First of all, you don't really offer much to support your claim that he says one thing and then says the next immediately afterwards. You offer one example of that, and it only applies if you don't accept his explanation that he meant it wouldn't be physically divided as it was until 1967. I bet you accept McCain's clarifications and explanations all the time, don't you?
Here's a McCain overnight reversal for you, and that's only the third entry in the list. You don't seem to care to scrutinize McCain the way you do Obama. I suppose you think that all of McCain's position changes during the primary season were not pandering either? You think that he wasn't modifying his positions to appeal more to fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives who he needs to energize if he's to get them out to vote in November?
The claim of saying one thing and voting another is a classic example of misleading and oversimplifying when it suits your position. Being against a provision of a bill and voting for a bill are not necessarily contradictory. As much as I hated the FISA bill, and as much as it dampened my enthusiasm for Obama after I voted for him in the primary (to the point that I donated to the EFF instead of his campaign), I do understand that congresspeople will vote for bills that they feel do more good than harm, because that's the only way they can get anything done. The fact that people like to use votes on bills that do lots of things as a way to prove support or opposition to one specific provision just shows that there are a lot of gullible people out there ready to believe that crap.
On the debate issue, Obama's camp had offered to do more debates. They were turned down by McCain, apparently because he only wants to do them if he can do them in the format he wants. Info here. Anytime, anywhere doesn't mean that McCain should get to pick the rules. So, offers were made from both sides. Neither side could live with them. So it didn't happen. No story there.
And since when is verbosity a virtue? Any average 8th grader can write a 3 page paper in 5 pages. What takes skill is to write that 3 page paper in 1.
It's not a virtue in itself, but it is a virtue to truly discuss the nuances of the issues rather than spout the bumper-sticker version for the masses that have no clue about the complexities of foreign policy and international relations. Some candidates just like to appear tough and firm in their positions (e.g. Bush). That definitely doesn't make them a good person to be running things. Bush played the cowboy with the kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out philosophy. It's been a disaster for us. Better to have someone willing to discuss things and keep options open as the world is a constantly changing place. I want someone who's really going to put effort into working out problems rather than taking the approach that everyone should do what we want or else.
It's so funny how easy it is to be seduced by Obama's words. I actually voted for him in the primaries, but I had only been paying attention to him for a week or so at that point. But in the months that followed, it was clear that Obama's words and his deeds were at odds with each other. I don't like being told what I want to hear, even if it sounds nice. I want the truth.
John McCain is the real deal. I don't agree with a lot of his positions, but at least I know his positions. I have never voted for a Republican before, but I will in November.
Yeah, I can play that game too. Here's a list of McCain flip-flops. They've both done it. Some of them are pandering. Some are legitimate changes of heart or mind. The fact that you're willing to condemn Obama for it, but give McCain a pass just shows that you're not giving serious consideration to the issue.
They are already scheduled to have 3 debates, and another for the VP candidates. Given the SuperBowl nature of debates these days, they don't really serve much purpose for people who really want to know more about what a candidate thinks about an issue or what they plan to do. They just end up being watched like a sporting event where someone is keeping score.
They might as well be up there slinging "yo mamma" jokes at each other for all the good these things do. Someone like Obama, who is a very good speaker, but also very precise and thoughtful in his speech is at a disadvantage to someone like McCain who likes to go with the "straight talk" and catchy sound-bites intended to mask the complexity of the issues and oversimplify the answers to a point that it should become obvious that what he's saying is meaningless. Unfortunately too many people just like to see him "burn" the other guy with a catchy remark even though it's completely empty, and often just wrong.
It's easy to give people slogans that they can repeat. It worked for Bush... twice. The whole "plain talk" thing and voting for the guy you'd like to have a beer with has lead us to disaster. Vote for the person who is thoughtful and can really give the problems we face the kind of consideration they need rather than just making smart-ass quips like Bush is so fond of.
But if attacking Iraq was such obvious poor judgment at the time, why did Senate Democrats vote 29-21 [senate.gov] in favor of the war?
Because the administration and conservatives in general were helping to paint anyone who objected as unpatriotic at best, and often traitorous in their lack of support for defending the country from its enemies. That was part of the reason they kept trying to tie Saddam to 9/11 or terrorism in general. They were never able to do so, but polls at the time showed that they'd gotten a lot of people to believe that Saddam was either behind 9/11 or at least involved in it.
Here's one to make your head spin: Barack Obama voted with is party 96.0% [washingtonpost.com] of the time.
Let me provide you with this quote from a speech Obama made on Oct 2, 2002. See if you still think he would have been in favor of the war:
That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.
He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.
Shows a remarkable foresight and ability to reason. He opposed it for exactly the right reason in my opinion, and I think history has shown that he was correct.
Seems to me that article can be summed up by saying that the federal government was pretty fiscally conservative in Clinton's terms. The thing is, the federal government was fiscally conservative because of Newt Gingrich, the Republican Congress, and the Contract with America. Clinton himself was far from a fiscal conservative.
More like in pretty much all democratic terms, and while I'm sure republicans have all sorts of excuses for why virtually every term they've had since WWII has been a failure in terms of being fiscally responsible, the fact remains that that is what history shows.
Bush Jr. has just been the worst yet, and republican deregulation (which McCain and his buddy Phil Gramm have long supported) has allowed the financial industry to run amok. That combined with lousy tax policies and a failed war strategy, has managed to bankrupt the country for who knows how long.
I'm almost hoping McCain wins now since I feel like it should be a republican that has to take the fall since there will be no money for the things we need and that the candidates have promised to the voters.
However, any politician that is fiscally conservative (i.e., actually wants to reduce government spending) is a Republican (or at least not a Democrat).
Well, judging by the info in the article, and some of the references in it, the democrats have done a much better job than the republicans have. Call them whatever you want, but they've gotten the results.
And it's not like it was such a huge leadership stand he took, opposing the war from the comfort of Springfield, Illinois. I was against the war too, but it isn't my responsibility to prevent despotic rulers from acquiring nuclear weapons and selling them to terrorists. I also wasn't privy to the intelligence of the day (and neither were you). Had I been a senator at the time, I couldn't tell you if I would or would not have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
Not everything, no, but we were all privy to enough that got out, including the faked yellow-cake evidence and the fact that none of the intelligence established that there was any sort of imminent threat that required us to strike immediately. They believed Iraq to be at least 5 years away from being able to develop any sort of nuclear capability, and had they continued to investigate, as the Energy Department suggested, they would have realized that that estimate was way off base too. The lack of an immediate threat should have lead to increased intelligence gathering and increased pressure by the UN and the IAEA to validate or disprove the intelligence we had.
Supporting the rush to war was irresponsible and reckless. All because some guys in the defense department thought they could just sweep in and win the day with some tanks and helicopters and laser-guided bombs, despite military experts telling them that it wouldn't work. They got rid of dissenters and did it anyway. Rumsfeld claimed it would cost about 8 billion and be over in a matter of weeks. I'm not sure it's even conceivable to be more naive or flat-out wrong than they were.
Judgement and leadership are two different things. The question still stands, Where is Obama's leadership?
Running his campaign for the last couple years and succeeding in the primary has shown that he can lead and that people are eager to follow him. I don't particularly care whether he's got executive experience or not. I don't want someone that can just lead. Bush was a leader too, and look where that's gotten us.
Leading isn't the hard part. Determining where to lead us is the hard part. There are plenty of leaders around the world that have lead people in horrible directions. Leadership alone is not enough. Judgment is the most important aspect of a good leader, and I don't think McCain has good judgment. He certainly got snowed by the Bush administration.
I feel as though you may have changed the subject on me.
The subject was John McCain's leadership, contrasted with Barack Obama's lack of leadership. Can I interpret your response to be anything other than an attempt to distract me from Barack Obama's lack of leadership? Or are we still in agreement that Barack Obama has shown zero leadership in his life as a politician, and you just want to nitpick?
I'm saying that there is a lot more to leadership than just doing something. It's showing good judgment in what you do. Buying into the ridiculous crap that the administration was shoveling in the months leading up to the war was incredibly bad judgment. Not just in hindsight either, as there was more than enough info out there to make it pretty clear that the reasons coming from the administration were bogus.
As for Obama, he at least showed some good judgment in opposing the Iraq war. Given McCain's stance on a variety of other issues, I'm inclined to give Obama the opportunity to lead and hope that he continues to show good judgment when it counts, rather than cede the position to someone who's judgment I couldn't possibly trust.
That's not to say that I think Obama always makes the right call. I don't agree with some of the things he's done. But none of those have cost us thousands of lives and over half a trillion dollars for reasons that the administration couldn't quite settle on for years, and which, if they had been cited up front, would never have won support for the war.
Called out Secretary Rumsfeld for being a moron and supporting what history has revealed to be the successful troop surge in Iraq
Quick, go dig up the "Mission Accomplished" banner again! While the surge may have helped increase security, it hasn't been proved out as a successful strategy for creating a stable country. Petraeus himself has described the situation as tenuous, fragile and reversible. The political situation there is still very shaky. So before McCain goes off about how he backed a winning strategy, maybe we should figure out if anything will actually be won. Seems like the best strategy would have been not dragging us into a pointless war. Wonder which candidate supported that strategy?
The Presidency is not an entry-level executive position and anyone who hasn't run a state, a large company, a military branch, or something equivalent, has no business even running for the Oval Office. Vice-presidents count, obviously."
Because CEOs really understand accountability, right? They understand consequences right? Like if they drive the company into the ground, they'll only walk away with 80 million instead of 100 million. Wow. I totally see how that would teach them some lessons.
and the catastrophe who thinks you just take money from anyone who has it and give it to anyone who doesn't
If your policies are going to favor those with the money (which they do, as we can see that the middle and lower classes are worse off, but the wealthy are doing much better), while cutting the services and education for those that don't have much money, then I'd support having them pay for those policies.
I take more of a Libertarian stance, and am very much a fiscal conservative, which makes it hard for me to ever vote for a Democrat.
Who's the last republican president that actually reduced spending? I wonder if you can name him. Google being the great equalizer, I assume you'll get it, but the point is that republicans haven't been a fiscally conservative party for a loooong time.
Here's a rather short, but interesting article that brings up some information that was surprising to me. It's almost like republicans get the reputation for being fiscally conservative just by claiming they are and yelling about how democrats are going to raise your taxes.
I really like how you keep defending criminals. Hey, don't hate rapists! They have lots of reasons why they do it, its unfair to treat them all the same! I'd be more than happy to have each and every pirate treated as individuals in their own civil/criminal trials. Funny thing though, they don't seem to stand up enough for their beliefs to actually admit to it, instead choosing to hind behind a shroud of anonymity. Yeah, sounds real dignified to me, they definitely deserve our respect.
Wow. Ok, I'm done with you. You're either trolling (likely), or just a typical internet fucktard. Have a nice life.
Well, you've obviously decided that pirates are some kind of secret society with their own goals and plans that they can put into action at a moment's notice.
How many 1-star Spore reviews did Amazon get? A couple thousand? If that's the best coordination that pirates can muster, then you're giving them far too much credit for being organized.
Or more likely, he told you the car could go up to 200mph, yet road law permits you from ever actually driving that fast, and he fails to tell you. Whose fault now?
No, it's nothing like that. The game is incapable of the advertised performance with the specified hardware requirements. There are no qualifiers in those requirements. Nothing that tells you that you can't experience the whole game. This is hardly uncommon.
By "expanded content" and "expanding demands", I am of course referring to the inevitable situation of "I had 3 units in the demo and it was fine, but now in the full version when I have 3 million units on screen, it slows down? I was duped!"
If the game can't handle its maximum number of units with the minimum or even recommended hardware, then those requirements are too low. You can't expect gamers to guess how much game they're going to get to play based on their hardware. Publishers need to set accurate requirements to play the game.
By the way, your argument makes it impossible for developers to sell a game with unlimited/near-unlimited potential. Or are you saying that they should always place hard limits on every aspect of a game (including resolution, detail, and game content), then choose a minimum set of system requirements which cater towards the maximum fulfilment of all those limits?
Most games have used hard limits. It's perfectly possible to allow for nearly unlimited potential, but there must still be a baseline. You can then allow players to ramp up the limits to meet their system's level of power. Sins mentions nothing about you only being able to play on small maps if you meet the minimum requirements. And if that's the case, then how do we know what the requirements are to play on large maps, or that they are different from small maps?
Why should gamers believe there is a difference? They don't understand game programming. Many games can have large total areas, but are made manageable by the fact that they only load small pieces at a time into memory, or only have to draw to a certain level of detail depending on the view. Customers are in no position to guess at what a game is or should be capable of, or how well it was implemented versus how well it could be implemented. It's up to the publishers to be honest about it.
They have to download the game don't they? Find a crack that works? And they're being offset, because, as you keep claiming, they REALLY wanted to buy the game but for some reason couldn't because it has DRM, forcing them to now download it instead, those poor souls (not even considering the option of not having it at all). That seems inconvenient to me.
Quit putting words in my mouth. I've said repeatedly that there are many reasons why people pirate. Some have no desire at all to purchase the game. Some like to support the developer even though they don't want to deal with the DRM, so they pirate it and buy it too. There are different scenarios and you're being belligerent in your attempts to keep trying to assign one reason to everyone.
Happy now?
You can find a few crazy stories about damn near anything though. They don't prove anything except that some people are nutcases, which we already know. It doesn't change the fact that there are many legitimate problems caused by DRM either. Sony rootkits? Starforce crashes and unplayability?
So in other words, you agree that the whole thing is entirely subjective.
I'd like to wait until you answer the "do your doors have locks?" question until I respond. Thanks.
Yes my doors have locks, which are intended to deter people from casually entering my home. I think the difference is obvious in that this is a physical access issue, whereas DRM is fighting a battle against information access. If there were infinite copies of my home available for anyone to test their lock-picking skills against, I'm quite sure they could access it without much difficulty. Then they could share what they find by offering unlocked copies of my house and everything in it to anyone that wanted it.
Do you see why the typical DRM scheme is useless? The locks are available for anyone to break at their leisure and share the results. Why bother with locks when they make no difference to the final outcome, except to piss off and inconvenience the people that would actually buy your product?
The difference is, after a certain point in time, creators of artistic works (ie goods where the primary value is in the design and conception, not the production - aka intellectual property) are forced to stop being allowed to make money from their works. An even bigger problem is, certain [slashdot.org] people [slashdot.org] feel that this time frame should be zero.
That's called backlash. It's what happens when someone gets too greedy and vastly overreaches in taking from others, namely the public in this case. Copyright law has gone beyond excessive and crossed well into transparently corrupt. Hence the lack of respect for it by such a huge number of people. Scaling it back to something on the order of the original term, say 15 years, and cutting back the more egregious terms of the DMCA would re-establish the balance of the system.
Intellectual property businesses operate on the assumption that they invest in something good, they will get returns when it hits retail. Not 2 weeks, a month, a year, 10 years after retail when the pirates have completed their use of the product and, as an afterthought, may or may not decide to actually take the initiative to send some form of compensation to them
You know, that's what I've been thinking too. Which is one reason I just can't understand why they need 90+ year copyright terms. Again, we're back to the overreaching versus balance issue. They can't make their money in 15 years? Only a minute fraction of works makes any significant money beyond that time.
Or, looking at it from a completely different angle: DRM wouldn't be so intrusive if people stopped trying to circumvent it.
There will always be people trying to circumvent it. And so pirates will not be the one's being inconvenienced or having their systems damaged by intrusive DRM. That's just for those lucky paying customers.
Yet they expect companies to take the initiative and back down on DRM first. What would you say to pirates being the ones to back down first? Surely they would jump on the chance to prove once and for all they they really do have the better ethics. And yet, this hasn't happened, and probably won't ever. What does this tell you about a pirate's ethics?
Not a lot, but it does tell me that you're seriously not understanding things if you think that pirates are some kind of organized group that can make decisions together. WTF? Even just in the U.S. there are likely millions of pirates, each with their own reasons/excuses and motivations and morals. They are incapable of acting as a group. They each act as individuals. The fact that so many individuals are breaking the law probably says something significant about the law. Maybe that it's not wise to let industry lobbyists write the law to begin with.
The industry is a much more focused and cohesive group. They are the only side capable of taking action in a concerted way.
But these are reasons not to buy the game, not to pirate it. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I simply cannot make the connection between "these are my reasons to not buy it" and "so that's why I pirated it instead". At least not without it inevitably resolving to "because I wanted to play it, but didn't want to pay for it". Maybe you have the explanation for this invisible link. Do you?
I think it's simply the inevitable backlash against corrupt laws that hand out practically endless monopolies on what is essentially just information, combined with business models that are outdated and il-equipped to deal with evolving technologies. Some companies are dealing pretty well with the changes (e.g. Valve, Stardock) and others are dealing very poorly with them (e.g. EA). I think things need a major overhaul.
But these are reasons not to buy the game, not to pirate it. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I simply cannot make the connection between "these are m
Certain forms of piracy certainly do! It is common knowledge that certain gangs in the London area mass produce pirate DVDs to sell to fund other, more sinister, activities.
The ads that I'm referring to were not addressing that kind of mass-production and sale of DVDs, but online file-sharing by kids and adults. As you point out, their actions were probably helping more than they were harming. Yet they were portrayed as if they were mailing cash to violent drug cartels. Pretty sick stuff, and a pretty good indication of the kind of people running the industry.
Ahh, so special classes of people have special rights and responsiblities? In other words, all men are not created equal?
Some people are held to higher standards due to their position or job. There are good reasons for this, such as preventing conflicts of interest and prejudicial actions in legal proceedings. Without such standards, our legal system would suffer.
The RIAA has been conducting a multimillion dollar ad campaign in an attempt to paint copyright infringement as a crime in the same class or worse as theft
Remember how piracy helps the terrorists and drug dealers? Think of the children!
In what way? A nuclear destruct device is an armament designed to deter the opponent from killing you on the risk that he himself will be killed.
A firearm, presumably, operates on much the same principles of deterrence.
A firearm is designed to kill your attacker, but generally not everyone on your block (I'm being generous in assuming a very small size here) and you along with it. If that was your intent, I would have just gone with the classic terrorist bomb-vest instead of the nuke. It's still ridiculous, as suicide is not one of the goals or even a likely outcome of self-defense using a gun. Mutually assured destruction does not apply.
Really? Are you saying that a smaller person cannot overcome a larger one? That a weaker person cannot overcome a stronger one?
Of course not. But those are the exceptional cases. The smaller person must be in better physical shape, and have not just the knowledge of how to incapacitate a larger opponent, but also the ability to do it under extreme pressure, and they need some luck as well because fights almost never go as planned.
Despite what you might like to believe, home invasions are very rare; home invasions in which people are killed, even rarer. Murders are very rare, and are more often than not they are committed by people who know each other, by a great margin. In fact, You seem to be under the belief that in fact, attackers choose their victims; this is rarely the case.
Of course they're rare. But that doesn't matter to the person who is the ultimate victim. Often the attacker is someone they know, such as an estranged ex-spouse or lover. They are often motivated by simple jealousy and rage, and restraining orders do little to stop them.
In any case, the point of that anecdote amongst others was to indicate that there is a perenial belief extant that one is surrounded by huge masses of well-armed, well-trained, and well-armored criminals, all of whom are apparently willing to conduct offensive maneuvers that would put Delta Force to shame at the drop of a hat in order to steal what petty cash someone might happen to have on their nightstand.
Or it could be that the perpetrator was simply offering it up as the only excuse he could come up with for his actions, even though he knew exactly what he was doing. I don't tend to fear paramilitary forces raiding my home. If they ever did, resistance would be a pretty bad idea.
Really, the restrictions that come into play with regard to self-defense in most jurisdictions rely on the fact that statistically speaking, the vast majority of self-defense situations do not involve one being attacked by special operations commandos, and therefore the force necessary to repel the attack is in fact far more limited than most people would at first imagine
Sure. I'd like to see you repel a larger attacker wielding a baseball bat. There's likely not more than a relative handful of people in this country or any other who could do that successfully. Unless the attacker does something very stupid, you're pretty screwed. I think normal people whose bodies are not lethal weapons should have the means to defend themselves too.
One of the primary motivations for restrictions on guns, amongst the usual attempts to limit their access by the criminal element, is to stop frightened individuals from wildly overreacting as they are so prone to do.
There are occasional overreactions, but most guns kept for self-defense are never even used. Of those that are used defensively, the vast majority are never fired. People are not as dumb and panicky as you like to think, especially if they've bothered to get any training, which is something that I'd recommend for all gun owners. Ultimately we're all responsible for our own safety, as there is nobody else willing or able to take that responsibility.
Turn in your geek card, please. Anyway, yes, I did. Because that's the point of examples- they tend to exaggerate in order to draw out the differences.
I understand that, but a good example usually has something to do with the case at hand. Yours goes so far beyond exaggeration that it couldn't possibly be used to make any sort of point.
But so what? You don't need a gun to protect yourself.
You do if your attacker is bigger and stronger than you, or has a weapon of some sort themselves. I think you'll find those things to be pretty common in assault and home invasion cases. The attackers kind of like to have the upper hand. Home invasions are generally less common in places where people can legally own guns than they are in places where guns are banned. Again I'm speaking of the U.S. and ymmv in other countries.
For example, if we decided that it was very practical for people to protect their lives by equipping themselves with thermonuclear destruct devices activated by the lack of a heartbeat (which would probably solve all murders that weren't started out as suicide missions), the advantage, i.e., the protection of individual lives, would have to be strictly weighed against the risk to society in general.
Did you really just make that argument?
Laws that prevent people from 'protecting themselves' serve the same purpose as any other law; they weigh the advantage to individuals against the advantage to society. That is the fallacy of the 'the police will not protect you' saw- the police were never intended to protect you. Their purpose is to protect society, and your life, in the grand scheme of society, is not very valuable. If you happen to lose it because the law prevented you from protecting yourself, that's really just tough luck.
And in the grand scheme of things, people having the right to protect themselves and their family seems to have a generally positive effect on the rate of violent crime, at least in the U.S. Not all countries are the same, so if you think that legalizing guns will cause your citizens to go on killing rampages, then by all means, don't do that.
If half of Candidate #1's support is so easily drawn away, his support is weak and he probably shouldn't win an election as a result.
You argued before that people should vote the way they want and not feel trapped into voting for the two major parties. Now you're arguing that if there are two equally popular candidates, both liked by a sizable majority of voters, they don't deserve to win because the split vote leaves them both with fewer votes than the person least liked by most of the country. That just supports my argument that we have to avoid splitting the vote with a third party because we end up electing the person that most people DON'T want elected.
The fact that Candidate #2's support was not drawn off by the 2 points needed to lose the election to either 1 or 3 shows that he's a strong leader.
No, it just shows that his supporters don't like either of the other two candidates. That's completely understandable if the rest of the population likes both of them about the same, but some have different issue priorities which lead them to support #1 more than #3 or vice versa. The fact still remains that 65% of the country doesn't want #2 to be elected, but they have no way of expressing that while still voting their conscience.
Voting major party because it gave a vote to the candidate you hated less was a terrible idea in the short AND long terms. All you did was continue to push down awareness of the full spectrum of political leanings. When does the awareness get raised when people follow your system?
A ranking system fixes that nicely. While the 2 main party candidates may be clowns, you can vote for the third party and still have a preference expressed between the other two. It would allow people to quit worrying about the side-effect, which is a completely legitimate thing to worry about given past experiences with third parties, and just spell out who they support, and in what order they prefer them.
How do you think you're going to change the voting process when the people you voted in are the people that the system works for?
I will admit that that is the hard part. But with the polarization we see today, it's not likely that any third party could get enough votes to get elected. There aren't enough independents out there to make it happen, and the people that are dumb enough to identify themselves as republicans or democrats are too wrapped up in cheerleading their respective teams and proclaiming the saintliness of their candidates to even consider anyone else.
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First of all, you don't really offer much to support your claim that he says one thing and then says the next immediately afterwards. You offer one example of that, and it only applies if you don't accept his explanation that he meant it wouldn't be physically divided as it was until 1967. I bet you accept McCain's clarifications and explanations all the time, don't you?
Here's a McCain overnight reversal for you, and that's only the third entry in the list. You don't seem to care to scrutinize McCain the way you do Obama. I suppose you think that all of McCain's position changes during the primary season were not pandering either? You think that he wasn't modifying his positions to appeal more to fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives who he needs to energize if he's to get them out to vote in November?
The claim of saying one thing and voting another is a classic example of misleading and oversimplifying when it suits your position. Being against a provision of a bill and voting for a bill are not necessarily contradictory. As much as I hated the FISA bill, and as much as it dampened my enthusiasm for Obama after I voted for him in the primary (to the point that I donated to the EFF instead of his campaign), I do understand that congresspeople will vote for bills that they feel do more good than harm, because that's the only way they can get anything done. The fact that people like to use votes on bills that do lots of things as a way to prove support or opposition to one specific provision just shows that there are a lot of gullible people out there ready to believe that crap.
On the debate issue, Obama's camp had offered to do more debates. They were turned down by McCain, apparently because he only wants to do them if he can do them in the format he wants. Info here. Anytime, anywhere doesn't mean that McCain should get to pick the rules. So, offers were made from both sides. Neither side could live with them. So it didn't happen. No story there.
And since when is verbosity a virtue? Any average 8th grader can write a 3 page paper in 5 pages. What takes skill is to write that 3 page paper in 1.
It's not a virtue in itself, but it is a virtue to truly discuss the nuances of the issues rather than spout the bumper-sticker version for the masses that have no clue about the complexities of foreign policy and international relations. Some candidates just like to appear tough and firm in their positions (e.g. Bush). That definitely doesn't make them a good person to be running things. Bush played the cowboy with the kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out philosophy. It's been a disaster for us. Better to have someone willing to discuss things and keep options open as the world is a constantly changing place. I want someone who's really going to put effort into working out problems rather than taking the approach that everyone should do what we want or else.
It's so funny how easy it is to be seduced by Obama's words. I actually voted for him in the primaries, but I had only been paying attention to him for a week or so at that point. But in the months that followed, it was clear that Obama's words and his deeds were at odds with each other. I don't like being told what I want to hear, even if it sounds nice. I want the truth.
John McCain is the real deal. I don't agree with a lot of his positions, but at least I know his positions. I have never voted for a Republican before, but I will in November.
Yeah, I can play that game too. Here's a list of McCain flip-flops. They've both done it. Some of them are pandering. Some are legitimate changes of heart or mind. The fact that you're willing to condemn Obama for it, but give McCain a pass just shows that you're not giving serious consideration to the issue.
They are already scheduled to have 3 debates, and another for the VP candidates. Given the SuperBowl nature of debates these days, they don't really serve much purpose for people who really want to know more about what a candidate thinks about an issue or what they plan to do. They just end up being watched like a sporting event where someone is keeping score.
They might as well be up there slinging "yo mamma" jokes at each other for all the good these things do. Someone like Obama, who is a very good speaker, but also very precise and thoughtful in his speech is at a disadvantage to someone like McCain who likes to go with the "straight talk" and catchy sound-bites intended to mask the complexity of the issues and oversimplify the answers to a point that it should become obvious that what he's saying is meaningless. Unfortunately too many people just like to see him "burn" the other guy with a catchy remark even though it's completely empty, and often just wrong.
It's easy to give people slogans that they can repeat. It worked for Bush... twice. The whole "plain talk" thing and voting for the guy you'd like to have a beer with has lead us to disaster. Vote for the person who is thoughtful and can really give the problems we face the kind of consideration they need rather than just making smart-ass quips like Bush is so fond of.
But if attacking Iraq was such obvious poor judgment at the time, why did Senate Democrats vote 29-21 [senate.gov] in favor of the war?
Because the administration and conservatives in general were helping to paint anyone who objected as unpatriotic at best, and often traitorous in their lack of support for defending the country from its enemies. That was part of the reason they kept trying to tie Saddam to 9/11 or terrorism in general. They were never able to do so, but polls at the time showed that they'd gotten a lot of people to believe that Saddam was either behind 9/11 or at least involved in it.
Here's one to make your head spin: Barack Obama voted with is party 96.0% [washingtonpost.com] of the time.
Let me provide you with this quote from a speech Obama made on Oct 2, 2002. See if you still think he would have been in favor of the war:
That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.
He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.
Shows a remarkable foresight and ability to reason. He opposed it for exactly the right reason in my opinion, and I think history has shown that he was correct.
Seems to me that article can be summed up by saying that the federal government was pretty fiscally conservative in Clinton's terms. The thing is, the federal government was fiscally conservative because of Newt Gingrich, the Republican Congress, and the Contract with America. Clinton himself was far from a fiscal conservative.
More like in pretty much all democratic terms, and while I'm sure republicans have all sorts of excuses for why virtually every term they've had since WWII has been a failure in terms of being fiscally responsible, the fact remains that that is what history shows.
Bush Jr. has just been the worst yet, and republican deregulation (which McCain and his buddy Phil Gramm have long supported) has allowed the financial industry to run amok. That combined with lousy tax policies and a failed war strategy, has managed to bankrupt the country for who knows how long.
I'm almost hoping McCain wins now since I feel like it should be a republican that has to take the fall since there will be no money for the things we need and that the candidates have promised to the voters.
However, any politician that is fiscally conservative (i.e., actually wants to reduce government spending) is a Republican (or at least not a Democrat).
Well, judging by the info in the article, and some of the references in it, the democrats have done a much better job than the republicans have. Call them whatever you want, but they've gotten the results.
And it's not like it was such a huge leadership stand he took, opposing the war from the comfort of Springfield, Illinois. I was against the war too, but it isn't my responsibility to prevent despotic rulers from acquiring nuclear weapons and selling them to terrorists. I also wasn't privy to the intelligence of the day (and neither were you). Had I been a senator at the time, I couldn't tell you if I would or would not have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
Not everything, no, but we were all privy to enough that got out, including the faked yellow-cake evidence and the fact that none of the intelligence established that there was any sort of imminent threat that required us to strike immediately. They believed Iraq to be at least 5 years away from being able to develop any sort of nuclear capability, and had they continued to investigate, as the Energy Department suggested, they would have realized that that estimate was way off base too. The lack of an immediate threat should have lead to increased intelligence gathering and increased pressure by the UN and the IAEA to validate or disprove the intelligence we had.
Supporting the rush to war was irresponsible and reckless. All because some guys in the defense department thought they could just sweep in and win the day with some tanks and helicopters and laser-guided bombs, despite military experts telling them that it wouldn't work. They got rid of dissenters and did it anyway. Rumsfeld claimed it would cost about 8 billion and be over in a matter of weeks. I'm not sure it's even conceivable to be more naive or flat-out wrong than they were.
Judgement and leadership are two different things. The question still stands, Where is Obama's leadership?
Running his campaign for the last couple years and succeeding in the primary has shown that he can lead and that people are eager to follow him. I don't particularly care whether he's got executive experience or not. I don't want someone that can just lead. Bush was a leader too, and look where that's gotten us.
Leading isn't the hard part. Determining where to lead us is the hard part. There are plenty of leaders around the world that have lead people in horrible directions. Leadership alone is not enough. Judgment is the most important aspect of a good leader, and I don't think McCain has good judgment. He certainly got snowed by the Bush administration.
I feel as though you may have changed the subject on me.
The subject was John McCain's leadership, contrasted with Barack Obama's lack of leadership. Can I interpret your response to be anything other than an attempt to distract me from Barack Obama's lack of leadership? Or are we still in agreement that Barack Obama has shown zero leadership in his life as a politician, and you just want to nitpick?
I'm saying that there is a lot more to leadership than just doing something. It's showing good judgment in what you do. Buying into the ridiculous crap that the administration was shoveling in the months leading up to the war was incredibly bad judgment. Not just in hindsight either, as there was more than enough info out there to make it pretty clear that the reasons coming from the administration were bogus.
As for Obama, he at least showed some good judgment in opposing the Iraq war. Given McCain's stance on a variety of other issues, I'm inclined to give Obama the opportunity to lead and hope that he continues to show good judgment when it counts, rather than cede the position to someone who's judgment I couldn't possibly trust.
That's not to say that I think Obama always makes the right call. I don't agree with some of the things he's done. But none of those have cost us thousands of lives and over half a trillion dollars for reasons that the administration couldn't quite settle on for years, and which, if they had been cited up front, would never have won support for the war.
Called out Secretary Rumsfeld for being a moron and supporting what history has revealed to be the successful troop surge in Iraq
Quick, go dig up the "Mission Accomplished" banner again! While the surge may have helped increase security, it hasn't been proved out as a successful strategy for creating a stable country. Petraeus himself has described the situation as tenuous, fragile and reversible. The political situation there is still very shaky. So before McCain goes off about how he backed a winning strategy, maybe we should figure out if anything will actually be won. Seems like the best strategy would have been not dragging us into a pointless war. Wonder which candidate supported that strategy?
The Presidency is not an entry-level executive position and anyone who hasn't run a state, a large company, a military branch, or something equivalent, has no business even running for the Oval Office. Vice-presidents count, obviously."
Because CEOs really understand accountability, right? They understand consequences right? Like if they drive the company into the ground, they'll only walk away with 80 million instead of 100 million. Wow. I totally see how that would teach them some lessons.
and the catastrophe who thinks you just take money from anyone who has it and give it to anyone who doesn't
If your policies are going to favor those with the money (which they do, as we can see that the middle and lower classes are worse off, but the wealthy are doing much better), while cutting the services and education for those that don't have much money, then I'd support having them pay for those policies.
I take more of a Libertarian stance, and am very much a fiscal conservative, which makes it hard for me to ever vote for a Democrat.
Who's the last republican president that actually reduced spending? I wonder if you can name him. Google being the great equalizer, I assume you'll get it, but the point is that republicans haven't been a fiscally conservative party for a loooong time.
Here's a rather short, but interesting article that brings up some information that was surprising to me. It's almost like republicans get the reputation for being fiscally conservative just by claiming they are and yelling about how democrats are going to raise your taxes.
I really like how you keep defending criminals. Hey, don't hate rapists! They have lots of reasons why they do it, its unfair to treat them all the same! I'd be more than happy to have each and every pirate treated as individuals in their own civil/criminal trials. Funny thing though, they don't seem to stand up enough for their beliefs to actually admit to it, instead choosing to hind behind a shroud of anonymity. Yeah, sounds real dignified to me, they definitely deserve our respect.
Wow. Ok, I'm done with you. You're either trolling (likely), or just a typical internet fucktard. Have a nice life.
It still shows up in the RSS feed.
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Do not despair. It is not very glamorous.
Dude, my UID gets me chicks! ..... Just not the ones that I'd want to date..... :(
Well, you've obviously decided that pirates are some kind of secret society with their own goals and plans that they can put into action at a moment's notice.
How many 1-star Spore reviews did Amazon get? A couple thousand? If that's the best coordination that pirates can muster, then you're giving them far too much credit for being organized.
Or more likely, he told you the car could go up to 200mph, yet road law permits you from ever actually driving that fast, and he fails to tell you. Whose fault now?
No, it's nothing like that. The game is incapable of the advertised performance with the specified hardware requirements. There are no qualifiers in those requirements. Nothing that tells you that you can't experience the whole game. This is hardly uncommon.
By "expanded content" and "expanding demands", I am of course referring to the inevitable situation of "I had 3 units in the demo and it was fine, but now in the full version when I have 3 million units on screen, it slows down? I was duped!"
If the game can't handle its maximum number of units with the minimum or even recommended hardware, then those requirements are too low. You can't expect gamers to guess how much game they're going to get to play based on their hardware. Publishers need to set accurate requirements to play the game.
By the way, your argument makes it impossible for developers to sell a game with unlimited/near-unlimited potential. Or are you saying that they should always place hard limits on every aspect of a game (including resolution, detail, and game content), then choose a minimum set of system requirements which cater towards the maximum fulfilment of all those limits?
Most games have used hard limits. It's perfectly possible to allow for nearly unlimited potential, but there must still be a baseline. You can then allow players to ramp up the limits to meet their system's level of power. Sins mentions nothing about you only being able to play on small maps if you meet the minimum requirements. And if that's the case, then how do we know what the requirements are to play on large maps, or that they are different from small maps?
Why should gamers believe there is a difference? They don't understand game programming. Many games can have large total areas, but are made manageable by the fact that they only load small pieces at a time into memory, or only have to draw to a certain level of detail depending on the view. Customers are in no position to guess at what a game is or should be capable of, or how well it was implemented versus how well it could be implemented. It's up to the publishers to be honest about it.
They have to download the game don't they? Find a crack that works? And they're being offset, because, as you keep claiming, they REALLY wanted to buy the game but for some reason couldn't because it has DRM, forcing them to now download it instead, those poor souls (not even considering the option of not having it at all). That seems inconvenient to me.
Quit putting words in my mouth. I've said repeatedly that there are many reasons why people pirate. Some have no desire at all to purchase the game. Some like to support the developer even though they don't want to deal with the DRM, so they pirate it and buy it too. There are different scenarios and you're being belligerent in your attempts to keep trying to assign one reason to everyone.
Happy now?
You can find a few crazy stories about damn near anything though. They don't prove anything except that some people are nutcases, which we already know. It doesn't change the fact that there are many legitimate problems caused by DRM either. Sony rootkits? Starforce crashes and unplayability?
So in other words, you agree that the whole thing is entirely subjective.
No, I'm saying that there's two types of DRM.
I'd like to wait until you answer the "do your doors have locks?" question until I respond. Thanks.
Yes my doors have locks, which are intended to deter people from casually entering my home. I think the difference is obvious in that this is a physical access issue, whereas DRM is fighting a battle against information access. If there were infinite copies of my home available for anyone to test their lock-picking skills against, I'm quite sure they could access it without much difficulty. Then they could share what they find by offering unlocked copies of my house and everything in it to anyone that wanted it.
Do you see why the typical DRM scheme is useless? The locks are available for anyone to break at their leisure and share the results. Why bother with locks when they make no difference to the final outcome, except to piss off and inconvenience the people that would actually buy your product?
The difference is, after a certain point in time, creators of artistic works (ie goods where the primary value is in the design and conception, not the production - aka intellectual property) are forced to stop being allowed to make money from their works. An even bigger problem is, certain [slashdot.org] people [slashdot.org] feel that this time frame should be zero.
That's called backlash. It's what happens when someone gets too greedy and vastly overreaches in taking from others, namely the public in this case. Copyright law has gone beyond excessive and crossed well into transparently corrupt. Hence the lack of respect for it by such a huge number of people. Scaling it back to something on the order of the original term, say 15 years, and cutting back the more egregious terms of the DMCA would re-establish the balance of the system.
Intellectual property businesses operate on the assumption that they invest in something good, they will get returns when it hits retail. Not 2 weeks, a month, a year, 10 years after retail when the pirates have completed their use of the product and, as an afterthought, may or may not decide to actually take the initiative to send some form of compensation to them
You know, that's what I've been thinking too. Which is one reason I just can't understand why they need 90+ year copyright terms. Again, we're back to the overreaching versus balance issue. They can't make their money in 15 years? Only a minute fraction of works makes any significant money beyond that time.
Or, looking at it from a completely different angle: DRM wouldn't be so intrusive if people stopped trying to circumvent it.
There will always be people trying to circumvent it. And so pirates will not be the one's being inconvenienced or having their systems damaged by intrusive DRM. That's just for those lucky paying customers.
Yet they expect companies to take the initiative and back down on DRM first. What would you say to pirates being the ones to back down first? Surely they would jump on the chance to prove once and for all they they really do have the better ethics. And yet, this hasn't happened, and probably won't ever. What does this tell you about a pirate's ethics?
Not a lot, but it does tell me that you're seriously not understanding things if you think that pirates are some kind of organized group that can make decisions together. WTF? Even just in the U.S. there are likely millions of pirates, each with their own reasons/excuses and motivations and morals. They are incapable of acting as a group. They each act as individuals. The fact that so many individuals are breaking the law probably says something significant about the law. Maybe that it's not wise to let industry lobbyists write the law to begin with.
The industry is a much more focused and cohesive group. They are the only side capable of taking action in a concerted way.
But these are reasons not to buy the game, not to pirate it. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I simply cannot make the connection between "these are my reasons to not buy it" and "so that's why I pirated it instead". At least not without it inevitably resolving to "because I wanted to play it, but didn't want to pay for it". Maybe you have the explanation for this invisible link. Do you?
I think it's simply the inevitable backlash against corrupt laws that hand out practically endless monopolies on what is essentially just information, combined with business models that are outdated and il-equipped to deal with evolving technologies. Some companies are dealing pretty well with the changes (e.g. Valve, Stardock) and others are dealing very poorly with them (e.g. EA). I think things need a major overhaul.
But these are reasons not to buy the game, not to pirate it. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I simply cannot make the connection between "these are m
Certain forms of piracy certainly do! It is common knowledge that certain gangs in the London area mass produce pirate DVDs to sell to fund other, more sinister, activities.
The ads that I'm referring to were not addressing that kind of mass-production and sale of DVDs, but online file-sharing by kids and adults. As you point out, their actions were probably helping more than they were harming. Yet they were portrayed as if they were mailing cash to violent drug cartels. Pretty sick stuff, and a pretty good indication of the kind of people running the industry.
Ahh, so special classes of people have special rights and responsiblities? In other words, all men are not created equal?
Some people are held to higher standards due to their position or job. There are good reasons for this, such as preventing conflicts of interest and prejudicial actions in legal proceedings. Without such standards, our legal system would suffer.
The RIAA has been conducting a multimillion dollar ad campaign in an attempt to paint copyright infringement as a crime in the same class or worse as theft
Remember how piracy helps the terrorists and drug dealers? Think of the children!
In what way? A nuclear destruct device is an armament designed to deter the opponent from killing you on the risk that he himself will be killed.
A firearm, presumably, operates on much the same principles of deterrence.
A firearm is designed to kill your attacker, but generally not everyone on your block (I'm being generous in assuming a very small size here) and you along with it. If that was your intent, I would have just gone with the classic terrorist bomb-vest instead of the nuke. It's still ridiculous, as suicide is not one of the goals or even a likely outcome of self-defense using a gun. Mutually assured destruction does not apply.
Really? Are you saying that a smaller person cannot overcome a larger one? That a weaker person cannot overcome a stronger one?
Of course not. But those are the exceptional cases. The smaller person must be in better physical shape, and have not just the knowledge of how to incapacitate a larger opponent, but also the ability to do it under extreme pressure, and they need some luck as well because fights almost never go as planned.
Despite what you might like to believe, home invasions are very rare; home invasions in which people are killed, even rarer. Murders are very rare, and are more often than not they are committed by people who know each other, by a great margin. In fact, You seem to be under the belief that in fact, attackers choose their victims; this is rarely the case.
Of course they're rare. But that doesn't matter to the person who is the ultimate victim. Often the attacker is someone they know, such as an estranged ex-spouse or lover. They are often motivated by simple jealousy and rage, and restraining orders do little to stop them.
In any case, the point of that anecdote amongst others was to indicate that there is a perenial belief extant that one is surrounded by huge masses of well-armed, well-trained, and well-armored criminals, all of whom are apparently willing to conduct offensive maneuvers that would put Delta Force to shame at the drop of a hat in order to steal what petty cash someone might happen to have on their nightstand.
Or it could be that the perpetrator was simply offering it up as the only excuse he could come up with for his actions, even though he knew exactly what he was doing. I don't tend to fear paramilitary forces raiding my home. If they ever did, resistance would be a pretty bad idea.
Really, the restrictions that come into play with regard to self-defense in most jurisdictions rely on the fact that statistically speaking, the vast majority of self-defense situations do not involve one being attacked by special operations commandos, and therefore the force necessary to repel the attack is in fact far more limited than most people would at first imagine
Sure. I'd like to see you repel a larger attacker wielding a baseball bat. There's likely not more than a relative handful of people in this country or any other who could do that successfully. Unless the attacker does something very stupid, you're pretty screwed. I think normal people whose bodies are not lethal weapons should have the means to defend themselves too.
One of the primary motivations for restrictions on guns, amongst the usual attempts to limit their access by the criminal element, is to stop frightened individuals from wildly overreacting as they are so prone to do.
There are occasional overreactions, but most guns kept for self-defense are never even used. Of those that are used defensively, the vast majority are never fired. People are not as dumb and panicky as you like to think, especially if they've bothered to get any training, which is something that I'd recommend for all gun owners. Ultimately we're all responsible for our own safety, as there is nobody else willing or able to take that responsibility.
Of c
Turn in your geek card, please. Anyway, yes, I did. Because that's the point of examples- they tend to exaggerate in order to draw out the differences.
I understand that, but a good example usually has something to do with the case at hand. Yours goes so far beyond exaggeration that it couldn't possibly be used to make any sort of point.
But so what? You don't need a gun to protect yourself.
You do if your attacker is bigger and stronger than you, or has a weapon of some sort themselves. I think you'll find those things to be pretty common in assault and home invasion cases. The attackers kind of like to have the upper hand. Home invasions are generally less common in places where people can legally own guns than they are in places where guns are banned. Again I'm speaking of the U.S. and ymmv in other countries.
For example, if we decided that it was very practical for people to protect their lives by equipping themselves with thermonuclear destruct devices activated by the lack of a heartbeat (which would probably solve all murders that weren't started out as suicide missions), the advantage, i.e., the protection of individual lives, would have to be strictly weighed against the risk to society in general.
Did you really just make that argument?
Laws that prevent people from 'protecting themselves' serve the same purpose as any other law; they weigh the advantage to individuals against the advantage to society. That is the fallacy of the 'the police will not protect you' saw- the police were never intended to protect you. Their purpose is to protect society, and your life, in the grand scheme of society, is not very valuable. If you happen to lose it because the law prevented you from protecting yourself, that's really just tough luck.
And in the grand scheme of things, people having the right to protect themselves and their family seems to have a generally positive effect on the rate of violent crime, at least in the U.S. Not all countries are the same, so if you think that legalizing guns will cause your citizens to go on killing rampages, then by all means, don't do that.
If the hacker didn't know that in advance it is still hacking.
Yeah, I caught my cat hacking my computer the other day. Fucker had typed all kinds of shit into the login box.
If half of Candidate #1's support is so easily drawn away, his support is weak and he probably shouldn't win an election as a result.
You argued before that people should vote the way they want and not feel trapped into voting for the two major parties. Now you're arguing that if there are two equally popular candidates, both liked by a sizable majority of voters, they don't deserve to win because the split vote leaves them both with fewer votes than the person least liked by most of the country. That just supports my argument that we have to avoid splitting the vote with a third party because we end up electing the person that most people DON'T want elected.
The fact that Candidate #2's support was not drawn off by the 2 points needed to lose the election to either 1 or 3 shows that he's a strong leader.
No, it just shows that his supporters don't like either of the other two candidates. That's completely understandable if the rest of the population likes both of them about the same, but some have different issue priorities which lead them to support #1 more than #3 or vice versa. The fact still remains that 65% of the country doesn't want #2 to be elected, but they have no way of expressing that while still voting their conscience.
Voting major party because it gave a vote to the candidate you hated less was a terrible idea in the short AND long terms. All you did was continue to push down awareness of the full spectrum of political leanings. When does the awareness get raised when people follow your system?
A ranking system fixes that nicely. While the 2 main party candidates may be clowns, you can vote for the third party and still have a preference expressed between the other two. It would allow people to quit worrying about the side-effect, which is a completely legitimate thing to worry about given past experiences with third parties, and just spell out who they support, and in what order they prefer them.
How do you think you're going to change the voting process when the people you voted in are the people that the system works for?
I will admit that that is the hard part. But with the polarization we see today, it's not likely that any third party could get enough votes to get elected. There aren't enough independents out there to make it happen, and the people that are dumb enough to identify themselves as republicans or democrats are too wrapped up in cheerleading their respective teams and proclaiming the saintliness of their candidates to even consider anyone else.