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Because people with any taste and sensitivity to such issues whatsoever know that it's racially-charged to use the symbolism of a monkey to represent a black person. In the name of not looking like a racist pig most people would just choose a different way to caricaturize the President.

The funny thing is, people criticize Obama all the time without being called racists. It's when they pull in the racist imagery that it becomes racist.

At least people can't complain now that Google isn't applying the same set of moral values to the US and China.

You know, I am heartily sick of hearing that lazy mantra of the Baby Boomer generation.

I'm tired of hearing idiots blame a pile of stuff on the baby boomer generation. It's a stupid idea that never made sense. They're just a bunch of people that happened to be born during a certain period of time.

"When are you all going to learn that government is inherently bad; that it is inherently corrupt." Back in the '60s this was followed by, "All you need is love, man." By the 80s it became "Just trust the corporations. Deregulate everything, and the free market will take care of us." By 2000 it was, "All you need is God."

These words don't come from the same source. Perhaps you've heard of the term strawman? Where the debater constructs a phony argument based on an imaginary and artificial weak opponent? An example of this is treating tens of millions of people as if they collectively said the above in sequence. They didn't. Further, you ignore that there were genuine problems (for example, government elites breaking the law liberally to punish political opposition or assisting organized crime) that resulted in the variety of attitudes you caricature. It is stupid to make such a claim in ignorance of why they appeared.

What the Boomers keep failing to understand is that government is not, and never has been, "The Man," some strange group controlled by an alien entity. Government is nothing more or less than the sum of its parts, namely the people who work to create and maintain it. In this country we happen to be blessed with a Democratic Republic, which means that group of people is everyone in the country. Everyone gets to participate, by running for office, by volunteering for a campaign or a cause, by discussing the issues with friends and family and coworkers, by voting.

What you seem to neglect is just as government can do touchie feelie good stuff, it can also do tyranny and corruption. I'm not one of those people who believe government is automatically bad. But there's simply way too much stuff the US government is doing now (and that it has done in the past) that it simply should not be involved in. It results in the problems that the baby boomer generation struggled against.

We CAN fix this, but we're not going to do it by staying in our parents' indolent fantasy land, and pretending that we can keep selling our votes every year and government will just go away if we ignore it enough. We have to stop selling our participation every election, and get out there and make the changes that we need. And we have to do it quickly: the EU and Japan and the BRIC nations aren't suffering from the same government-phobia that we are, and are poised to toss us into the dustbin of history.

And we're not suffering from the same problems they are. I don't know why you're obsessed with "government-phobia". A distrust of government is warranted both by history, and by the current inability of government to address or even recognize real problems today. You seem to imply that you understand this which makes your ire even more misguided IMHO. Maybe you should worry more about real problems and not about what your parents think.

I just don't think I have the stomach for it.

You do realize that most execution methods don't require obesity as a factor, right? ;)

There was once a time when mere prison sentences would serve as a deterrent - getting chained to a straw-covered floor and being brutalized, underfed, and half-frozen tends to do that, and hard labor was usually thrown in for good measure. By the time you got out, you definitely did not want to get thrown back in. Executions were usually pretty ugly, and getting killed after sentencing was a swift near-certainty.

Nowadays? The two biggest things most convicts have to worry about are not angering the other cons, and not getting a horny cellmate. Otherwise, the system basically supports you for however long you're locked up. Even an execution can take years if not decades to arrive, and by then the condemned is likely so damned bored with life that he looks forward to it as a means of release.

So yeah - deterrence isn't so much a factor these days IMHO. I once supported capital punishment, since it seems to make the most sense (removed from society while at the same time incurring the minimum amount of expense). OTOH, the vindictive side of me prefers them to live on for years, forgotten by society, world+dog moving on, as they are driven slowly mad by the monotony of knowing they will amount to nothing, in spite of whatever brief notoriety they might have had.

Once in a blue moon they drag out ol' Charlie Manson and interview him... and every year he became less of an icon of fear, and more of a caricature or parody. In 1969, the citizens of LA feared him terribly. In 2009, he's just some crazy old nutjob that people crack jokes about, the majority not even bothering to think of him at all. And there isn't jack that he can do about it. That, especially to some fame-seeking crackpot, is the cruelest punishment of all, no?

1+ for the reference (I love that show and noticed it instantly :P) but several hundred minus for delivery. I highly doubt they got the idea for a copyright enforcer from a caricature of the medias "witch hunt" of paedofiles.The name maybe, but just no.

From an AC. Oh, the irony.

There's nothing ironic, or even relevant, about the fact that I'm posting anonymously. You know that, and so by pretending that it's so, you're lying again.

Go to Rodney King and tell him it was a lie. I'm sure Ian Tomlinson would also agree that cops are all perfect.

I never said or implied that "cops are all perfect". That's yet another lie. You know that you can't refute what I actually said, so you instead make up something and pretend I said that instead. By doing so you scream at the top of your lungs that you know you're completely wrong.

If you're a cop, I pity the people where you live. You deserve locking up more than 99% of inmates.

You say I should be locked up solely because I called you out as the lying scumbag we both know you are. You literally want it to be illegal to contradict you. That is the ONLY possible reason you would have said that, and saying it proves beyond all possible doubt that you are a hundred times worse than even the caricatures you pretend all cops to be.

Naah. What made EpIV stand out was that the characters were animated by actors and technicians rather than by puppetteers.

In the later films, "Original Yoda" looked and sounded too much like Fozzie Bear, and moved just like a like a muppet.
"Fozzie Bear am I, muppet am I being". Pah.

Had the exaggerrated theatricality that some puppeteers get off on, which was fine on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, but on a "realistic" film just amounts to really hammy acting. You know the thing, where every action is loudly flagged in advance by a set of overblown prequel movements. Walking over to a chair and sitting on it becomes a bloody mime-artist performance. For me, that totally destroyed any illusion that you were looking at a real creature. You can't blame CGI for the Ewoks, either.

IMO, "Episode III" Yoda was way better than the Hensonised version. "EpIII Yoda" acted everyone else off the screen.

JarJar Binks and the buzzing fly thing in the early episodes weren't crappy because they were CGI, they were crappy because they were badly written, played on crude and offensive ethnic stereotypes (a "Jamaican" stereotype for lazy JJB and a "Jewish" stereotype for the loansharking fly thing with the big nose), used cartoonish "pantomime" acting and were there as caricatures rather than as proper characters. It didn't matter whether you got puppeteers to animate them as mechanical puppets or as CGI - with the same script and direction they'd have been just as crap.

Now if you'd mentioned Chewbacca, THERE was a non-CGI alien that you could believe in. Guy in a suit. But an actual actor, NOT a marionettist. When Chewie stomped across a room or scratched his arse, or growled at someone, it wasn't some puppeteer trying to produce the ultimate stylised ballet performance.

Plus it probably helped that Chewie didn't have any George Lucas dialogue. Same thing for Artoo.

It is sad and pathetic that the United States popular culture portrays any foreign culture as a vulgar caricature, but americans feel outrage when a character from 1960's mexican comics does the exact same thing.

I'm uncertain as to what waterfall means where you work...but despite loud protestations from several developers...where I work, it means precisely the caricature that we Agile folks oppose. And it's basically mandated that a formal, pre-planned, no-iterations "waterfall" approach is used, as per the guidelines pushed by PMI and CMMI. I wish you were right...but it ain't a strawman.

This is ridiculous. And shows a lot of developers simply dont understand processes.

1) nothing in waterfall mandates that it cannot be iterative. In fact it *must* be iterative, allowing you to jump up levels as well as flow down. Thew waterfall levels simply are to be used as milestone gates so progress can be measured. Companies simply cannot work with the 'just give me unlimited funds and resources, leave me alone, and I'll get you the product sometime" approach that some so called agile developers think that is what agile is all about. Grow up thats not going to happen.

2) Agile is nothing new. It basically describes a method to work together. Other engineering disciplines have been doing this for years and it is NOT incompatible with waterfall.

3) CMMI does not mandate a specific process. It just tells you to document what you are doing, follow that process, and feed back the results to improve the process. If you want to document waterfall, agile, or pull it out of your ass as your standard process, thats fine. CMMi doesn't care as long as it is documented, everyone understands it, and results are fed back to improve the process.

I'm uncertain as to what waterfall means where you work...but despite loud protestations from several developers...where I work, it means precisely the caricature that we Agile folks oppose. And it's basically mandated that a formal, pre-planned, no-iterations "waterfall" approach is used, as per the guidelines pushed by PMI and CMMI. I wish you were right...but it ain't a strawman.

@turtleshadow: Is 'slum' the best analogy you can come up with? As though slums everywhere are singularly about criminality? Do you live in Palm Beach or something? Monaco? What a thoughtless way to caricature people all round the world, and miss the point you want to make about criminality on the internet. See, in real life, slums are where people live when they've trying to make ends meet but just don't have the resources or infrastructure they need. You won't find spam kings working from Kibeira.

Cartoonist Tom Richmond was very excited about his new iPhone application project: He was approached to contribute cartoon caricatures of members of Congress for an app that would allow users to locate and contact their representatives using zipcodes and/or the iPhone's GPS capabilities. But then Apple rejected the app, after Richmond had done all 540 caricatures, claiming that "it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement."

From Here

I don't know about general distraction studies, but a study done on distracted driving showed that cell phone conversations, even hands-free ones were more distracting than conversations with people in the car. And there are good reasons to expect this result. Anyway.

1. I don't care if it's a luxury, or about people flaunting things. I care that people pay attention, a lot, as a runner and a cyclist.

2. Radios don't demand your attention the way that phone callers do. You can completely tune them out -- often while driving with a CD playing my favorite song on the album will go by and I won't notice until halfway through the next one. They don't demand much of your reasoning abilities, don't demand that you try to remember anything, and are very unlikely to frustrate or annoy you, as callers often do. If radios were anywhere near the distraction problem of phones people would be studying them.

3. Passengers in the car know that you're driving. They don't just know it as a fact, they're in the same boat. They can see traffic conditions and respond to your body language. They know when you don't respond immediately that you're still there (pauses become awkward *fast* on the phone -- someone talking to you face-to-face would never "ping" you by saying, "Hello?" or, "You still there?" like people do on the phone all the time). Passengers, in fact, often help drivers operate the radio/heater/windows, find change for tolls, navigate, and notice dangerous situations on the road. That's not true of everyone, but it's true of just about all my passengers.

I was once almost hit by a woman holding a dog in her lap (I was on my bike, caught up to her at the next stoplight, and knocked on her window to notify her that she was driving unsafely -- she said she didn't see me, which was really scary). I know that pets and children can be a problem... so store them properly! Cats and small dogs have carriers, children have child seats. Believe me, I don't ignore this problem. There's another factor to this -- often when traveling with passengers the whole point of the trip is to get the passengers somewhere. Banning them would defeat the whole purpose.

4. This is a caricature. I am quite aware that there is no one cause for anything. When on the road there's a certain amount of risk that we have to accept. When people willfully do things that introduce risk beyond that we should single those things out. Speeding, bad lane behavior, driving drunk/high, fiddling excessively with stereo/heater/iPod, holding a dog in your lap... I will single those things out. Using a phone to text or make a call is one of those things also; based on actual studies, it increases the risk of an accident more than drinking to the legal limit in the average person.

5. More caricatures.

6. More caricatures. I should note that when you drive distracted you externalize that additional risk you create onto other road users. So you're imposing your will on others as well. When externalities are involved, the argument, "I should just do WTF I want" doesn't hold much weight. True, some people like to tell people what to do when their behavior doesn't really affect anyone else. Anti-cell phone people are not among them.

Please. Nobody knows what a truly artificial intelligence would be like. They probably wouldn't resemble SF robots, which are just human caricatures, with a few machine-like behaviors so you'll think of them as mechanical. If you assume there are cognitive models that are profoundly different from the ones humans use (and any animal behaviorist will tell you that there are) a machine intelligence built from scratch would probably be something completely new. The classic work on that theme is William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Believe it or not, we actually more-or-less agree. We don't know because the technology's not here. That's my point, though, can't say it's dated if the technology hasn't come around.

There's a very good chance that when the technology does arrive, it'll be strikingly similar to what he wrote about.

Please. Nobody knows what a truly artificial intelligence would be like. They probably wouldn't resemble SF robots, which are just human caricatures, with a few machine-like behaviors so you'll think of them as mechanical. If you assume there are cognitive models that are profoundly different from the ones humans use (and any animal behaviorist will tell you that there are) a machine intelligence built from scratch would probably be something completely new. The classic work on that theme is William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Sibling poster is fairly accurate. John Gault is an idiotic caricature created by someone with zero understanding of economics or human nature.

I was going to reply with something along the lines of "You could not have read _Atlas Shrugged_ if you are willing to make that statement publicly -- or if you did read it, it was with a passion to NOT understand it."...

...but then you misspelled his name ('Galt'), and so I knew you were talking out of your ass. May the next life you lead be a slightly less dishonest one.

(Oh, and *plonk*)

Sibling poster is fairly accurate. John Gault is an idiotic caricature created by someone with zero understanding of economics or human nature.

That doesn't even make sense. Do away with "the top" and you'll just create a new "the top" to deal with. Your view is a caricature so strange I don't even know where you got it from. From what I can see, anti-government people (which right now also include "government is good in general but right now we've got too much of it") pretty much do want to cut at all levels. I for one could live with fewer czars.

If a human does not possess rights - specifically, the right to live - simply because they are human, created by God, then no human has any rights at all.

I've just pointed out that your position seems to imply that sapient aliens don't have rights. I'm curious, if we ever encounter a sapient alien, would it be immoral to kill it?

Frankly, I'm not expecting a thoughtful response since the rest of your post boils down to "pro-choice people are the same as Nazis!" In fact, it's a perfect example of the strawman I mentioned in my other post.

But, hey. Maybe you'll surprise me and raise my opinion of Christians. Maybe they don't all caricature people who disagree with them as being in league with the devil and/or Hitler?

My apologize for using the term "Intellectual Property" without verbose explanation.

I am personally more centrist on most issues. For example, I don't believe that immediate and drastic removal of all drug laws would make sense. Yes, the drug laws we have are crazy and should be reformed. Similarly... copyright, patent, and trademark law are also totally nuts. However I don't believe that throwing it all out the window is a rational option either. I like the idea that if I create something intangible that is also unique, that I will get some reasonable amount of protection around that work.

As long as Libertarians are caricatured as pot smokers and anarchists, the party will be doomed to fringe status.