Unless he wants to GPL his codebase. You basically forced him to either GPL his code or not accept any of your patches. Keep in mind dual licensing is only practicle when a single person or organization owns the copyright to an entire project. Many people, including myself, take issue with projects that want to own the entire copyright on an open source project. It limits our ability to use our work else ware.
The short of it is you guys are like little high-minded leeches. At least people who take "lesser" licensed code and "lock it up" don't have the high-minded attitude (and really, we wouldn't have licensed it the way we did unless we cared). You guys do it all under the pretense of "Freedom", which makes you guys sound really, really pretentious.
What if somebody came up with the MEGA-GPL lisence that was one-way compatible with the GPL? This MEGA-GPL license could suck up GPL code, but could not give back to the GPL project without the original project becoming MEGA-GPL. If this sounds far-fetched, the same scenario already exists with GPLv2 vs GPLv3.
So I take your project, MEGA-GPL it and make all kinds of changes to your project. Sadly, you'll never see any of my changes unless you adopt my MEGA-GPL license.
You forgot the bit about that compatibility being one direction. You can't take GPL code and use it in any codebase under the Apache License without GPL'ing the whole damn thing.
Nice you got modded up though, even when you forgot that very, very important bit. GPL is more then happy to take other code, but it isn't so happy to give back...
Almost all OSS licenses are "compatible" with GPL, but only in one direction. You can take BSD code, Apache License code and integrate it into GPL code, but you can't take any changes you made in the GPL code back into the BSD/Apache code*.
* Unless you own the copyright to the entire body of work under GPL, in which case you can do whatever you want with it.
Most media compression schemes exploit how our brain interprets light, motion and sound. Given this, if you played a compressed video to a bird or snake, what would they see? Would their experience of it be anything like ours?
As we switch to digital TV, we will soon be broadcasting MPEG2 streams into space. In a million years, maybe an intelligent alien life form will tune into this MPEG2 stream. Given their brains must have evolved in a different way, would what they see on their screen be interpreted the same way? Likewise, if we intercepted their compressed video stream it would be optimized for how their brain deals with audio and video. Would we be able to view it in a way our brains could properly decode?
Mod me as a troll if you must but... People ought to read the link given by the parent. Wow.
So, how do we permit plugins while prohibiting proprietary plugins, and how do we do it while staying within the bounds of copyright law which is the basis of the GPL
Nice. You know, in a very funny way, the FSF and their jiahad against the evils of proprietary software are basically creating their own twisted form of DRM. Witness this brilliant idea:
most people participating in the related discussions on the gcc mailing list, suggested already that an unstable plugin API would bring all major advantages of plugins in gcc, while complicating the scenario of proprietary plugins. Indeed, it would probably even make sense to consider having a default policy of the plugin API to be modified for each major release, this could be achieved using automated scripts-which would also increase the motivation for plugin authors to keep their plugins in the main repository
Nice. The Linux kernel guys did this and look at the result--it is a bitch for hardware guys to write drivers for Linux. I'm sure deliberately altering the API with a script will work really well for the GCC guys! Makes me want to participate. Not! In truth, it makes me feel like I'm some kind of criminal--only guilty until proven innocent.
Sadly, the FSF did some very nice things, but I think they are becoming so extreme they are going to marginalize themselves and fade away. You know what the biggest hurdle for the BSD guys go separate themselve from GPL? The compiler. The compiler really is the last bit of power the FSF holds over the open source world as a whole. Pretty much every other bit of the toolchain has been replaced with a non-GPL lisence except a good compiler.
LLVM seems to be coming along nicely with major players backing it. I'd be pretty nervous if I was the FSF.
I'm not worried about offsite. My specific case is a bunch of recorded TV shows. If those go, the lady will kill me. I'm not interested in thinking too much about rotating backups and juggling disks for this:-)
What case holds ten 200GB disks? What kind of power supply do I need when none of them can fall asleep? How will I keep said drives cool and quiet when they are supposed to be in a HTPC in the living room?
Small is the future. I don't buy big tower computers any more. They were cool when I was 16 and 386's with turbo buttons roamed the earth, but I've grown out of that state.
Every generation of hard drive is more quiet and more power efficient then the prior generation. 200GB IDE drives are about 2 generations old now days. Those are some nasty, noisy drives.
My solution would be 2 2TB drives on a software raid. "OMG IT ISN'T BACKUP". So what. If one dies, I'll probably have a day or so to go get a new drive. The risk of "rm -rf" is pretty low too, the only software touching it is SageTV.
You get your jollies off harping on "RAID != BACKUP" and yet offer no cheap, low-cost way to back up several TB's worth of media. A software RAID1 array is plenty fine for backing up 2TB's of video and music. Obviously you back up important stuff like the 500 megs of documents and the family photos offsite. But that just isn't sensible for 2TB of videos your Sage/MythTV recorded.
Until one of you pedants suggest a better way to kinda-sorta-protect 2TB worth of data for under $200, you add nothing to the conversation.
We dont want to spend a bazillion dollars to buy a tape drive for home use. "Offsite" is not an answer either because our internet isn't fast enough, and there exists no cheap media to backup 2TB of data. DVD only holds like 4 gigs so you'd need about 500 or so of those. Blu-ray might make that 50 disks or so.
The proper answer for the backup of any media at home is "buy another hard drive and copy to that". Any other suggestion, such as a $3,000 tape drive that still only holds 800GB (!!!) is academic, pedantic, impractical or all three.
Short answer: basically, there is no good answer. Buying a second drive is the best we have these days.
Unless you have fiber pulled into your house, 2TB is a hell of a lot of data to backup offsite. Even if it is a differential backup, the time it would take to initially back up even 1TB of data on a home internet connection would be measured in weeks.
The proper answer to the original question "how do I backup a 2TB disk" is "there is no good answer".
No matter how stupid, ill-thought, ugly, racist, or sexist a product or standard is named, there exists at least one Slashdot poster who will defend it on the grounds that if you are truly pure, names never matter.
I call this new law The Greasy Nerd Law. It might sound like a silly name, but what, really, is in a name?
I wasn't being serious to suggest we use a kitten or puppy--those are extremes given only to make a point. But something about the design of those boxes needs to be changed to make it look less oppressive.
You could soften the warning box up with a gradient.
You could use rounded corners. You could change the colors to something other then red/yellow to avoid suggesting "stop / danger / warning"--you dont want to suggest "stop" or "danger" as they are telling your brain "something is wrong! stop reading! go away!".
You could move the warnings to a less prominent location like in the margins (the left column is horribly underused).
You could make them tooltips that pop-up when you hover over a smaller icon next to a heading.
You could rephrase the message to have a positive tone--eg: "Want to help us improve this website? You can help us by adding citations and references to the bottom of this article. To get started, read our helpful tutorial".
There are all kinds of ways they could have their cake an eat it too. All of the changes I suggested are simple ones that would go a long ways to improving the website's tone.
I've done an experiment in a wiki article too. Just changed one of the numbers from like "3 gigabits" to "3.9 gigabits" and watched the thing for a whole year until I got bored. It was never changed.
If you are a so-called editor on wikipedia and don't know about the subject you are editing, all the rules in the world won't protect the article from what I did. After all, why would anybody change some random number (which had no citation to back it up anyway) in a article unless they knew what they were talking about? Wikipedia articles are wide open to that kind of psuedo-social-engineering.
ps: the thing was later changed to the proper number when the whole article was revamped.
Why else do you think so many conservative pundits and politicians like to bash "elite west coast liberals", "ivory tower eggheads", "liberal scientists", etc? One should question a political ideology lead by people who dismiss those with education.
But that warning box is a huge turn-off. I'd be okay with it if they could "cuteify" it somehow. Maybe put a cartoon puppy dog next to it or something. Right now, the design of those boxes are downright oppressive.
Despite what some would say, design matters. It matters a *lot*. And right now, the design of wikipedia "warning boxes" gives the whole website a pretentious overtone that bleeds into attitudes projected by its editors and contributors.
If those damned [Citation Needed] boxes printed out a picture of a kitten saying "warning kitten says 'Citation Needed'", you'd see a whole lot less power-tripping on wikipedia. Design and presentation matter as much as content. Wikipedia is living proof of it.
Is what is needed. Look, most people understand that they need to take anything they read on wikipedia with a grain of salt; a website that anybody can edit has to be. But see, wikipedia seems to project the aura that it doesn't think it's shit stinks. As a result, you get crap like the warnings for this. Look, who cares if that article isn't well referenced or cited. I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse. We dont need the damn disclaimer, it makes the place feel like it is full of anal retentive blow-hards on power trips. And the best part is, the article I linked to seems to have had at least one of those warning boxes since Sept. 2007! Nobody cares!
I used to remove every one of those stupid warnings when I'd hit an article via google just for spite. Now I stopped caring. When I see one, I just back out and go somewhere else. I certainly wouldn't take the time to do whatever the silly warning box wanted. Obviously I'm not alone or those boxes wouldn't have been around for more than a year.
My ideal wikipedia would not have any of that "citation needed" or "needs more references" bullshit. Just leave the damn thing alone. We all know the thing is never going to be a bastion of truthliness. We all use it for trivia and cases were we really dont care how accurate the information we get is. And if we spot bias, we just might edit it out. Isn't that the point?
Bottom line is wikipedia would be better served by removing every single one of those annoying warning boxes. Every one. They serve no purpose other then to project the aura of pretenciousness.
Nobody in the private industry seems to want to open their pocketbooks. Consumers aren't in the mood either.
Somebody has to do it... the only entity that really can is the government. Would you rather they do nothing and let our economy sink into a huge downward spiral?
I'm curious what your idea is to get our economy moving?
My suspicion is, the invention of a portable, relatively secure online reputation system would change everything.
Our governments (all of them) should be the folks in charge of SSL. In a perfect world, we'd get a free SSL certificate with our drivers license or business license.
Regulation limits Freedom, and is thus, at best, a necessary evil.
That we can agree on. As long as we agree with that statement and balance each other out life should be good. I'll keep you from removing all regulations on the stock market, and you can keep me from regulating the hell out of the telcos (which created a huge mess).
Well, life will be fine as long as I dont call you a fat-cat corporate bastard and I you dont call me a pinko socialist hippie. For too long, *that* has been the problem in our society... we've become so divided that we cannot see that most of us agree with eachother:-)
Your idea is interesting. It is kind of like how you need a chance for the public to comment on public projects via environmental impact statement.
A couple things you'd have to figure out:
1) How do you identify and weight people from the US, and those outside the US? 2) How do you filter out sockpuppets and paid lobbyists. Corporations and governments already game wikipedia and they'd drool at the ability to game "digg-my-house-bill.gov"
How does congress manage documents now? Are they just emailing word documents around as attachments, or is there a modern-ish document management system in place? Is it homebrew, or commercial?
A quick search turned up that "they" might already be working on a solution to your problems.
GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) is an advanced digital system that will enable GPO to manage Government information in a digital form. FDsys will enable GPO to manage information from all three branches of the U.S. Government...
...[Some of the main functions of the system include] Version control -- Multiple versions of published information are common; FDsys will provide version control for government information.
I realized the whole "separate energy from transit" sounded silly as I typed it. Never said my idea was any good.
Still, my point stands. You gotta do something to give the site a feeling that you are part of the community. If you don't, it will be like comment sections in the NYT or your local paper... just a bunch of people typing into thin air. Nobody reads, nobody replies.. just thousands of isolated comments. The outcome of that would be as useless as my suggestion:-)
I doubt drawing hard lines between topics is a good idea, but there has to be some tricks to making it feel "homely". I hope they pull it off successfully--it would be a model for all to follow.
Going after the bush-era full bore might make a lot of far-left democrats happy, but it would instantly piss off the republicans end the so-called "honeymoon". Speaking up too loudly about FISA right now would burn political capital he needs for more immediate plans (sadly).
Would you rather have him use up his political capitol on FISA, or something else? He can't do everything--he has to compromise on some things to move forward.
And if anybody though Obama was gonna go on a witch-hunt after the former administration, you will be dissapointed. He has said numerous times he wants to look forward, not backward.
Silence is a tacit acceptance of the status quo.
Or, again, smart politics. Maybe he doesn't want to kick a fuss and burn his political capital over FISA because he figures it will be knocked down in the courts. Maybe if he did kick up a fuss, it would make it even *harder* to remove. Look at the war on drugs--the best way to fix that little problem is to shut the fuck up about it and start funding statewide initiative that chip away at it. The minute Obama starts talking about ending the drug war, the whole process will grind to a halt and become yet another wedge like "gun control" or "abortion".
Or maybe he agrees with parts of it. Who knows? Politics isn't easy.
My hunch on this? The best way to end this "war on drugs" is for him to not lift a finger. States, via their initiative process, are already slowly ending the war for us. As long as Obama lets the whole thing go under the radar, by the time he leaves office the power state governments have will be significantly reduced. The *minute* he talks about reforming drug law, the gig will be up. The pro-drug war people will make it a wedge issue like gun control or abortion and the whole "underground" reform will grind to a halt. The best way he can end the drug war is to just let the process work its way out on its own.
As for the recession, I think we can't place blame anywhere until it is over and we can use hindsight to figure it out. But I'll bet you "regulation was a major problem" isn't right. Regulation is a word used to describe something. You can have good regulation and bad regulation. Partisan politics in this country have eroded our ability to communicate effectivly. They've taken words like "regulation" and assigned negative connotations to them that simply do not belong.
What you probably mean is "the wrong kinds of regulation helped cause the problem". That is a non ideological, non-loaded, non-partisan statement we can all agree on. If we could all work to stop loading words like "regulation" with emotional connotations, we'd go a long ways to ending this stupid partisan bullshit. Put your anger, concern and outrage into the word "wrong", not "regulation". Say "the wrong kind of regulation" and then offer "the right kinds of regulation". Saying "regulation itself is the problem" is a cop-out used by slick politicians to dodge complex issues:-)
But for all we really know your cat, Fluffy, caused this. I know my cat seems awfully content these days. Wonder what they know that we don't?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless he wants to GPL his codebase. You basically forced him to either GPL his code or not accept any of your patches. Keep in mind dual licensing is only practicle when a single person or organization owns the copyright to an entire project. Many people, including myself, take issue with projects that want to own the entire copyright on an open source project. It limits our ability to use our work else ware.
The short of it is you guys are like little high-minded leeches. At least people who take "lesser" licensed code and "lock it up" don't have the high-minded attitude (and really, we wouldn't have licensed it the way we did unless we cared). You guys do it all under the pretense of "Freedom", which makes you guys sound really, really pretentious.
What if somebody came up with the MEGA-GPL lisence that was one-way compatible with the GPL? This MEGA-GPL license could suck up GPL code, but could not give back to the GPL project without the original project becoming MEGA-GPL. If this sounds far-fetched, the same scenario already exists with GPLv2 vs GPLv3.
So I take your project, MEGA-GPL it and make all kinds of changes to your project. Sadly, you'll never see any of my changes unless you adopt my MEGA-GPL license.
Sound like a plan?
You forgot the bit about that compatibility being one direction. You can't take GPL code and use it in any codebase under the Apache License without GPL'ing the whole damn thing.
Nice you got modded up though, even when you forgot that very, very important bit. GPL is more then happy to take other code, but it isn't so happy to give back...
Almost all OSS licenses are "compatible" with GPL, but only in one direction. You can take BSD code, Apache License code and integrate it into GPL code, but you can't take any changes you made in the GPL code back into the BSD/Apache code*.
* Unless you own the copyright to the entire body of work under GPL, in which case you can do whatever you want with it.
Most media compression schemes exploit how our brain interprets light, motion and sound. Given this, if you played a compressed video to a bird or snake, what would they see? Would their experience of it be anything like ours?
As we switch to digital TV, we will soon be broadcasting MPEG2 streams into space. In a million years, maybe an intelligent alien life form will tune into this MPEG2 stream. Given their brains must have evolved in a different way, would what they see on their screen be interpreted the same way? Likewise, if we intercepted their compressed video stream it would be optimized for how their brain deals with audio and video. Would we be able to view it in a way our brains could properly decode?
Mod me as a troll if you must but... People ought to read the link given by the parent. Wow.
Nice. You know, in a very funny way, the FSF and their jiahad against the evils of proprietary software are basically creating their own twisted form of DRM. Witness this brilliant idea:
Nice. The Linux kernel guys did this and look at the result--it is a bitch for hardware guys to write drivers for Linux. I'm sure deliberately altering the API with a script will work really well for the GCC guys! Makes me want to participate. Not! In truth, it makes me feel like I'm some kind of criminal--only guilty until proven innocent.
Sadly, the FSF did some very nice things, but I think they are becoming so extreme they are going to marginalize themselves and fade away. You know what the biggest hurdle for the BSD guys go separate themselve from GPL? The compiler. The compiler really is the last bit of power the FSF holds over the open source world as a whole. Pretty much every other bit of the toolchain has been replaced with a non-GPL lisence except a good compiler.
LLVM seems to be coming along nicely with major players backing it. I'd be pretty nervous if I was the FSF.
I'm not worried about offsite. My specific case is a bunch of recorded TV shows. If those go, the lady will kill me. I'm not interested in thinking too much about rotating backups and juggling disks for this :-)
What case holds ten 200GB disks? What kind of power supply do I need when none of them can fall asleep? How will I keep said drives cool and quiet when they are supposed to be in a HTPC in the living room?
Small is the future. I don't buy big tower computers any more. They were cool when I was 16 and 386's with turbo buttons roamed the earth, but I've grown out of that state.
Every generation of hard drive is more quiet and more power efficient then the prior generation. 200GB IDE drives are about 2 generations old now days. Those are some nasty, noisy drives.
My solution would be 2 2TB drives on a software raid. "OMG IT ISN'T BACKUP". So what. If one dies, I'll probably have a day or so to go get a new drive. The risk of "rm -rf" is pretty low too, the only software touching it is SageTV.
You get your jollies off harping on "RAID != BACKUP" and yet offer no cheap, low-cost way to back up several TB's worth of media. A software RAID1 array is plenty fine for backing up 2TB's of video and music. Obviously you back up important stuff like the 500 megs of documents and the family photos offsite. But that just isn't sensible for 2TB of videos your Sage/MythTV recorded.
Until one of you pedants suggest a better way to kinda-sorta-protect 2TB worth of data for under $200, you add nothing to the conversation.
We dont want to spend a bazillion dollars to buy a tape drive for home use. "Offsite" is not an answer either because our internet isn't fast enough, and there exists no cheap media to backup 2TB of data. DVD only holds like 4 gigs so you'd need about 500 or so of those. Blu-ray might make that 50 disks or so.
The proper answer for the backup of any media at home is "buy another hard drive and copy to that". Any other suggestion, such as a $3,000 tape drive that still only holds 800GB (!!!) is academic, pedantic, impractical or all three.
Short answer: basically, there is no good answer. Buying a second drive is the best we have these days.
Unless you have fiber pulled into your house, 2TB is a hell of a lot of data to backup offsite. Even if it is a differential backup, the time it would take to initially back up even 1TB of data on a home internet connection would be measured in weeks.
The proper answer to the original question "how do I backup a 2TB disk" is "there is no good answer".
No matter how stupid, ill-thought, ugly, racist, or sexist a product or standard is named, there exists at least one Slashdot poster who will defend it on the grounds that if you are truly pure, names never matter.
I call this new law The Greasy Nerd Law. It might sound like a silly name, but what, really, is in a name?
I wasn't being serious to suggest we use a kitten or puppy--those are extremes given only to make a point. But something about the design of those boxes needs to be changed to make it look less oppressive.
There are all kinds of ways they could have their cake an eat it too. All of the changes I suggested are simple ones that would go a long ways to improving the website's tone.
I've done an experiment in a wiki article too. Just changed one of the numbers from like "3 gigabits" to "3.9 gigabits" and watched the thing for a whole year until I got bored. It was never changed.
If you are a so-called editor on wikipedia and don't know about the subject you are editing, all the rules in the world won't protect the article from what I did. After all, why would anybody change some random number (which had no citation to back it up anyway) in a article unless they knew what they were talking about? Wikipedia articles are wide open to that kind of psuedo-social-engineering.
ps: the thing was later changed to the proper number when the whole article was revamped.
Why else do you think so many conservative pundits and politicians like to bash "elite west coast liberals", "ivory tower eggheads", "liberal scientists", etc? One should question a political ideology lead by people who dismiss those with education.
Reality, indeed, has a well-known liberal bias.
But that warning box is a huge turn-off. I'd be okay with it if they could "cuteify" it somehow. Maybe put a cartoon puppy dog next to it or something. Right now, the design of those boxes are downright oppressive.
Despite what some would say, design matters. It matters a *lot*. And right now, the design of wikipedia "warning boxes" gives the whole website a pretentious overtone that bleeds into attitudes projected by its editors and contributors.
If those damned [Citation Needed] boxes printed out a picture of a kitten saying "warning kitten says 'Citation Needed'", you'd see a whole lot less power-tripping on wikipedia. Design and presentation matter as much as content. Wikipedia is living proof of it.
Is what is needed. Look, most people understand that they need to take anything they read on wikipedia with a grain of salt; a website that anybody can edit has to be. But see, wikipedia seems to project the aura that it doesn't think it's shit stinks. As a result, you get crap like the warnings for this. Look, who cares if that article isn't well referenced or cited. I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse. We dont need the damn disclaimer, it makes the place feel like it is full of anal retentive blow-hards on power trips. And the best part is, the article I linked to seems to have had at least one of those warning boxes since Sept. 2007! Nobody cares!
I used to remove every one of those stupid warnings when I'd hit an article via google just for spite. Now I stopped caring. When I see one, I just back out and go somewhere else. I certainly wouldn't take the time to do whatever the silly warning box wanted. Obviously I'm not alone or those boxes wouldn't have been around for more than a year.
My ideal wikipedia would not have any of that "citation needed" or "needs more references" bullshit. Just leave the damn thing alone. We all know the thing is never going to be a bastion of truthliness. We all use it for trivia and cases were we really dont care how accurate the information we get is. And if we spot bias, we just might edit it out. Isn't that the point?
Bottom line is wikipedia would be better served by removing every single one of those annoying warning boxes. Every one. They serve no purpose other then to project the aura of pretenciousness.
Nobody in the private industry seems to want to open their pocketbooks. Consumers aren't in the mood either.
Somebody has to do it... the only entity that really can is the government. Would you rather they do nothing and let our economy sink into a huge downward spiral?
I'm curious what your idea is to get our economy moving?
And I've said it elseware...
Our governments (all of them) should be the folks in charge of SSL. In a perfect world, we'd get a free SSL certificate with our drivers license or business license.
That we can agree on. As long as we agree with that statement and balance each other out life should be good. I'll keep you from removing all regulations on the stock market, and you can keep me from regulating the hell out of the telcos (which created a huge mess).
Well, life will be fine as long as I dont call you a fat-cat corporate bastard and I you dont call me a pinko socialist hippie. For too long, *that* has been the problem in our society... we've become so divided that we cannot see that most of us agree with eachother :-)
Your idea is interesting. It is kind of like how you need a chance for the public to comment on public projects via environmental impact statement.
A couple things you'd have to figure out:
1) How do you identify and weight people from the US, and those outside the US?
2) How do you filter out sockpuppets and paid lobbyists. Corporations and governments already game wikipedia and they'd drool at the ability to game "digg-my-house-bill.gov"
How does congress manage documents now? Are they just emailing word documents around as attachments, or is there a modern-ish document management system in place? Is it homebrew, or commercial?
A quick search turned up that "they" might already be working on a solution to your problems.
FDsys
I realized the whole "separate energy from transit" sounded silly as I typed it. Never said my idea was any good.
Still, my point stands. You gotta do something to give the site a feeling that you are part of the community. If you don't, it will be like comment sections in the NYT or your local paper... just a bunch of people typing into thin air. Nobody reads, nobody replies.. just thousands of isolated comments. The outcome of that would be as useless as my suggestion :-)
I doubt drawing hard lines between topics is a good idea, but there has to be some tricks to making it feel "homely". I hope they pull it off successfully--it would be a model for all to follow.
Going after the bush-era full bore might make a lot of far-left democrats happy, but it would instantly piss off the republicans end the so-called "honeymoon". Speaking up too loudly about FISA right now would burn political capital he needs for more immediate plans (sadly).
Would you rather have him use up his political capitol on FISA, or something else? He can't do everything--he has to compromise on some things to move forward.
And if anybody though Obama was gonna go on a witch-hunt after the former administration, you will be dissapointed. He has said numerous times he wants to look forward, not backward.
Or, again, smart politics. Maybe he doesn't want to kick a fuss and burn his political capital over FISA because he figures it will be knocked down in the courts. Maybe if he did kick up a fuss, it would make it even *harder* to remove. Look at the war on drugs--the best way to fix that little problem is to shut the fuck up about it and start funding statewide initiative that chip away at it. The minute Obama starts talking about ending the drug war, the whole process will grind to a halt and become yet another wedge like "gun control" or "abortion".
Or maybe he agrees with parts of it. Who knows? Politics isn't easy.
My hunch on this? The best way to end this "war on drugs" is for him to not lift a finger. States, via their initiative process, are already slowly ending the war for us. As long as Obama lets the whole thing go under the radar, by the time he leaves office the power state governments have will be significantly reduced. The *minute* he talks about reforming drug law, the gig will be up. The pro-drug war people will make it a wedge issue like gun control or abortion and the whole "underground" reform will grind to a halt. The best way he can end the drug war is to just let the process work its way out on its own.
As for the recession, I think we can't place blame anywhere until it is over and we can use hindsight to figure it out. But I'll bet you "regulation was a major problem" isn't right. Regulation is a word used to describe something. You can have good regulation and bad regulation. Partisan politics in this country have eroded our ability to communicate effectivly. They've taken words like "regulation" and assigned negative connotations to them that simply do not belong.
What you probably mean is "the wrong kinds of regulation helped cause the problem". That is a non ideological, non-loaded, non-partisan statement we can all agree on. If we could all work to stop loading words like "regulation" with emotional connotations, we'd go a long ways to ending this stupid partisan bullshit. Put your anger, concern and outrage into the word "wrong", not "regulation". Say "the wrong kind of regulation" and then offer "the right kinds of regulation". Saying "regulation itself is the problem" is a cop-out used by slick politicians to dodge complex issues :-)
But for all we really know your cat, Fluffy, caused this. I know my cat seems awfully content these days. Wonder what they know that we don't?