Did you know that the Bill of Rights originally had 12 amendments in it? Two were not passed initially; one of them was ratified 200 years later and became the 27th Amendment; the other, Article the First as it originally was the first one proposed, is technically still pending. It stipulates the size of Congressional districts, to start at 30,000 ( Read more... )

So why is it that states are not allowed to secede from the Union?

I'm reading Team of Rivals about Lincoln's candidacy and Presidency. When he took office, seven states had already seceded, so Lincoln tried to calm the situation in his inaugural address by stating that he did not believe the Union could be broken, and that his Administration ( Read more... )

Forbes:
GM already has essentially done a self-funded restructuring without filing for bankruptcy. This year alone, 19,000 of its workers have accepted early retirement or a buyout from the company. Since launching its turnaround in 2005, it has slashed its hourly workforce by 56% and its salaried workforce by 36%. From 2005 to 2007, the company ( Read more... )

Paypal must be one of the top targets of phishing scam emails. And yet, Paypal just sent me an email encouraging me to click a link in the email and install the PayPal Plug-In for my Internet browser to make secure shopping easier. Really? You're encouraging your clients to click links in emails to download software to their computer that's going ( Read more... )

I missed the appearance of a new Indonesian restaurant in Seattle: Julia's Indonesian Kitchen. Must go soon. TO summarize the reviews on Yelp: Indonesian food aficionados seem to like it, others do not; service can be weak. (Unclear to me if they're related to the other Julia's'es.)

I'm going to blab for a minute outside of my competent reach. OK, what else is new? :) I'm just writing this to explore the issue for my own purposes ( Read more... )

Dear Mac OS X Finder ( Read more... )

OK, let's geek out for a moment and talk about those new MacBooks ( Read more... )

If we estimate that the total capitalization of the NYSE market is $20 trillion [1] and that the market went down by more than 8% today on the news that Congress failed to pass a rescue package, then the damage to shareholders is $1.6 trillion. Of course not all stock is held by Americans, so we can't say that Americans lost $1.6 trillion as a ( Read more... )

I'm looking input from the techies out there.

I've got:

• 1 Mac SE/30
• 2 SCSI hard drives of questionable health but with possibly interesting data on them
• A small stack of Mac floppies with data backups
• a 45MB SyQuest drive cartridge with a hard drive backup on it, but no SyQuest drive to put it in

There's probably a fair amount of interesting old email ( Read more... )