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This is certainly a stark constrast to McCain's "100 years": Obama is going to reduce troop levels by nearly 66% over the next 18 months and have them all out in 3 years. This is the sort of timetable many have been clammoring for for quite some time now.

It gets my thumbs up, and the fact it's getting bipartisan approval is practically miraculous to me after this being one of the most polarizing issues of the decade.

Here's a fun question for our friends across the pond... how many of you from the UK think the Bank of England should be abolished?

The real question which remains is are the Cylons fans of Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix?

I plan on being immortal, unless I die first.

I haven't used Solaris regularly for awhile, but I certainly used to. If you want my general opinion on it I think it's a great OS for a server but would recommend against using it for a desktop. You'd be a lot better off with something like Ubuntu if you want a Unix-based desktop

Yes, and this further compounds the "anyone is a potential terrorist" problem. It's becoming increasingly easier to become a terrorist. Terrorists have access to military grade encryption. In fact terrorists can make virtually untappable Internet phone calls using Skype. Want to build a bomb? Want to build a dirty bomb? Google can tell you how!

The immediate problem is P2P traffic. The profit margins of selling Internet are the immediate problem, and P2P effectively allows consimers to "trade" bandwidth, repaying the cost of delivering content to you by paying it forward to others. Unfortunately, most ISPs are trying to sell an all-you-can-eat model, so while bandwidth you "trade" to other users comes at no immediate cost to you, it does end up costing ISPs money. This isn't helped by the fact that P2P traffic is suspected to account from anywhere from 20% to 50% of all Internet traffic, depending on who you ask

qft

The only limits to terrorism are human creativity. Any smart terrorist is going to try to attack in a creative way which their target will be unprepared for. What is the "source"? Any given person is a potential terrorist, and there's no "origin of terrorism".

I think searing the flesh off enemy civilians merely for expediting troop movements should be illegal, but maybe that's just me.

So what are you accusing me of... giving additional context? After you lied about what I said and put words in my mouth, never quoting me? That's rich... omit the context of my statements then complain about me doing so? Yes, and that's EXACTLY what I've been saying all along... http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=471034#post471034 Do I need to break it down for you a little better here? 1) Using white phosphorus is not in and of itself a war crime 2) Certain manners of usage of white phosphorus can be construed as war crimes 3) I believe the way it was used by the Palestinians should be construed as a war crime What are you accusing me of? Having an opinion?

Having seen the latest episode I'm going to guess Daniel is Starbuck's dad

Do you have another "theory" as to where else besides credit peasants got enough money to stop being peasants and start being landowners themselves?

No they have not! I've been sitting here going "quote me, don't put words in my mouth" Now you're not only avoiding quoting me, you're saying others have already done so. Who? Now not only are you strawmanning me, you're passing the buck onto other imaginary people. Again: use the forum quote function. That's what it's for. Let's use the handy dandy forum quote function to see what the CONTEXT of that statement was, shall we? Oh look, I was quoting the "Arms control status and military regulations" section of the Wikipedia article on white phosphorus: There's some background info on the Geneva Conventions. Does white phosphorus fall under this? Well let's KEEP READING... HEY LOOK AT THAT. Not only did I not say white phosphorus is banned under treaty, I quoted a source which claims explicitly that it's NOT. Not only have you failed to back up your argument, but you were trying to use something I said out of context (without quoting me) to back it up which, had you simply quoted me, would've immediately demonstrated that I was saying the exact opposite thing you claimed I was. And that, sir, is a strawman. Or should I just say that you're lying about what I said and sticking words in my mouth? So, for the record, I claimed the weapons don't contravene treaties. But thanks for playing.

Yes, this is the whole Net Neutrality debate, the one that spawned the whole meme from now convicted senator Ted Stevens. It's hard to say where I stand in this now. It's odd to see most of the Internet architects are opposed to it (except Vint Cerf, who may have a small conflict-of-interest given his role at Google) Generally I support it, but I do think operators should be able to prioritize certain types of traffic on their network.

I rewatched the episode of the Day the Universe Changed I linked earlier. Here's a YouTube playlist that will play the whole episode: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A502F5EC13753A1F&playnext=1 Everyone, please watch this. James Burke argues that a central bank and credit are what took England from a nation of desperately divided landowners and peasants living a mostly agrarian lifestyle to "Great Britain" with a burgeoning middle class.

Assembly is considered a second-generation programming language (or 2GL). This means it's one level of abstraction above machine language, which is considered a first-generation programming language (or 1GL). Languages with the expressive power of C (i.e. context-free languages) are considered to be third-generation programming languages (or 3GLs) because they exist at a level of abstraction above assembly language.

First, that's not what JohnB said. He said "You've claimed the weapons contravene treaties," which I never did. Second, I never said they're "guilty of war crimes". I said I thought what they did should (morally) be a war crime. Again, where? How about quoting me on it instead of putting words in my mouth?

Do you think war should be waged differently on civilian doorsteps than in areas where it's a purely military-on-military conflict? When did I do that? Please stop strawmanning. Actually I did that way back in the beginning of the thread But since you seem apt to strawman me and stick words in my mouth let me point out I never claimed similar levels of effectiveness. If there is no regard for the enemy's humanity in war, why don't we simply nuke all of our enemies into glass? As you said: If war isn't in any way humane, why give civilian casualties any regard? Why not just nuke them all?

They can do that while still meeting the (weekly) reporting requirements?

I think the best way to answer that question is to look at how society functioned prior to credit. You might try watching James Burke (of Connections fame) explain it in this episode of The Day the Universe Changed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62JDnxDSZaM (you can find the rest of the episode in the related videos) Credit kicked off international trade and with it the marketplace as well as the industrial revolution. Without it the economy was restrained and people lead a largely agrarian lifestyle with local craftsmen making goods by hand and most trade highly localized. Credit revolutionized the way society operates by overcoming economic gridlock and allowing entrepreneurs to plan a better future ahead of time, financing their schemes on credit as opposed to a just in time approach which necessitates cash on hand. Imagine if a craftsman had to work his entire life to save up enough cash to build a factory to automate his craft, as opposed to seeking money from creditors on the condition that he could utilize the money and his expertise to repay his creditors, plus interest. Credit underlies mechanization and mass production. This leads to commoditization of goods, which means we can all afford the things which were once only available to the rich. But I am not doing James Burke justice. Watch the show, and I think it will improve your appreciation of how credit benefits society.

I have since seen it. I guess I should watch Razor now, or something. That apparently explains all these weird little bits I'm missing? (how the Final Five came to be, the origin of the Hybrids, etc.) I think there's been substantial foreshadowing that Starbuck is a Cylon. That'd be a fitting end. Of course, it could just be that this is all a last ditch attempt to explain a numbering error. It seemed like they were retroactively trying to keep the continuity by saying that there are "12 models of Cylon" because there weren't any more sevens. So there are 12 models of Cylon now, but there used to be 13. Whatever...

Your guess would appear to contract this poll. Have another poll which backs it up? Or do you have a magical Pangloss "mainstream America" detector with a "far left" filter? Not to sound insulting, but that's the kind of rhetoric I hear out of Bill O'Reilly... he likes to try to marginalize the opinions of liberals by equivocating them with the "far left" and overstate the opinions of conservatives by attributing them to "mainstream America" I suspect indignation towards Bush is more vast than you have lead yourself to believe, and this poll would appear to back me up. Would you have suspected that this large a percentage of the population wished for Bush to be investigated?

Okay, I'm confused by your whole post. From how I'm reading the article, ANY spending decisions by any government agencies receiving money from the stimulus bill (state level or otherwise, no?) must be syndicated in RSS format, and furthermore meet their additional metadata requirements. This includes all reporting requirements of the bill, including major communications, formula block grant allocations, and weekly reports. What are you claiming is missing from this reporting process? This is a truly novel and impressive use of existing Internet standards and if they follow through with what they're proposing it will give a wealth of intelligence to ANYONE interested in dissecting how the money is actually spent. You don't have to trust the government's boiled down summary... you should be able to aggregate the RSS feeds from any government agency receiving money as part of the stimulus bill and slice and dice the numbers any way you desire. Never in the history of any government has this happened for any such spending bill. My hope would be that Obama tries to expand this program to all government agencies so that any citizen can see exactly how their tax dollars (present or future) are being spent. Truly, this blows my mind. I work with RSS every day (albeit for video syndication) and I wouldn't have thought of this. It's a truly novel use of the technology. As you can tell I'm really excited by the prospect.