Lets see now. Who filled their cabinet posts with lobbyist after vowing not to?
Yes, he broke his promise on not allowing lobbyists in his administration.
However he did provide a transparency mechanism to see who is a lobbyist in his administration and has fewer of them than any president in modern times. It's not perfect, nor arguably even good enough, but it is better.
Who campaigned with the transparency pledge then developed a health care plan behind closed doors and limited examination of the bill to 72 hours before the vote??
The Senate.
How did that stimulus bill work out for the middle class and poor of the country?
Don't know yet.
What has this guy done to help this country? You don't need to believe what any news the media "filters".
A lot. It's easy to argue he hasn't done enough. I tend to agree, more on quality than quantity though. He's been relatively prolific, although I'd rather he focus solidly on some of the big issues rather than the hands off approach he's taken to them so far.
Listen to the mans own words and match what he says and what he does for yourself. They don't add up. What gives you reason to believe this or anything else he says? If he has a plan, why not present it now? Learn from the past. The spin you need to watch out for is coming from him.
I agree with you more here. He's president, not a dictator and he can't enforce a lot of the policies he wants to change. I think he can take a more active role and influence things better than he is now, and his State of the Union seemed to indicate this. I wonder if he has the force of personality to get a lot of it done.
Of course there are some things he's back pedaled on that give me no end of frustration, but those are mostly Liberal issues that, frankly, he probably never had the power to do.
And you fall back to the "just go somewhere else" while market pressures are clearly pointing for "somewhere else" to become marginalized and disappear. Bravo on your cognitive dissidence and doublethink. Big Brother would be proud.
It's a specious point. If the corporation's products are pervasive to the point of being ubiquitous and market pressure shows no sign of changing(which naturally occurs) you're stuck with the same system you'd imagine a dis-utopian gov't providing.
Saying you "you can go without" is directly analogous to saying "you can move somewhere else" if you don't like policy X.
Just like Apple doesn't have a right to make you purchase an iPad and content from the iTunes Store, you do not have a right to impose your desire for openness on Apple's platform and relationship with its customers.
I don't claim that right, I'm just pointing out the fallacy that you can just "go without it". That's equivalent to saying, "you can just live someplace else" if you criticize the U.S.'s policies.
Only if it wants to alienate almost all of its users and developers.
It won't happen.
Just like it couldn't happen with cell phones right?
If Apple can get away with it they will do it. It's win-win for them, easier and cheaper to provide better service for systems, AND they get to increase profit. And if it becomes a market standard, good luck finding any competitor to not offer it since it increases cost and reduces potential profit. The freedom for you to control your computer just became an externalized cost to the market.
Why are the privacy nutcases always so ready to imagine the most terrible wrongs about potential abuse of power by the government, but think it is super okay to give all control to a corporation?
Because you still retain the option of not buying the corporation's product.
HAHAHAHA! Okay!
Since you can just forgo any product that has terrible restrictions on it that we wouldn't put up with from the gov't I assume you don't have a cell phone cable internet and are posting from your local library.
The smoking gun I'd heard about was the IP Addresses of the command servers, not this CRC algorithm.
While these machines could be rouge agents in the Chinese Gov't. infrastructure they're even less likely to admit a security compromise that than espionage.
There is so much potential to leverage technology to make schools better too.
Current technology is all about transmitting large amounts of information to multiple sources and presenting it in different forms. Imagine being able to easily leverage the plans and methods of the "best" teacher in the country for your particular subject. Having good templates for making lessons more interactive using technology instead of sitting watching a lecture / screen.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken
I could see this ruling being used to support a school's case against D&D because it promotes "gang behavior" in its students.
Can you think of another example? Hopefully one that doesn't involve out and out lying to the public? This may seem tangential to your point, but I think the apathy of the average constituent is key here.
There are anthropogenic global warming skeptics, and there are also deniers.
Skeptics say while there is non-trivial linkage of CO2 to warming, and increased CO2 is being caused by humans, and the current trend of climate data shows a warming, there is unlikely to be catastrophic change in climate, and efforts to prevent a catastrophic change are likely not well spent for their own sake.
Deniers claim the science is wrong and there is a conspiracy among climate scientists/the left/whoever else they think is involved. They use one way hash arguments like "cherry picking data" that sound correct, but are misleading to the point of being wrong.
Also, please reconsider posting Costella's "work". He's a physics PHD who seems to like feeding conspiracy theorists, usually of the JFK variety. Don't mistake his work for scientifically reviewed papers.
Finally I fail to see the point of you mentioning you're a liberal, you're ideology should have nothing to do with the science. This coupled with phrases like "faith", "junk science", and "neo-creationists" sounds like you're just using buzzwords to support your argument without actually understanding what you're railing against.
Why is he modded down? He has a valid viewpoint. If you disagree reply or mod others up. I don't need the karma; I just think that this is a shame when we could have had a discussion.
In the specific case of Healthcare I think he was trying to avoid the failures of the 1990's heath care attempt. If he had crafted it and dumped it on congress he would have been criticized for overreaching(the executive branch doesn't make the laws!) and not learning from the Clintons' attempt to craft a health care bill.
Of course a large group of Americans would rather have no bill pass than one hashed through congress so thoroughly. Obama did the politically safe thing rather than the "right" thing.
Basically any legislation worth passing would have to be relatively uncompromising. The catch is any legislation that is uncompromising has very little chance of getting passed. If A bill doesn't pass now, I don't think it's possible for one to pass.
That's not really an excuse. Didn't Obama publically state that he wouldn't be spending Federal Funds to go after state licensed medical marijuana growers? That sounds a a lot like not defending the laws as passed.
I'll cut Obama slack when he has to choose the lesser of two evils. This is not one of those cases.
The internet is not the main problem for newspapers(in terms of news). Newspapers have forgotten what they are good at. Internet news isn't much different from the morning, afternoon, and nightly news on T.V. You can get quick headlines, and LOTS of opinions easily. What newspapers are good for is investigative journalism. But they don't DO that anymore. They try and cater to specific crowds like the news channels and blogs.
The New York Times is a decent paper in a time of mediocre papers. It would still be considered far too run by its advertising and getting more quick fluff stories than it's 1970's version.
If people have X disposable income that they're willing to spend on music then you'll likely not see much of a decrease in terms of the industry as a whole. But that money will be far more spread around, and more of it will be going directly to the artists.
The problem with his thinking is that the money doesn't "come from" anywhere. It's a person's, potentially a fan's, money, and as long as you don't try to sell them more music than they can reasonably listen to they will pay for it.
It wouldn't be this way in the beginning, however. Because fans are so used to inflated prices there'd probably be an orgy of grab everything you can because you're getting something for nothing mentality. Eventually, though, people will realize that they can and should support the artists of the music they're listening to, especially when it's easier to give the money directly to the artist.
imagine for a moment that Americans would put up with an Israeli-style grilling from minimum-wage TSA employees with a chip on their shoulder.
That's the root of the problem isn't it? Airport security is sold to the lowest bidder here while Israel is using its well trained military force. If a country that actually needs its military to protect its borders is sparing troops for this, why the hell can't we?
No, the major hurdle would be that this would be slapped with "socialism" because it's during Obama's administration. Nevermind the Department of Homeland Security, which was really Bush's stimulus package.
I doubt Google will forsake FF yet. Their market share plus competition with MS makes them an attractive ally. Until chrome gains substantial share(and I think it will) supporting FF is in Google's best interest.
At that point though, FF will probably need a kick in the butt. Some new forks moving away from the relatively stable and comfortable, but slower to change browser it's become seems to me be a natural part of the life cycle of a project like FF. It has provided a solid foundation for other open source browsers, and has opened up the market in general. On some level, what's left for it to do other than compete like any other browser? If it maintains good market share, Google will want to keep funding it. If it doesn't, then a large change will be needed to make it relevant again.
Security in airports isn't inherently a bad thing, but to quote the internet "ur doin it wrong".
Israel has been dealing for this threat on a much higher level for years. It's not as hassle free a solution as no security, but the wait times are substantially less, and success substantially better than America's Funniest Security Theater.
The Fourth Amendment has long been held to apply to all people under US jurisdiction, whether citizens or not. However, as stated by another reply to your post, the Supreme Court has ruled, rightly or wrongly, that it does not apply to border searches. So, by current law, the government is within its rights to search you at the border regardless of your citizenship status.
It's a fallacy to state that the rights outlined in the Constitution (particularly the Bill of Rights) are granted only to citizens. The Constitution makes distinctions between "citizens" and "persons" all over the place. When the Constitution refers to "persons" or "people" (as it does in the fourth amendment), it is referring to ALL people, citizen or not. The founders believed in the concept of inalienable rights, which are rights granted to all people (or at least all white males in their day) by their Creator. The purpose of enumerating some of the more important of those rights in the Constitution was not to grant them, but to prevent the government from infringing on them.
Isn't it amazing that 218 years later even "activist judges" would consider the constitution a radical document with respect to "inalienable rights"? I fear that reflects more on the current society than on the wisdom of the founding fathers.
The point was that the damage, even nuclear weapon damage, is localized to where the bombs are dropped(duh) and presumably we won't be a part of the nuke throwing match if it starts between two other countries on the other side of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see now. Who filled their cabinet posts with lobbyist after vowing not to?
Yes, he broke his promise on not allowing lobbyists in his administration.
However he did provide a transparency mechanism to see who is a lobbyist in his administration and has fewer of them than any president in modern times. It's not perfect, nor arguably even good enough, but it is better.
Who campaigned with the transparency pledge then developed a health care plan behind closed doors and limited examination of the bill to 72 hours before the vote??
The Senate.
How did that stimulus bill work out for the middle class and poor of the country?
Don't know yet.
What has this guy done to help this country? You don't need to believe what any news the media "filters".
A lot. It's easy to argue he hasn't done enough. I tend to agree, more on quality than quantity though. He's been relatively prolific, although I'd rather he focus solidly on some of the big issues rather than the hands off approach he's taken to them so far.
Listen to the mans own words and match what he says and what he does for yourself. They don't add up. What gives you reason to believe this or anything else he says? If he has a plan, why not present it now? Learn from the past. The spin you need to watch out for is coming from him.
I agree with you more here. He's president, not a dictator and he can't enforce a lot of the policies he wants to change. I think he can take a more active role and influence things better than he is now, and his State of the Union seemed to indicate this. I wonder if he has the force of personality to get a lot of it done.
Of course there are some things he's back pedaled on that give me no end of frustration, but those are mostly Liberal issues that, frankly, he probably never had the power to do.
And you fall back to the "just go somewhere else" while market pressures are clearly pointing for "somewhere else" to become marginalized and disappear. Bravo on your cognitive dissidence and doublethink. Big Brother would be proud.
It's a specious point. If the corporation's products are pervasive to the point of being ubiquitous and market pressure shows no sign of changing(which naturally occurs) you're stuck with the same system you'd imagine a dis-utopian gov't providing.
Saying you "you can go without" is directly analogous to saying "you can move somewhere else" if you don't like policy X.
Just like Apple doesn't have a right to make you purchase an iPad and content from the iTunes Store, you do not have a right to impose your desire for openness on Apple's platform and relationship with its customers.
I don't claim that right, I'm just pointing out the fallacy that you can just "go without it". That's equivalent to saying, "you can just live someplace else" if you criticize the U.S.'s policies.
Only if it wants to alienate almost all of its users and developers.
It won't happen.
Just like it couldn't happen with cell phones right?
If Apple can get away with it they will do it. It's win-win for them, easier and cheaper to provide better service for systems, AND they get to increase profit. And if it becomes a market standard, good luck finding any competitor to not offer it since it increases cost and reduces potential profit. The freedom for you to control your computer just became an externalized cost to the market.
Because you still retain the option of not buying the corporation's product.
HAHAHAHA! Okay!
Since you can just forgo any product that has terrible restrictions on it that we wouldn't put up with from the gov't I assume you don't have a cell phone cable internet and are posting from your local library.
FWIW I find politifact and factcheck to be good investigative journalism with respect to politicians.
Newspapers? None.
but not for opinions on an AP story.
Give me investigative journalism that is reasonably unbiased and you have a lifetime subscriber.
Give me right or left slanted takes on a WH press release or random blogger's "news story" and you're worse than useless to me.
The smoking gun I'd heard about was the IP Addresses of the command servers, not this CRC algorithm.
While these machines could be rouge agents in the Chinese Gov't. infrastructure they're even less likely to admit a security compromise that than espionage.
There is so much potential to leverage technology to make schools better too.
Current technology is all about transmitting large amounts of information to multiple sources and presenting it in different forms. Imagine being able to easily leverage the plans and methods of the "best" teacher in the country for your particular subject. Having good templates for making lessons more interactive using technology instead of sitting watching a lecture / screen.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken
I could see this ruling being used to support a school's case against D&D because it promotes "gang behavior" in its students.
Can you think of another example? Hopefully one that doesn't involve out and out lying to the public? This may seem tangential to your point, but I think the apathy of the average constituent is key here.
Funny how they don't seem to have to compromise much when it comes to bills like the Patriot Act.
And it was never worth passing to begin with.
There are anthropogenic global warming skeptics, and there are also deniers.
Skeptics say while there is non-trivial linkage of CO2 to warming, and increased CO2 is being caused by humans, and the current trend of climate data shows a warming, there is unlikely to be catastrophic change in climate, and efforts to prevent a catastrophic change are likely not well spent for their own sake.
Deniers claim the science is wrong and there is a conspiracy among climate scientists/the left/whoever else they think is involved. They use one way hash arguments like "cherry picking data" that sound correct, but are misleading to the point of being wrong.
Also, please reconsider posting Costella's "work". He's a physics PHD who seems to like feeding conspiracy theorists, usually of the JFK variety. Don't mistake his work for scientifically reviewed papers.
Finally I fail to see the point of you mentioning you're a liberal, you're ideology should have nothing to do with the science. This coupled with phrases like "faith", "junk science", and "neo-creationists" sounds like you're just using buzzwords to support your argument without actually understanding what you're railing against.
Why is he modded down? He has a valid viewpoint. If you disagree reply or mod others up. I don't need the karma; I just think that this is a shame when we could have had a discussion.
3/4. Gitmo is being closed, even though everyone is yelling about the "folly" of bringing these criminals back to American soil.
In the specific case of Healthcare I think he was trying to avoid the failures of the 1990's heath care attempt. If he had crafted it and dumped it on congress he would have been criticized for overreaching(the executive branch doesn't make the laws!) and not learning from the Clintons' attempt to craft a health care bill.
Of course a large group of Americans would rather have no bill pass than one hashed through congress so thoroughly. Obama did the politically safe thing rather than the "right" thing.
Basically any legislation worth passing would have to be relatively uncompromising. The catch is any legislation that is uncompromising has very little chance of getting passed. If A bill doesn't pass now, I don't think it's possible for one to pass.
That's not really an excuse. Didn't Obama publically state that he wouldn't be spending Federal Funds to go after state licensed medical marijuana growers? That sounds a a lot like not defending the laws as passed.
I'll cut Obama slack when he has to choose the lesser of two evils. This is not one of those cases.
The internet is not the main problem for newspapers(in terms of news). Newspapers have forgotten what they are good at. Internet news isn't much different from the morning, afternoon, and nightly news on T.V. You can get quick headlines, and LOTS of opinions easily. What newspapers are good for is investigative journalism. But they don't DO that anymore. They try and cater to specific crowds like the news channels and blogs.
The New York Times is a decent paper in a time of mediocre papers. It would still be considered far too run by its advertising and getting more quick fluff stories than it's 1970's version.
In a way it is.
If people have X disposable income that they're willing to spend on music then you'll likely not see much of a decrease in terms of the industry as a whole. But that money will be far more spread around, and more of it will be going directly to the artists.
The problem with his thinking is that the money doesn't "come from" anywhere. It's a person's, potentially a fan's, money, and as long as you don't try to sell them more music than they can reasonably listen to they will pay for it.
It wouldn't be this way in the beginning, however. Because fans are so used to inflated prices there'd probably be an orgy of grab everything you can because you're getting something for nothing mentality. Eventually, though, people will realize that they can and should support the artists of the music they're listening to, especially when it's easier to give the money directly to the artist.
imagine for a moment that Americans would put up with an Israeli-style grilling from minimum-wage TSA employees with a chip on their shoulder.
That's the root of the problem isn't it? Airport security is sold to the lowest bidder here while Israel is using its well trained military force. If a country that actually needs its military to protect its borders is sparing troops for this, why the hell can't we?
No, the major hurdle would be that this would be slapped with "socialism" because it's during Obama's administration. Nevermind the Department of Homeland Security, which was really Bush's stimulus package.
Should Mozilla do anything about it?
I doubt Google will forsake FF yet. Their market share plus competition with MS makes them an attractive ally. Until chrome gains substantial share(and I think it will) supporting FF is in Google's best interest.
At that point though, FF will probably need a kick in the butt. Some new forks moving away from the relatively stable and comfortable, but slower to change browser it's become seems to me be a natural part of the life cycle of a project like FF. It has provided a solid foundation for other open source browsers, and has opened up the market in general. On some level, what's left for it to do other than compete like any other browser? If it maintains good market share, Google will want to keep funding it. If it doesn't, then a large change will be needed to make it relevant again.
Security in airports isn't inherently a bad thing, but to quote the internet "ur doin it wrong".
./er who I saw this from first(sorry I don't remember who you are).
Israel has been dealing for this threat on a much higher level for years. It's not as hassle free a solution as no security, but the wait times are substantially less, and success substantially better than America's Funniest Security Theater.
Thanks to the
Israelification of American Airports
The Fourth Amendment has long been held to apply to all people under US jurisdiction, whether citizens or not. However, as stated by another reply to your post, the Supreme Court has ruled, rightly or wrongly, that it does not apply to border searches. So, by current law, the government is within its rights to search you at the border regardless of your citizenship status. It's a fallacy to state that the rights outlined in the Constitution (particularly the Bill of Rights) are granted only to citizens. The Constitution makes distinctions between "citizens" and "persons" all over the place. When the Constitution refers to "persons" or "people" (as it does in the fourth amendment), it is referring to ALL people, citizen or not. The founders believed in the concept of inalienable rights, which are rights granted to all people (or at least all white males in their day) by their Creator. The purpose of enumerating some of the more important of those rights in the Constitution was not to grant them, but to prevent the government from infringing on them.
Isn't it amazing that 218 years later even "activist judges" would consider the constitution a radical document with respect to "inalienable rights"? I fear that reflects more on the current society than on the wisdom of the founding fathers.
The point was that the damage, even nuclear weapon damage, is localized to where the bombs are dropped(duh) and presumably we won't be a part of the nuke throwing match if it starts between two other countries on the other side of the world.