it helped bring on early cabin fever.
Luckily politicians aren´t smart enough to understand the subtleties of information theory. Theres one very basic channel model called the binary symmetric channel ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi ... tric_channel_%28en%29.svg ) which basically is a channel that has a certain probability "p" that you recieve the wrong symbol, or in case of politics and the media, that instead of the truth youre being told complete bull.
What makes this channel interesting in term of politics is the way its capacity, basically a measure for how much information makes it across, is influenced by the error probability "p". The curious thing is that if p is 1, ie 100% bullshit, you get just as much information out of it as if you were being told the truth; at least as soon as you figure out, that all what you´re being told is BS and the complete opposite of it is in fact the truth.
As long as politicians don´t figure out that effective lying means to lie inconsitently instead of all the time we´re good.
What makes this channel interesting in term of politics is the way its capacity, basically a measure for how much information makes it across, is influenced by the error probability "p". The curious thing is that if p is 1, ie 100% bullshit, you get just as much information out of it as if you were being told the truth; at least as soon as you figure out, that all what you´re being told is BS and the complete opposite of it is in fact the truth.
As long as politicians don´t figure out that effective lying means to lie inconsitently instead of all the time we´re good.
2008 candadints!
(273 posts, started )
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG