Pain_Man
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Everything posted by Pain_Man
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It correct that VCRs were "legalized" by the 1986 "Betamax" decision. The crux of the decision was that the VCRs had "substantial non-infringing uses"; i.e. video-taping junior's 8th birthday or security cameras, etc. Related to this, Congress has passed a law called the American Home Recording Act. It put a tax of a few pennies on casette tapes, blank CDs, etc. The tax is collected into a fund and then paid out to the record companies. Yet the same record companies receiving the money are allowed to attempt obstruct what our tax money is paying for. The bullshit from the RIAA? "The law doesn't stop us from trying to protect our content." So STOP taking the goddamned money!! There's been some talk in Congress of stopping payments to companies that use Right's Destruction Technology. Nothing concrete so far.
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Amen, Shamus. Can't put it much better than that.
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NO Rush fans...on the imgboard...oh God...
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The crowd pulling down Palpatine's statue on Coruscant was a nice touch. As well as the fireworks. On the commentary track (for Jedi) Ben Burtt (editor and sound man) talks about how they hired a fireworks company to create the fireworks for the "special edition". Said it was a blast. They asked the fireworks guys to do whatever they wanted see and, presto, it was done. Tres cool.
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LMFAOROTF....
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Yeah, it's pretty much been downhill ever since that colossal error.
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My kid's in kindergarten, and thankfully, the academic standard's she's being held to are higher than the description you give of the one's this sixth grader (?) is being held to. A lot of it depends on the district and the teacher. My daughter's got homework in kindergarten. That's something we didn't have in 1975!
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One of my best friends in the world is African-American. When all that of horseshit was going on, he was horrified. In fact, I don't remember a single African-American who wasn't appalled at the whole idea. Talk about a nimrod idea. Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ!
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As for woman voting, it depended upon the state or territory. Women had the vote in Wisconsin, for example, from 1855. But it was the XIXth Amendment that granted women the vote nationally. Originally, only men with property--as having a stake in the community--were allowed to vote. Universal Manhood suffrage began in 1832 under Andrew Jackson (who ordered the eviction of the Cherokee Indians leading to the murder of my great-great-great grandmother). Like England, the progress was slow and steady. As for "Jim Crow" laws, African-Americans regularly voted until the 1890s when voter "literacy tests" and the like were implemented to strip blacks of the vote. Like every country, there are things we are not proud of. Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Canada and Austrailia, to name a few, treated their natives no better than we did. As you read this, the Chinese conquest and colonization of Tibet goes on with mass murder, torture and oppression that make anything done on this continent look like a pic-nic. History, however, is full of irony. Without the arrival of English colonists in Massachusettes in 1620 and the eventual marriage of one of my ancestors with a Cherokee woman, I would not be here today writing this. Nothing is lost and everything is preserved, if only in our words and our genes. hell I think it was 1924 before AMERICAN Indians got the vote and they were here first,and still in some states they were denied the vote New Mexico denied them that right untill 1962 ,if ever a group of people was fucked over by the government it was them ,sent to reservations where the land was so poor you couldn't grow weeds much less food
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History is one of my passions. Especially Anglo-European history. I used to be a political junkie, but the Left-Liberal media (sometimes mistakenly called "the mainstream media") now openly supports the Democratic Party and conspires with Democrats to publish lies about Republican candidates. The Clinton News Network is a prime example: in 1996, the President of CNN News helped the former Perjurer-in-Chief plan media strategy. In 2004 the head newsreader--people who, in America, are laughably called "anchors"--of the Big Three tv network CBS (Communist Bullshit Service) conspired with a known kook to spread forged documents about President Bush's National Guard service. Despite the fact that four CBS document experts called the "evidence" forgeries". The font used in the forgeries was a Microsoft Word font that hadn't been invented until 1980--the documents purported to be from the mid-1970s. CBS went with the story anyway--the weekend before the election! And there are so many examples of this kind of shit that I'm almost cured of my news addiction. Anything other than FoxNews or Rush Limbaught tends to make me want to puke. But history, that's still my passion.
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"Vovlo: a Swedish car with a Japanese transmission built in Belgium." --Pain Man Sr (retired after 48 yrs in the automotive repair business)
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You see, Ground, I can turn that one right around on you. Parliament has absolute power over everything and everyone in the UK. Tomorrow, Parliament could decided to have everyone over 6'4" tall thrown into prison and and there's nothing and no one to stop them. The House of Lords, which had the only slight check on Parliament--it could delay enactment of a law for two years--has been gutted by Blair & Co. So I can easily ask you, how can you call your government a "democracy" (in reality both systems are representative democracies, very different than true democracy) when Parliament controls all? The Monarch has zero power; the Queen's rubberstamp approval of the government is no loner required. The Royal Veto of Parliamentary legislation hasn't been used since 1707 under Queen Anne. The House of Lords lost all real power in 1914, when the Commons got Edward VII to threaten to create a shitload of "Liberal" peers to swamp the Conservative majority. The House of Lords folded. But in practice, but Parliament and the Electoral College behave democratically. The Electoral College (more on this below) has never elected someone president who didn't win a majority of the states. We don't want a tyranny of the majority in this country. Just as I suspect y'all don't want 1200 unelected aristocrats having real power to pass laws or stop legislation passed by the Commons. I'm not trying to bust your ball here or criticize England. After all, our bill of Rights is based, to a large degree, on the Bill of Rights which Parliament passed after booting out James II and resplacing him with his daughter (Mary II) and her husband, the Dutch Stadtholder William III. Our revolution is the only conservative revolution in history. It was fought to "restore the rights of Englishmen." When George III & Parliament balked, we sent them packing. Of all the ingredients that go to make up the heritage of the United States, it is the English contribution that is decisive. The Founders--the most brilliant collection of men ever assembled in history--knew better than to trust the mob (sometimes miscalled the "people"). We have what's called the Electoral College. It protects us from a Hitler or a Napoleon. It's a check on the wild passions of the moment that can sometimes animate the mob. And it's a healthy check. And we are NOT an oligarchy. We are run by an aristocracy of lawyers, judges and the Federal bureaucracies. If history teaches us anything it is those that control the functioning of government control everything. Politicians are mere window dressing. Freedom disappears by degrees, one regulation, one court decision, one bureaucreatic ukase at a time. Every year the Federal government adds FIFTEEN THOUSAND PAGES of new laws and regulations to the Federal Register--the official "book" into which a law or reg has to be entered into before it can actually take effect. Ours is a system of checks and balances. It is not that system that fails the people; it is the people that fail the system. The missus is American and has tried to explain this to me on numerous occasions but i just don't get it If your President is not chosen by the people then how can you live in a democracy..?
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Dude. That's a Lib site. By definition, they can't be trusted.
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Well, no that's not accurate. Since American Idol counts votes and not voters. In reality, probably no more than five or six million people actually voted in the American Idol final. In '04 election, 60,000,000+ went to the polls, a record turn-out. Civic duty doesn't motivate people but hating the other party's guy seemed to do it for some people who would normally have stayed home. Only in Democrat controlled places are people allowed to vote more than once.
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65% is a record turn out and the last presidential election was the first one where the turn-out got that high in decades. In "off-year" elections--i.e. elections between Presidental ones--voter turn out is normally below 30%. A bit of both I think bill. most are in survival mode just trying to get by and feed families pay bills etc and dont have time for the crap that politicians throw their way ,some are of the mind that it doesn't matter who gets elected you're going to get screwed anyway so whats the use .The Govt. counts on that, here in the US only 65% of all eligible voters vote and then some candidate gets elected with say 55% of that vote so its not like its the voice of the majority that gets him/her elected .Then they're called world leaders ,I wondered if any of them has taken a good look at the state of the worlds affairs at all, this kind of leadership we can all do without
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It's so much worse than you can imagine... It's no longer Easter Vacation, it's Spring Vacation. If that wasn't pussified enough, it's no longer Christmas Vacation. It's "Winter Break." If you oppose gay "marriage" you're a homophobe. If you oppose "Affirmative" Action, you're a racist. If you oppose tax increases, you hate the poor. If you oppose illegal immigration, you hate all immigrants. If you want immigrants to learn English, you're a language bigot. If you don't want your grade schooler given graphic descriptions of homosexual acts, you're a bigot. If you support allowing prayer at graduation or before school sporting events, you're a religious "fanatic seeking to force you're religious beliefs on everyone else." (No religious fanatics were the assholes who flew airliners into the WTCs on 9/11!!!) If you're a conservative (i.e. on the Right politically), you can forget about getting a college degree. (Example: in my home town, at the state college, a conservative student was set up on a phony pot rap by the Administration because she kept protesting Leftist bias among her professors). It's a crime for a the school nurse to give your teenage daughter a Tylenol, but the Nurse can give the lass all the condoms that can fit in her purse. It's illegal to discuss God but legal to give referrals for abortions to high school students. And it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse... I could list so many examples I'd explode LUK's bandwidth bill. The examples are, as the Demon told Jesus, Legion.
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(Well, there is Minnesota, but I don't think they're actually a state.)
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I'm no hockey fan but you don't beat us all the time. Besides, we just buy your best players. So there!! Personally, I've always inclined toward George Carlin's definition of hockey: "Hockey's not a sport, it's three activities in one. Ice skating, beating the shit of someone and chasing a puck. What the fuck is a puck anyway? Where else have you seen one besides at the bottom of a urinal?"
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I find it a bit strange that the USA bother to enter if everyone's so disinterested in it. ESPN & FoxNews are both covering it. And there are several million, mostly immigrant, followers of the World Cup in the US. Another odd factor in the mix is the popularity of youth soccer. But US youth soccer is a rather different game than the English variety played 'round the world. It's faster and points are much more frequent. Ironically, despite the fact it bores me to tears, soccer's the only organized sport I ever played. (I use "soccer" here to differentiate from the way its played 'round the world.) Remember there is one (used to be two) Canadian team (the Expos) in Major League baseball, so it's not exclusively American. The Japanese are getting better and better (there are several Japanese players among MLB's best; American players have also been playing in Japan for 20+ yrs); and there are a few Koreans in the game as well. So it is becoming more and more international. I believe we'll see a truly world series in our lifetimes. The Cubans and Dominicans also produce outstanding baseball players. If it weren't for the huge disparities in national wealth, there'd probably be Dominican teams in MLB. Cuba too if it weren't for the Beard and the poverty. It's also growing more and more popular in Mexico. If Japan weren't 10,000 miles away, they might already have teams in the MLB. However, the distances, given the present flying speeds, make it simply impossible logistically. After all, except for the World Cup and the Olympics, soccer/football is organized into national and regional leagues, is it not? E.g., teams from Senegal and Japan don't regularly play each other.
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Did we shoot a Tomahawk missile up anyone's ass? No? Waste of time.
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Uh, Kev, How much is the model without the oil fetish? I personally think its a lovely pet...........
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Oh, c'mon, wheel. He's cute. You know, 100,000 years, ago they used to be the size of Volkswagon Bugs. Then they go down-sized. <<< Can you imagine, a 1500lb wombat? >>> Fuckin' dingos'd be running for the hills.
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I don't know. At he's not shoving clothes pins (?) up his ass. That would put him above the intellectual level of most of the naked,bipedal apes on this planet.
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THAT'S NO WOMBAT! It's a small moon." Seriously, how'd ya get a picture of my ex-mother-in-law on a goodday?
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What if ya prefer sweaty, unwashed koalas?