Dumb people cannot do smart things, even if told in general terms how.
Look at that Times Square bombing idiot. Generally, that was a reasonable plan.
But, as he is a total moron, it didn't work at all. He didn't bother to find out exactly how to explode propane tanks, he locked his keys in the car, he waited far far too long to blow the thing up, the guy he bought from remembered him, etc.
Dumb people can do smart things if someone actually plans out every step, and they practice and drill, but that generally would not happen as part of a hypothetical.
Yes, but an equally useful thing would have simply been a 'Install program' menu item, that, when launched, looks on all removable media for autorun.inf files or whatever, and presents their devices, names, and icons in a little list where you pick one.
Automatically running it was just stupid. You can automate systems but still put a menu item to start the process.
Hell, in some cases, that would result in less steps. We've all had to walk someone through an install progress, and ended up first having to uninstall something else or update a driver and then reboot...at which point, to get autorun to work, they have to eject the damn CD and put it back in.
American revolution, was a rebellion against a distant Big Government limiting people's freedom (in particular, freedom to do spend their money as they wish, without being subject to unjust taxation).
BZZZT, Wrong, thank you for playing, please exit the country in an orderly manner.
The American revolution was over the English people living in America being denied the civil rights they were granted under various English laws and traditions.
It wasn't 'No taxation without representation.', it was 'No taxation without representation'.
I don't know why idiots try to make it about taxes (Oh, right, they're idiots. I mean libertarians.). The damn Declaration of Independence explains why the US revolted. There's a damn list of reasons, right there, literally the third thing in the first official document ever of this country.(1) Getting it wrong should make you automatically discounted from being listened to in a political argument.
I will, as I am nice, count and summarize the reasons given. Feel free to go read it.
Lack of representation, 7
Lack for following laws, 8
Refusing to pass needed laws, 2
Stupid laws, 1
His military and waging war against us, 8
Cutting off trade, 1
Taxes, 1
Yeah, boy, that war sure was about taxes, wasn't it. There are twice as many complaints not passing laws as there are about taxes. That's right, the Declaration of Independence has as the second and third grievances, 'Hey, we need some sort of functioning system of laws over here, and neither you nor your governors seem to actually want to set them up. You aren't restricting us enough, we're breaking free to restrict ourselves more, because laws are needed things.'!
Put that in your damn stupid 'taxes are anti-freedom, the war was about taxes' pipe and smoke it. The revolutionary war was not only not about taxes, it wasn't about 'freedom' either. It was about rights.
The vast majority of the complaints are about a) the king not following the law WRT to representation in parliament of English citizens(8), b) the king not following other laws that apply to English citizens, like trial by jury and whatnot(7), or c) the fact England already appeared to be operating in a state of war towards the American colonies anyway(9).
Incidentally, as the Wikipedia article hilariously points out, the settlements in the US actually predates the 'Glorious Revolution', which is where it was established once and for all that the English monarchy must defer to parliament and do not have absolute power, so it's possibly that Americans were technically wrong about supposing to have 'the Rights of Englishmen'. The English kings had, by the American revolution, agreed at swordpoint at least twice that they didn't have absolute power, and signed documents to that end, but that happened after the colonies were founded, and no one actually ever stated if the colonies were included or if they got their own parliament or what. But the revolution was indisputably about those rights, regardless if the rights were 'supposed' to exist for 'Englishmen' living in America.
1) First person to argue that the Declaration isn't part of 'this country' get punched in the head twice, once for missing the point and again for being wrong.
Unfortunately, they also hate the ideas of the left on principle.
Hilariously, when they do come up with reasonable ideas, the left often takes them (The left actually is trying to solve problems, and so if the other side invents a reasonable idea, even if it's slightly worse than yours, you go for it, because it, in theory, should be easier to do.), and the right then reflexively opposes the idea they themselves came up with.
Cap and trade is the most obvious example of that. Cap and trade was the right's idea for a free market solution to pollution. And now it's a 'scam'. (It is a scam, because for some reason proposals seem to give away credits for free instead of charging for them, but somehow I doubt that's what Republicans dislike about it.)
The did the same thing for insurance mandates. That was their solution to the health insurance problem. Require insurance companies to sell to everyone, and mandate people buy a minimal level. It was their solution as recent as the 2008 election! Fun article with interesting quote: "It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't. Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
And with health insurance, it wasn't even corporatism, like cap and trade opposition might be. With cap and trade, perhaps the Republicans are cynically in the pocket of big businesses, but the health insurance companies loved mandates, and have in fact complained they aren't strong enough.
So why did they oppose it? Well, to scare voters, apparently.
People wonder why I say the Republicans can't govern, and that's it. Hell, for all I know, the policy they pretend to have would be good for the country...but for quite some time they've simply been the anti-Democratic party. That's it. That's the entirety of their platform. Hence the recent constant whigning about made-up stuff, like ACORN and Van Jones and whatnot.
Most of those ideas were 'progressive', but liberal and progressive, thanks to being stuck on the same side for so long, have ended up blended together in really goofy ways.
Liberalism is a bunch of ideas that everyone accepts now, like everyone should have the right to vote. *holds hand to ear* The Republicans want to do what with the 14th amendment? Um, okay, bad example. Like everyone should have the right to free exercise of religion. *holds hand to ear* What the hell? Okay, like everyone should have the right to a trial by jury. *holds hand to ear* Oh, for fuck's sake.
Okay, ignoring the obvious insanity of the current right, liberalism is a bunch of ideas that were the foundation of this country, even though we liked to pretend they weren't for the longest time. They're basically all accepted now, or at least arguing against them makes you look like a loon. (Although, for some reason, looking like a loon has become fashionable again.)
Liberalism is equal rights under the law, it's a government of law, but by the people. Gay rights and abortion are probably some of the few current liberal issues, although a few other issues should be. (For example, education access and the horrible condition of poor public schools.)
The other aspect of the left is progressivism which has resulted in stuff like Social Security and the FAA and, oh, oh yea, a bunch of stupid stuff like prohibition and whatnot.
In other words, liberals want to make sure everyone is treated the same under the law, whereas progressives want to fix problems, regardless if everyone is treated equally or not. For example, prohibition was to fix the very real problem that the end of the day for high percentage of married factory workers consisted of going out, getting smashed, and going home and beating and/or raping their wife. Divorce, of course, didn't exist, and even if it did it meant abandoning children and not having any actual way to earn a living.
Of course, prohibition blew up in everyone's face, but it was an actual attempt to solve a real problem, and not just moralizing.
Sometimes progressivism and liberalism interact in very dumb ways, like affirmative action, which is trying to solve a liberal issue (People locked in poverty for generations with no way out.) using progressive means (Replacing other people with them.) while looking at the problem via a liberal lens. (Making it about race, which it wasn't, the problem is that black people are a lot more likely to have gone to really shitty schools.)
Anyway, those two things have gotten so mixed together that no one seems to be able to tell them apart. Almost all ideas, good or bad, since liberalism was invented, were invented on the left, aka, invented by progressives. (Liberalism, OTOH, was invented in Europe essentially right on time to be the foundation of this country.)
Incidentally, in the past, liberals have been often found on the right. They only ended up entirely on the left when the progressives on the left kicked out the racists and gave up on racism, and liberals on the right looked around, found a bunch of racists in their party, and said 'What the fuck?' and left.
The libertarians will agree with almost all this, BTW, and they'll assert they're liberals but not progressives. But to keep them from agreeing with me I will point out they are idiots who think that classic liberal thought includes freedom for businesses. Which is, um, really wrong.
And you also need to draw a line between 'things that crazy people who support that party believe' (Which includes a lot of insane people on both sides.) and 'things that leaders in the party, and public figures supported by those leaders, push out to the party'.
I'm sure there are plenty of Truthers who vote Democrat, because they think Bush was behind 9/11. That's probably about half of all Truthers. (And the rest have managed to be even more paranoid and think everyone's in on it.)
But if a Democratic leader, or someone associated with the Democratic party, breathes the slightest hint of Trutherism, they get throw out of the party, get disassociated from the party, as fast as humanly possible.
Look at Van Jones, who apparently was approached by a group of people at a conference asking if he'd help an organization supporting 9/11 families, said yes, and was smeared into having signed some Truther petition and immediately let go from his position. The slightest hint, and bam. (Incidentally, where the fuck is his apology, Obama?)
OTOH, we've got elected Republican politicians who don't appear to be sure that Obama is a US citizen. Elected officials.
And it's even worse with the 'entertainers' of the right, like Beck and Limbaugh, can one day spew all sorts of lies and conspiracy theories, and then get interviews with leaders in the GOP.
Compare that to, oh, Michael Moore. He made a documentary about what happened to the US after 9/11. Is there any hint of Trutherism at all in Fahrenheit 911? Hell no. Did he even run around interviewing Truthers while carefully not agreeing with them? Nope. And yet Michael Moore is much farther away from the elected left in this country than Beck is from the elected right.
In summary, there are kooks and conspiracy nuts on both sides. One side encourages them, and hangs out with people who encourage them and even invents theories themselves, and the other side runs away from them as fast as humanly possible.
We could argue about who 'deserves' what, and it's pretty easy to point out all the ways in which the government is deliberately designed to make money go upward, but that's not the issue at all.
To have a functioning economy, people must have money. All people, or almost all.
For a decade, people got less and less money. Wages were the same, more people were out of work, and inflation continued to happen, so everyone got poorer.
Luckily, they could all borrow endlessly, because that works forever...oh, SHIT. The economy just melted.
Nor am I entirely against supply-side solutions - they have their place.
I am entirely against them, as no one has ever managed to explain to me how the rich having more personal money results in businesses spending more. That is really total nonsense when you think about it. How does that work...do rich people demand lower salaries when taxes go down? (Which, um, is easily disprovable by the past decade.)
The might possibly some supply-side argument to corporate taxes, but the idea that there's any to personal tax is such utter nonsense that anyone promoting it, in a sane world, would be laughed out of the room.
The other side of this is that Obama did nothing to fix this problem. None of what he did did a thing to affect the distribution of wealth and income in the country.
I don't blame Obama for that, I blame the asshat Democrats in the Senate and House who can't get anything done because, apparently, now we've decided to let the minority dictate everything.
I blame Obama because he hasn't set the agenda in that direction, but I suspected that we were getting Clinton 2.0 when we elected him to start with, so I'm not surprised.
To be fair, the neocon concepts of invading other countries to 'free' the people actually does have it's origin on the left, way back in the 60s.
In fact, interventionism is a 'historically' left idea. Look at who was trying to enter WWI and WWII vs. who was trying to stay out of it.
Of course, all those idiots got kicked out of the Democrats after their great adventures in Korea and Vietnam, uh, didn't work out so well.
And racism, of course, started on the left. (The right was, and has always been, stuck firmly in classism.) Unions pushed to keep black and Hispanic and Chinese workers out of their jobs. Strangely enough, the racists were kicked out of the left, and moved to the right, about the same time as the neocons.
And, while we're at it, 'moral engineering' was a original concept of the left. The progressive movement, along with Women's suffrage, was pro-prohibition, and then gave up on that idea when that failed disastrously. That's far enough back that I don't know what happened to the pro-prohibitionists, though...that policy really stopped being important with the Great Depression happening.
So, essentially, in this country, the left invents all ideas. If they're good ideas, the left keeps them and the right opposes them. If they've bad ideas, the left eventually drops them, whereas all the supporters of the idea move to the right and somehow that become a platform of the right, despite the fact that these platforms often make no sense when integrated into other right platforms.
An interface designed to mimic something that exists is emulation.
Or, to put it another way, an abstraction, like DirectX, is an API aimed at a fictional, simplifed thing, mapped onto something else, whereas an emulation, like SoundBlaster support, is an API aimed at something that does really exist, mapped onto something else.
And, as I pointed out, in the end, it's all nonsense, as absolutely everything that exists in a computer passes through several layers, some aimed at converting APIs to older APIs, some just aimed at simplifying and generalizing kernel calls, some aimed at turning generic hardware calls into other hardware calls, some aimed at turn hardware access into actual hardware access, etc, etc.
Anyone who thinks there's a hard and fast line on what 'emulation' is is a fool, as is anyone who thinks it matters at all.
What people who, for some reason, assert that Wine isn't an emulator actually mean is that 'Under wine, Windows programs run natively in the CPU, the same as Linux programs. Wine is just a library like gtk.'. They mean the processor isn't emulated.
Heh, except the processor is in protected mode, so certain instructions are emulated, but all modern operating systems do that.
Like I said, 'emulation' is a stupid and nonsensical line to draw in the stand. It's more about why you're setting up the API you're setting up, as opposed to anything to do with the API.
The implication was not that Steam was DRM protected, the implication was that Steam is DRM. Which it is.
Actually, he said the 'Steam client' was DRM, which is just nonsensical. The Steam Client is a damn custom web browser/package install system.
But, anyway, the implication was that Stream was hardware based DRM.
I quote: Any form of DRM is fundamentally incompatible with an open OS -- since the user has full control over the hardware, and can tell the kernel to lie to the Steam client in any way he wants. And even if they add a kernel driver, it can be easily worked around.
This is clearly nonsensical and shows no understanding of what Steam does, because Steam doesn't care about 'the hardware' or what the kernel is lying about. In fact, Steam already works in Wine, on purpose.
Steam is network activation DRM, and would have no problem or additional security issues running on Linux. It contacts a server and says 'Can this person run this game?', and the server says yes or no.
Obviously, someone could hack it by replacing part of the program to always return true...just like they could (and do) on Windows, because Steam isn't using any secret kernel rootkits or whatever the poster imagined they're using to stop that.
Nor does it try to figure out what hardware it's running on, as that would be rather pointless for a program that's designed to run on as many computers as you install it on. (Because it's a web browser and package management system.)
Yeah, and if they'd just ran him for some office I'd understand. But he's in charge of the RNC, which is rather more important, tactically. It is not a job for an empty suit.
There really are only four options:
1) There are no other black people available, and they thought they really really needed one. which raises the question of where the other Republican black people have gotten to.
2) Whoever decides on the leadership of the RNC can't judge the competency of black people.
3) Whoever decides on the leadership of the RNC can't judge the competency of people at all.
I guess it's not really about porting the games itself, it's about porting the DRM. Any form of DRM is fundamentally incompatible with an open OS -- since the user has full control over the hardware, and can tell the kernel to lie to the Steam client in any way he wants. And even if they add a kernel driver, it can be easily worked around.
I know you've decided to believe that Steam is DRM protected, but, um, it's not. (It is, in fact, free.) Steam is a frontend to an online server, and you can install it on as many computers as you want, and login from them all.
Steam will download and install games if they're in your account. You can no more use the OS to get around this then you could can use the OS to get around having to log into your bank online. Steam logs in, and downloads the games if they're in your account. If they are not in your account, the server won't give them out, no matter what you do to the client. (You could, of course, download them illegally yourself, stick them in the Steam cache dir, and trick the Steam client into installing them, if you could find a 'pirated Steam cache' of games, but I fail to see the point of that vs. just installing them.)
Now, Steam also requires network activation when running the games, and the OS could 'get around' that...but so can replacing a DLL or two. It's easy enough to find a hacked DLL that will always return 'success' for activation on Google. This won't let you play any games for free, although it will let you use a single game on multiple computers at the same time, if you want to do that for some reason.
There is no low level or hardware copy protection on Steam or Steam games. There is no 'kernel driver' to work around.
However, if Wine does count as emulator, should the ability of newer Windows versions to run programs made for the older ones be considered that too?
Yes, goddamn it, that's emulation also.
And things don't 'count' as emulators, like it's some sort of penalty. That's the entire fucking problem with this discussion, a bunch of people convinced that emulators are 'slow' or 'bad', and half the people arguing Wine is emulation (Hence bad) and the other half arguing it's not (Hence good.) Both you are fools.
All modern OSes emulate things. An emulation is just another way of saying 'API' (Well, ABI), except it's an API of a thing that does really exist like that.
If there was some actual existing DirectX video card that people could buy and put in their machine, DirectX in Windows would be an 'emulation'. This would not magically make existing implementations slower.
USB flash drives show up in modern OSes as hard drives. The OS is emulating a hard drive when it presents them to you. You can interact with it as if it were a hard drive. (Hell, now the damn BIOSes can even emulate a hard drive and boot off it. And speaking of booting, CD-ROMs still boot as floppy emulations, IIRC.)
Likewise, Java was deliberately designed as a fictional machine to be emulated...and then later actual Java CPUs were built.
A good portion of Wine is just API remapping, which isn't normally called 'emulation', otherwise all applications would be running 'under an emulator' unless they wrote directly to the actual screen image in memory or wrote to files on disk without byte-level access. Applications are supposed to use some sort of OS interface, or, rather, they're supposed to use some sort of library interface and the library is supposed to use the OS interface. That's not normally called emulation even if said library interface mimics another OSes, hence most of Wine is not an emulation, just like glibc isn't 'emulating' libc.
However, parts of Wine do things that normally would be called emulation, like, oh, mapping drive letters, which isn't some frontend to a Linux function because, obviously, no such functionality exists in Linux.
Of course, emulation doesn't make things slower. Translation from API to hardware, or API to a different API, happens several time for everything a program does, and Wine doesn't add any of those compared to other X programs or Windows programs running on Windows.
A Java VM is an emulator. It's a 'virtual machine', after all. It's just an emulator of a machine that doesn't exist, and one that was designed to be easy to emulate. (As opposed to a lot of other CPU emulators, which have to work really hard to implement things like 'too many registers' or 'too wide a bus' on processors that can't handle them.)
Likewise, although the people who think 'Wine is an emulator, and emulators are slow' are wrong for two reasons, strictly speaking, parts of Wine are an emulator.
Yes, 99.99% of the function calls are just directly mapped only X functions, and thus those calls aren't 'emulated' in any sense...but there are parts of Windows that are emulated. There's a pretty blurry line between 'compatibility stub' and 'emulation', and most of the low-level windows calls that Wine supports probably cross the line to 'emulation'. It is inventing hardware and presenting it Windows programs as if that hardware exists. It's doing it at the driver level, and presenting a fake driver, instead of doing it at the hardware level and using an actual Windows driver, but it's still emulation.
Just like modern Windows machines also emulate some functionality, in fact.
And, hilariously, some of the emulation is actually within Linux, not Wine. For example, if you play sounds, you might have a program use DirectSound, which is essentially opening a sound device and writing directly to it, so Wine opens/dev/dsp...but if you're using something like ALSA, ALSA will be emulating/dev/dsp for you. Not just for Wine, but all programs.
I know what people are trying to say, that Wine is not slower than any other library on Linux, nor is it slower than the libraries on Windows, and when people hear 'emulation', they think 'slow', and Wine is not slow. Buggy, sometimes, but not slow. But parts of Wine are certainly pretending to be parts of Windows, not just 'mapping', but outright lying and maintaining their own state independent of Linux and that is, indeed, emulation.
At this point in time, there is no program, anywhere, on any OS, that does not deal with 'emulation' at some point. In fact, half the point of operating systems are to create 'fake' devices that programs can use to talk to stuff. Some of those are emulations of actual devices, and some of those are emulations of devices that never existed, and it all gets rather blurry as to what is an 'emulation' and what is an 'API'.
Um, if there is no legal way to get something, then, yes, it was ipso facto stolen by someone if someone ends up with it. And if the person possessing it knows there's no legal way to get it, they are knowingly in possession of stolen property.
Don't go inventing a lack of crime because you approve of the crime. I think electronic voting machines are profoundly undemocratic, and everyone who has ever promoted them or sold them in, any way, should be charged with treason. (Although those charges would be hard to prove.)
But that doesn't change the fact someone stole the machine. Yes, he might not be the thief, and he's not guilty of anything until it's proven, but it was stolen.
OTOH, while I haven't see their recycling episode, pushing recycling is idiotic. What is much more important than having people not throw recycling in the trash is not have them throw batteries in the trash. And smoke detectors, and all that horrible stuff.
I've got no problem with recycling, but recycling has somehow became 'not destroying the planet for stupid people', and we waste resources on it instead of working on better things, including better things we could remove from the trash. Actual harmful-to-the-environment things, instead of just slightly wasteful, if that. (Honestly, I'm not convinced that recycling paper will ever make sense. The stuff grows on trees!)
That said, I'm sure P&T's take on the issue was idiotic, because that's exactly the sort of thing they become stupid over. Reading other comments, it seems like they found a city that didn't actually recycle, but pretended it did. Yeah, that just argues for more transparency in government, not against recycling.
Yeah, I feel the same way. They had an 'accessibility laws are bullshit' episode that finally made me stop watching. Or, at least, watch until they tell me what the episode is about, and only watch if it's an anti-quackery or anti-pseudoscience episode.
I remember the cornerstone of their anti-handicapped laws was an asshole who went around suing an entire historic city by claiming they didn't have the right handicap ramps or something. (It's not like you can just rip out facades of crowded historic buildings, or easily widen a door.)
Yeah, well, that sucks...but that really doesn't demonstrate we should stop having new buildings have them. You can sue anyone over any reason. If he actually won those lawsuits, that state need to provide a stronger grandfather clause to buildings that can't be altered, or perhaps help them subsidize the cost of alteration for poor shopkeepers essentially living in a ghost town. (OF course, 'subsidize the cost' is never an option on P&T.)
They also showed some random idiot who felt that his business shouldn't have to provide handicap parking because...um...everyone had to park slightly farther away. Also he only had like eight parking spots in his parking lot, so a dedicated handicap spot cut down on his parking area.
Oh, and they showed some wheelchair-bound person who could manage stairs without ramps. And impressive guy, but I'm sure he didn't know what his amazing trick would be used to argue for. And was totally irrelevant because 99.999% of the people in wheelchairs cannot manage to get up steps in them, even if that single guy can.
It's worth pointing out that the only people they interviewed were business owners. At no point did they bother to find some actual person who can't do without ramps, and ask him what it would be like if he had to drive around looking for special 'handicap accessible' stores, which I believe was their conclusion of what should be done.
It solely consisted of 'These laws are bad, because we found a guy abusing them to sue people', and 'And this guy doesn't like them', ergo, we should make handicap people forge their own way in this world with no help, or, at least, volunteer help.
Dude, you do realize we were actually complaining about the job performance of a black person, right? And wondering how the hell he got in charge of the RNC.
You know, the guy who recently said Afghanistan is a war of Obama's choosing? Which is an...odd position for the head of the RNC to take.
If it wasn't something to do with race, then the Republicans are just simple idiots for hiring Steele.
What are you talking about? The second sentence there is why people are complaining about the first. If they're forced to hire black people, they'll end up with incompetent boobs. Because they can't look at a black person and see 'hard worker' or 'goof off' or 'smartass who I should hire but keep away from customers'...they see 'black person'.
The premise of my argument is that right has a lot of closet racists who cannot treat black people like people. They're aware they aren't supposed to treat them badly, and to be fair they don't, but there's a large difference between that and treating them like any other 'normal' people. Black people are, instead 'the other'.
Hence the complaints about racial quotes, where they have to judge the competency of black people. I mean, I'll be as reasonable as possible and assume that none of the complainers have any actual problem working with black people, but there's still the fact they're so 'different' that it's impossible to figure out anything about them, like if they'd be any good in their job...
'Oh, look, the president is black. He seems like a nice black person. We better hire one to make sure people don't think we're racists.'
It's Racism Lite. It's where people have become aware they are supposed to treat black people the same, and do that as much as they can, but can't really mentally manage it. Black people are still 'black people' instead of 'people'. So, if the law or the force of political pressure required you hiring a black person, you just grab a random one, like with Steele.
OTOH, maybe I'm crazy, and Steele was literally the only black person that applied for the leadership of the RNC, and they could judge him fine and knew he was totally incompetent, but hired him anyway. Which is less racist but rather more sad for the current state of the Republican party.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are legally allowed weapons; nobody else is.
Wrong.
Any country is legally allowed to have nuclear weapons, in that is it not a crime under international law. (Well, actually, a few people like Noam Chomsky have argued that having nuclear weapons are, ipso facto, war crimes, as they designed to kill civilians, but that's neither here nor there, and would apply to everyone.)
Non-nuclear signatories of the NPT say, if nuclear signatories help them develop civilian uses of nuclear power, they won't develop military uses.
That's it. It's just a trade agreement, at least for the non-nuclear members. If someone violates it, they're in violation of a trade agreement, which isn't 'illegal' in any sense of the word. That just means the other parties should also stop following the treaty, aka, the nuclear members should stop supplying help with nuclear stuff.
If the US and Canada make an agreement that Canada is not to mine for bauxite, in return for the US paying X dollars a year, and Canada secretly mines for bauxite, Canada has not broken any international law. The US should stop paying Canada, obviously, but that is not any sort of justification for an invasion or bombing of the bauxite mine.
If the NPT Nuclear Powers and Iran make an agreement that Iran is not to make nukes, in return for said Nuclear Powers giving them uranium for use in a civilian nuclear program, and Iran secretly develops nukes, Iran has not broken any international law. Nuclear Powers should stop supplying uranium, obviously, but that is not any sort of justification for an invasion or bombing of the weapon site.
It is probably important to mention that the NPT says, for non-nuclear members, that they won't try to develop nuclear tech in exchange for help with civilian programs, aka, exactly what this Russia thing is. (In fact, legally, the nuclear powers must sell them nuclear tech, priced near 'cost', including nuclear weapons for civilian purposes like construction.) That is the exchange.
And it's even more important to mention the penalty for violating the treaty: Nothing. Nuclear powers are just supposed to withdraw their help, that's all.
There is no possible interpretation of the NPT which would allow anyone to attack a non-nuclear power because they're were secretly developing nuclear weapons. All that can happen is, like South Africa, they get kicked out. (Although strangely we don't ever seem to do that to allies. As michael_cain mentioned below, Israel developed them in secret, and yet we still pretend they're a member in good standing and supply them with nuclear help.)
As we're not supplying any nuclear tech to Iran, the only people who can 'punish' Iran would be the Russians, by taking all their nuclear material and going home.
And not to mention that most sane people expect the price of oil to keep rising. The less they use now, the more they can sell later when it's 100x what it is now.
Whether that will be a decade or ten decades is unknown, but Iran does think long term.
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Dumb people cannot do smart things, even if told in general terms how.
Look at that Times Square bombing idiot. Generally, that was a reasonable plan.
But, as he is a total moron, it didn't work at all. He didn't bother to find out exactly how to explode propane tanks, he locked his keys in the car, he waited far far too long to blow the thing up, the guy he bought from remembered him, etc.
Dumb people can do smart things if someone actually plans out every step, and they practice and drill, but that generally would not happen as part of a hypothetical.
Yes, but an equally useful thing would have simply been a 'Install program' menu item, that, when launched, looks on all removable media for autorun.inf files or whatever, and presents their devices, names, and icons in a little list where you pick one.
Automatically running it was just stupid. You can automate systems but still put a menu item to start the process.
Hell, in some cases, that would result in less steps. We've all had to walk someone through an install progress, and ended up first having to uninstall something else or update a driver and then reboot...at which point, to get autorun to work, they have to eject the damn CD and put it back in.
American revolution, was a rebellion against a distant Big Government limiting people's freedom (in particular, freedom to do spend their money as they wish, without being subject to unjust taxation).
BZZZT, Wrong, thank you for playing, please exit the country in an orderly manner.
The American revolution was over the English people living in America being denied the civil rights they were granted under various English laws and traditions.
It wasn't 'No taxation without representation.', it was 'No taxation without representation'.
I don't know why idiots try to make it about taxes (Oh, right, they're idiots. I mean libertarians.). The damn Declaration of Independence explains why the US revolted. There's a damn list of reasons, right there, literally the third thing in the first official document ever of this country.(1) Getting it wrong should make you automatically discounted from being listened to in a political argument.
I will, as I am nice, count and summarize the reasons given. Feel free to go read it.
Lack of representation, 7
Lack for following laws, 8
Refusing to pass needed laws, 2
Stupid laws, 1
His military and waging war against us, 8
Cutting off trade, 1
Taxes, 1
Yeah, boy, that war sure was about taxes, wasn't it. There are twice as many complaints not passing laws as there are about taxes. That's right, the Declaration of Independence has as the second and third grievances, 'Hey, we need some sort of functioning system of laws over here, and neither you nor your governors seem to actually want to set them up. You aren't restricting us enough, we're breaking free to restrict ourselves more, because laws are needed things.'!
Put that in your damn stupid 'taxes are anti-freedom, the war was about taxes' pipe and smoke it. The revolutionary war was not only not about taxes, it wasn't about 'freedom' either. It was about rights.
The vast majority of the complaints are about a) the king not following the law WRT to representation in parliament of English citizens(8), b) the king not following other laws that apply to English citizens, like trial by jury and whatnot(7), or c) the fact England already appeared to be operating in a state of war towards the American colonies anyway(9).
Incidentally, as the Wikipedia article hilariously points out, the settlements in the US actually predates the 'Glorious Revolution', which is where it was established once and for all that the English monarchy must defer to parliament and do not have absolute power, so it's possibly that Americans were technically wrong about supposing to have 'the Rights of Englishmen'. The English kings had, by the American revolution, agreed at swordpoint at least twice that they didn't have absolute power, and signed documents to that end, but that happened after the colonies were founded, and no one actually ever stated if the colonies were included or if they got their own parliament or what. But the revolution was indisputably about those rights, regardless if the rights were 'supposed' to exist for 'Englishmen' living in America.
1) First person to argue that the Declaration isn't part of 'this country' get punched in the head twice, once for missing the point and again for being wrong.
Unfortunately, they also hate the ideas of the left on principle.
Hilariously, when they do come up with reasonable ideas, the left often takes them (The left actually is trying to solve problems, and so if the other side invents a reasonable idea, even if it's slightly worse than yours, you go for it, because it, in theory, should be easier to do.), and the right then reflexively opposes the idea they themselves came up with.
Cap and trade is the most obvious example of that. Cap and trade was the right's idea for a free market solution to pollution. And now it's a 'scam'. (It is a scam, because for some reason proposals seem to give away credits for free instead of charging for them, but somehow I doubt that's what Republicans dislike about it.)
The did the same thing for insurance mandates. That was their solution to the health insurance problem. Require insurance companies to sell to everyone, and mandate people buy a minimal level. It was their solution as recent as the 2008 election! Fun article with interesting quote: "It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't. Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
And with health insurance, it wasn't even corporatism, like cap and trade opposition might be. With cap and trade, perhaps the Republicans are cynically in the pocket of big businesses, but the health insurance companies loved mandates, and have in fact complained they aren't strong enough.
So why did they oppose it? Well, to scare voters, apparently.
People wonder why I say the Republicans can't govern, and that's it. Hell, for all I know, the policy they pretend to have would be good for the country...but for quite some time they've simply been the anti-Democratic party. That's it. That's the entirety of their platform. Hence the recent constant whigning about made-up stuff, like ACORN and Van Jones and whatnot.
Most of those ideas were 'progressive', but liberal and progressive, thanks to being stuck on the same side for so long, have ended up blended together in really goofy ways.
Liberalism is a bunch of ideas that everyone accepts now, like everyone should have the right to vote. *holds hand to ear* The Republicans want to do what with the 14th amendment? Um, okay, bad example. Like everyone should have the right to free exercise of religion. *holds hand to ear* What the hell? Okay, like everyone should have the right to a trial by jury. *holds hand to ear* Oh, for fuck's sake.
Okay, ignoring the obvious insanity of the current right, liberalism is a bunch of ideas that were the foundation of this country, even though we liked to pretend they weren't for the longest time. They're basically all accepted now, or at least arguing against them makes you look like a loon. (Although, for some reason, looking like a loon has become fashionable again.)
Liberalism is equal rights under the law, it's a government of law, but by the people. Gay rights and abortion are probably some of the few current liberal issues, although a few other issues should be. (For example, education access and the horrible condition of poor public schools.)
The other aspect of the left is progressivism which has resulted in stuff like Social Security and the FAA and, oh, oh yea, a bunch of stupid stuff like prohibition and whatnot.
In other words, liberals want to make sure everyone is treated the same under the law, whereas progressives want to fix problems, regardless if everyone is treated equally or not. For example, prohibition was to fix the very real problem that the end of the day for high percentage of married factory workers consisted of going out, getting smashed, and going home and beating and/or raping their wife. Divorce, of course, didn't exist, and even if it did it meant abandoning children and not having any actual way to earn a living.
Of course, prohibition blew up in everyone's face, but it was an actual attempt to solve a real problem, and not just moralizing.
Sometimes progressivism and liberalism interact in very dumb ways, like affirmative action, which is trying to solve a liberal issue (People locked in poverty for generations with no way out.) using progressive means (Replacing other people with them.) while looking at the problem via a liberal lens. (Making it about race, which it wasn't, the problem is that black people are a lot more likely to have gone to really shitty schools.)
Anyway, those two things have gotten so mixed together that no one seems to be able to tell them apart. Almost all ideas, good or bad, since liberalism was invented, were invented on the left, aka, invented by progressives. (Liberalism, OTOH, was invented in Europe essentially right on time to be the foundation of this country.)
Incidentally, in the past, liberals have been often found on the right. They only ended up entirely on the left when the progressives on the left kicked out the racists and gave up on racism, and liberals on the right looked around, found a bunch of racists in their party, and said 'What the fuck?' and left.
The libertarians will agree with almost all this, BTW, and they'll assert they're liberals but not progressives. But to keep them from agreeing with me I will point out they are idiots who think that classic liberal thought includes freedom for businesses. Which is, um, really wrong.
And you also need to draw a line between 'things that crazy people who support that party believe' (Which includes a lot of insane people on both sides.) and 'things that leaders in the party, and public figures supported by those leaders, push out to the party'.
I'm sure there are plenty of Truthers who vote Democrat, because they think Bush was behind 9/11. That's probably about half of all Truthers. (And the rest have managed to be even more paranoid and think everyone's in on it.)
But if a Democratic leader, or someone associated with the Democratic party, breathes the slightest hint of Trutherism, they get throw out of the party, get disassociated from the party, as fast as humanly possible.
Look at Van Jones, who apparently was approached by a group of people at a conference asking if he'd help an organization supporting 9/11 families, said yes, and was smeared into having signed some Truther petition and immediately let go from his position. The slightest hint, and bam. (Incidentally, where the fuck is his apology, Obama?)
OTOH, we've got elected Republican politicians who don't appear to be sure that Obama is a US citizen. Elected officials.
And it's even worse with the 'entertainers' of the right, like Beck and Limbaugh, can one day spew all sorts of lies and conspiracy theories, and then get interviews with leaders in the GOP.
Compare that to, oh, Michael Moore. He made a documentary about what happened to the US after 9/11. Is there any hint of Trutherism at all in Fahrenheit 911? Hell no. Did he even run around interviewing Truthers while carefully not agreeing with them? Nope. And yet Michael Moore is much farther away from the elected left in this country than Beck is from the elected right.
In summary, there are kooks and conspiracy nuts on both sides. One side encourages them, and hangs out with people who encourage them and even invents theories themselves, and the other side runs away from them as fast as humanly possible.
Don't forget wars. Wars are free too.
Amen.
We could argue about who 'deserves' what, and it's pretty easy to point out all the ways in which the government is deliberately designed to make money go upward, but that's not the issue at all.
To have a functioning economy, people must have money. All people, or almost all.
For a decade, people got less and less money. Wages were the same, more people were out of work, and inflation continued to happen, so everyone got poorer.
Luckily, they could all borrow endlessly, because that works forever...oh, SHIT. The economy just melted.
Nor am I entirely against supply-side solutions - they have their place.
I am entirely against them, as no one has ever managed to explain to me how the rich having more personal money results in businesses spending more. That is really total nonsense when you think about it. How does that work...do rich people demand lower salaries when taxes go down? (Which, um, is easily disprovable by the past decade.)
The might possibly some supply-side argument to corporate taxes, but the idea that there's any to personal tax is such utter nonsense that anyone promoting it, in a sane world, would be laughed out of the room.
The other side of this is that Obama did nothing to fix this problem. None of what he did did a thing to affect the distribution of wealth and income in the country.
I don't blame Obama for that, I blame the asshat Democrats in the Senate and House who can't get anything done because, apparently, now we've decided to let the minority dictate everything.
I blame Obama because he hasn't set the agenda in that direction, but I suspected that we were getting Clinton 2.0 when we elected him to start with, so I'm not surprised.
To be fair, the neocon concepts of invading other countries to 'free' the people actually does have it's origin on the left, way back in the 60s.
In fact, interventionism is a 'historically' left idea. Look at who was trying to enter WWI and WWII vs. who was trying to stay out of it.
Of course, all those idiots got kicked out of the Democrats after their great adventures in Korea and Vietnam, uh, didn't work out so well.
And racism, of course, started on the left. (The right was, and has always been, stuck firmly in classism.) Unions pushed to keep black and Hispanic and Chinese workers out of their jobs. Strangely enough, the racists were kicked out of the left, and moved to the right, about the same time as the neocons.
And, while we're at it, 'moral engineering' was a original concept of the left. The progressive movement, along with Women's suffrage, was pro-prohibition, and then gave up on that idea when that failed disastrously. That's far enough back that I don't know what happened to the pro-prohibitionists, though...that policy really stopped being important with the Great Depression happening.
So, essentially, in this country, the left invents all ideas. If they're good ideas, the left keeps them and the right opposes them. If they've bad ideas, the left eventually drops them, whereas all the supporters of the idea move to the right and somehow that become a platform of the right, despite the fact that these platforms often make no sense when integrated into other right platforms.
An interface designed to mimic something that exists is emulation.
Or, to put it another way, an abstraction, like DirectX, is an API aimed at a fictional, simplifed thing, mapped onto something else, whereas an emulation, like SoundBlaster support, is an API aimed at something that does really exist, mapped onto something else.
And, as I pointed out, in the end, it's all nonsense, as absolutely everything that exists in a computer passes through several layers, some aimed at converting APIs to older APIs, some just aimed at simplifying and generalizing kernel calls, some aimed at turning generic hardware calls into other hardware calls, some aimed at turn hardware access into actual hardware access, etc, etc.
Anyone who thinks there's a hard and fast line on what 'emulation' is is a fool, as is anyone who thinks it matters at all.
What people who, for some reason, assert that Wine isn't an emulator actually mean is that 'Under wine, Windows programs run natively in the CPU, the same as Linux programs. Wine is just a library like gtk.'. They mean the processor isn't emulated.
Heh, except the processor is in protected mode, so certain instructions are emulated, but all modern operating systems do that.
Like I said, 'emulation' is a stupid and nonsensical line to draw in the stand. It's more about why you're setting up the API you're setting up, as opposed to anything to do with the API.
Yeah, I should have said 'didn't exist'. It didn't when created, it does now.
I actually think there's hardware that can only run Java bytecode.
The implication was not that Steam was DRM protected, the implication was that Steam is DRM. Which it is.
Actually, he said the 'Steam client' was DRM, which is just nonsensical. The Steam Client is a damn custom web browser/package install system.
But, anyway, the implication was that Stream was hardware based DRM.
I quote: Any form of DRM is fundamentally incompatible with an open OS -- since the user has full control over the hardware, and can tell the kernel to lie to the Steam client in any way he wants. And even if they add a kernel driver, it can be easily worked around.
This is clearly nonsensical and shows no understanding of what Steam does, because Steam doesn't care about 'the hardware' or what the kernel is lying about. In fact, Steam already works in Wine, on purpose.
Steam is network activation DRM, and would have no problem or additional security issues running on Linux. It contacts a server and says 'Can this person run this game?', and the server says yes or no.
Obviously, someone could hack it by replacing part of the program to always return true...just like they could (and do) on Windows, because Steam isn't using any secret kernel rootkits or whatever the poster imagined they're using to stop that.
Nor does it try to figure out what hardware it's running on, as that would be rather pointless for a program that's designed to run on as many computers as you install it on. (Because it's a web browser and package management system.)
Yeah, and if they'd just ran him for some office I'd understand. But he's in charge of the RNC, which is rather more important, tactically. It is not a job for an empty suit.
There really are only four options:
1) There are no other black people available, and they thought they really really needed one. which raises the question of where the other Republican black people have gotten to.
2) Whoever decides on the leadership of the RNC can't judge the competency of black people.
3) Whoever decides on the leadership of the RNC can't judge the competency of people at all.
4) Steele is a really good conman.
I guess it's not really about porting the games itself, it's about porting the DRM. Any form of DRM is fundamentally incompatible with an open OS -- since the user has full control over the hardware, and can tell the kernel to lie to the Steam client in any way he wants. And even if they add a kernel driver, it can be easily worked around.
I know you've decided to believe that Steam is DRM protected, but, um, it's not. (It is, in fact, free.) Steam is a frontend to an online server, and you can install it on as many computers as you want, and login from them all.
Steam will download and install games if they're in your account. You can no more use the OS to get around this then you could can use the OS to get around having to log into your bank online. Steam logs in, and downloads the games if they're in your account. If they are not in your account, the server won't give them out, no matter what you do to the client. (You could, of course, download them illegally yourself, stick them in the Steam cache dir, and trick the Steam client into installing them, if you could find a 'pirated Steam cache' of games, but I fail to see the point of that vs. just installing them.)
Now, Steam also requires network activation when running the games, and the OS could 'get around' that...but so can replacing a DLL or two. It's easy enough to find a hacked DLL that will always return 'success' for activation on Google. This won't let you play any games for free, although it will let you use a single game on multiple computers at the same time, if you want to do that for some reason.
There is no low level or hardware copy protection on Steam or Steam games. There is no 'kernel driver' to work around.
However, if Wine does count as emulator, should the ability of newer Windows versions to run programs made for the older ones be considered that too?
Yes, goddamn it, that's emulation also.
And things don't 'count' as emulators, like it's some sort of penalty. That's the entire fucking problem with this discussion, a bunch of people convinced that emulators are 'slow' or 'bad', and half the people arguing Wine is emulation (Hence bad) and the other half arguing it's not (Hence good.) Both you are fools.
All modern OSes emulate things. An emulation is just another way of saying 'API' (Well, ABI), except it's an API of a thing that does really exist like that.
If there was some actual existing DirectX video card that people could buy and put in their machine, DirectX in Windows would be an 'emulation'. This would not magically make existing implementations slower.
USB flash drives show up in modern OSes as hard drives. The OS is emulating a hard drive when it presents them to you. You can interact with it as if it were a hard drive. (Hell, now the damn BIOSes can even emulate a hard drive and boot off it. And speaking of booting, CD-ROMs still boot as floppy emulations, IIRC.)
Likewise, Java was deliberately designed as a fictional machine to be emulated...and then later actual Java CPUs were built.
A good portion of Wine is just API remapping, which isn't normally called 'emulation', otherwise all applications would be running 'under an emulator' unless they wrote directly to the actual screen image in memory or wrote to files on disk without byte-level access. Applications are supposed to use some sort of OS interface, or, rather, they're supposed to use some sort of library interface and the library is supposed to use the OS interface. That's not normally called emulation even if said library interface mimics another OSes, hence most of Wine is not an emulation, just like glibc isn't 'emulating' libc.
However, parts of Wine do things that normally would be called emulation, like, oh, mapping drive letters, which isn't some frontend to a Linux function because, obviously, no such functionality exists in Linux.
Of course, emulation doesn't make things slower. Translation from API to hardware, or API to a different API, happens several time for everything a program does, and Wine doesn't add any of those compared to other X programs or Windows programs running on Windows.
A Java VM is an emulator. It's a 'virtual machine', after all. It's just an emulator of a machine that doesn't exist, and one that was designed to be easy to emulate. (As opposed to a lot of other CPU emulators, which have to work really hard to implement things like 'too many registers' or 'too wide a bus' on processors that can't handle them.)
Likewise, although the people who think 'Wine is an emulator, and emulators are slow' are wrong for two reasons, strictly speaking, parts of Wine are an emulator.
Yes, 99.99% of the function calls are just directly mapped only X functions, and thus those calls aren't 'emulated' in any sense...but there are parts of Windows that are emulated. There's a pretty blurry line between 'compatibility stub' and 'emulation', and most of the low-level windows calls that Wine supports probably cross the line to 'emulation'. It is inventing hardware and presenting it Windows programs as if that hardware exists. It's doing it at the driver level, and presenting a fake driver, instead of doing it at the hardware level and using an actual Windows driver, but it's still emulation.
Just like modern Windows machines also emulate some functionality, in fact.
And, hilariously, some of the emulation is actually within Linux, not Wine. For example, if you play sounds, you might have a program use DirectSound, which is essentially opening a sound device and writing directly to it, so Wine opens /dev/dsp...but if you're using something like ALSA, ALSA will be emulating /dev/dsp for you. Not just for Wine, but all programs.
I know what people are trying to say, that Wine is not slower than any other library on Linux, nor is it slower than the libraries on Windows, and when people hear 'emulation', they think 'slow', and Wine is not slow. Buggy, sometimes, but not slow. But parts of Wine are certainly pretending to be parts of Windows, not just 'mapping', but outright lying and maintaining their own state independent of Linux and that is, indeed, emulation.
At this point in time, there is no program, anywhere, on any OS, that does not deal with 'emulation' at some point. In fact, half the point of operating systems are to create 'fake' devices that programs can use to talk to stuff. Some of those are emulations of actual devices, and some of those are emulations of devices that never existed, and it all gets rather blurry as to what is an 'emulation' and what is an 'API'.
Um, if there is no legal way to get something, then, yes, it was ipso facto stolen by someone if someone ends up with it. And if the person possessing it knows there's no legal way to get it, they are knowingly in possession of stolen property.
Don't go inventing a lack of crime because you approve of the crime. I think electronic voting machines are profoundly undemocratic, and everyone who has ever promoted them or sold them in, any way, should be charged with treason. (Although those charges would be hard to prove.)
But that doesn't change the fact someone stole the machine. Yes, he might not be the thief, and he's not guilty of anything until it's proven, but it was stolen.
OTOH, while I haven't see their recycling episode, pushing recycling is idiotic. What is much more important than having people not throw recycling in the trash is not have them throw batteries in the trash. And smoke detectors, and all that horrible stuff.
I've got no problem with recycling, but recycling has somehow became 'not destroying the planet for stupid people', and we waste resources on it instead of working on better things, including better things we could remove from the trash. Actual harmful-to-the-environment things, instead of just slightly wasteful, if that. (Honestly, I'm not convinced that recycling paper will ever make sense. The stuff grows on trees!)
That said, I'm sure P&T's take on the issue was idiotic, because that's exactly the sort of thing they become stupid over. Reading other comments, it seems like they found a city that didn't actually recycle, but pretended it did. Yeah, that just argues for more transparency in government, not against recycling.
Yeah, I feel the same way. They had an 'accessibility laws are bullshit' episode that finally made me stop watching. Or, at least, watch until they tell me what the episode is about, and only watch if it's an anti-quackery or anti-pseudoscience episode.
I remember the cornerstone of their anti-handicapped laws was an asshole who went around suing an entire historic city by claiming they didn't have the right handicap ramps or something. (It's not like you can just rip out facades of crowded historic buildings, or easily widen a door.)
Yeah, well, that sucks...but that really doesn't demonstrate we should stop having new buildings have them. You can sue anyone over any reason. If he actually won those lawsuits, that state need to provide a stronger grandfather clause to buildings that can't be altered, or perhaps help them subsidize the cost of alteration for poor shopkeepers essentially living in a ghost town. (OF course, 'subsidize the cost' is never an option on P&T.)
They also showed some random idiot who felt that his business shouldn't have to provide handicap parking because...um...everyone had to park slightly farther away. Also he only had like eight parking spots in his parking lot, so a dedicated handicap spot cut down on his parking area.
Oh, and they showed some wheelchair-bound person who could manage stairs without ramps. And impressive guy, but I'm sure he didn't know what his amazing trick would be used to argue for. And was totally irrelevant because 99.999% of the people in wheelchairs cannot manage to get up steps in them, even if that single guy can.
It's worth pointing out that the only people they interviewed were business owners. At no point did they bother to find some actual person who can't do without ramps, and ask him what it would be like if he had to drive around looking for special 'handicap accessible' stores, which I believe was their conclusion of what should be done.
It solely consisted of 'These laws are bad, because we found a guy abusing them to sue people', and 'And this guy doesn't like them', ergo, we should make handicap people forge their own way in this world with no help, or, at least, volunteer help.
It was total glibertarian crap.
Dude, you do realize we were actually complaining about the job performance of a black person, right? And wondering how the hell he got in charge of the RNC.
You know, the guy who recently said Afghanistan is a war of Obama's choosing? Which is an...odd position for the head of the RNC to take.
If it wasn't something to do with race, then the Republicans are just simple idiots for hiring Steele.
What are you talking about? The second sentence there is why people are complaining about the first. If they're forced to hire black people, they'll end up with incompetent boobs. Because they can't look at a black person and see 'hard worker' or 'goof off' or 'smartass who I should hire but keep away from customers'...they see 'black person'.
The premise of my argument is that right has a lot of closet racists who cannot treat black people like people. They're aware they aren't supposed to treat them badly, and to be fair they don't, but there's a large difference between that and treating them like any other 'normal' people. Black people are, instead 'the other'.
Hence the complaints about racial quotes, where they have to judge the competency of black people. I mean, I'll be as reasonable as possible and assume that none of the complainers have any actual problem working with black people, but there's still the fact they're so 'different' that it's impossible to figure out anything about them, like if they'd be any good in their job...
'Oh, look, the president is black. He seems like a nice black person. We better hire one to make sure people don't think we're racists.'
It's Racism Lite. It's where people have become aware they are supposed to treat black people the same, and do that as much as they can, but can't really mentally manage it. Black people are still 'black people' instead of 'people'. So, if the law or the force of political pressure required you hiring a black person, you just grab a random one, like with Steele.
OTOH, maybe I'm crazy, and Steele was literally the only black person that applied for the leadership of the RNC, and they could judge him fine and knew he was totally incompetent, but hired him anyway. Which is less racist but rather more sad for the current state of the Republican party.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are legally allowed weapons; nobody else is.
Wrong.
Any country is legally allowed to have nuclear weapons, in that is it not a crime under international law. (Well, actually, a few people like Noam Chomsky have argued that having nuclear weapons are, ipso facto, war crimes, as they designed to kill civilians, but that's neither here nor there, and would apply to everyone.)
Non-nuclear signatories of the NPT say, if nuclear signatories help them develop civilian uses of nuclear power, they won't develop military uses.
That's it. It's just a trade agreement, at least for the non-nuclear members. If someone violates it, they're in violation of a trade agreement, which isn't 'illegal' in any sense of the word. That just means the other parties should also stop following the treaty, aka, the nuclear members should stop supplying help with nuclear stuff.
If the US and Canada make an agreement that Canada is not to mine for bauxite, in return for the US paying X dollars a year, and Canada secretly mines for bauxite, Canada has not broken any international law. The US should stop paying Canada, obviously, but that is not any sort of justification for an invasion or bombing of the bauxite mine.
If the NPT Nuclear Powers and Iran make an agreement that Iran is not to make nukes, in return for said Nuclear Powers giving them uranium for use in a civilian nuclear program, and Iran secretly develops nukes, Iran has not broken any international law. Nuclear Powers should stop supplying uranium, obviously, but that is not any sort of justification for an invasion or bombing of the weapon site.
It is probably important to mention that the NPT says, for non-nuclear members, that they won't try to develop nuclear tech in exchange for help with civilian programs, aka, exactly what this Russia thing is. (In fact, legally, the nuclear powers must sell them nuclear tech, priced near 'cost', including nuclear weapons for civilian purposes like construction.) That is the exchange.
And it's even more important to mention the penalty for violating the treaty: Nothing. Nuclear powers are just supposed to withdraw their help, that's all.
There is no possible interpretation of the NPT which would allow anyone to attack a non-nuclear power because they're were secretly developing nuclear weapons. All that can happen is, like South Africa, they get kicked out. (Although strangely we don't ever seem to do that to allies. As michael_cain mentioned below, Israel developed them in secret, and yet we still pretend they're a member in good standing and supply them with nuclear help.)
As we're not supplying any nuclear tech to Iran, the only people who can 'punish' Iran would be the Russians, by taking all their nuclear material and going home.
And not to mention that most sane people expect the price of oil to keep rising. The less they use now, the more they can sell later when it's 100x what it is now.
Whether that will be a decade or ten decades is unknown, but Iran does think long term.
If Russia wanted to protect Iran from the US a saner plan than nuclear weapons would just be a defensive pact.