So you don't support the Republicans based on the single issue of "lack of oversight". You don't support libertarians based on the single issue of economic and social freedom.
I don't support republicans on a whole host of issues. Same with many other parties.
The grandparent post implied he switched party affiliations on the basis of one issue, one which he doesn't even have his facts correct on. Not just switching his vote for one election, but switching his party affiliation, on one issue...an issue that the opposing party (Republican) is quietly on the same page on (except when its a liberal black pursuing the policy instead of a neoconservative white). Hardly a well considered move, and one worth of some derision, whichever side of the isle you happen to be at home on.
(Max Lib Here) Psst... Dude, Clinton deregulated banking structure and exotic investment products. He even apologized about it last week. GWB kept the stupid ball rolling.
True, but Clinton signed the bill repealing Glass-Stiegl because (a) he faced a republican controlled congress with enough conservative democrates to override his veto and (b) by then he'd moved from being a liberal to being very much a conservative-centrist democrat on most issues, including banking regulation. Deregulation was by and large a republican move (with some conservative democrat support), pushed by "small 'L'" libertarians--republicans who have adopted many of the Libertarian lassaiz-faire deregulation stances, persued with even more vigor by the neo-cons under Bush, with consequences we'll be digging ourselves out from under for a generation.
When Obama decided that the only way out of this depression was massive spending programs, I affiliated myself with a different party.
I hope it wasn't the Republicans, since the bailout that was required to prevent a depression directly resulting from years of irresponsible lack of oversight was initiated by George W. Bush and merely completed by Obama.
I also hope it wasn't the Libertarians, since it was their lassaiz-faire philosophy of deregulation and strict adherence to the Chicago School of Economics which infected and drove the Republican deregulation push of the last 20 years that in turn was directly responsible for the unregulated behavior that resulted in the current crash, and would have sent us directly into a second Great Depression had Bush/Obama/Brown not acted as they did.
I'm not sure what that leaves... the Greens? Aryan Nationalists? Socialists? Teabaggers? Communists? The Party of Everything-is-Black-and-White-No-Exceptions-Allowed-and-Anything-That-Doesn't-Fit-My-World-View-Perfectly-Must-Be-a Liberal/Conservative-Conspiracy?
One issue only voting rarely works out--there will be some other issue in your new affiliation that drives you away, like a lone sheep being herded back and forth across the paddock by a playful terrier.
Kind of like everyone blamed Bush for anything that happened in the previous 8 years? Including a few hurricanes?
No one blamed bush for Hurricane Katrina. Just for sitting on his ass when it hit, for appointing unqualified and flagrantly incompetent butt-buddies, excuse me, political henchmen to run FEMA, and for deliberately underfunding and eviscerating FEMA and nearly every other non-military federal agency in order to deliberately make them incapable of carrying out their mandate. Which worked brilliantly in his war against "big government", until we actually needed that government to rescue tens of thousands of people.
Then we got our act together, at many times the expense, and with many times the casualties, than it would have entailed if a competent president had appointed a competent leader of FEMA, and not gutted the agency of funds and logistical support.
And yes, everyone (except the hard-core right) quite correctly blames him for that. And the illegal war he started, and the financial implosion that was a direct result of Republican lassaiz-faire bank regulation (and which the Republicans are trying to continue today by filibustering any meaningful bank reform).
It's bad enough they do these things and then try to make us feel bad for pointing out the error of their ways. It's even more disburbing how utterly incapable of learning from their mistakes, and correcting their ways, these idealogues are. They'd rather be stubbornly wrong regardless of the evidence, than have a hint of flip-flopping on an issue(what most of the rest of us would call "correcting a mistake")
A 2 minute long video, that's a howto. 30 seconds in I got bored. even with this publicity, I think it is unlikely to take off.
Besides, losers who use foursquare are just begging to be stalked. It makes Facebook's abysmal privacy look positively friendly by comparison.
In fact, stalking foursquare losers ("fourstalking") has become quite the pastime, so much so that this attention junkie quit the service, despite craving the attention. A part of me feels sympathy...while another part can't help but feel these narcissists are getting exactly what they deserve.
Longtime? Like people still dying years later? You can get that with normal bombs, in fact you are likely to find those in almost any bombed area just waiting for something to trigger them. Just this month a WWII bomb had to be diffused in munich.
We had a couple of those here in the UK over the past year as well (though thankfully, no one died).
You get the same effect with airplanes. People are still dying (years later) from illness and other health-related problems directly attributable to the 9/11 atrocity, which involved no bombs (nuclear or otherwise), just a couple of big airplanes, a couple of big buildings, and a whole lot of jet fuel.
Tabloid rags? WSJ? Geez, I'm as non-Republican as they come but you sound like an idiot saying that.
He does sound like an idiot, until you read some of what the WSJ has become under Murdoch. Once you have the context, his comments don't sound stupid at all. Sure, the WSJ still has plenty of decent business news, but now it is laced with editorials and "business" news stories that are laced with Murdoch's political agenda... the days of an unbiased, factual WSJ are long gone, more's the pity.
Unfortunately, our perception of the rag lags well behind the change, and will probably do so for quite some time.
Thankfully, for those of us still investing and engaged with the markets, there are better alternatives:
So let them ringfence Murdoch's tripe (even the formerly great WSJ he is wrecking). Please.
Or don't wait for Rupert to take both barrels to his own feet and do it for him: filter his tripe out of Google News yourself (I use both approaches: "take off, nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"):
You should have a ABP stop sign looking thing to the right of your FireFox search box. Click the little arrow to the right of it. Click preferences. Click Add Filter. Paste in:
There are two different objectives here, with (at least) two different processes. The first of these objectives is securing corporate assets. The second is securing sensitive individual information about people with whom the corporation does business. Security processes should ideally serve both objectives, but if that's impossible, then one process (or set of processes) has to be given prioroty over the other.
You are quite right, as far as you go. In fact, there are at least four objectives being served here.
(Disclaimer, I work at a large international investement bank)
3. Kissing corporate executive ass 4. Kissing government regulatory ass
Most of compliance falls into the latter two categories, and is about perception and ticking of boxes in corporate compliance forms far more than protecting assets. In fact, more often than not, the compliance requirements result in technical and bureaucratic logjams that are so onerous that the employees of the company are forced to route around them in order to do their jobs, resulting in far less security than would be in place of the compliance requirements were more sensible (and common sense) and less attorney driven. In either event, neither corporate nor customer security is enhanced...merely the bottom line of government bureaucrats, third party vendors, an entire division of the company whose sole purpose is to prostrate themselves before the ass of said parties, and the most important bottom line of all: ticking off a few annual objectives of some of the higher-up executives so they can "show their impact" and pad their bonus.
Day-to-day operating procedures are routinely decimated by this, but that only affects the bonuses and bottom line of the lower ranks and the day-to-day security of the firm...hardly a concern (after all, if something does happen, there's always someone (far) beneath said executives to fire).
The lesson is that while 1/40th of the population falls under the "supertasker" category, the number that claim to be is much, much higher. My estimate would be 1/4th or more perceive themselves that way. And that's a dangerous perception to have.
The assumption is that these 1 in 40 "supertaskers" are competent drivers when not talking on the phone (or, deity forbid, texting). It seems more likely they are crap drivers under normal conditions, and remain just as shitty behind the wheel while on the phone.
I've seen sober people who drive like their drunk...not because they have some immunity to alcohol, but because they are such completely incompetent drivers that, frankly, alcohol doesn't make a great deal of difference in their case.
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
But the real question is, did our MPs manage to expense the costs of this investigation? Wouldn't want them to miss out on an opportunity to line their pockets while whitewashing the damning evidence against their pet researchers and rubber stamping their highly questionable results. And I say this as one who believes global warming is happening, and is very likely a direct result of human activity and CO2 emissions. That doesn't change the fact that their behaviour was reprehensible, their models flawed, their data still missing and no longer verifiable (it's hard to verify data that has been deleted wholesale), and that as such it should not be the basis for any public policy.
But why let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of a juicy new (carbon) tax?
Okay, a bit confused here. Are you stating three things?
One, recording a show from TV. Two, recording a show from YouTube, Hulu, etc. Three, downloading a copy someone illegally put up online (torrenting)?
I assume ONE and TWO are covered by the Betamax decision, but THREE cannot be justified since it is something totally separate.
They are technically (both in the technology and legal sense of the word), but not to the casual end user.
I once predicted on this very site, somewhere around ten years ago, that trying to shoehorn copyright law into the digital age in a way that would satisfy the content cartels would require laws so draconian as to make the old Soviet Union look positively liberal by comparison. I see I was right.
First of all, "holy grail of transportation engineering"?? Bullshit. The goal of transportation engineering should be to achieve the best balance of maximized capacity, efficiency, and safety.
Absolutely.
This is the holy grail of transport engineering. Everything else is a kludgy workaround we have to use in the meantime.
What they are proposing is adopting something like this. As you so eloquently said: fuck this article.
That is an old tale, but not told the way you wrote it. A (somewhat) corrected version:
A scorpion was travelling across the land when he came to a river. Wanting to get across, he approached a frog to help him get across.
The frog replied "Why should I help you across because you will sting me and we will both drown."
The scorpion said "I promise not to sting you."
They are half-way across the river then the scorpion is startled by a splash of water and stings the frog. The frog cries out as his body begins to paralyze "Why have you done this? You have doomed us both!"
The scorpion replies "What did you expect Frog? This is the middle-east."
One might substitute "This is business" for "This is the middle-east" and be closer to the mark, but in reality, it's more a pissing match between internal teams in Oracle/Sun, with the entrenched Oracle interests putting their newly acquired Sun lackeys in their place. It's a shame, because while I think the open development model of GNU and Linux give it a leg up over Solaris, with the advent of Open Solaris it really looked like we'd have a healthy eco-system with room for both. Thanks Oracle...for nothing.
Your humor is unwittingly accurate factually
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I live in a country that has government-run universal insurance, and I deal *directly* with my doctor, too. I'm not sure why you believe this isn't possible.
Brain-washing and indoctrination.
The funny thing is, your tongue-in-cheek post spoofing the right-wing mentality in the US actually answers the question quite factually right there.
I'm American. I've lived most of my life in the United States, but have lived numerous times, for a number of years, outside of the United States (Germany, France, Japan, Hong Kong, and currently the United Kingdom) and had occasion to use the healthcare system myself, or have one in my family use it, in nearly all those locations (to be pedantic: I did not need to use the healthcare system in Japan).
The US system is by far the worst system I have used, in terms of delivery of service, cost, and effeciency. The healthcare (when provided) was adequate most of the time, but subpar more often than you might imagine (my wife got a staff infection from a routine vaccination that nearly killed her...mainly because the hospitical couldn't figure out how to diagnose such an obvious problem for an indordinate amount of time. And don't get me started on the weeks-long waiting lists for critical tests like angiograms, and the lab test results that show up months late, the lack of follow-through by doctores, and the billing mistakes that are perpetual to the point of absurdity, and always favor the hospital).
In contrast, we've had no trouble whatsoever with the medical system in Germany, France, or Hong Kong (though this was back when Hong Kong was a part of the British Empire, so YMMV these days), and with the NHS in England, only the occasional hassle of having to follow up on getting test results (but at least when you do follow up, they show up within a couple of weeks, unlike Northwestern, where they routinely go AWOL for 6 months or longer).
But try telling that to any of my fellow Americans. They simply will refuse to believe it (and most likely label you a liar for daring to reveal such uncomfortable truths that challenge their world-view of us having the best system in the world). Why? Years of rhetoric and brainwashing, founded on absolutely no facts.
Want another datapoint? Guess where the richest (non-American) people in the world tend to travel to for their private medical treatment. And I'm talking about Richer-Than-God, I can fly in my gold-plated jet anywhere in the world I like (including the US) and spend more than the GDP of a small country on my medical care people.
It isn't the US. Not most of the time, anyway.
The US is a distant fourth, behind France, the UK, and Germany? Why? Because a lot of the leading-edge research Americans (like one who has posted here) think only happens in the US, and excuse our rediculously lousy price/performance ratio on, actually take place and is funded by those countries that are paying 25-50% of what we pay for our substandard medical care.
But then, we're the best in the world. We don't need to learn anything from anyone else, do we? (cue patriotic music and refrains of "God Bless America" here)
So, after all the waiting, will this be the year of Linux on the judge's desktop!?
Don't know what you're waiting for. Those of us with even a modicum of technical savvy have been running Linux on our desktop for years, and remain quite happy doing so. There is in many people's experience nothing that runs on Microsoft for which there isn't an adequate, and often better, free alternative.
Just because you're behind the curve doesn't mean everyone is.
Linux is not a giant. Nothing that anyone does is going to change that any time soon.
Depends on your definition. It runs on vastly more devices than Microsoft or Apple. The fact that most of them aren't PCs may have gone over your head isn't going to change that anytime soon.
Besides, it's rather apparent that the author was probably referring to either IBM or Google as the sleeping giant (or perhaps Nokia, who still remain predominant in cell phone markets outside of the rather provincial and self-absorbed United States), rather than the operating system both happen to have a significant investment in Linux, and are prepared to defend with their own mammoth portfolio of patents (both legitimate and software). SCO should be a lesson to anyone willing to be Microsoft's proxy, and I wouldn't be overly suprised if IBM and/or Google decided it was time to stop batting away Microsoft's proxies and go after the source of the rot itself.
Now that Apple has armed the nukes, all bets are off...at least until the supreme court deals software patents the death-blow they (and those who litigate with them) so richly deserve. Should be entertaining...and with even a sliver of commen sense, most satisfying in its outcome.
Please don't speak in behalf of Buddhists because it shows you don't understand the religion.
You've confused philosophical aspirations and religious teachings with real-world human behavior, motivation, and emotion.
Buddhists can and do become as angry as anyone else in this world. Sri Lanka comes to mind as a recent example of that sort of anger taken to a widespread, murderous level (not to pick on Buddhism, just to point out that Buddhists are as capable of descending into mayhem as any other religious group). It doesn't require me to understand the nuances or aspirations of the Buddhist philosophy to recognize hatred or anger when I see it... and seeking to repress it and accept the world "as it is" appears to be more of an aspiration than an ongoing character trait.
I do know Buddhists who are angry at where the world finds itself, and what the Christian right has done to America (and is currently trying to export to the United Kingdom, among other places). You may want to claim they are not Buddhists because they feel this way, but what gives you the right to deny them their self-identity simply because they fall short of what you believe to be a central tenant of their religion?
* In fact, it's fairly obvious that men and women are not the same. For example, men generally don't get pregnant. Most feminists consider the differences to be minor overall, and certainly no justification for discrimination, but there are still differences.
That is a completely spurious and irrelevant argument. We are discussing women and men's equality under the law as intellectual beings, not reproductive or biological differences that anyone over the age of two is already well aware of and have long since been factored into the discussion.
Women are often sexist. Most often sexist against themselves (remember the recent poll that found 50% of women are inclined to blame the rape victim, usually a woman, for the crime, rather than the perpetrator, usually a man), sometimes (as in Harriot Harmon's case) against men. Either way it is sexism, practiced by a woman, against one gender or another. To argue women cannot be sexist, even if you buy into a politicized, logically indefensible definition such as "sexism can only be applied against women" is nonsense. To argue sexism can only be applied against women by men is even stupider, as some of the worst offendors in propogating sexist behaviours are in fact women, and if those aren't addressed in tandem with male-instigated sexism progress will fail to be made on all fronts.
As for expecting equality from others, but being unwilling to practice equality yourself, well, in that case you really do end up getting exactly what you deserve: dismissal and contempt from those of us who do believe in equality for all, irrespective of gender, race, or anything else. And that most assuradly includes men (including white men) as well as women (or any other of the numerous groups we've chosen to subdivide ourselves into).
"Live and let live" went out the window when the religious right took over US politics, systematically intimidated (and even murdered) doctors for providing reproductive healthcare to women, and organized to force their toxic agenda down the rest of our throats, whether or not we believe in their sky fairy.
You are no longer entitled to "live and let live" from the rest of us. If you ever want it back, you'll have to learn to behave yourselves, and prove your benign intentions toward the rest of society, probably over a span of time at least equal to the last several decades of your sustained attack on that society, as you've systematically dismantled separation of church and state, not to mention most of our other fundamental rights.
Athiests aren't the only ones angry. There are plenty of angry Buddhists, Daoists, Hindus, Muslims, Wiccans, Agnostics, and non-right-wing Christians who are fed up with this, and if the christian right doesn't like it, they need to take a good hard look in the mirror, because they have only themselves and their own excesses to blame.
As for anger and vitriol in general, Athiests may be fed up, and enjoy using their intellects to rhetorically debunk and expose stupid beliefs, which no doubt makes the religious feel foolish and persecuted (but then, the religious often feel persecuted if someone nearby doesn't share their exact belief system), but that is nothing compared to the hatred and bigotry the rest of us experience from the religious right. Compared to them, Athiests are positively touchy-feely mother-earth all-is-good accepting.
Indeed, to hear christians accuse Athiests of "being angry" brings to mind pots, kettles, and the color black (except that the rest of us more resemble a tupperware container than a kettle, in that we're more transparent, and less angry, than the extreme right. Though why that's so, after so many decades of abuse from that quarter, is beyond me. Perhaps because those of us with a secular bent have proven to be far more longsuffering than our religiously frenzied co-citizens).
Sorry, but she's no dipshit female supremicist. A female supremicist would be someone like m Andrea, or Mary Daly, or... (though it's worth noting that most of those are reasonably widely tolerated and defended even within the mainstream of feminism). This is a normal, common feminist definition from a mainstream site - in fact, a site that people on a lot of other feminist website use. It's founded and run by tigtog, of Hoyden About Town, who's about as far from an extremist as you can get.
Sorry, but her definition of sexism as something only men can do to women clearly disqualifies her as a feminist, as it has inherent in it the assumption that men and women are NOT to be treated as equal. If men and women are equal, than women are as capable of being sexist as men (which, in fact, they are, as Harriot Harmon amply demonstrates). Sexism, racism, and every other *ism is a two way street: either party is capable of dishing out hatred and bigotry toward the other, and there is almost always a fringe in every group that does exactly that.
She may or may not be an extremest, but she is certainly NOT a feminist, as made obvious by her fundamental belief that men and women are NOT equal. An activist, maybe, but by the very definition of the word she is not a feminist, no matter what she chooses to call herself.
Remember that sexism, by definition, can only be against women and that it's impossible for women to be sexist against men. Once you understand the standard feminist definition of sexism, things should make a lot more sense, whether you agree with it or not.
OK, some dipship female supremecist who calls herself a feminist makes a boneheaded definition for sexism on her blog, and you paint all feminists with that brush?
Femenism simply means the belief that all people are equal irrespective of gender. Some femenists are angrier or more shrill than others, but the fundamental definition of femenism remains, to wit
feminism/fmnzm/ Show Spelled[fem-uh-niz-uhm] - noun 1. the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. 2. (sometimes initial capital letter) an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women. 3. feminine character.
The problem is that a whole lot of angry men (and eager-to-please women) jumped on a reactionary "not in these-here parts" bandwagen and have deliberately misused the term to mean something it isn't. It makes me wonder if the blogger you linked to isn't really a right-wing troll / agent provocatuer. Certainly her definition of sexism isn't consistent wtih the definition of feminism. Clearly men and women are equal, and equally clearly, sexism goes both ways. It is simply an unfortunate symptom of history, not to mention a whole lot of mysognist cultures (e.g. much of the middle-east, though by no means limited only to that region) and institutions (e.g. the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, Penthouse Magazine, and the list goes on), that the most common experience by far is male sexism against women.
Harriot Harmon is a prime example of the opposite, and her methods should clearly not be supported, but that's no excuse to go labelling feminists as female supremecists, or pointing to some random blog by someone who doesn't even know the meaning of the word as an "authority" on how feminists would define "sexism" or any other term.
Slashdot Mirror
So you don't support the Republicans based on the single issue of "lack of oversight".
You don't support libertarians based on the single issue of economic and social freedom.
I don't support republicans on a whole host of issues. Same with many other parties.
The grandparent post implied he switched party affiliations on the basis of one issue, one which he doesn't even have his facts correct on. Not just switching his vote for one election, but switching his party affiliation, on one issue...an issue that the opposing party (Republican) is quietly on the same page on (except when its a liberal black pursuing the policy instead of a neoconservative white). Hardly a well considered move, and one worth of some derision, whichever side of the isle you happen to be at home on.
(Max Lib Here) Psst... Dude, Clinton deregulated banking structure and exotic investment products. He even apologized about it last week. GWB kept the stupid ball rolling.
True, but Clinton signed the bill repealing Glass-Stiegl because (a) he faced a republican controlled congress with enough conservative democrates to override his veto and (b) by then he'd moved from being a liberal to being very much a conservative-centrist democrat on most issues, including banking regulation. Deregulation was by and large a republican move (with some conservative democrat support), pushed by "small 'L'" libertarians--republicans who have adopted many of the Libertarian lassaiz-faire deregulation stances, persued with even more vigor by the neo-cons under Bush, with consequences we'll be digging ourselves out from under for a generation.
When Obama decided that the only way out of this depression was massive spending programs, I affiliated myself with a different party.
I hope it wasn't the Republicans, since the bailout that was required to prevent a depression directly resulting from years of irresponsible lack of oversight was initiated by George W. Bush and merely completed by Obama.
I also hope it wasn't the Libertarians, since it was their lassaiz-faire philosophy of deregulation and strict adherence to the Chicago School of Economics which infected and drove the Republican deregulation push of the last 20 years that in turn was directly responsible for the unregulated behavior that resulted in the current crash, and would have sent us directly into a second Great Depression had Bush/Obama/Brown not acted as they did.
I'm not sure what that leaves ... the Greens? Aryan Nationalists? Socialists? Teabaggers? Communists? The Party of Everything-is-Black-and-White-No-Exceptions-Allowed-and-Anything-That-Doesn't-Fit-My-World-View-Perfectly-Must-Be-a Liberal/Conservative-Conspiracy?
One issue only voting rarely works out--there will be some other issue in your new affiliation that drives you away, like a lone sheep being herded back and forth across the paddock by a playful terrier.
Kind of like everyone blamed Bush for anything that happened in the previous 8 years? Including a few hurricanes?
No one blamed bush for Hurricane Katrina. Just for sitting on his ass when it hit, for appointing unqualified and flagrantly incompetent butt-buddies, excuse me, political henchmen to run FEMA, and for deliberately underfunding and eviscerating FEMA and nearly every other non-military federal agency in order to deliberately make them incapable of carrying out their mandate. Which worked brilliantly in his war against "big government", until we actually needed that government to rescue tens of thousands of people.
Then we got our act together, at many times the expense, and with many times the casualties, than it would have entailed if a competent president had appointed a competent leader of FEMA, and not gutted the agency of funds and logistical support.
And yes, everyone (except the hard-core right) quite correctly blames him for that. And the illegal war he started, and the financial implosion that was a direct result of Republican lassaiz-faire bank regulation (and which the Republicans are trying to continue today by filibustering any meaningful bank reform).
It's bad enough they do these things and then try to make us feel bad for pointing out the error of their ways. It's even more disburbing how utterly incapable of learning from their mistakes, and correcting their ways, these idealogues are. They'd rather be stubbornly wrong regardless of the evidence, than have a hint of flip-flopping on an issue(what most of the rest of us would call "correcting a mistake")
It's the only way to be sure.
Just don't try to take off from the UK, western Europe, or (soon) Eastern Canada.
"Take off and nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Oh wait, they're in post-soviet Russia...
(Sirens wailing)
That probably wasn't a very good--
[NO CARRIER]
A 2 minute long video, that's a howto.
30 seconds in I got bored.
even with this publicity, I think it is unlikely to take off.
Besides, losers who use foursquare are just begging to be stalked. It makes Facebook's abysmal privacy look positively friendly by comparison.
In fact, stalking foursquare losers ("fourstalking") has become quite the pastime, so much so that this attention junkie quit the service, despite craving the attention. A part of me feels sympathy...while another part can't help but feel these narcissists are getting exactly what they deserve.
Longtime? Like people still dying years later?
You can get that with normal bombs, in fact you are likely to find those in almost any bombed area just waiting for something to trigger them. Just this month a WWII bomb had to be diffused in munich.
We had a couple of those here in the UK over the past year as well (though thankfully, no one died).
You get the same effect with airplanes. People are still dying (years later) from illness and other health-related problems directly attributable to the 9/11 atrocity, which involved no bombs (nuclear or otherwise), just a couple of big airplanes, a couple of big buildings, and a whole lot of jet fuel.
Tabloid rags? WSJ? Geez, I'm as non-Republican as they come but you sound like an idiot saying that.
He does sound like an idiot, until you read some of what the WSJ has become under Murdoch. Once you have the context, his comments don't sound stupid at all. Sure, the WSJ still has plenty of decent business news, but now it is laced with editorials and "business" news stories that are laced with Murdoch's political agenda ... the days of an unbiased, factual WSJ are long gone, more's the pity.
Unfortunately, our perception of the rag lags well behind the change, and will probably do so for quite some time.
Thankfully, for those of us still investing and engaged with the markets, there are better alternatives:
http://www.ft.com/
with various localizations, and without the Murdoch poison:
http://www.ft.com/home/us
http://www.ft.com/home/uk
So let them ringfence Murdoch's tripe (even the formerly great WSJ he is wrecking). Please.
Or don't wait for Rupert to take both barrels to his own feet and do it for him: filter his tripe out of Google News yourself (I use both approaches: "take off, nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"):
1) Bespoke AdBlock Rules
Open FireFox, go here and install AdblockPlus:
http://adblockplus.org/en/installation
You should have a ABP stop sign looking thing to the right of your FireFox search box. Click the little arrow to the right of it. Click preferences. Click Add Filter. Paste in:
news.google.com##*[href*=".foxnews.com"]
Murdoch ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation ) also owns The Wall Street Journal. Add Filter again, and paste in:
news.google.com##*[href*=".wsj.com"]
2) Greasemoneky Script
Get Greasemonkey:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Get Sterc's script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/61397
"Laugh it up" :-)
[ Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=10c7469adda1fdac&hl=en ]
Game, set and match.
Internet Freedom: 1
Copyright Cartels and their shills: 0
There are two different objectives here, with (at least) two different processes. The first of these objectives is securing corporate assets. The second is securing sensitive individual information about people with whom the corporation does business. Security processes should ideally serve both objectives, but if that's impossible, then one process (or set of processes) has to be given prioroty over the other.
You are quite right, as far as you go. In fact, there are at least four objectives being served here.
(Disclaimer, I work at a large international investement bank)
3. Kissing corporate executive ass
4. Kissing government regulatory ass
Most of compliance falls into the latter two categories, and is about perception and ticking of boxes in corporate compliance forms far more than protecting assets. In fact, more often than not, the compliance requirements result in technical and bureaucratic logjams that are so onerous that the employees of the company are forced to route around them in order to do their jobs, resulting in far less security than would be in place of the compliance requirements were more sensible (and common sense) and less attorney driven. In either event, neither corporate nor customer security is enhanced...merely the bottom line of government bureaucrats, third party vendors, an entire division of the company whose sole purpose is to prostrate themselves before the ass of said parties, and the most important bottom line of all: ticking off a few annual objectives of some of the higher-up executives so they can "show their impact" and pad their bonus.
Day-to-day operating procedures are routinely decimated by this, but that only affects the bonuses and bottom line of the lower ranks and the day-to-day security of the firm...hardly a concern (after all, if something does happen, there's always someone (far) beneath said executives to fire).
The lesson is that while 1/40th of the population falls under the "supertasker" category, the number that claim to be is much, much higher. My estimate would be 1/4th or more perceive themselves that way. And that's a dangerous perception to have.
The assumption is that these 1 in 40 "supertaskers" are competent drivers when not talking on the phone (or, deity forbid, texting). It seems more likely they are crap drivers under normal conditions, and remain just as shitty behind the wheel while on the phone.
I've seen sober people who drive like their drunk...not because they have some immunity to alcohol, but because they are such completely incompetent drivers that, frankly, alcohol doesn't make a great deal of difference in their case.
"Supertaskers" ... yeah, right.
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
But the real question is, did our MPs manage to expense the costs of this investigation? Wouldn't want them to miss out on an opportunity to line their pockets while whitewashing the damning evidence against their pet researchers and rubber stamping their highly questionable results. And I say this as one who believes global warming is happening, and is very likely a direct result of human activity and CO2 emissions. That doesn't change the fact that their behaviour was reprehensible, their models flawed, their data still missing and no longer verifiable (it's hard to verify data that has been deleted wholesale), and that as such it should not be the basis for any public policy.
But why let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of a juicy new (carbon) tax?
Okay, a bit confused here. Are you stating three things?
One, recording a show from TV.
Two, recording a show from YouTube, Hulu, etc.
Three, downloading a copy someone illegally put up online (torrenting)?
I assume ONE and TWO are covered by the Betamax decision, but THREE cannot be justified since it is something totally separate.
They are technically (both in the technology and legal sense of the word), but not to the casual end user.
I once predicted on this very site, somewhere around ten years ago, that trying to shoehorn copyright law into the digital age in a way that would satisfy the content cartels would require laws so draconian as to make the old Soviet Union look positively liberal by comparison. I see I was right.
First of all, "holy grail of transportation engineering"?? Bullshit. The goal of transportation engineering should be to achieve the best balance of maximized capacity, efficiency, and safety.
Absolutely.
This is the holy grail of transport engineering. Everything else is a kludgy workaround we have to use in the meantime.
What they are proposing is adopting something like this. As you so eloquently said: fuck this article.
Pass the fries.
That is an old tale, but not told the way you wrote it. A (somewhat) corrected version:
A scorpion was travelling across the land when he came to a river. Wanting to get across, he approached a frog to help him get across.
The frog replied "Why should I help you across because you will sting me and we will both drown."
The scorpion said "I promise not to sting you."
They are half-way across the river then the scorpion is startled by a splash of water and stings the frog. The frog cries out as his body begins to paralyze "Why have you done this? You have doomed us both!"
The scorpion replies "What did you expect Frog? This is the middle-east."
One might substitute "This is business" for "This is the middle-east" and be closer to the mark, but in reality, it's more a pissing match between internal teams in Oracle/Sun, with the entrenched Oracle interests putting their newly acquired Sun lackeys in their place. It's a shame, because while I think the open development model of GNU and Linux give it a leg up over Solaris, with the advent of Open Solaris it really looked like we'd have a healthy eco-system with room for both. Thanks Oracle...for nothing.
I live in a country that has government-run universal insurance, and I deal *directly* with my doctor, too. I'm not sure why you believe this isn't possible.
Brain-washing and indoctrination.
The funny thing is, your tongue-in-cheek post spoofing the right-wing mentality in the US actually answers the question quite factually right there.
I'm American. I've lived most of my life in the United States, but have lived numerous times, for a number of years, outside of the United States (Germany, France, Japan, Hong Kong, and currently the United Kingdom) and had occasion to use the healthcare system myself, or have one in my family use it, in nearly all those locations (to be pedantic: I did not need to use the healthcare system in Japan).
The US system is by far the worst system I have used, in terms of delivery of service, cost, and effeciency. The healthcare (when provided) was adequate most of the time, but subpar more often than you might imagine (my wife got a staff infection from a routine vaccination that nearly killed her...mainly because the hospitical couldn't figure out how to diagnose such an obvious problem for an indordinate amount of time. And don't get me started on the weeks-long waiting lists for critical tests like angiograms, and the lab test results that show up months late, the lack of follow-through by doctores, and the billing mistakes that are perpetual to the point of absurdity, and always favor the hospital).
In contrast, we've had no trouble whatsoever with the medical system in Germany, France, or Hong Kong (though this was back when Hong Kong was a part of the British Empire, so YMMV these days), and with the NHS in England, only the occasional hassle of having to follow up on getting test results (but at least when you do follow up, they show up within a couple of weeks, unlike Northwestern, where they routinely go AWOL for 6 months or longer).
But try telling that to any of my fellow Americans. They simply will refuse to believe it (and most likely label you a liar for daring to reveal such uncomfortable truths that challenge their world-view of us having the best system in the world). Why? Years of rhetoric and brainwashing, founded on absolutely no facts.
Want another datapoint? Guess where the richest (non-American) people in the world tend to travel to for their private medical treatment. And I'm talking about Richer-Than-God, I can fly in my gold-plated jet anywhere in the world I like (including the US) and spend more than the GDP of a small country on my medical care people.
It isn't the US. Not most of the time, anyway.
The US is a distant fourth, behind France, the UK, and Germany? Why? Because a lot of the leading-edge research Americans (like one who has posted here) think only happens in the US, and excuse our rediculously lousy price/performance ratio on, actually take place and is funded by those countries that are paying 25-50% of what we pay for our substandard medical care.
But then, we're the best in the world. We don't need to learn anything from anyone else, do we? (cue patriotic music and refrains of "God Bless America" here)
So, after all the waiting, will this be the year of Linux on the judge's desktop!?
Don't know what you're waiting for. Those of us with even a modicum of technical savvy have been running Linux on our desktop for years, and remain quite happy doing so. There is in many people's experience nothing that runs on Microsoft for which there isn't an adequate, and often better, free alternative.
Just because you're behind the curve doesn't mean everyone is.
Linux is not a giant. Nothing that anyone does is going to change that any time soon.
Depends on your definition. It runs on vastly more devices than Microsoft or Apple. The fact that most of them aren't PCs may have gone over your head isn't going to change that anytime soon.
Besides, it's rather apparent that the author was probably referring to either IBM or Google as the sleeping giant (or perhaps Nokia, who still remain predominant in cell phone markets outside of the rather provincial and self-absorbed United States), rather than the operating system both happen to have a significant investment in Linux, and are prepared to defend with their own mammoth portfolio of patents (both legitimate and software). SCO should be a lesson to anyone willing to be Microsoft's proxy, and I wouldn't be overly suprised if IBM and/or Google decided it was time to stop batting away Microsoft's proxies and go after the source of the rot itself.
Now that Apple has armed the nukes, all bets are off...at least until the supreme court deals software patents the death-blow they (and those who litigate with them) so richly deserve. Should be entertaining...and with even a sliver of commen sense, most satisfying in its outcome.
Please don't speak in behalf of Buddhists because it shows you don't understand the religion.
You've confused philosophical aspirations and religious teachings with real-world human behavior, motivation, and emotion.
Buddhists can and do become as angry as anyone else in this world. Sri Lanka comes to mind as a recent example of that sort of anger taken to a widespread, murderous level (not to pick on Buddhism, just to point out that Buddhists are as capable of descending into mayhem as any other religious group). It doesn't require me to understand the nuances or aspirations of the Buddhist philosophy to recognize hatred or anger when I see it ... and seeking to repress it and accept the world "as it is" appears to be more of an aspiration than an ongoing character trait.
I do know Buddhists who are angry at where the world finds itself, and what the Christian right has done to America (and is currently trying to export to the United Kingdom, among other places). You may want to claim they are not Buddhists because they feel this way, but what gives you the right to deny them their self-identity simply because they fall short of what you believe to be a central tenant of their religion?
* In fact, it's fairly obvious that men and women are not the same. For example, men generally don't get pregnant. Most feminists consider the differences to be minor overall, and certainly no justification for discrimination, but there are still differences.
That is a completely spurious and irrelevant argument. We are discussing women and men's equality under the law as intellectual beings, not reproductive or biological differences that anyone over the age of two is already well aware of and have long since been factored into the discussion.
Women are often sexist. Most often sexist against themselves (remember the recent poll that found 50% of women are inclined to blame the rape victim, usually a woman, for the crime, rather than the perpetrator, usually a man), sometimes (as in Harriot Harmon's case) against men. Either way it is sexism, practiced by a woman, against one gender or another. To argue women cannot be sexist, even if you buy into a politicized, logically indefensible definition such as "sexism can only be applied against women" is nonsense. To argue sexism can only be applied against women by men is even stupider, as some of the worst offendors in propogating sexist behaviours are in fact women, and if those aren't addressed in tandem with male-instigated sexism progress will fail to be made on all fronts.
As for expecting equality from others, but being unwilling to practice equality yourself, well, in that case you really do end up getting exactly what you deserve: dismissal and contempt from those of us who do believe in equality for all, irrespective of gender, race, or anything else. And that most assuradly includes men (including white men) as well as women (or any other of the numerous groups we've chosen to subdivide ourselves into).
What ever happened to "live and let live"?
"Live and let live" went out the window when the religious right took over US politics, systematically intimidated (and even murdered) doctors for providing reproductive healthcare to women, and organized to force their toxic agenda down the rest of our throats, whether or not we believe in their sky fairy.
You are no longer entitled to "live and let live" from the rest of us. If you ever want it back, you'll have to learn to behave yourselves, and prove your benign intentions toward the rest of society, probably over a span of time at least equal to the last several decades of your sustained attack on that society, as you've systematically dismantled separation of church and state, not to mention most of our other fundamental rights.
Athiests aren't the only ones angry. There are plenty of angry Buddhists, Daoists, Hindus, Muslims, Wiccans, Agnostics, and non-right-wing Christians who are fed up with this, and if the christian right doesn't like it, they need to take a good hard look in the mirror, because they have only themselves and their own excesses to blame.
As for anger and vitriol in general, Athiests may be fed up, and enjoy using their intellects to rhetorically debunk and expose stupid beliefs, which no doubt makes the religious feel foolish and persecuted (but then, the religious often feel persecuted if someone nearby doesn't share their exact belief system), but that is nothing compared to the hatred and bigotry the rest of us experience from the religious right. Compared to them, Athiests are positively touchy-feely mother-earth all-is-good accepting.
Indeed, to hear christians accuse Athiests of "being angry" brings to mind pots, kettles, and the color black (except that the rest of us more resemble a tupperware container than a kettle, in that we're more transparent, and less angry, than the extreme right. Though why that's so, after so many decades of abuse from that quarter, is beyond me. Perhaps because those of us with a secular bent have proven to be far more longsuffering than our religiously frenzied co-citizens).
Sorry, but she's no dipshit female supremicist. A female supremicist would be someone like m Andrea, or Mary Daly, or... (though it's worth noting that most of those are reasonably widely tolerated and defended even within the mainstream of feminism). This is a normal, common feminist definition from a mainstream site - in fact, a site that people on a lot of other feminist website use. It's founded and run by tigtog, of Hoyden About Town, who's about as far from an extremist as you can get.
Sorry, but her definition of sexism as something only men can do to women clearly disqualifies her as a feminist, as it has inherent in it the assumption that men and women are NOT to be treated as equal. If men and women are equal, than women are as capable of being sexist as men (which, in fact, they are, as Harriot Harmon amply demonstrates). Sexism, racism, and every other *ism is a two way street: either party is capable of dishing out hatred and bigotry toward the other, and there is almost always a fringe in every group that does exactly that.
She may or may not be an extremest, but she is certainly NOT a feminist, as made obvious by her fundamental belief that men and women are NOT equal. An activist, maybe, but by the very definition of the word she is not a feminist, no matter what she chooses to call herself.
Remember that sexism, by definition, can only be against women and that it's impossible for women to be sexist against men. Once you understand the standard feminist definition of sexism, things should make a lot more sense, whether you agree with it or not.
OK, some dipship female supremecist who calls herself a feminist makes a boneheaded definition for sexism on her blog, and you paint all feminists with that brush?
Femenism simply means the belief that all people are equal irrespective of gender. Some femenists are angrier or more shrill than others, but the fundamental definition of femenism remains, to wit
The problem is that a whole lot of angry men (and eager-to-please women) jumped on a reactionary "not in these-here parts" bandwagen and have deliberately misused the term to mean something it isn't. It makes me wonder if the blogger you linked to isn't really a right-wing troll / agent provocatuer. Certainly her definition of sexism isn't consistent wtih the definition of feminism. Clearly men and women are equal, and equally clearly, sexism goes both ways. It is simply an unfortunate symptom of history, not to mention a whole lot of mysognist cultures (e.g. much of the middle-east, though by no means limited only to that region) and institutions (e.g. the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, Penthouse Magazine, and the list goes on), that the most common experience by far is male sexism against women.
Harriot Harmon is a prime example of the opposite, and her methods should clearly not be supported, but that's no excuse to go labelling feminists as female supremecists, or pointing to some random blog by someone who doesn't even know the meaning of the word as an "authority" on how feminists would define "sexism" or any other term.