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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/06/08
12/06/08
I'm seeing a lot of cheering going on here, but is anyone else worried about the government getting anywhere near the internet's infrastructure? Private industry has it's issues, but I've read enough 1984-esque books to know I'd rather it be them then Big Brother overseeing the flow of information.
12/06/08
Also, he gets a .gov address because he is an elected official. Yes, he's not yet sworn in, but it doesn't matter. He gets top-secret security briefings and most all the other things that the active President gets, as part of the transition period. At least Obama is using government resources which will be accessible via the Freedom of Information Act. Bush & Co use GOP resources for quite a lot to keep their stuff from the public eye.
12/06/08
Technically, he's not an elected official until he is sworn in on January 20th. Until then, he's just an official-elect...but even then, not until he's duly elected by the Electoral College on December 15th. Until then, he's really just the sole candidate on the basis that McCain, like most candidates who see that they're pretty much guaranteed to lose, withdraw from the race before the final votes are even tallied, let alone waiting around for the College to vote. And even then, I've heard that there's some guy out there who's filed suit in the US Supreme Court to prove that he's constitutionally eligible to hold that office. Seems there's some confusion regarding his birth certificates, and whether there's one that was filed in Kenya _before_ the one that was filed in Hawaii.
12/06/08
Obama is a US Senator. I think Senators are allowed a .gov address as they are part of the federal government.
12/06/08
Well, I hadn't heard anything but that the lawsuit was filed, but from the sounds of things, if Obama _was_ born on foreign soil, he really wouldn't have been a natural born citizen. That is, of course, assuming that all the constitutional information that was cited was actually both part of the US Constitution, and still valid. The ironic thing in all of this is how long the Democrats have been trying to have McCain declared inelligible for POTUS on the basis that he was born in Panama (he was born on a US military base to a member of the US military who was stationed abroad, with two parents who were both US citizens, so he qualified for natural-born citizenship on several counts).
My biggest question in that regard was what would happen if he _was_ determined to be a native-born Kenyan? Would Biden be sworn in as POTUS in Obama's stead, or would their entire ticket have been declared invalid, thus resulting in either an automatic win for McCain, or a forced revote?
12/06/08
I'd add that at my university here in his state of Illinois, they recently made the school revamp the lighting by having motion-detector switches installed in every class, laboratory and bathroom. It still isn't clear to me that the change saved much power as people were already very good with turning off lights (except the bathrooms). And, not to be short-sighted, but it sure seemed an expensive upgrade overall.
12/06/08
If it's flourescent lighting, it might actually take more power to turn them on than it would to run them for several hours straight. Modern ballasts might be more efficient during the power-up phase, but if you've got fixtures that have plug-in starters (little aluminum can-looking things with a black plastic disc on one end, and two little mushroom-shaped metal contacts sticking out of it)...well, you're almost better off leaving them on M-F and just shut them off on weekends when noone will be there.
12/06/08
Give me fiber optics or give me death!
12/06/08
Claim to be the person behind the massive surge in internetness while vast hordes of not-them people do all the actual work and business goes on as usual with no significant involvement from Washington? Yeah, pretty much.