If they said they would not post anything inappropriate for television, then that implies a screening process. If they didn't have a screening process at all, then they should have. It's not like they were just providing a generic technology to just allow people to share information. They sponsored and anti-Bush ad campaign. To say, "Oh, we didn't realize somebody submitted something extremely offensive and distasteful" is just disingenuous.
If you had a site that was widely known to be Anti-Semitic, and started an art contest, and said "we'll post everything unless it's inappropriate" (implying that you will indeed be screening the entries), and you posted an entry that was "Kill all Jews"-themed, even if you took it down when somebody complained, I don't think you could really claim to have clean hands in the matter. I think [Just my opinion here] that the MoveOn.org people were probably rather pleased with the Hitler analogy and found posting it rather amusing. Or are you going to argue that they are actually just an apolitical Peace 'n' Love group? In any case, if it's your website, you've going to have to take some responsibility for its content. A good example is Groklaw. It gets tons of posts, but PJ still manages to keep the language pretty clean because she doesn't like profanity.
This is one of the most ridiculous cases of outrage I've seen in the past year.
It's an election year. You'll se a lot more on both sides before it's over.
You're the second person in this thread to defend the Democrats from goldspider, yet I do not see him mentioning the Democracitc party at all. He said moveon.org was a hate group, and pointed to the fact that they posted an ad submission that compared Pres. Bush to Adolf Hitler. They said they would post "anything appropriate for television," but honestly, that's just a cop out? By saying they would just post anything, they were inviting their fans to puke out extremist garbage like that and get it posted without having to take responsibility for the content themselves. If you're going to post crap like that on your website, you don't get to disavow responsibility after the fact. It's your site. Take responsibility for the content, especially if you admittedly have a screening process in place.
Your attitude reeks of immaturity and short-sightedness. I have no more respect or sympathy for people like you than I have for the content industy they pretend to be fighting. Perhaps the RIAA really does see a failing business model and wants desperately to hold on to it instead of innovating their business, but the fact remains that the member companies hold the rights to their repsective publications, and have the right to dictate how they will be distributed. I do not believe for a minute that people "trading" music online are some kind of band of freedom fighters pursuing the greater public good. They are freeloaders groping for any lame justification for their illegal activities, and they are doing at least as much to destroy my personal liberties as any "megacorp" because they lend credibility to the RIAA's cries of widespread copyright abuses. In fact, I dare say that when the RIAA execs pray to their Dark Lord Satan every night, they thank His Evilness for sending you and your friends to give them a plausible legal basis for propping up their failing business model. If you want to really do something to protect our liberties, stop illegally distributing copyrighted works and encourage all of your online buddies to do the same, and the next time the RIAA goes to congress whining about how they need new legislation to enforce its business model, it will be laughed out of the city because the congressmen will rightly perceive that they are asking to solve a non-existant problem. Distributing copyrighted music is not your right, and as long as you keep doing it, you are contributing to the perception, right or wrong, that the problem is so overwhelming that draconian legislation is the only solution. If you want to keep technology legally unencumbered, demonstrate that you are responsible enough to handle it, and your opponents will be left toothless. I personally do not want to lose the ability to operate my hardware and software as I please just because you're too cheap to drop a few bucks on your assembly line bubblegum pop.
Just count the clear, obvious votes and Gore wins.
See, the problem is, you can't remove the politics from the recount. What is a "clear, obvious vote?" I saw the pictures, and I've certainly heard this argument before, and ike I said, the only overvotes I consider compelling are the write-ins with the same candidate, and I have not seen any source claim that those alone would change the result. I've only seen claims that the overvotes would throw it to Gore, with a couple of the "clearest" examples thrown in. When you start counting overvotes because there are extra marks on the ballot (i.e., "it looks like he crossed one out"), you have to make an objective standard for what marks clearly indicate voter intent, and make sure those apply to every overvote, and it once again devolves into a charged political discussion with each side vying for its favorite standard. The fact that they took a photo of one ballot that seems to clearly indicate a vote for Gore does not mean anything. Don't buy it? It's exactly what happened with the chad issue. The candidates fought for the "clear intent" standard they thought would be most beneficial to themselves. Ironically, Gore got his way, and Bush's margin increased. Even more ironically, if Bush had gotten his way, Gore would have won by literally a couple of votes, which is a good illustration of my point that the Florida results were easily within the sampling error.
Sure, democracy isn't perfect. Nonetheless, I don't see why the Bush camp resists it so strongly.
That's just posturing, as I could as easily say the same of Democrats, and that Gore tried to steal Florida after he lost it legitimately. I maintain that nobody knows who would have won Florida had the system been perfect (and that's even putting aside arguments over what the "perfect" system is), but I believe that the evidence supports Bush as the best guess. Anything that purports to have a more definite answer than that is supsect in my opinion.
Seven Justices of the Court agree that there are constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that demand a remedy. See post, at 6 (Souter, J., dissenting); post, at 2, 15 (Breyer, J., dissenting). The only disagreement is as to the remedy.
I have to grant that I was wrong in that Ginsburg was not one of the dissenting two, though ultimately she did find for Gore.
You never had to argue with me, and namecalling hardly makes you appear more credible. However, if you disagree that the 17th Amendment dilluted Federalism and have an intelligent argument to make, feel free to state it. In any case, maybe I should have been more explicit. You cited "Congress," which is composed of two bodies. The House represents the people, as it was designed to. The Senate was to be elected by the States and was to represent the States' interests. So, like I said, we used to have a Senate to represent the States. The 17th Amendment turned the Senate into just another popularly-elected body, thus dilluting Federalism. If you have an intelligent contention with any of this, please post it for all the world to see. If all you have left in your debate arsenal is crude epithets, please let those loose too, as they serve to prove that I have won the point.
Look at the sources the green party cites. It isn't just their opinion. This is all well documented. I disagree with their overall thesis that Nader didn't hurt Gore; I simply googled, and theirs was the best page I found to summarize various issues.
The only "voter intent" issue that I find absolutely compelling is where somebody filled in a bubble and also wrote in the same candidate. I have not seen any source that has asserted that there were enough of those specifically to throw it to Gore. Everything else leaves some ambiguity, and I use the same thesis for an inability to follow simple directions as I use for not looking before you punch.
As the dissenting justices pointed out, the US Supreme Court did not do what it was designed to do. It rendered a decision on state law, with no federal/constitutional issue entering into the question. They were outside their jurisdiction
There have been lots of really long discussions about this, and I will tell you that I am a strong supporter of Federalism, and feel that it is has become far too dilluted. However, consider this: there are two very conservative justices (expect them to automatically rule for Bush) and two very liberal justices (expect them to automatically rule for Gore). The other 5 are moderates. 7 justices agreed that the Florida Supreme Court was in the wrong (excluding only the two liberals we expect to automatically find for Gore based on political ideology). These 7 justices agreed that there was an issue of federal law (and, had the tables been turned, I expect the other two would have ruled the same, with the two conservatives dissenting). The ruling that split 5-4 was to stop the recounting and force Florida to immediately certify a winner. The end result was the 5 agreed with me (Florida had already recounted and needed to certify its winner and appoint delegates) and 4 agreed with you (Florida could recount until its Supreme Court liked the result), which meant that Gore lost.
The butterfly ballot was set up so that uncareful Republicans would have no trouble.
If you're implying that this ballot was somehow rigged, I would remind you that the county official who certified this ballot was a Democrat, so I would be inclined to call it an honest mistake. Hopefully, we learned from it.
We used to have a Senate for the states. Thanks to the 17th Amendment, we don't anymore. And like I mentioned in my earlier post, do you honestly believe that you would be better represented by a President elected popularly? If so, you're certainly entitled to that opinion, but I don't see any logic to the premise.
Also, if you're going to accuse me of "borrowing a clue," I hope you've studied the Constitution and Supreme Court cases extensively and substantially more than I have, or your claim is just BS.
Exactly, and the GP's call for elimination of "winner takes all" voting would require the federal government to mandate to the states how to run their elections, which is a gross violation of federalism. The system works very nicely like it is. The states decide how to elect delegates to the Electoral College, meaning that the states get to decide how they will best be represented. LIke you said, the Constitution doesn't mandate "winner takes all," and it shouldn't.
Gee, the freakin' Green Party of California decided that Bush didn't win the election legitimately? There's a reliable source I know I can trust because they have no political agenda. But I know you're wrong, because somebody from the John Birch society told me so.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, intelligent people recognize that the results of the election were within the margin of statistical error, and both candidates knew that, so both candidates were playing every political card they could to try to make the most of the sampling error. In the meantime, the US Supreme Court did exactly what it was designed to do: it made a final and binding decision during a period of national crisis by telling Florida, "Sorry, you don't get to change the rules after the fact." Honestly, it's not like Al Gore was some kind of Righteous Crusader for preserving the Integrity of the Vote. He wanted recounts in select counties where he thought he could pick up a net gain. He wanted to win. He just never managed to get the recounts to come out in his favor.
As for the butterfly ballot, I'm sure that some people who intended to vote for Gore ended up voting for Buchannan, but it would be highly illegal to just assign a certain number of those votes to Gore. In any case, if your vote isn't important enough to you that you're willing to make sure you're punching the right hole, then you deserve for your vote to be a random function. Or do you suggest that we just give all of the Buchannan votes to Gore, to make sure that nobody gets disenfranchised?
Note to liberals: That election was 4 years ago. Wipe your tears, quit the sobbing and get over it.
Not a big fan or the Constitution, are you? I love the myth of the "popular vote" (hint: there's no such thing) and how clueless people think that further trading our federal system for true mob-rule democracy would somehow make them more empowered. Get a clue. You are, and should be, a citizen of your state first.
1) WWII was an ugly business, yes. That doesn't change the nature of firebombings as being weapons of terror that focus on civilian populations. Gen. MacArthur described them as "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history."
Okay, so we agree on that point. Good. In fact, since the most destructive aspect of the two bombs was in fact the firestorms, I would say that the two bombings were in fact an extreme form of firebombing.
2) We know *one heck of a lot* more than just "dropping the bombs ended the war". We know very well what the Japanese government had been discussing, and what was being discussed in our own government about the Japanese, and in both cases, it was preparations for surrender. I can go on into many more people who have discussed this - for example the National Security Advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, who wrote "Hiroshima alone was enough to bring the Russians in; these two events together brought the crucial imperial decision for surrender, just before the second bomb was dropped.".
To say that somebody was discussing doing something and that somebody else was saying they thought it would happen does not equate to "knowing" that it would, in fact, have happened. We know that it was being discussed. How long would it have taken? How many would have died in the meantime? Like I said, we don't know. What we know is that dropping the bombs ended the war immediately, and as far as I'm concerned, ending the war immediately was a good thing (as for whether Nagasaki was strictly necessary, I'll grant that I have a tough time calling that one). If there was another way to end the war immediately with less human cost, then that would have been better, but can you honestly say with a straight face that you are positive another method would have accomplished that?
What on earth was the Soviets' test of the Tsar Bomba supposed to mean? How is that at all relevant? Both sides had nukes. It was MAD. A new nuke doesn't change MAD, it just adds to the fears of the other side.
My point was that the fact that the Soviets tested a 50 Mt weapon that could easily be boosted to 100 Mt or more did not cause the President to call Moscow and say "Okay, you win, we lose, tell us your conditions." We never believed they would use the thing (and not just because we had nukes too -- it wasn't practical as a weapon for many reasons). The Tsar Bomba was just a flick of the middle finger, and we knew it. It didn't change the balance of power at all. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the other hand, had an immediate and dramatic effect on the balance of power. And right or wrong (morality in war is always a sticky subject -- I'm personally glad I don't have to make those decisions), dropping them on cities scared the crap out of a lot of people and put a lot more pressure on the government than dropping them on a remote island with a handful of sailors would have. Again, that's my opinion. What we know is that dropping them on the cities did end the war.
In case you didn't know, the Emperor didn't have much of any power during the war, either, so that wasn't much changed.
He had the fanatical devotion of an entire popluation who thought he was a direct descendant of the gods and who were happy to expend their lives carrying out his wishes. I'd say that counts for something.
Obviously, there must be some reason they don't. Wonder why that could be....
Well, obviously it's the monopolistic stranglehold Linux has on the computer industry. Just watch; if Linus Torvalds has his way, soon, you'll only be able to operate hardware and software that he has personally reviewed and approved.
1) Fire bombs are not considered "special" weapons by any DoD or DoE agency I am aware of, hence, by my definition, "conventional" weapons. Their psychological effect is immaterial to that definition. Even if the firebombing deaths totalled about the same as the nuclear-related deaths, the point is still the same: WWII was an ugly business before the Bombs were dropped, and it wasn't going to get any prettier before it ended. Nobody is disputing that (in fact, that seems to be the whole gist of your post, and I entirely agree).
2) Like I said, there are lots of theories. The only thing we know is that dropping the bombs did indeed end the war immediately. I personally don't think a test site would have done the trick: it would have just said "Hey look, we have a super weapon, but we won't actually use it." Just like the Soviets' test of the 50 Mt "Tsar Bomba" did not end the Cold War. Again, that's just theory. We only know one thing for sure (i.e., what happened happened). As far as keeping the Emporer, they were allowed to keep a basically castrated ceremonial Emporer who had to admit in front of Gen. MacArthur and the whole Japanese population that he was not, in fact, a deity. After that, he had about as much actual power as the British royalty.
As for your last point, the only thing that I argue for the two bombings is that they ended the war. I don't know that they were necessary to keep the Cold War Cold. We had a pretty good idea of what they could do, and as long as two parties had them, nobody was going to use them. Also, I don't argue that nuclear weapons are "good" or "evil." They just are. Once they were discovered it was inevitable that somebody would build one. If the net result of that was to keep two mutually mistrusting bitter enemies at bay from one another for 50 years, then I would call the result good.
Actually, we had already killed more people with our conventional firebombing. The two Bombs accounted for approximately 1/3 of Japanese bombing deaths, meaning that twice as many people were killed by conventional fire bombing. That being said, I personally believe that the Bomb saved many Japanese lives. It wasn't that it killed more people, it's that it killed so many people and did so much damage all at once. There are plenty of theories about whether the Japanese would have surrendered soon, or whether there would have been an invasion with U.S. ground forces, or whether the Vulcans would have intervened and stopped all the madness, but the truth is, the Bomb ended the war definitely and immediately, thus saving a lot of lives on both sides. And it was such a terrible weapon that it averted open war between the US and USSR for 50 years. Personally, I'll take a pissing match -- even one that causes some residual damage -- over a shooting match any day.
Grep my post for the word "Linux" and then for any name of a Linux distribution. You won't find any. I didn't mention Linux a single time. What does a comparison of installing something on Redhat 8 to Windows XP have to do with Windows 2000? Who's trolling now? I suppose I'll bite.
I was comparing Windows XP to Windows 2000, and like I said, I'd love to see your "demonstrable" data. XP is not "stable as 2000" -- they tossed that out the Window by trying to tie themselves down to backward compatibility. It was Microsoft trying to build a "consumer" (read "dumbed-down because we assume our consumers are too stupid to handle such complex tasks as logging in") OS on top of the NT kernel, and breaking what was good about Windows 2000 in the process. Now, my personal experience and that of others I know is hardly an industry-wide benchmark, but that experience is that XP is buggy, slow and basically useless compared to 2000 on the exact same hardware. If your gripe about Windows 2000 is that it doesn't have enough drivers, then it's usually about as complicated as running a single executable and maybe rebooting (it is still Windows, and even 2000 didn't quite get this right).
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I got the impression the parent was talking about Windows XP, from Microsoft. That alleged "OS" was the biggest pile of horse crap to encumber my computer since Windows 98. It was buggy, unstable and useless. The only decent OS Microsoft ever made was Windows 2000, and it is the only one I am willing to use on a daily basis. I'd love to see the data that give you "demonstrably." Whatever they are, they sure don't jive with my experience.
I personally loved the movies and the books, but honestly, what's up with modding the guy as "Flamebait?" I mean, how dare he blaspheme against the Holy LOTR on Slashdot?
I know Slashdot is all about bashing Republicans and all, and the facts are not terribly popular around here (especially when they don't support the majority opinion), but you might note that the co-sponsors include Sens. Leahy and Daschle. The Democrats are hardly our all-holy protectors on this issue. And for the record, I'm a conservative Republican, a Mormon, and even moved to Utah about a year ago (much to my chagrin -- I'm outta here in February), and I'd just like to state that I hate Orrin Hatch.
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If they said they would not post anything inappropriate for television, then that implies a screening process. If they didn't have a screening process at all, then they should have. It's not like they were just providing a generic technology to just allow people to share information. They sponsored and anti-Bush ad campaign. To say, "Oh, we didn't realize somebody submitted something extremely offensive and distasteful" is just disingenuous.
Sure, but you're just trying to avoid paying the Estate Tax. It'll catch up with you eventually.
You're the second person in this thread to defend the Democrats from goldspider, yet I do not see him mentioning the Democracitc party at all. He said moveon.org was a hate group, and pointed to the fact that they posted an ad submission that compared Pres. Bush to Adolf Hitler. They said they would post "anything appropriate for television," but honestly, that's just a cop out? By saying they would just post anything, they were inviting their fans to puke out extremist garbage like that and get it posted without having to take responsibility for the content themselves. If you're going to post crap like that on your website, you don't get to disavow responsibility after the fact. It's your site. Take responsibility for the content, especially if you admittedly have a screening process in place.
Snopes is your friend.
Exactly. Everybody with half a brain already knows that vi is better.
Your attitude reeks of immaturity and short-sightedness. I have no more respect or sympathy for people like you than I have for the content industy they pretend to be fighting. Perhaps the RIAA really does see a failing business model and wants desperately to hold on to it instead of innovating their business, but the fact remains that the member companies hold the rights to their repsective publications, and have the right to dictate how they will be distributed. I do not believe for a minute that people "trading" music online are some kind of band of freedom fighters pursuing the greater public good. They are freeloaders groping for any lame justification for their illegal activities, and they are doing at least as much to destroy my personal liberties as any "megacorp" because they lend credibility to the RIAA's cries of widespread copyright abuses. In fact, I dare say that when the RIAA execs pray to their Dark Lord Satan every night, they thank His Evilness for sending you and your friends to give them a plausible legal basis for propping up their failing business model. If you want to really do something to protect our liberties, stop illegally distributing copyrighted works and encourage all of your online buddies to do the same, and the next time the RIAA goes to congress whining about how they need new legislation to enforce its business model, it will be laughed out of the city because the congressmen will rightly perceive that they are asking to solve a non-existant problem. Distributing copyrighted music is not your right, and as long as you keep doing it, you are contributing to the perception, right or wrong, that the problem is so overwhelming that draconian legislation is the only solution. If you want to keep technology legally unencumbered, demonstrate that you are responsible enough to handle it, and your opponents will be left toothless. I personally do not want to lose the ability to operate my hardware and software as I please just because you're too cheap to drop a few bucks on your assembly line bubblegum pop.
You never had to argue with me, and namecalling hardly makes you appear more credible. However, if you disagree that the 17th Amendment dilluted Federalism and have an intelligent argument to make, feel free to state it. In any case, maybe I should have been more explicit. You cited "Congress," which is composed of two bodies. The House represents the people, as it was designed to. The Senate was to be elected by the States and was to represent the States' interests. So, like I said, we used to have a Senate to represent the States. The 17th Amendment turned the Senate into just another popularly-elected body, thus dilluting Federalism. If you have an intelligent contention with any of this, please post it for all the world to see. If all you have left in your debate arsenal is crude epithets, please let those loose too, as they serve to prove that I have won the point.
Also, if you're going to accuse me of "borrowing a clue," I hope you've studied the Constitution and Supreme Court cases extensively and substantially more than I have, or your claim is just BS.
Exactly, and the GP's call for elimination of "winner takes all" voting would require the federal government to mandate to the states how to run their elections, which is a gross violation of federalism. The system works very nicely like it is. The states decide how to elect delegates to the Electoral College, meaning that the states get to decide how they will best be represented. LIke you said, the Constitution doesn't mandate "winner takes all," and it shouldn't.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, intelligent people recognize that the results of the election were within the margin of statistical error, and both candidates knew that, so both candidates were playing every political card they could to try to make the most of the sampling error. In the meantime, the US Supreme Court did exactly what it was designed to do: it made a final and binding decision during a period of national crisis by telling Florida, "Sorry, you don't get to change the rules after the fact." Honestly, it's not like Al Gore was some kind of Righteous Crusader for preserving the Integrity of the Vote. He wanted recounts in select counties where he thought he could pick up a net gain. He wanted to win. He just never managed to get the recounts to come out in his favor.
As for the butterfly ballot, I'm sure that some people who intended to vote for Gore ended up voting for Buchannan, but it would be highly illegal to just assign a certain number of those votes to Gore. In any case, if your vote isn't important enough to you that you're willing to make sure you're punching the right hole, then you deserve for your vote to be a random function. Or do you suggest that we just give all of the Buchannan votes to Gore, to make sure that nobody gets disenfranchised?
Note to liberals: That election was 4 years ago. Wipe your tears, quit the sobbing and get over it.
2) Like I said, there are lots of theories. The only thing we know is that dropping the bombs did indeed end the war immediately. I personally don't think a test site would have done the trick: it would have just said "Hey look, we have a super weapon, but we won't actually use it." Just like the Soviets' test of the 50 Mt "Tsar Bomba" did not end the Cold War. Again, that's just theory. We only know one thing for sure (i.e., what happened happened). As far as keeping the Emporer, they were allowed to keep a basically castrated ceremonial Emporer who had to admit in front of Gen. MacArthur and the whole Japanese population that he was not, in fact, a deity. After that, he had about as much actual power as the British royalty.
As for your last point, the only thing that I argue for the two bombings is that they ended the war. I don't know that they were necessary to keep the Cold War Cold. We had a pretty good idea of what they could do, and as long as two parties had them, nobody was going to use them. Also, I don't argue that nuclear weapons are "good" or "evil." They just are. Once they were discovered it was inevitable that somebody would build one. If the net result of that was to keep two mutually mistrusting bitter enemies at bay from one another for 50 years, then I would call the result good.
Actually, we had already killed more people with our conventional firebombing. The two Bombs accounted for approximately 1/3 of Japanese bombing deaths, meaning that twice as many people were killed by conventional fire bombing. That being said, I personally believe that the Bomb saved many Japanese lives. It wasn't that it killed more people, it's that it killed so many people and did so much damage all at once. There are plenty of theories about whether the Japanese would have surrendered soon, or whether there would have been an invasion with U.S. ground forces, or whether the Vulcans would have intervened and stopped all the madness, but the truth is, the Bomb ended the war definitely and immediately, thus saving a lot of lives on both sides. And it was such a terrible weapon that it averted open war between the US and USSR for 50 years. Personally, I'll take a pissing match -- even one that causes some residual damage -- over a shooting match any day.
I was comparing Windows XP to Windows 2000, and like I said, I'd love to see your "demonstrable" data. XP is not "stable as 2000" -- they tossed that out the Window by trying to tie themselves down to backward compatibility. It was Microsoft trying to build a "consumer" (read "dumbed-down because we assume our consumers are too stupid to handle such complex tasks as logging in") OS on top of the NT kernel, and breaking what was good about Windows 2000 in the process. Now, my personal experience and that of others I know is hardly an industry-wide benchmark, but that experience is that XP is buggy, slow and basically useless compared to 2000 on the exact same hardware. If your gripe about Windows 2000 is that it doesn't have enough drivers, then it's usually about as complicated as running a single executable and maybe rebooting (it is still Windows, and even 2000 didn't quite get this right).
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I got the impression the parent was talking about Windows XP, from Microsoft. That alleged "OS" was the biggest pile of horse crap to encumber my computer since Windows 98. It was buggy, unstable and useless. The only decent OS Microsoft ever made was Windows 2000, and it is the only one I am willing to use on a daily basis. I'd love to see the data that give you "demonstrably." Whatever they are, they sure don't jive with my experience.
I personally loved the movies and the books, but honestly, what's up with modding the guy as "Flamebait?" I mean, how dare he blaspheme against the Holy LOTR on Slashdot?
But still not as many as the book!
I know Slashdot is all about bashing Republicans and all, and the facts are not terribly popular around here (especially when they don't support the majority opinion), but you might note that the co-sponsors include Sens. Leahy and Daschle. The Democrats are hardly our all-holy protectors on this issue. And for the record, I'm a conservative Republican, a Mormon, and even moved to Utah about a year ago (much to my chagrin -- I'm outta here in February), and I'd just like to state that I hate Orrin Hatch.