Americans work more hours than anyone else. I'm sure IT staff are not immune from weekends at the office or staying until 9 PM trying to fix a killer glitch that will knock out Blackberry service for your users if you don't fix it right away. Other countries have labor laws that limit hours. The trade-off is apparently income.
Doctors complaining about how little they make as residents are whiny little babies that I want to backhand. First, all the poor little doctors say that they didn't enter the field to make money--then immediately start complaining about how little money they make. Then they complain about how they make only $55,000 a year right out of medical school and how that's nothing compared to the 80 hour work-weeks they have to maintain. But they ignore the fact that after they complete their residencies, they're basically guaranteed over $200,000 for the rest of their lives. Unlike law or banking, doctors have job security and high-paying jobs. Furthermore, the government pays the hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars for each resident they take to offset training costs. That's right, we pay for their education.
And assuming that they're all intelligent people, they signed up for this knowing what was going to happen. The question is why they did it anyway if things were so dire. The answer is that things are not so dire, medicine is a very lucrative field for all involved, and that whiners like this really should shut up and go away without comparing themselves to IT folks who will make $60,000 for the rest of their lives with NO job security and crazy long hours.
Sure, Americans work crazily hard but the United States is the world's strongest economy. Without Americans working so hard to create products for the rest of the world, and thereby making money to spend on the stuff the rest of the world makes, the global economy would be a very different place.
Alright, you can score this as flamebait. But IBM, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Sun, and Google dominate the global IT infrastructure, and they're all American companies staffed with the same insanely hard-working SOBs we're talking about. It's entirely possible that the same results can be had without the long work week, but that's how it's being done in America and no other country with their stronger labor laws has been able to compete on a meaningful basis with these companies. (Antitrust explains Microsoft, but name a non-American company that makes a consumer microprocessor worth a damn.)
And all the financial Wall Street whizzes who occasionally collapse our economy (what? we shouldn't have lent money to bad credit risks?!) make billions for the economy. Our insanely overworked lawyers and bankers revolve around the large "real" companies staffed by the insanely-overworked. Bonuses paid by one bank in New York City totaled $16 billion last year. All that money is spent on the global marketplace and makes the world go around.
You can hate the United States--many of you do--but you can't say no to our products or our money. It's great. We're laughing all the way to the bank.
The administrator of a law student forum was sued by two Yale Law School students who claimed they were harassed and defamed by posts on the site. The problem is that none of the posters aside from the administrator had a real name. Furthermore, it looks like the site never kept IP logs except to stop mass-postings so there is nothing to subpoena. There's a real question as to whether the law can require websites to maintain IP logs and whether there is a right to online anonymity.
No. It's an example of a useful patent created by an actual inventor being exerted to get manufacturers to pay them what the invention is worth. Products would be cheaper without paying for patent rights, but that would prevent invention, wouldn't it?
This is the patent system actually doing something useful. CSIRO created the standard in expectation of being able to sell it. Now patent rights are preventing others from stealing it. That's promoting the useful arts.
The grandparent post was arguing that it's always unfortunate that our uncivilized society has to use the Taser at all. I'm arguing that there are valid instances of electrocuting people into compliance.
The rest of the world is on a first-to-file system. This encourages inventors to file their patents as soon as possible. Furthermore, it simplifies ownership of patent rights. Instead of litigating over who first "conceived" of the invention, you look at a piece of paper at the patent office.
The prior art aspect is not changed by moving to a first-to-file system. Pretend A first conceived of an invention but B filed first. B obtains a patent. Person A cannot receive patent rights but he can defeat B's patent if he can proof his case (if he publicized his invention). If A kept it secret, then the world would be no different in regards to whether A or B got the patents because that invention was not going to go on the public domain.
Damages right now are based on a reasonable royalty, at a minimum. The move to limiting damages to the added benefit provided over the prior art is cumbersome and unworkable in my book. But a company sued Microsoft for patent infringement of an aspect of Windows and proves infringement. The judge uses the entire value of the computer system and Windows to set the royalty base. I think it was overturned on appeal because that was just insane.
In conclusion, the first-to-file system is meant to improve parity with the rest of the world's patent systems. It should not affect prior art at all.
It's not. People should listen to the legitimate requests of law enforcement officers without question--such as "Put down the knife and step away from the baby!" But as long as uncivilized people are going to resist arrest, or disobey legitimate police commands, then we're going to need to electrocute them. It's better than shooting them when they refuse to put down the knife.
Modern Western-rooted terrorism still has a long way to go before it matches up with modern Middle Eastern terrorism. Sharia law and Muslim states where women are stoned for adultery, where limbs are amputated for petty thefts, where not practicing Islam is a capital crime, where executions are by beheading, where courts are religious, where women have to wear burkas, where women can't go to school, where women are locked into a burning schoolhouse because male firefighters can't be allowed to see them without a burka, where suicide bombing civilians in malls, trains and buses is considered okay if not a religious duty, where torture and beatings are considered par for the course, where prisoners routinely die from neglect and starvation, where gassing your own citizens is a good idea in governance, where developing a nuclear bomb to exterminate Jews is a legitimate government goal, where the connected are allowed to walk around and rape anyone they want without fear of recourse, where the Internet is not allowed, where pornography can get you killed, where dancing, music and movies are illegal, where freedom of speech is at the whim of the religious leaders, where rule is by diktat, and where religion is state are much, much worse than Western nations if you're concerned with liberty and security.
Call me a flamer, or a troll (see my posting history to see what Slashdot does to people who disagree) but unless you're moving from Germany or America to Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, you've already voted on this issue with your feet.
You make a good point that alternative employment is lacking in these foreign countries, and that's why I've always been critical to anti-globalization activists. But there should be no competition on who is most willing to get maimed for a buck.
There has to be some basic standards of humanity we have to afford the rest of the world. If we're saving money by sending work abroad by decreasing the safety standards, or by polluting more and costing lives that way, then we're basically buying human lives. In other words, the limbs that are lost because we want to save a dime on our Mattel toys actually become fungible goods on the market place. I have a problem with that, as it implies their lives are less valuable than ours.
We need to set comprehensive standards across the world about a basic level of human rights based on safety and not economics. Instead of saying we need to pay workers at least ten dollars an hour, we need to say that we need to not dump heavy metals into their water supplies at dangerous levels. And this should be non-mandatory. Even if the workers happily would take the higher pay along with the pollution, that's not an option we should give them because we don't give that choice to our workers. Otherwise, there is going to be a race to the bottom as world workers compete on who is most willing to die to make a buck.
Ethical matters are usually handled by the state bar in which the federal court sits, or by the state bar in which the attorney in question works in. Federal courts apply state laws and perhaps even their own when decided if an ethical violation exists. However, the actual punishment of an attorney is by the state bar. The most a federal court could do is to kick the guy out of practicing in front of federal courts.
States want to regulate their lawyers. Otherwise, attorneys would just become registered "federal" attorneys under one federal bar, be able to practice in all fifty states, and the fifty bar associations would lose their power. Then the small bars such as Wisconsin get screwed because no one would practice Wisconsin law in particular.
"But there's no consensus as to the best way to get rid of the physical kilogram."
New technology may be able to help. By growing silicon crystals in a near-perfect lattice, and being able to form an almost perfect spheres in this silicon lattice, and therefore being able to figure out how many silicon atoms there are in the sphere, scientists want to redefine the kilogram as a precise number of silicon atoms. Then anybody who can count out that number of silicon atoms (or a known fraction thereof) can have their own reference mass without going to Paris.
I would be careful about relying on the testimony of technicians. The United States was lulled into the first Gulf War partially on the testimony of a woman saying Iraqi troops were breaking into Kuwaiti hospitals and stomping infants in incubators to death. It later turned out the woman was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, and made the whole thing up as part of a systematic Kuwaiti campaign to get America to attack their invaders.
That's not to say the charges against China are without basis. I'm just advocating some skepticism about people who may have a grudge against China, or have a good reason to lie about torture back home (so they can get asylum and citizenship here in the United States).
The theory in passing the laws seemed to be that there was no way of actually catching a significant amount of copyright infringers and suing them, so the fines were really high to provide a huge disincentive to steal. In real life, it's getting to the point where the RIAA/MPAA is just suing everyone. The laws need an updating.
There's no country where you can drink the water without the risk of illness. I guess you'd have to live in a world with no germs, or animals that carry germs and then pee or crap into lakes. Or organic material that rot, then fall into the river along with all the germs in it. Something like Antarctica.
It's not pollution stopping me from drinking; it's bacteria that live everywhere in the world.
The ideas in your head are not illegal, and neither are the specs IF you just designed a machine like that on your own, and kept it to yourself. If you tried to sell the product, you'd infringe patents. If you tried to sell the resulting TV shows, you'd violate copyrights. However, if you reverse-engineered the DirecTV system to obtain your system, then you are violating their trade secrets, copyrights, and the like.
This is the basis for "clean room" engineering. One team reverse-engineers a product and writes a spec. The spec is reviewed by lawyers and engineers to make sure there's nothing trade secret in there. The spec is then giving to another team of engineers who try to create a product from the spec with no input from the first two teams. If possible, this is fine (as long as you avoid patent issues).
There's nothing wrong with coming up with your own stuff. It's copying other people's stuff that gets you in trouble.
You know how you never want to be the first to acquire new technology because of the high prices? Right now, the dude is targeting the military with this product at this price. He sold out his entire 1,000 bottle stock at a military trade show. Just like GPS, night vision, and sat phones, the prices will come down as the armed forces acquire these things. Eventually, these suckers will become commodities. I hike a lot. I would love to have one of these things because right now, you have to either carry lots of water, or plan routes that go by running water sources so you can boil the water or filter/iodine it.
NTP actually created a product in the eighties that embodied push e-mail. As you can imagine from the time period, it was not very marketable. You're right they didn't market a modern product, however. In other words, they weren't competing head-to-head with RIM, and this really bothers people.
I think that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. RIM had been walking around suing companies for having a miniature keyboard on their mobile devices. If you believe NTP, it was this blatant patent trolling that led NTP to file its own suit. (How would NTP explain this one?) Furthermore, RIM refused to settle for $10 million, and its courtroom behavior was horribly bad. However, once it was obvious that NTP could get injunctive relief and shut down all Blackberry service in the United States, RIM had no leverage at all and had to pay an extortionate amount to settle before they went bankrupt.
"Wow. That logic is shocking. I just have to repeat it to actually believe that some executive thought this up: Consumers want songs individually, so lets package 3 songs together with a ringtone and double the price!"
What you describe is actually a brilliant idea. In economics, it's called bundling and it's commonplace. For instance, a sandwich at McDonald's will cost four bucks and an Extra-Value Meal with soda and fries costs five fifty. It costs four bucks to buy the soda and fries separately. Lots of people only want to buy the sandwich, but after you paid four dollars for the sandwich, it's only two more dollars to get fries and soda! If the sandwich was priced at three dollars, the overall amount of money paid to McDonald's would drop. Effectively, they bundle the sandwich that people really want to soda and fries that people kind of want.
Are these liberties we have given up "essential," and is the protection the new laws provide "temporary"?
In war time, we give up liberties. We ration food and gas. We censor the news. We read soldier's mail. We even interned the Japanese.
Make no mistake: we are at war. The question is whether we will respond and win, or we will wring our hands about liberties until we are all dead from a nuclear bomb blast.
Dude. The country twice elected Bill Clinton right before they elected King George. Clinton was a poor kid from the South whose real dad died, and whose step-dad was a mean, drunk SOB who beat his mom up all the time. Life gave him no handouts, and he had to earn everything he ever had. From this background, he became an Oxford scholar. He went to law school and was voted governor of Arkansas. On the national TV circuit, his obvious intelligence and warmth made him the closest thing a President got to being a rock star since Kennedy.
I have faith in my country that it will find its way again. We are not always prone to electing the rich and powerful only because they are rich and powerful. We rejected Perot, and we'll reject the next guy who wants to be President because his Daddy was President.
What's really scary is the reaction from the Muslim posters on Facebook.
The group in question simply objected to extremist Islam because they were killing civilians with car bombs and beheading innocents. The group directly confronted what it thought was a politically-correct reluctance to challenge extremist Muslims who wanted to kill Westerners and infidels. In response, lots of pro-Islam groups started to suggest killing Jews and Westerners. Existing Muslim groups (roughly paraphrasing, groups titled "Israel is not a real country, delist it") began to spout extremist threats. Even moderates on those boards refused to disavow terrorism, beheadings, car bombs, crashing airplanes into skyscrapers, killing Jews, and similar violence. The moderates said they were against violence, but you have to understand the kind of threats the Muslims are facing.
Anyone who dug into this would see the Muslim supporters on Facebook tend to be far more extreme and just flat-out crazy than anyone on "Fuck Islam." But it is too politically-sensitive to say this, thereby proving the point of the Fuck Islam groups.
The dude can't even pull the battery out of the iPhone because, you know, it's welded in. And who's really going to remember to put the iPhone into airplane mode when he's just going to another country?
Slashdot Mirror
Americans work more hours than anyone else. I'm sure IT staff are not immune from weekends at the office or staying until 9 PM trying to fix a killer glitch that will knock out Blackberry service for your users if you don't fix it right away. Other countries have labor laws that limit hours. The trade-off is apparently income.
Doctors complaining about how little they make as residents are whiny little babies that I want to backhand. First, all the poor little doctors say that they didn't enter the field to make money--then immediately start complaining about how little money they make. Then they complain about how they make only $55,000 a year right out of medical school and how that's nothing compared to the 80 hour work-weeks they have to maintain. But they ignore the fact that after they complete their residencies, they're basically guaranteed over $200,000 for the rest of their lives. Unlike law or banking, doctors have job security and high-paying jobs. Furthermore, the government pays the hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars for each resident they take to offset training costs. That's right, we pay for their education.
And assuming that they're all intelligent people, they signed up for this knowing what was going to happen. The question is why they did it anyway if things were so dire. The answer is that things are not so dire, medicine is a very lucrative field for all involved, and that whiners like this really should shut up and go away without comparing themselves to IT folks who will make $60,000 for the rest of their lives with NO job security and crazy long hours.
Sure, Americans work crazily hard but the United States is the world's strongest economy. Without Americans working so hard to create products for the rest of the world, and thereby making money to spend on the stuff the rest of the world makes, the global economy would be a very different place.
Alright, you can score this as flamebait. But IBM, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Sun, and Google dominate the global IT infrastructure, and they're all American companies staffed with the same insanely hard-working SOBs we're talking about. It's entirely possible that the same results can be had without the long work week, but that's how it's being done in America and no other country with their stronger labor laws has been able to compete on a meaningful basis with these companies. (Antitrust explains Microsoft, but name a non-American company that makes a consumer microprocessor worth a damn.)
And all the financial Wall Street whizzes who occasionally collapse our economy (what? we shouldn't have lent money to bad credit risks?!) make billions for the economy. Our insanely overworked lawyers and bankers revolve around the large "real" companies staffed by the insanely-overworked. Bonuses paid by one bank in New York City totaled $16 billion last year. All that money is spent on the global marketplace and makes the world go around.
You can hate the United States--many of you do--but you can't say no to our products or our money. It's great. We're laughing all the way to the bank.
http://www.abovethelaw.com/anthony_ciolli/
The administrator of a law student forum was sued by two Yale Law School students who claimed they were harassed and defamed by posts on the site. The problem is that none of the posters aside from the administrator had a real name. Furthermore, it looks like the site never kept IP logs except to stop mass-postings so there is nothing to subpoena. There's a real question as to whether the law can require websites to maintain IP logs and whether there is a right to online anonymity.
No. It's an example of a useful patent created by an actual inventor being exerted to get manufacturers to pay them what the invention is worth. Products would be cheaper without paying for patent rights, but that would prevent invention, wouldn't it?
This is the patent system actually doing something useful. CSIRO created the standard in expectation of being able to sell it. Now patent rights are preventing others from stealing it. That's promoting the useful arts.
The grandparent post was arguing that it's always unfortunate that our uncivilized society has to use the Taser at all. I'm arguing that there are valid instances of electrocuting people into compliance.
Let me try to address your concerns one by one.
The rest of the world is on a first-to-file system. This encourages inventors to file their patents as soon as possible. Furthermore, it simplifies ownership of patent rights. Instead of litigating over who first "conceived" of the invention, you look at a piece of paper at the patent office.
The prior art aspect is not changed by moving to a first-to-file system. Pretend A first conceived of an invention but B filed first. B obtains a patent. Person A cannot receive patent rights but he can defeat B's patent if he can proof his case (if he publicized his invention). If A kept it secret, then the world would be no different in regards to whether A or B got the patents because that invention was not going to go on the public domain.
Damages right now are based on a reasonable royalty, at a minimum. The move to limiting damages to the added benefit provided over the prior art is cumbersome and unworkable in my book. But a company sued Microsoft for patent infringement of an aspect of Windows and proves infringement. The judge uses the entire value of the computer system and Windows to set the royalty base. I think it was overturned on appeal because that was just insane.
In conclusion, the first-to-file system is meant to improve parity with the rest of the world's patent systems. It should not affect prior art at all.
It's not. People should listen to the legitimate requests of law enforcement officers without question--such as "Put down the knife and step away from the baby!" But as long as uncivilized people are going to resist arrest, or disobey legitimate police commands, then we're going to need to electrocute them. It's better than shooting them when they refuse to put down the knife.
Forget scrolls. I misread the summary as "which got Bill Gates jizzed" and almost puked. I was thinking how pathetic life was before Internet porn.
Modern Western-rooted terrorism still has a long way to go before it matches up with modern Middle Eastern terrorism. Sharia law and Muslim states where women are stoned for adultery, where limbs are amputated for petty thefts, where not practicing Islam is a capital crime, where executions are by beheading, where courts are religious, where women have to wear burkas, where women can't go to school, where women are locked into a burning schoolhouse because male firefighters can't be allowed to see them without a burka, where suicide bombing civilians in malls, trains and buses is considered okay if not a religious duty, where torture and beatings are considered par for the course, where prisoners routinely die from neglect and starvation, where gassing your own citizens is a good idea in governance, where developing a nuclear bomb to exterminate Jews is a legitimate government goal, where the connected are allowed to walk around and rape anyone they want without fear of recourse, where the Internet is not allowed, where pornography can get you killed, where dancing, music and movies are illegal, where freedom of speech is at the whim of the religious leaders, where rule is by diktat, and where religion is state are much, much worse than Western nations if you're concerned with liberty and security.
Call me a flamer, or a troll (see my posting history to see what Slashdot does to people who disagree) but unless you're moving from Germany or America to Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, you've already voted on this issue with your feet.
You make a good point that alternative employment is lacking in these foreign countries, and that's why I've always been critical to anti-globalization activists. But there should be no competition on who is most willing to get maimed for a buck.
There has to be some basic standards of humanity we have to afford the rest of the world. If we're saving money by sending work abroad by decreasing the safety standards, or by polluting more and costing lives that way, then we're basically buying human lives. In other words, the limbs that are lost because we want to save a dime on our Mattel toys actually become fungible goods on the market place. I have a problem with that, as it implies their lives are less valuable than ours.
We need to set comprehensive standards across the world about a basic level of human rights based on safety and not economics. Instead of saying we need to pay workers at least ten dollars an hour, we need to say that we need to not dump heavy metals into their water supplies at dangerous levels. And this should be non-mandatory. Even if the workers happily would take the higher pay along with the pollution, that's not an option we should give them because we don't give that choice to our workers. Otherwise, there is going to be a race to the bottom as world workers compete on who is most willing to die to make a buck.
Fair competition should not be on this level.
This is a federal suit.
Ethical matters are usually handled by the state bar in which the federal court sits, or by the state bar in which the attorney in question works in. Federal courts apply state laws and perhaps even their own when decided if an ethical violation exists. However, the actual punishment of an attorney is by the state bar. The most a federal court could do is to kick the guy out of practicing in front of federal courts.
States want to regulate their lawyers. Otherwise, attorneys would just become registered "federal" attorneys under one federal bar, be able to practice in all fifty states, and the fifty bar associations would lose their power. Then the small bars such as Wisconsin get screwed because no one would practice Wisconsin law in particular.
"But there's no consensus as to the best way to get rid of the physical kilogram."
New technology may be able to help. By growing silicon crystals in a near-perfect lattice, and being able to form an almost perfect spheres in this silicon lattice, and therefore being able to figure out how many silicon atoms there are in the sphere, scientists want to redefine the kilogram as a precise number of silicon atoms. Then anybody who can count out that number of silicon atoms (or a known fraction thereof) can have their own reference mass without going to Paris.
I would be careful about relying on the testimony of technicians. The United States was lulled into the first Gulf War partially on the testimony of a woman saying Iraqi troops were breaking into Kuwaiti hospitals and stomping infants in incubators to death. It later turned out the woman was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, and made the whole thing up as part of a systematic Kuwaiti campaign to get America to attack their invaders.
That's not to say the charges against China are without basis. I'm just advocating some skepticism about people who may have a grudge against China, or have a good reason to lie about torture back home (so they can get asylum and citizenship here in the United States).
The theory in passing the laws seemed to be that there was no way of actually catching a significant amount of copyright infringers and suing them, so the fines were really high to provide a huge disincentive to steal. In real life, it's getting to the point where the RIAA/MPAA is just suing everyone. The laws need an updating.
There's no country where you can drink the water without the risk of illness. I guess you'd have to live in a world with no germs, or animals that carry germs and then pee or crap into lakes. Or organic material that rot, then fall into the river along with all the germs in it. Something like Antarctica.
It's not pollution stopping me from drinking; it's bacteria that live everywhere in the world.
The ideas in your head are not illegal, and neither are the specs IF you just designed a machine like that on your own, and kept it to yourself. If you tried to sell the product, you'd infringe patents. If you tried to sell the resulting TV shows, you'd violate copyrights. However, if you reverse-engineered the DirecTV system to obtain your system, then you are violating their trade secrets, copyrights, and the like.
This is the basis for "clean room" engineering. One team reverse-engineers a product and writes a spec. The spec is reviewed by lawyers and engineers to make sure there's nothing trade secret in there. The spec is then giving to another team of engineers who try to create a product from the spec with no input from the first two teams. If possible, this is fine (as long as you avoid patent issues).
There's nothing wrong with coming up with your own stuff. It's copying other people's stuff that gets you in trouble.
You know how you never want to be the first to acquire new technology because of the high prices? Right now, the dude is targeting the military with this product at this price. He sold out his entire 1,000 bottle stock at a military trade show. Just like GPS, night vision, and sat phones, the prices will come down as the armed forces acquire these things. Eventually, these suckers will become commodities. I hike a lot. I would love to have one of these things because right now, you have to either carry lots of water, or plan routes that go by running water sources so you can boil the water or filter/iodine it.
There's no one to declare war against this time. What are you going to do, get Congress to declare war on extremist Muslims around the world?
NTP actually created a product in the eighties that embodied push e-mail. As you can imagine from the time period, it was not very marketable. You're right they didn't market a modern product, however. In other words, they weren't competing head-to-head with RIM, and this really bothers people.
I think that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. RIM had been walking around suing companies for having a miniature keyboard on their mobile devices. If you believe NTP, it was this blatant patent trolling that led NTP to file its own suit. (How would NTP explain this one?) Furthermore, RIM refused to settle for $10 million, and its courtroom behavior was horribly bad. However, once it was obvious that NTP could get injunctive relief and shut down all Blackberry service in the United States, RIM had no leverage at all and had to pay an extortionate amount to settle before they went bankrupt.
"Wow. That logic is shocking. I just have to repeat it to actually believe that some executive thought this up: Consumers want songs individually, so lets package 3 songs together with a ringtone and double the price!"
What you describe is actually a brilliant idea. In economics, it's called bundling and it's commonplace. For instance, a sandwich at McDonald's will cost four bucks and an Extra-Value Meal with soda and fries costs five fifty. It costs four bucks to buy the soda and fries separately. Lots of people only want to buy the sandwich, but after you paid four dollars for the sandwich, it's only two more dollars to get fries and soda! If the sandwich was priced at three dollars, the overall amount of money paid to McDonald's would drop. Effectively, they bundle the sandwich that people really want to soda and fries that people kind of want.
Are these liberties we have given up "essential," and is the protection the new laws provide "temporary"?
In war time, we give up liberties. We ration food and gas. We censor the news. We read soldier's mail. We even interned the Japanese.
Make no mistake: we are at war. The question is whether we will respond and win, or we will wring our hands about liberties until we are all dead from a nuclear bomb blast.
Dude. The country twice elected Bill Clinton right before they elected King George. Clinton was a poor kid from the South whose real dad died, and whose step-dad was a mean, drunk SOB who beat his mom up all the time. Life gave him no handouts, and he had to earn everything he ever had. From this background, he became an Oxford scholar. He went to law school and was voted governor of Arkansas. On the national TV circuit, his obvious intelligence and warmth made him the closest thing a President got to being a rock star since Kennedy.
I have faith in my country that it will find its way again. We are not always prone to electing the rich and powerful only because they are rich and powerful. We rejected Perot, and we'll reject the next guy who wants to be President because his Daddy was President.
What's really scary is the reaction from the Muslim posters on Facebook.
The group in question simply objected to extremist Islam because they were killing civilians with car bombs and beheading innocents. The group directly confronted what it thought was a politically-correct reluctance to challenge extremist Muslims who wanted to kill Westerners and infidels. In response, lots of pro-Islam groups started to suggest killing Jews and Westerners. Existing Muslim groups (roughly paraphrasing, groups titled "Israel is not a real country, delist it") began to spout extremist threats. Even moderates on those boards refused to disavow terrorism, beheadings, car bombs, crashing airplanes into skyscrapers, killing Jews, and similar violence. The moderates said they were against violence, but you have to understand the kind of threats the Muslims are facing.
Anyone who dug into this would see the Muslim supporters on Facebook tend to be far more extreme and just flat-out crazy than anyone on "Fuck Islam." But it is too politically-sensitive to say this, thereby proving the point of the Fuck Islam groups.
Moderate away, my friends.
The dude can't even pull the battery out of the iPhone because, you know, it's welded in. And who's really going to remember to put the iPhone into airplane mode when he's just going to another country?