Microsoft's market position has little or nothing to do with the quality of their software. If it did they would be somewhere behind the BeOS in terms of installed seats.
What Microsoft has is a lot of inertia, marketing bucks and FUD about alternatives going for them. This is a group of people that haven't had much of an original idea since they produced BASIC for the Altair -- which was admittedly a very well-done and cleverly-designed program. Largely they are where they are because of shrewd acquisitions, the first and most brilliant of which was QDOS, which they modified slightly and released as MS- (and, for IBM, PC-) DOS.
They're a very smart business company, no one will contest that. Hell, they were smart enough to trick IBM into paying them for a new-generation OS while they were making their own, er, next-generation OS! Of course IBM at that point evidently wasn't led by Einstein, but one gets the picture fairly quickly.
Personally ever since I decided to run a Microsoft-free home I find myself cursing at my systems much less. Interesting coincidence.
Typical, I'm afraid, of business reporting... Hopefully their tune will change once M$ comes in for a torrent of bad customer reactions and reduced expectations due to the XP product line, but until then we'll have to put up with very uncritical reporting.
Wonder if this has to do with the millions that M$ plans on spending to distribute trial versions of Office XP in with several popular newspapers and mags. It's all a conspiracy, I tell ya...
Good point about Compaq... I owned a Presario 1850, and it didn't make me a fan, esp. the fact that you couldn't upgrade the HD beyond 8 gig.
Oh, you'd get access to the first 8G, but nothing beyond that. Firmware was not upgradeable. Talk about planned obsolescence...
Meantime my old G3/266MT still handles whatever I put into it. I could upgrade it to a G4 if it were worth the expense for me. There's two different visions of computing for you!
I've been using one of those old-style kneeling chairs, and I haven't had any back pain since then. The "trick" of it is that because your legs are placed at a forward angle you end up having to sit up right in the first place. It's a bit like sitting on the edge of a normal chair all day long, but with your knees supported.
On the other hand it does make my butt sore after a few hours, so getting out there is also pretty essential.
Note that it doesn't get as sore as that guy on that pointless goatse.xce link. Who the h*ll puts up that stupid link on every story? Wouldn't it be a good idea for./ to block contributions from the subnet that guy must always be using? If they can do it on IRC then surely it can be done here. Just a thought.
Once the black sheep of CPUs, the PowerPC is certainly getting a lot of attention on the Linux side these days. First mkLinux, then LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog, SuSE, more recently Debian, and now Mandrake. The times they are a-changing indeed.
This being said, how many distros can the ppc user base support? I'm certainly a backer of linux on the PPC; I'm running SuSE now, and I am planning on trying a Debian install once I figure out a way to install it without floppies (Macs haven't had (internal) floppies since 1998) but I can't imagine that there's much of a business case for another distro. Unless they can do it better than the others, and really get the word out about that, it's a bit of a doomed enterprise.
Actually you could build this for less than that, and dump the deskstar for a Maxtor diamond 60G.
Moot point though, as there are distros around for much more obscure and expensive platforms like Sparc and Alpha. Personally I'm not sure what the point is in switching from Solaris to Linux, especially now that Gnome is touted by the Sun people...
Still, as the owner of a PPC G3 and a K6-2, both running at 400 Mhz, I can tell you that the gcc performance I get is much greater on the ppc side. It's roughly comparable to the speed I observed on an Athlon 1G system. Only now that I have Linux on both can I see what the G3 marketing hoopla was really all about, since now both systems run the same sw; the ppc 750 (or G3) really does have much better performance than equivalent-speed i386 systems.
Now if Apple can get off its corporate butt and bring true SMP support to OS X, then I'm sold on the upcoming dual-733 G4 systems:-)
Also you really don't want to mess with the system internals, or future updates may totally kill your system. It's happened to me when the 10.0.2 update came around.
The fact is that OS X is, to paraphrase Apple's old marketing lines, "UN*X for the rest of us." It's simply not well done for those of us who like to get under the hood. That's the reason why it runs root-less unless you specify it. And once you do enable root you're pretty much on your own.
My advice would be, install the SuSE distro using FTP, install yaboot/ybin, and configure it to triple-boot SuSE, OS 9 and OS X. Then you can poke around and see how different Linux is from X.
Try SuSE... their installer definitely works, I'm using SuSE for PPC right now... You can even do a full install over the net by using their "suseboot" partition.
er, stick with i386 arch systems then... or simply don't install MOL. Actually you might want to check out yaboot and ybin on the the penguinppc.org web site (under Hardware/Blue and White G3) which work pretty well if you have two drives.
the state of the kernels is definitely not what it should be. Much as I feel the flames descending upon me as I type, it's obvious that no one bothers to QA the ppc parts of the kernel before release time. So far I've not been able to compile a single kernel from the standard source tree, although I must also say that Benjamin Herrenschmidt (sp?) is doing a wonderful job at bringing improvements for those of us who want to optimize our ppc kernels.
I am absolutely horrified by the so-called post-Columbine trend which is quickly resulting in the further stigmatization of certain types of students in American high schools today.
While many choose to see these attitudes as promoting greater safety in schools, this point of view is extremely deficient; it ignores basic realities of school life and can produce a virtual elimination from the school environment of people who "don't fit in". I think I can speak for a good number of/.'ers when I say that had I grown up in this paranoid age it might well be impossible for me to end up occupying my current position, and even to be a productive member of society!
Granted, one cannot tolerate actual death treats within an educational environment. However this is not the point at all -- death threats have never been tolerated anyway. What we are talking about now is the cataloguing of information about non-violent, personal behaviours, opinions, and creative thought. To wit, one who insists on wearing a black trenchcoat to go to high school nowadays is likely considered to be a threat to his fellow schoolmates. No threat required, no anti-social behaviour even. The wearing of an article of clothing, even a non-descript one, is seen as a criminal statement. It chills me to think about the implications of this.
It chills me particularly because, as with all "social" standards, the definition of what is social or anti-social rests with the majority of people in a given environment. What this ultimately means is that if you choose, with your clothing, opinion, or even looks, to stand up for yourself and not count yourself in with the majority you will become the target of investigations by authorities whose decisions are not only very powerful, but also quite difficult to appeal.
But what disturbs me the most in all this is that the whole "reporting" attitude only leads to the further stigmatization of already-unpopular students sooner or later. So we end up in a situation where not only one is unpopular at an age where popularity is the be-all and end-all of social life, but that same lack of popularity will automatically result in being closely watched by the authorities.
In other words, after Columbine, if you're a nerd, or goth, or are part of any group that is outside the mainstream and easily identifiable, not only do you still have the jocks and other "popular" types on your back, but your local school administration is quickly becoming your enemy as well. So the very act of being victimized by someone who holds a little power over you makes you eligible to be victimized by a bureaucracy which has a lot of power over you.
Perhaps it's just me, but it sounds like a plan that Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or indeed any totalitarian head of state would be proud of.
I wish I was only being cynical about this, but that's what's happening now.
I guess it only makes me glad that I am not growing up in this day and age, and makes me appreciate the realities of not being an american.
After all, it has the following defects:
-the Outlook application doesn't seem to do IMAP. I'm not sure about 2000, but the 97 version definitely does not. This means that you'll have some serious migration issues with existing IMAP account, which will > end up with tons of very important messages getting lost. In that sense switching to Outlook is a lot like having your hard drive crash when you use POP mail with standard settings. While this is not really a big issue with readers of this forum it risks being one with most other users.
-Exchange systems are proprietary. This means that in order to enjoy the advanced features mentioned by Exchange "pushers" your entire desktop base will have to be switched to Windows if they are not already. No *NIX, no Macs. You could perhaps find a third-party solution for this, but then why would you give up one software to potentially embrace two or three packages in order to replace it?
-It doesn't make sense in terms of startup and future costs. There's the rollout cost, the cost of hiring additional support personnel, the cost of purchasing or developing documentation (guess what... when M$ site-licenses something you don't get any print documentation), and you are putting yourself at risk of being ordered to perform software audits periodically. Those audits are expensive in terms of man-hours, lost productivity, and the legal costs of having to deal with M$ attorneys.
-There's precious little likelihood that most users will make any use of Outlook's advanced features unless you develop or pay for extensive tutorials for the whole company. More out-of-pocket money and lost productivity there. And even then you'll never get the sort of efficiency gains advertized by the M$ marketing elves.
Personally I can't think of any reason why a company would want to put itself in a position where they become dependent on the sort of megalomaniac corporation which Microsoft has proved itself to be again and again. You've got the arguments against the switch, demand to see arguments in favor of the switch, and weigh the pros and cons. I'm pretty sure that this should take care of the issue.
Actually it's a little-known fact that the QWERTY layout was invented back in the days of mechanical typewriters. It was specifically designed to slow down typists whose speed was too quick for the machine to follow -- keys would get stuck together, etc.
Of course, once you're used to any one system, it hardly matters how objectively "speedy" it's designed to be...
What a moronic thought. But let's not stop there. If it hadn't been for Ross Perot, Bush would have won in 1992, and your precious little Al Gore would not have gotten to be VP and would now probably be an insignificant little footnote in history.
I do seem to have a violent allergy to idiocy, don't I?
Anyway, as anyone with half-a-brain knows (but evidently this tidbit flew right by you), a good deal of the votes Nader picked up were from people who would not otherwise have voted, so you even fail to make the feeble point you're so pathetically on about.
Hello there. A lot of you have already announced plans for not voting today. There are various reasons for this -- Bush and Gore being the two main ones.
However, NOT voting is a mistake. If you do have the right to vote -- which I personally do not, not being an American -- and are planning on not going to the booth, please consider doing this:
1. Look at the so-called "third party" candidates for whom you can cast a ballot. My personal favorite is Harry Browne, but there are plenty of other ones of all political stripes (libertarian, communist, natural law, etc.)
2. Pick the candidate whose philosophy and platform you most agree with.
3. Go vote for that candidate.
Pretty simple stuff. It won't take that long, and it's a good excuse for taking off early from work.
By voting for a so-called "alternative" candidate you not only vote your conscience (what a novel concept), but you also send a message to Washington that you will no longer tolerate the two-party sh*te the country has been in since God-knows-when. And if you weren't planning to vote anyway, you're not taking a vote away from any of the other candidates.
For some reason this is obvious to me, but not to most eligible voters. Go figure.
Pardon my preposterous butting-in, but hasn't MIR been keeping a "permanent" human presence in space for a good number of years now?
As for those who scoff at the mention of the soon-to-be-scuttled Soviet space platform -- look at the NASA orbiting station in 25 years before laughing. There is no guarantee that it won't share MIR's fate.
Cheers,
TAE
LOL! Very funny -- you can't possibly be serious. Or do you perhaps suffer from some sort of intellectual disability.
1- I suppose that if you politics don't square with your boss's that should be grounds for firing too. Or if you worship a different god. Or your skin is darker than his. To paraphrase your earlier statements, you're walking proof that your right to express yourself in no way means that you have an opinion worth sharing with the rest of the world.
2- "What do you care if the IRS pays a visit?" You've got to be kidding me. The IRS is one of those few people who can casually say, "You owe us $20,000. Pay us now or go to jail. If we made a mistake we'll let you know in 4-5 years, after you've spent $150,000 in legal fees".
3- relevance? Actually that's true of your whole post.
4- see 1.
5- Look at what else happened... your son is in a federal lockup being raped daily by big burly men because he sent a friend a question about smoking pot. Your daughter has been fired from her job because you opened your big yap and your whole family's blackballed, so she has to sell her 17-year old body in the streets to make ends meet. Meantime everytime you drive down the street there's a cop on your tail ready to bust your tail lights and arrest you for it.
You strike me as the kind of guy with a $5000 PC and a $0.25 head controlling it.
Carnivore is really lovely... that is, if you're a mindless drone willing to goose-step to the dictates of the latest presidential edict. Those idiots have it easy, because they don't have minds to make up for themselves.
Actually the election date is only Canada's second-worst-kept secret. The worst-kept secret is that Chretien will win yet again.
What are the alternatives? the right-wing extremists at the Alliance? I hope not. Let's face it, Canada has only one truly national party, and sadly it's the Liberals.
At least the US gets the feeble impression of having a choice...
I've always found intriguing the idea that voting for a third-party candidate amounted to "throwing away" your vote.
Perhaps I'm a little naive in this, but let's see which action is a real waste of a vote: voting for someone because you want to "back a winner", or voting for a third-party candidate who best represents your ideology.
If you want to back a winner you will try and determine which (Bore/Gush) big party candidate is most likely to get the most votes. Therefore the real power of your vote will truly become insignificant -- it will be only 1 out of several million, and even then it will only only solidify the current political status quo. Aside of course from the fact that the two big parties hold pretty much interchangeable positions on any given subject (let's face it, it's a choice between a white southern middle-aged man of privilege who went to an Ivy League school, and, well, another white southern middle-aged man of privilege who went to another Ivy League school).
On the other hand, by casting your vote for the third-party who best represents you (because frankly the two big parties don't truly represent anyone), you accomplish much more:
1- you are taking a stand in favor of that candidate.
2- you increase his/her party's visibility. With enough votes maybe, just maybe the name of the party will be mentioned in passing by Jennings/Rather/Brokaw during the election night coverage
3- the more votes are case for anyone but the two major party candidates, the stronger the message will be sent to Washington that if the politicos don't start taking democracy a little more seriously, then they might find themselves out of a job at the next elections.
To those who say, "but my vote is only one vote", I reply that it's just one vote one way or the other. If you think that voting for a third-party candidate is a waste of a vote, consider the real implications of voting for establishment candidates. At least the candidates from the smaller parties will probably be receptive to your discussions and ideas. They're not likely to cower from the public behind their Secret Service escorts.
Slashdot Mirror
In the word of John McLaughlin, "WRONG!"
Microsoft's market position has little or nothing to do with the quality of their software. If it did they would be somewhere behind the BeOS in terms of installed seats.
What Microsoft has is a lot of inertia, marketing bucks and FUD about alternatives going for them. This is a group of people that haven't had much of an original idea since they produced BASIC for the Altair -- which was admittedly a very well-done and cleverly-designed program. Largely they are where they are because of shrewd acquisitions, the first and most brilliant of which was QDOS, which they modified slightly and released as MS- (and, for IBM, PC-) DOS.
They're a very smart business company, no one will contest that. Hell, they were smart enough to trick IBM into paying them for a new-generation OS while they were making their own, er, next-generation OS! Of course IBM at that point evidently wasn't led by Einstein, but one gets the picture fairly quickly.
Personally ever since I decided to run a Microsoft-free home I find myself cursing at my systems much less. Interesting coincidence.
I believe that this software is called Windows, and encourages you to take a break by going all blue periodically...
Typical, I'm afraid, of business reporting... Hopefully their tune will change once M$ comes in for a torrent of bad customer reactions and reduced expectations due to the XP product line, but until then we'll have to put up with very uncritical reporting.
Wonder if this has to do with the millions that M$ plans on spending to distribute trial versions of Office XP in with several popular newspapers and mags. It's all a conspiracy, I tell ya...
Good point about Compaq... I owned a Presario 1850, and it didn't make me a fan, esp. the fact that you couldn't upgrade the HD beyond 8 gig.
Oh, you'd get access to the first 8G, but nothing beyond that. Firmware was not upgradeable. Talk about planned obsolescence...
Meantime my old G3/266MT still handles whatever I put into it. I could upgrade it to a G4 if it were worth the expense for me. There's two different visions of computing for you!
Whether it's for the sake of more "real estate" on the desktop, or to watch a movie during a long flight, it does have its uses.
I've been using one of those old-style kneeling chairs, and I haven't had any back pain since then. The "trick" of it is that because your legs are placed at a forward angle you end up having to sit up right in the first place. It's a bit like sitting on the edge of a normal chair all day long, but with your knees supported.
On the other hand it does make my butt sore after a few hours, so getting out there is also pretty essential.
Note that it doesn't get as sore as that guy on that pointless goatse.xce link. Who the h*ll puts up that stupid link on every story? Wouldn't it be a good idea for ./ to block contributions from the subnet that guy must always be using? If they can do it on IRC then surely it can be done here. Just a thought.
What, no wide screen?
How old school :-)
Once the black sheep of CPUs, the PowerPC is certainly getting a lot of attention on the Linux side these days. First mkLinux, then LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog, SuSE, more recently Debian, and now Mandrake. The times they are a-changing indeed.
This being said, how many distros can the ppc user base support? I'm certainly a backer of linux on the PPC; I'm running SuSE now, and I am planning on trying a Debian install once I figure out a way to install it without floppies (Macs haven't had (internal) floppies since 1998) but I can't imagine that there's much of a business case for another distro. Unless they can do it better than the others, and really get the word out about that, it's a bit of a doomed enterprise.
"All your post are belong to us!"
Heck, someone had to say it :-)
Actually you could build this for less than that, and dump the deskstar for a Maxtor diamond 60G.
Moot point though, as there are distros around for much more obscure and expensive platforms like Sparc and Alpha. Personally I'm not sure what the point is in switching from Solaris to Linux, especially now that Gnome is touted by the Sun people...
Still, as the owner of a PPC G3 and a K6-2, both running at 400 Mhz, I can tell you that the gcc performance I get is much greater on the ppc side. It's roughly comparable to the speed I observed on an Athlon 1G system. Only now that I have Linux on both can I see what the G3 marketing hoopla was really all about, since now both systems run the same sw; the ppc 750 (or G3) really does have much better performance than equivalent-speed i386 systems.
Now if Apple can get off its corporate butt and bring true SMP support to OS X, then I'm sold on the upcoming dual-733 G4 systems :-)
TAE (Visit my web site!)
Actually X is BSD, not Linux...
Also you really don't want to mess with the system internals, or future updates may totally kill your system. It's happened to me when the 10.0.2 update came around.
The fact is that OS X is, to paraphrase Apple's old marketing lines, "UN*X for the rest of us." It's simply not well done for those of us who like to get under the hood. That's the reason why it runs root-less unless you specify it. And once you do enable root you're pretty much on your own.
My advice would be, install the SuSE distro using FTP, install yaboot/ybin, and configure it to triple-boot SuSE, OS 9 and OS X. Then you can poke around and see how different Linux is from X.
TAE (Visit my web site!)
TAE (Visit my web site!)
I am absolutely horrified by the so-called post-Columbine trend which is quickly resulting in the further stigmatization of certain types of students in American high schools today.
While many choose to see these attitudes as promoting greater safety in schools, this point of view is extremely deficient; it ignores basic realities of school life and can produce a virtual elimination from the school environment of people who "don't fit in". I think I can speak for a good number of /.'ers when I say that had I grown up in this paranoid age it might well be impossible for me to end up occupying my current position, and even to be a productive member of society!
Granted, one cannot tolerate actual death treats within an educational environment. However this is not the point at all -- death threats have never been tolerated anyway. What we are talking about now is the cataloguing of information about non-violent, personal behaviours, opinions, and creative thought. To wit, one who insists on wearing a black trenchcoat to go to high school nowadays is likely considered to be a threat to his fellow schoolmates. No threat required, no anti-social behaviour even. The wearing of an article of clothing, even a non-descript one, is seen as a criminal statement. It chills me to think about the implications of this.
It chills me particularly because, as with all "social" standards, the definition of what is social or anti-social rests with the majority of people in a given environment. What this ultimately means is that if you choose, with your clothing, opinion, or even looks, to stand up for yourself and not count yourself in with the majority you will become the target of investigations by authorities whose decisions are not only very powerful, but also quite difficult to appeal.
But what disturbs me the most in all this is that the whole "reporting" attitude only leads to the further stigmatization of already-unpopular students sooner or later. So we end up in a situation where not only one is unpopular at an age where popularity is the be-all and end-all of social life, but that same lack of popularity will automatically result in being closely watched by the authorities.
In other words, after Columbine, if you're a nerd, or goth, or are part of any group that is outside the mainstream and easily identifiable, not only do you still have the jocks and other "popular" types on your back, but your local school administration is quickly becoming your enemy as well. So the very act of being victimized by someone who holds a little power over you makes you eligible to be victimized by a bureaucracy which has a lot of power over you.
Perhaps it's just me, but it sounds like a plan that Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or indeed any totalitarian head of state would be proud of.
I wish I was only being cynical about this, but that's what's happening now.
I guess it only makes me glad that I am not growing up in this day and age, and makes me appreciate the realities of not being an american.
>it doesn't exactly speak well of those scholls
^^^^^^^
Hmm... insert your own joke here.
TAE
Gee, this just screams out for a polish joke, doesn't it? :-)
The first and easiest challenge at this point would be to challenge M$ to defend their pricing structure by showing real costs.
That oughtta destroy M$'s last shred of credibility, I think.
TAE
...would someone want to switch TO Outlook??
After all, it has the following defects:
-the Outlook application doesn't seem to do IMAP. I'm not sure about 2000, but the 97 version definitely does not. This means that you'll have some serious migration issues with existing IMAP account, which will > end up with tons of very important messages getting lost. In that sense switching to Outlook is a lot like having your hard drive crash when you use POP mail with standard settings. While this is not really a big issue with readers of this forum it risks being one with most other users.
-Exchange systems are proprietary. This means that in order to enjoy the advanced features mentioned by Exchange "pushers" your entire desktop base will have to be switched to Windows if they are not already. No *NIX, no Macs. You could perhaps find a third-party solution for this, but then why would you give up one software to potentially embrace two or three packages in order to replace it?
-It doesn't make sense in terms of startup and future costs. There's the rollout cost, the cost of hiring additional support personnel, the cost of purchasing or developing documentation (guess what... when M$ site-licenses something you don't get any print documentation), and you are putting yourself at risk of being ordered to perform software audits periodically. Those audits are expensive in terms of man-hours, lost productivity, and the legal costs of having to deal with M$ attorneys.
-There's precious little likelihood that most users will make any use of Outlook's advanced features unless you develop or pay for extensive tutorials for the whole company. More out-of-pocket money and lost productivity there. And even then you'll never get the sort of efficiency gains advertized by the M$ marketing elves.
Personally I can't think of any reason why a company would want to put itself in a position where they become dependent on the sort of megalomaniac corporation which Microsoft has proved itself to be again and again. You've got the arguments against the switch, demand to see arguments in favor of the switch, and weigh the pros and cons. I'm pretty sure that this should take care of the issue.
Cheers,
TAE
Actually it's a little-known fact that the QWERTY layout was invented back in the days of mechanical typewriters. It was specifically designed to slow down typists whose speed was too quick for the machine to follow -- keys would get stuck together, etc.
Of course, once you're used to any one system, it hardly matters how objectively "speedy" it's designed to be...
What a moronic thought. But let's not stop there. If it hadn't been for Ross Perot, Bush would have won in 1992, and your precious little Al Gore would not have gotten to be VP and would now probably be an insignificant little footnote in history.
I do seem to have a violent allergy to idiocy, don't I?
Anyway, as anyone with half-a-brain knows (but evidently this tidbit flew right by you), a good deal of the votes Nader picked up were from people who would not otherwise have voted, so you even fail to make the feeble point you're so pathetically on about.
TAE
Isn't it?
Seriously, let's examine the facts:
Everybody likes the web, and platform-neutral standards. I don't think that anyone would contradict me on this.
Everybody here is looking for the best web browser available.
However, most people here are only considering two browsers when considering what to use.
Neither of these two browsers supports the platform-neutral, open standards which everyone likes.
Meantime, other browsers languish and die off because no one bothers to use them.
Doesn't that sound like American politics to you?
TAE
Hello there. A lot of you have already announced plans for not voting today. There are various reasons for this -- Bush and Gore being the two main ones.
However, NOT voting is a mistake. If you do have the right to vote -- which I personally do not, not being an American -- and are planning on not going to the booth, please consider doing this:
1. Look at the so-called "third party" candidates for whom you can cast a ballot. My personal favorite is Harry Browne, but there are plenty of other ones of all political stripes (libertarian, communist, natural law, etc.)
2. Pick the candidate whose philosophy and platform you most agree with.
3. Go vote for that candidate.
Pretty simple stuff. It won't take that long, and it's a good excuse for taking off early from work.
By voting for a so-called "alternative" candidate you not only vote your conscience (what a novel concept), but you also send a message to Washington that you will no longer tolerate the two-party sh*te the country has been in since God-knows-when. And if you weren't planning to vote anyway, you're not taking a vote away from any of the other candidates.
For some reason this is obvious to me, but not to most eligible voters. Go figure.
TAE
Check out SuSE, it's a full-featured distribution that I found very easy to install and work with.
Pardon my preposterous butting-in, but hasn't MIR been keeping a "permanent" human presence in space for a good number of years now? As for those who scoff at the mention of the soon-to-be-scuttled Soviet space platform -- look at the NASA orbiting station in 25 years before laughing. There is no guarantee that it won't share MIR's fate. Cheers, TAE
LOL! Very funny -- you can't possibly be serious. Or do you perhaps suffer from some sort of intellectual disability.
1- I suppose that if you politics don't square with your boss's that should be grounds for firing too. Or if you worship a different god. Or your skin is darker than his. To paraphrase your earlier statements, you're walking proof that your right to express yourself in no way means that you have an opinion worth sharing with the rest of the world.
2- "What do you care if the IRS pays a visit?" You've got to be kidding me. The IRS is one of those few people who can casually say, "You owe us $20,000. Pay us now or go to jail. If we made a mistake we'll let you know in 4-5 years, after you've spent $150,000 in legal fees".
3- relevance? Actually that's true of your whole post.
4- see 1.
5- Look at what else happened... your son is in a federal lockup being raped daily by big burly men because he sent a friend a question about smoking pot. Your daughter has been fired from her job because you opened your big yap and your whole family's blackballed, so she has to sell her 17-year old body in the streets to make ends meet. Meantime everytime you drive down the street there's a cop on your tail ready to bust your tail lights and arrest you for it.
You strike me as the kind of guy with a $5000 PC and a $0.25 head controlling it.
Carnivore is really lovely... that is, if you're a mindless drone willing to goose-step to the dictates of the latest presidential edict. Those idiots have it easy, because they don't have minds to make up for themselves.
Actually the election date is only Canada's second-worst-kept secret. The worst-kept secret is that Chretien will win yet again.
What are the alternatives? the right-wing extremists at the Alliance? I hope not. Let's face it, Canada has only one truly national party, and sadly it's the Liberals.
At least the US gets the feeble impression of having a choice...
I've always found intriguing the idea that voting for a third-party candidate amounted to "throwing away" your vote.
Perhaps I'm a little naive in this, but let's see which action is a real waste of a vote: voting for someone because you want to "back a winner", or voting for a third-party candidate who best represents your ideology.
If you want to back a winner you will try and determine which (Bore/Gush) big party candidate is most likely to get the most votes. Therefore the real power of your vote will truly become insignificant -- it will be only 1 out of several million, and even then it will only only solidify the current political status quo. Aside of course from the fact that the two big parties hold pretty much interchangeable positions on any given subject (let's face it, it's a choice between a white southern middle-aged man of privilege who went to an Ivy League school, and, well, another white southern middle-aged man of privilege who went to another Ivy League school).
On the other hand, by casting your vote for the third-party who best represents you (because frankly the two big parties don't truly represent anyone), you accomplish much more:
1- you are taking a stand in favor of that candidate.
2- you increase his/her party's visibility. With enough votes maybe, just maybe the name of the party will be mentioned in passing by Jennings/Rather/Brokaw during the election night coverage
3- the more votes are case for anyone but the two major party candidates, the stronger the message will be sent to Washington that if the politicos don't start taking democracy a little more seriously, then they might find themselves out of a job at the next elections.
To those who say, "but my vote is only one vote", I reply that it's just one vote one way or the other. If you think that voting for a third-party candidate is a waste of a vote, consider the real implications of voting for establishment candidates. At least the candidates from the smaller parties will probably be receptive to your discussions and ideas. They're not likely to cower from the public behind their Secret Service escorts.
Think about that, America.