The Donald said something sensible:
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11639292/donald-trump-default-print-money

To quote the St. Louis Fed, again: "As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills."

Your prejudice is showing, I'm gonna give up on what is clearly a lost cause on this subject with you.

I get it, you believe, by default, that all police officers, not just this incident, are greater than 50% made up of liars and murderers who will kill people for slighting them and their authority. Just so you know, you are long, long past the point of confirmation bias in the degree which you've entrenched your train of thought in stone.

Anyone ever use the OS called CP\M on old Kaypro computers? My first computer job in 1985 was supporting an auto salvage yard database on those computers in Texas. CP\M was painful, you could erase the hard disk you booted from, if you weren't careful. Which I did, I spent a whole day entering inventory into the hard drive, then went to back it up by erasing a bunch of floppies first. The one time I forgot to specify A: for the floppy drive to be erased, it defaulted to the C drive. So when it said "Are you sure you want to erase this disk?" I tapped Y and it erased the boot drive, with the OS, the inventory program and all that data I had typed in all day. I took a long walk and considered a career change, I was so angry. Then went back and typed it all in again.

Here's a recent article to support my point that it's default encryption that's the issue:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/why-are-so-few-android-phones-encrypted-and-should-you-encrypt-yours/

@00Scud00

Apple has said it is planning to build a future firmware that cannot be flashed as the FBI has asked for in this case on an older iOS iPhone 5C (removing the time lock on password fails). That will likely be the more important legal case when it comes up - must a firmware be built to be potentially unlockable by officials to facilitate law enforcement.

From what I understand, serious terrorist organisations simply avoid using technology directly with their leaders (e.g. Osama avoided phone and email). Anyway as I said, this debate is not about that. It's about pressuring Apple to revert back to not having strong encryption enabled by default.

You say that, and yet the Government is still going to Apple to unlock that phone instead of just working out whatever 1+1 is.
You are correct in that nothing is fool proof, but it can still be made difficult enough for your opponents to decrypt it in a timely fashion. And while it's true that there are many dumb criminals out there who will use the default encryption settings, the smart ones will simply switch to a more secure system. And the smart ones are going to be the most likely to be committing the next 911.

There will always be foolproof software alternatives for encryption but the aim of the FBI here is clearly to be able to decrypt the lowest common denominator. They know that most criminal or even terrorist suspects will simply have the default level of encryption.

The fight here is really against Apple turning on encryption by default which is something it only started doing after the Snowden NSA revelations. If I recall right, previously Apple would unlock iPhones at will for law enforcement. The change was to protect their reputation given the pervasive assumption that US based tech companies were all in collusion with the NSA. Also they would have probably been miffed that while co-operating with them, the NSA was also hacking trans-continental cables to get access to communications more directly.

I also think that Obama had a point when he recently said at a tech conference that it is likely some ugly law will be rammed through Congress with very little debate after the next major terrorist attack, and that it will be much more draconian than anything proposed now. However, that doesn't really get past the fact there is no good software solution here. Encryption is math. You can no more build a foolproof backdoor than you can make 1+1 equal 3.

oh bobby bobby bobby..
you should know better than to talk smack like that my boy.
you need to back that shit up son!

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/2/amy_goodman_two_democracy_now_producers

https://www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/RNC%20DNC%20Final%20Draft%20REV1.pdf

http://rnc08report.org/archive/361.shtml

http://www.prisonplanet.com/why-we-were-falsely-arrested.html

http://911blogger.com/news/2008-09-05/lockdown-st-paul-adam-turl-september-5-2008

still think it didnt happen at an RNC?
why you keep defending fascism only to be forced to eat humble pie eludes me.
you may be republican but those cocksuckers dont give two shits about you bobby boy.

not...one...bit.

@radx

I think you misunderstand the Swiss referendum. It's about preventing banks from creating money through fractional lending, it doesn't restrict the central bank. Typically banks will take in deposits and lend a portion out (keeping a % as a capital buffer), that money then filters through the system and some of if returns as deposits, and the process repeats (hence the term fractional banking).

In effect banks are creating money through lending out more money than otherwise exists. It also means they lend out far in excess of the deposits they have, creating high leverage and meaning even a small level of default can lead to them eating through their capital and insolvency (see US in 2008). The referendum seems to be about effectively preventing fractional lending.

No idea what effect it would have in a country like Switzerland. The country is an exception as it has a relatively small economy but is seen globally as a safe haven currency meaning every time there is a crisis you see the CHF appreciate rapidly (similar to the USD). Naturally that tends to wreck havoc with the economy and exports since the currency value no longer reflects the real economy and is why the central bank has taken various measures to discourage it in the past.

You really do. Iain M. Banks was an amazing writer.

Excession is probably my favourite, along with Look To Windward and Use Of Weapons.

His non-sci-fi work is fantastic too, especially The Crow Road (any book that opens with the sentence "It was the day my grandmother exploded" is instantly brilliant IMO).

He was also a wonderful speaker. Listen to this (skip to 29:32 if you haven't read Use Of Weapons, it spoils the whole plot) http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2012/oct/12/iain-banks-book-club-podcast?fb_ref=Default. I love his analogy of writing fiction is like playing a piano and writing SF is like a massive pipe organ.

That's not true.

Despite what politicians may say, America has no trouble financing its debt. The US bond market is at the highest demand level (lowest yield) it has ever been because the US is perceived as the best house in a bad neighbourhood.

Literally, US bonds have not been more in demand since the US was founded.

Chart is a bit old, it's now solidly below 1945 levels:

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2013/12/20131220_bonds.jpg

I would highly advise you to stop listening to politicians, political pundits or partisans if you want truthful information about the economy.

Because of a lack of real pressure to cut the debt beyond the politics of it, Republicans or Democrats have no real incentive and thereby no genuine interest to actually reduce the debt rather than kicking the can down the road.

So adding what is a marginal amount of debt on top of that shouldn't make a difference to them.

Too many unsubstantiated assertions here. From a website titled Storm Clouds Gathering, rumor mongering isn't exactly a surprise.

John McCain does not represent US foreign policy and sounds misinformed. The 4-5 US trained fighters and provision of tactical equipment pretty much represents the degree of support/involvement the US has provided Syrian rebels. For obvious reasons that he himself points out. There's no credible opposition remotely alligned with US values, and any arms provided risk ending up with radical groups.

Just because McCain thinks it's a good idea doesn't mean it is happening, will happen or that the executive branch shares his mindset. However it is true that Russian air strikes have primarily targeted other groups over ISIS. This aligns with what I talked about elsewhere that Russia's aim is to prop up Assad. With a western coalition taking on ISIS already, this naturally leaves Assad in the strongest position.

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/20151010_MAM922.png

Sure I'll answer that: no one.

You can't find that video because you're using the default search, which excludes discarded posts.

Sweet Bastard Zombie Jesus!

You don't think well, and are 100% wrong about both my education and acquaintances, but you, on the other hand, do not seem to have either education or personal acquaintances to draw from on this subject. It seems some militant Feminist (they are not the only brand of Feminist, BTW) left a bad taste in your mouth, so now all feminism, to you, is distasteful. That's like eating a single spoilt sausage and from then on loudly telling people at dinner "meat is all tainted and it all makes you sick...you're just too dumb to know it", and continuing on that vein until they either (from exasperation) either stop eating it in your presence or find a way to ignore you, IMO, because attempting to rationally explain that some improperly handled meat is tainted, but not all, falls on deaf ears.

Dictionaries are where you look up the definitions of words, which is exactly what I did. Because you can't grasp the concept doesn't make it wrong.

Because your mind can't grasp the difference between the name of a movement based loosely on an idea and that idea does not mean there isn't one. Sorry, fail, just like your second paragraph in your last post which included many ANTI-feminist theories along with some overboard militant Feminist theories...I wonder if you can follow that thought since you don't grasp the difference in the words and claim there isn't one.

Equality is not advancement of one group at the expense of the other, it's the discontinuation of that process.

MY dictionary?!? Me thinks you protest too much. What's your issue with the English language (or language in general) that use of one of the main tools of language causes you such consternation and spawns such disrespectful and angry sounding replies? I honestly think you're just angry that I proved your argument's major flaw (that flaw being your inability to distinguish between a loose group's name and an idea...which makes one wonder, do you believe there were roaming gangs of large, dark colored cats protesting and attacking police in the US in the 60's and 70's?), but can't bring yourself to admit your argument had any flaw.

"Cultural fiction of gender"?!? Oh...I didn't realize I was having a discussion with a completely crazy person. If you actually believe gender is a "cultural fiction", there's no point discussing anything with you, because you live in a different reality from the rest of us that actually HAVE a gender, and not just culturally derived gender, and have ancestors that had gender before there was such a thing as "culture". What an insane statement, one that totally missed the point as well.

Spit on me, you'll find yourself in a bad place, and you'll find that many in favor of Women's rights are also in favor of removing ALL involuntary cultural distinctions of gender, a thing that has NOT been done by far, and you wish to stop any advancement towards equality of genders while one side is SO far ahead based solely on their GENDER. (damn, that word again describing a thing that doesn't exist...you must hate that, huh?)

Yes, if you fail to even conceive that, unfairly, there is a gender split in society that 99% of the time favors one gender to the detriment of the other, you by default fall into that opposing force, opposing fairness and equality, and individualism. No question. It's sad to me that you can't see that.

I'll ignore your last 2 paragraphs, I'm not speaking for @bareboards2, she's perfectly capable of speaking for herself, but has intelligently decided that further discussion with you on this subject is pointless...and I see she's likely right, you just want to argue about it, as made clear by your never ending arguments spawning from a simple clarification of what 2 words (spelled the same, but one being a proper name, the other an idea) actually mean...according to THE dictionary, and your insistence that the dictionary is wrong because it doesn't support your position that feminism and Feminism are the same thing. BWAAAHAAHAAHAAHAA!! That's too funny. Thanks for the laugh.

Enjoy exploring that hypothesis further, but without my further input. My points are made, some repeatedly.

One of the first things I do whenever I set up a clean install of Windows is to set the default view for every folder to "details".

A single column of content allows me to cycle the content through my stationary point of focus. I can stare at a fixed spot and just let my free-scroll mouse wheel do the work. Which is simply great for quickly browsing for interesting content.

Multiple columns of content, however, force me to scan by constantly changing my point of focus. The new design does precisely that, it makes me devote much more time to every single entry unless I reduce the tab's width to intentionally force the layout to organise its content in a single column.

But it's the same issue for almost every news site out there, so I guess I'm just too old for this shit. /rant