He posts on DailyKos.com sometimes, so do a few of his campaign staff. From what I recall of his postings there he seems like he's a genuinely nice guy, definitely intelligent and aware of the issues. He started promoting this gimmick in a diary on DailyKos. It seems like an interesting idea to me, it's a good way to show people what kind of things he does as part of his campaign and it gives them a sense that he is responsive to them.
I have a 2003 Ford Focus which had cruise control installed on it about 9 months ago. I've noticed on a several occasions the cruise control will randomly start accelerating - it always stops doing it when I tap the breaks, but if my breaks ever went out and it happened things would get exciting quick. It goes in for service soon so I'll have them take a look at it, I've tried to replicate it a few times with no luck and it seems completely rando. I've also tried to ride it out when on an empty road late at night, once it passed 100mph I gave up on that though:)
Are we in fact winning? I hadn't noticed what with 1000+ dead troops in Iraq and no links found to al-Qaeda and no WMDs and Osama bin Laden still on the loose and hundreds of children being blown up in Chechnya and airplanes being blown up in Russia and the anthrax killer never found and the Taliban regaining power in parts of Afghanistan and bombings in Bali and Turkey and Moscow and Madrid and...
I call BS on the site which raises questions on F9/11. In the very first section he links to a study by someone who has been completely discredited in the academic community: John Lott.
How long until we see a Slashdot interview of candidates? Neither of them has been very clear on where they stand on the issues important to us here. Of course there are more important issues this election, but it'd still be nice to get an idea of what we can expect for the next for years when it comes to technology and IP policy.
This is really common from what I can tell. I've had to refer a good number of people to local repair shops and following up with them find that almost always they are charging obscene fees for what amounts to minor work. They charge a shop fee, a labor fee, and a parts fee. Labor fee I can't disagree with, but they mark up the parts and a "shop fee" sounds like BS to me. At a minimum you are going to be paying $100 with no parts.
When I do freelance work I charge labor only and always show the person where I'm getting parts from and what the cost is, usually I just have them pay for it themselves.
I'm skeptical about licensing, but if it forces these dishonest businesses to charge more reasonable rates I might be willing to support it. What's more likely to happen is it will drive freelancers like me out of the market since we'll have to pay the state for the "right" to work on someones computer. To me it probably wouldn't be worth it to pay the licensing fee since freelance work is something I do rarely and never make much money at.
I've had a gmail account for almost 3 months now. In the first month I got 3 spam messages, they all made it thru the filter. Since then I've gotten 5 more, only 1 of which made it thru. It's not statistically significant yet, but to me it feels like the filter has improved. I'm already up to 5% of my 1gig too...
You are misinterpreting Locke. It's a philosophical argument that doesn't exactly fit into the real world. He's arguing that individuals can create property ownership over collective property (i.e. the whole "state of nature" thing) by "mixing his labor" with it, i.e. you can take common land that isn't being used by other people and make it yours if you plant crops there, or graze your sheep there, or whatever. Locke certainly believed in and argued for property rights, but what you quote is more about justifying the assertion of property rights over common property than about property rights in general.
I would also add that a right to property is something completely different from a right to profit from property.
I've had a blogger account for almost 2 years now, so I got selected for the Gmail beta. I just signed up about 10 minutes ago. First problem I had was that your username has to be at least 6 characters long. As you can see from my username here, it is less than 6 characters. Not that big of a deal I guess. Besides that it looks awesome, I haven't done much with it beside set up the account and send a few test emails but the display looks really clean, reminds me a little of YahooMail. The textads on the side aren't intrusive at all, especially compared to every other free webmail I've ever seen. Load times are impressive, could just be that they have a huge amount of bandwidth and server-power allocated at the moment, but it's faster than any other webmail. I'll have to see how it responds once I have a bunch of messages in it to load. So my first impression is that it is better than any other webmail - if their UI innovation (i.e. emails organized as conversations, searching, etc.) actually works (or isn't annoying) I would definitely switch to using it as my primary webmail account. 1gig of storage space is definitely awesome, I lost a bunch of relatively important email from my stupid hotmail account (I signed up long before MS bought them and ruined everything) when I was out of country and couldn't access it - I came back to an account overflowing with spam and all my old emails auto-deleted. Yeah, I should of kept them somewhere else - but the account wasn't near full and until then I was only getting a a few spam emails per day. Regardless, it's not likely to happen when you have a gig of space to play with.
At least I think I am, I bought a boxed copy of an MS OS during the time period covered. The reason I didn't apply is because a)It sounds way too complicated based on reports I've heard from other people who have done similiar things. b)I'm fairly certain you need your receipt, which has long since been recycled.
Basically, it sounds like more trouble than it's worth - not to mention I don't even live in CA anymore.
Not as good as the first one, the skipping ahead in time that goes on detracts a lot from the book and there aren't a lot of new ideas in it (compared to the first on at least). It's also a little short. Overall though I'd recommend it, especially if you read the first one. It's a decent book, solidly written.
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (Putnam):
I enjoyed this one a lot, definitely a solid book. Not sci-fi though.
I'd read it if they'd release it in the US. I've read his other books and all of them are awesome. Cyberpunkish space opera from a scientist who works for the ESA and knows his stuff, you can't beat that.
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
A lot of people didn't like this one, but I thought it was good. Yeah, it's long. And yeah, it doesn't all fit together completely (yet, its part one in a series). It is also not scifi, or even fantasy.
Succession: The Risen Empire; The Killing of Worlds, Scott Westerfeld (Tor - two volumes; SFBC)
I read the first one, it was pretty good. It's lame that they cut it in two the way they did. It was enjoyable and well written. A good amount of clever ideas. I'm still pissed about buying the first one and having it be half a book that I'm waiting for the second half to come out in paperback, so I haven't read that one yet.
The Golden Age: The Phoenix Exultant; The Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright (Tor - two volumes)
I highly recommend these books. They are by far some of the best novels I have read in recent years. It takes some work to get into them because its such a radically different environment than whats normal, but its worth struggling through the first chapter or two. Of all the books listed I'd say these stand out above the rest as the most likely to be considered classics 20 years from now.
Same here, if you pick the right parts you won't have any problems. I have seen some systems built by people who don't realize that contemporary systems need solid PSU's. Back in the day you could throw in any old PSU and not have to worry, these days unless you get a solid one (e.g. an Antec TruePower) you are going to have a lot of problems.
I have always compared my own homebuilt machines to pre-built ones and have never saved less than $300 by building my own. I remember on one system I built back in the late '90's I saved a little more than $1000 for a nearly identical system (it was actually not as good, the case I got was a high-end full-tower vs. a cheap mid-tower case in the pre-made system).
The nforce2 mobo chipset has a variant with built in video that is supposed to be pretty decent. I've never used it myself, but have seen it run deployed systems with no problems and the ability to play older games at solid framerates. It's basically a slighly slower version of the gf4 MX, which sucks in my opinion, but as an onboard solution for low-end users is fine.
Now the onboard sound that comes with the nforce2, that is very solid. I gave up my Soundblaster for it.
As long as there are gamers there will always be seperate video cards. Sound cards are much more likely to go away since they don't require the same kind of processing power 3d hardware acceleration does, and the kind of advances made are much slower and less important to as many people as is the case with video cards.
Setting a budget and then finding the best card in that range is how I and everyone else I know shops the majority of the time. The only benefit of a big shootout like this is seeing how much you are missing out by not going for the high-end. From what I gathered the Radeon 9800 is the best for price/performance, its one of the faster cards but can be found for $150 from newegg.com, if I were buying a card at the moment that'd be the one I would go for. Personally I'm going to wait a little longer and pick up probably a 9800 for that price once Doom3, HL2, etc. are closer to release. At this point with no games (or none I'm interested in anyways) really needing the kind of performance and features offered at the high-end it makes no sense to buy now, unless of course you really need that extra 50fps in existing games. For the extra cost I think very few people can afford to decide that they do.
This is a very debatable point. I and many proressives agree that Affirmative Action is problematic. It often does end up punishing people due to their race. Frankly I'm a little suprised at the recent SCOTUS decision regarding the AA policy of that lawschool in Michingan. Clearly the policy put asians, whites, and certain subsets of Hispanics at a disadvantage, based solely on their race. I do agree that the majority of "progressives" support Affirmative Action, it's a very contentious issue. Many progressive I know who do support it do so only because it is the only available solution. In effect, they are saying the perfect is the enemy of the good, i.e. we should settle with something that has a lot of benefits, and some harms. Although I disagree with this position and believe AA to be a violation of the 14th Amendment, I would argue that there is a huge distinction between racism as perpetuated by AA policies and racism as perpetuated by the KKK and its ilk. There is racism which is supported out of hatred, and there is racism which is supported out of an attempt to bring equal opportunity and/or to right past injustices.
I believe your own statements on this subject to be disingenous. Besides blurring these two very different forms of racism you state that these policies are "designed to punish people for having the wrong skin color." On the contrary, these policies are designed to give benefit to people for having the skin colors of the historically oppressed. The punishment element is not the intent but is an unfortunate side-effect.
Um, what the hell kind of "progressives" do you hang out with? I consider myself a progressive, I have many friends and associates who would describe themselves the same way. Certainly it is true that we are all inclined to generally distrust corporations, to fight racism, to end oppression, etc. But seriously, I've never met anyone who behaves as you suggest. What you have written is a gross caricature of "leftists", it is identical to the lies spouted by people like Rush "The Junkie Fascist" Limbaugh to demonize his political opponents, and is itself nothing more than a silly stereotype with a very limited basis in reality.
"Think about it. A bunch of personal computers that can't just walk up to, demand access, install viruses software and Windows updates and walk off."
But you can if your user policy requires machines to be patched up or have antivirus software because then the users have no choice but to either lose their connection or install, and if you're offering to install for them their pretty damn likely to let you do it. I've yet to encounter someone who didn't want me to do it for them. The trick is just to use some mild coercion on the user, then they'll let you at their computer ASAP.
I too work in a similiar environment. We had to do the same thing, all p2p traffic is partitioned together and can only take up around 500k/s total bandwidth. To deal with MSBlast and other worms we just scan the network for anyone flooding it (e.g. sequential ARP requests) and shut their port down. Right now its done manually but it'll be automated with some perl eventually. Once their port is shut down we send them a notice telling them whats up and how to get it fixed.
Most of those "small" papers are in fact owned by large companies like Gannet and Knight-Ridder. I know in my own town the paper was privately owned by a conservative businessman and while somewhat conservative was still relatively fair (unless business issues were involved). Until about 4 years ago when Gannet bought it out. They gutted the staff, brought in a bunch of out of town people to run it and now it is very conservative and even more "business is always right".
Is there such a thing as a real independent newspaper anymore? As far as I know they all got bought by big companies.
That great thing about the Verite 2100/2200 was that it didn't eat CPU resources at all. I ran GLQuake on it at a solid 15 FPS on a Pentium 100. No matter what happened in the game the FPS did not dip one bit. For $100 you couldn't beat that kind of performance at the time, even with a more expensive card on that slow of a system you would not get that level of performance, a Voodoo might of given you more FPS when nothing was happening, but the second you got into a fight it would chunk out at 3fps and be totally useless. For low end machines, the Rendition chips were the only way to go if you wanted playable GL-accelerated games. Another huge benefit was that they were the only consumer chipset with a full OpenGL ICD. First with 32-bit support too. Really solid cheap cards, its a tragedy Rendition died out.
If you work at a mall or Walmart then you probably aren't out buying cars or health insurance, they pay like crap. I agree with your point though, new businesses = new jobs. However, what kind of jobs? The US econony has a large and growing class of "working poor", people who have full time jobs but can not earn enough to cover the cost of living. Think about all those service workers (e.g. the people who clean your office) in San Fran or NYC, you think they can afford rent on minimum wage? You should read "Nickle and Dimed: Surviving in Low-Wage Americaickled" by Barbara Ehrenreich, she's a journalist who actually went out and the Walmart type jobs and tried to survive on the money she made.
I drove a friends Hybrid civic half way across the country, with 3 people in it, all our luggage, and a bunch of stuff strapped to the top (kayaks, bikes, etc.). We went thru mountains, deserts, thunderstorms, etc. The car did great... of course it couldn't pull much over 80, and our gas mileage was greatly reduced by drag from the stuff strapped on top, but it felt just like driving a non-hybrid car except that we got slightly better gas mileage. My understanding is that the hybrid Civic gets its best mileage in a city environment since it recharges the battery when you break and the assist works best at lower speeds, but I'm no expert.
I don't think voting is a priviledge, it is a fundamental right to have a say in how your government works, even if you are crazy or stupid.
"I think it's ironic that often, the same people that want the government to decide who can do what also don't want the government to restrict anybody from doing anything."
Yeah, the GOP tends to not make much sense - perhaps under your proposal they wouldn't have anyone left to vote for them...
I've met a lot of illegal immigrants in my time, every single one of them would be better described as "economic refugees", they are fleeing the structural economic failures of their home countries to come here because they know there are thousands of businesses that want to hire them. If you were in the same position: poor, living in a dysfunctional economy with no hope of ever not being poor, and with the richest nation on earth ready to employ you if you'll just show up - what would you do? Would you go get a job so you could send money home to your poor parents, or would you sit there unemployed and watch your family go hungry? The illegal immigrants I have met have been some of the hardest working people I've ever seen, certainly they know how to bust their asses a thousand times more than the spoiled children of the upper class suburbanites who support racist legislation like Prop. 187 in California. This one woman I know came to the US illegally in the early '90s from a village in northern Mexico. She could barely speak any english, but spoke spanish well and had a relatively decent education. She worked her ass off (primarily by cleaning the homes of the wealthy), sent a lot of money home to her poor family while still saving enough to BUY A CONDO, and started a family with another illegal immigrant who worked in the fields. She eventually got her citizenship and speaks english pretty well now. She went from a poor village in Mexico with no hope in attaining much in life to a middle class American with two kids who supports her parents, within a single decade. She is not a statistic, she is a human being. Most illegal immigrants are just people who want to work and know that if they come to the US they will find it, its that simple. I agree, they have broken the law by coming here - but I don't think there is a rational person anywhere who wouldn't do the same if presented with the choice of a life of squalor in the third world or a life in America. Which isn't to say that their lives are rosy here, illegal immigrants are some of the most abused people in the US and since they have no official labor rights they end up working in very unsafe conditions and are often treated very badly, but that is another story.
Slashdot Mirror
He posts on DailyKos.com sometimes, so do a few of his campaign staff. From what I recall of his postings there he seems like he's a genuinely nice guy, definitely intelligent and aware of the issues. He started promoting this gimmick in a diary on DailyKos. It seems like an interesting idea to me, it's a good way to show people what kind of things he does as part of his campaign and it gives them a sense that he is responsive to them.
I have a 2003 Ford Focus which had cruise control installed on it about 9 months ago. I've noticed on a several occasions the cruise control will randomly start accelerating - it always stops doing it when I tap the breaks, but if my breaks ever went out and it happened things would get exciting quick. It goes in for service soon so I'll have them take a look at it, I've tried to replicate it a few times with no luck and it seems completely rando. I've also tried to ride it out when on an empty road late at night, once it passed 100mph I gave up on that though :)
Are we in fact winning? I hadn't noticed what with 1000+ dead troops in Iraq and no links found to al-Qaeda and no WMDs and Osama bin Laden still on the loose and hundreds of children being blown up in Chechnya and airplanes being blown up in Russia and the anthrax killer never found and the Taliban regaining power in parts of Afghanistan and bombings in Bali and Turkey and Moscow and Madrid and...
I call BS on the site which raises questions on F9/11. In the very first section he links to a study by someone who has been completely discredited in the academic community: John Lott.
How long until we see a Slashdot interview of candidates? Neither of them has been very clear on where they stand on the issues important to us here. Of course there are more important issues this election, but it'd still be nice to get an idea of what we can expect for the next for years when it comes to technology and IP policy.
This is really common from what I can tell. I've had to refer a good number of people to local repair shops and following up with them find that almost always they are charging obscene fees for what amounts to minor work. They charge a shop fee, a labor fee, and a parts fee. Labor fee I can't disagree with, but they mark up the parts and a "shop fee" sounds like BS to me. At a minimum you are going to be paying $100 with no parts.
When I do freelance work I charge labor only and always show the person where I'm getting parts from and what the cost is, usually I just have them pay for it themselves.
I'm skeptical about licensing, but if it forces these dishonest businesses to charge more reasonable rates I might be willing to support it.
What's more likely to happen is it will drive freelancers like me out of the market since we'll have to pay the state for the "right" to work on someones computer. To me it probably wouldn't be worth it to pay the licensing fee since freelance work is something I do rarely and never make much money at.
I've had a gmail account for almost 3 months now. In the first month I got 3 spam messages, they all made it thru the filter. Since then I've gotten 5 more, only 1 of which made it thru. It's not statistically significant yet, but to me it feels like the filter has improved. I'm already up to 5% of my 1gig too...
You are misinterpreting Locke. It's a philosophical argument that doesn't exactly fit into the real world. He's arguing that individuals can create property ownership over collective property (i.e. the whole "state of nature" thing) by "mixing his labor" with it, i.e. you can take common land that isn't being used by other people and make it yours if you plant crops there, or graze your sheep there, or whatever. Locke certainly believed in and argued for property rights, but what you quote is more about justifying the assertion of property rights over common property than about property rights in general.
I would also add that a right to property is something completely different from a right to profit from property.
"Is it illegal to have traditions?"
That's funny, they said the same thing about slavery...
I've had a blogger account for almost 2 years now, so I got selected for the Gmail beta. I just signed up about 10 minutes ago. First problem I had was that your username has to be at least 6 characters long. As you can see from my username here, it is less than 6 characters. Not that big of a deal I guess. Besides that it looks awesome, I haven't done much with it beside set up the account and send a few test emails but the display looks really clean, reminds me a little of YahooMail. The textads on the side aren't intrusive at all, especially compared to every other free webmail I've ever seen. Load times are impressive, could just be that they have a huge amount of bandwidth and server-power allocated at the moment, but it's faster than any other webmail. I'll have to see how it responds once I have a bunch of messages in it to load. So my first impression is that it is better than any other webmail - if their UI innovation (i.e. emails organized as conversations, searching, etc.) actually works (or isn't annoying) I would definitely switch to using it as my primary webmail account. 1gig of storage space is definitely awesome, I lost a bunch of relatively important email from my stupid hotmail account (I signed up long before MS bought them and ruined everything) when I was out of country and couldn't access it - I came back to an account overflowing with spam and all my old emails auto-deleted. Yeah, I should of kept them somewhere else - but the account wasn't near full and until then I was only getting a a few spam emails per day. Regardless, it's not likely to happen when you have a gig of space to play with.
At least I think I am, I bought a boxed copy of an MS OS during the time period covered. The reason I didn't apply is because a)It sounds way too complicated based on reports I've heard from other people who have done similiar things.
b)I'm fairly certain you need your receipt, which has long since been recycled.
Basically, it sounds like more trouble than it's worth - not to mention I don't even live in CA anymore.
Darwin's Children, Greg Bear (Del Rey):
Not as good as the first one, the skipping ahead in time that goes on detracts a lot from the book and there aren't a lot of new ideas in it (compared to the first on at least). It's also a little short. Overall though I'd recommend it, especially if you read the first one. It's a decent book, solidly written.
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (Putnam):
I enjoyed this one a lot, definitely a solid book. Not sci-fi though.
Absolution Gap, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz; Ace 2004):
I'd read it if they'd release it in the US. I've read his other books and all of them are awesome. Cyberpunkish space opera from a scientist who works for the ESA and knows his stuff, you can't beat that.
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
A lot of people didn't like this one, but I thought it was good. Yeah, it's long. And yeah, it doesn't all fit together completely (yet, its part one in a series). It is also not scifi, or even fantasy.
Succession: The Risen Empire; The Killing of Worlds, Scott Westerfeld (Tor - two volumes; SFBC)
I read the first one, it was pretty good. It's lame that they cut it in two the way they did. It was enjoyable and well written. A good amount of clever ideas. I'm still pissed about buying the first one and having it be half a book that I'm waiting for the second half to come out in paperback, so I haven't read that one yet.
The Golden Age: The Phoenix Exultant; The Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright (Tor - two volumes)
I highly recommend these books. They are by far some of the best novels I have read in recent years. It takes some work to get into them because its such a radically different environment than whats normal, but its worth struggling through the first chapter or two. Of all the books listed I'd say these stand out above the rest as the most likely to be considered classics 20 years from now.
Same here, if you pick the right parts you won't have any problems. I have seen some systems built by people who don't realize that contemporary systems need solid PSU's. Back in the day you could throw in any old PSU and not have to worry, these days unless you get a solid one (e.g. an Antec TruePower) you are going to have a lot of problems.
I have always compared my own homebuilt machines to pre-built ones and have never saved less than $300 by building my own. I remember on one system I built back in the late '90's I saved a little more than $1000 for a nearly identical system (it was actually not as good, the case I got was a high-end full-tower vs. a cheap mid-tower case in the pre-made system).
The nforce2 mobo chipset has a variant with built in video that is supposed to be pretty decent. I've never used it myself, but have seen it run deployed systems with no problems and the ability to play older games at solid framerates. It's basically a slighly slower version of the gf4 MX, which sucks in my opinion, but as an onboard solution for low-end users is fine.
Now the onboard sound that comes with the nforce2, that is very solid. I gave up my Soundblaster for it.
As long as there are gamers there will always be seperate video cards. Sound cards are much more likely to go away since they don't require the same kind of processing power 3d hardware acceleration does, and the kind of advances made are much slower and less important to as many people as is the case with video cards.
Setting a budget and then finding the best card in that range is how I and everyone else I know shops the majority of the time. The only benefit of a big shootout like this is seeing how much you are missing out by not going for the high-end. From what I gathered the Radeon 9800 is the best for price/performance, its one of the faster cards but can be found for $150 from newegg.com, if I were buying a card at the moment that'd be the one I would go for. Personally I'm going to wait a little longer and pick up probably a 9800 for that price once Doom3, HL2, etc. are closer to release. At this point with no games (or none I'm interested in anyways) really needing the kind of performance and features offered at the high-end it makes no sense to buy now, unless of course you really need that extra 50fps in existing games. For the extra cost I think very few people can afford to decide that they do.
This is a very debatable point. I and many proressives agree that Affirmative Action is problematic. It often does end up punishing people due to their race. Frankly I'm a little suprised at the recent SCOTUS decision regarding the AA policy of that lawschool in Michingan. Clearly the policy put asians, whites, and certain subsets of Hispanics at a disadvantage, based solely on their race. I do agree that the majority of "progressives" support Affirmative Action, it's a very contentious issue. Many progressive I know who do support it do so only because it is the only available solution. In effect, they are saying the perfect is the enemy of the good, i.e. we should settle with something that has a lot of benefits, and some harms. Although I disagree with this position and believe AA to be a violation of the 14th Amendment, I would argue that there is a huge distinction between racism as perpetuated by AA policies and racism as perpetuated by the KKK and its ilk. There is racism which is supported out of hatred, and there is racism which is supported out of an attempt to bring equal opportunity and/or to right past injustices.
I believe your own statements on this subject to be disingenous. Besides blurring these two very different forms of racism you state that these policies are "designed to punish people for having the wrong skin color." On the contrary, these policies are designed to give benefit to people for having the skin colors of the historically oppressed. The punishment element is not the intent but is an unfortunate side-effect.
Um, what the hell kind of "progressives" do you hang out with? I consider myself a progressive, I have many friends and associates who would describe themselves the same way. Certainly it is true that we are all inclined to generally distrust corporations, to fight racism, to end oppression, etc. But seriously, I've never met anyone who behaves as you suggest. What you have written is a gross caricature of "leftists", it is identical to the lies spouted by people like Rush "The Junkie Fascist" Limbaugh to demonize his political opponents, and is itself nothing more than a silly stereotype with a very limited basis in reality.
"Think about it. A bunch of personal computers that can't just walk up to, demand access, install viruses software and Windows updates and walk off."
But you can if your user policy requires machines to be patched up or have antivirus software because then the users have no choice but to either lose their connection or install, and if you're offering to install for them their pretty damn likely to let you do it. I've yet to encounter someone who didn't want me to do it for them. The trick is just to use some mild coercion on the user, then they'll let you at their computer ASAP.
I too work in a similiar environment. We had to do the same thing, all p2p traffic is partitioned together and can only take up around 500k/s total bandwidth. To deal with MSBlast and other worms we just scan the network for anyone flooding it (e.g. sequential ARP requests) and shut their port down. Right now its done manually but it'll be automated with some perl eventually. Once their port is shut down we send them a notice telling them whats up and how to get it fixed.
Most of those "small" papers are in fact owned by large companies like Gannet and Knight-Ridder. I know in my own town the paper was privately owned by a conservative businessman and while somewhat conservative was still relatively fair (unless business issues were involved). Until about 4 years ago when Gannet bought it out. They gutted the staff, brought in a bunch of out of town people to run it and now it is very conservative and even more "business is always right".
Is there such a thing as a real independent newspaper anymore? As far as I know they all got bought by big companies.
That great thing about the Verite 2100/2200 was that it didn't eat CPU resources at all. I ran GLQuake on it at a solid 15 FPS on a Pentium 100. No matter what happened in the game the FPS did not dip one bit. For $100 you couldn't beat that kind of performance at the time, even with a more expensive card on that slow of a system you would not get that level of performance, a Voodoo might of given you more FPS when nothing was happening, but the second you got into a fight it would chunk out at 3fps and be totally useless. For low end machines, the Rendition chips were the only way to go if you wanted playable GL-accelerated games. Another huge benefit was that they were the only consumer chipset with a full OpenGL ICD. First with 32-bit support too. Really solid cheap cards, its a tragedy Rendition died out.
If you work at a mall or Walmart then you probably aren't out buying cars or health insurance, they pay like crap. I agree with your point though, new businesses = new jobs. However, what kind of jobs? The US econony has a large and growing class of "working poor", people who have full time jobs but can not earn enough to cover the cost of living. Think about all those service workers (e.g. the people who clean your office) in San Fran or NYC, you think they can afford rent on minimum wage? You should read "Nickle and Dimed: Surviving in Low-Wage Americaickled" by Barbara Ehrenreich, she's a journalist who actually went out and the Walmart type jobs and tried to survive on the money she made.
I drove a friends Hybrid civic half way across the country, with 3 people in it, all our luggage, and a bunch of stuff strapped to the top (kayaks, bikes, etc.). We went thru mountains, deserts, thunderstorms, etc. The car did great... of course it couldn't pull much over 80, and our gas mileage was greatly reduced by drag from the stuff strapped on top, but it felt just like driving a non-hybrid car except that we got slightly better gas mileage. My understanding is that the hybrid Civic gets its best mileage in a city environment since it recharges the battery when you break and the assist works best at lower speeds, but I'm no expert.
I don't think voting is a priviledge, it is a fundamental right to have a say in how your government works, even if you are crazy or stupid.
"I think it's ironic that often, the same people that want the government to decide who can do what also don't want the government to restrict anybody from doing anything."
Yeah, the GOP tends to not make much sense - perhaps under your proposal they wouldn't have anyone left to vote for them...
I've met a lot of illegal immigrants in my time, every single one of them would be better described as "economic refugees", they are fleeing the structural economic failures of their home countries to come here because they know there are thousands of businesses that want to hire them. If you were in the same position: poor, living in a dysfunctional economy with no hope of ever not being poor, and with the richest nation on earth ready to employ you if you'll just show up - what would you do? Would you go get a job so you could send money home to your poor parents, or would you sit there unemployed and watch your family go hungry? The illegal immigrants I have met have been some of the hardest working people I've ever seen, certainly they know how to bust their asses a thousand times more than the spoiled children of the upper class suburbanites who support racist legislation like Prop. 187 in California. This one woman I know came to the US illegally in the early '90s from a village in northern Mexico. She could barely speak any english, but spoke spanish well and had a relatively decent education. She worked her ass off (primarily by cleaning the homes of the wealthy), sent a lot of money home to her poor family while still saving enough to BUY A CONDO, and started a family with another illegal immigrant who worked in the fields. She eventually got her citizenship and speaks english pretty well now. She went from a poor village in Mexico with no hope in attaining much in life to a middle class American with two kids who supports her parents, within a single decade. She is not a statistic, she is a human being. Most illegal immigrants are just people who want to work and know that if they come to the US they will find it, its that simple. I agree, they have broken the law by coming here - but I don't think there is a rational person anywhere who wouldn't do the same if presented with the choice of a life of squalor in the third world or a life in America. Which isn't to say that their lives are rosy here, illegal immigrants are some of the most abused people in the US and since they have no official labor rights they end up working in very unsafe conditions and are often treated very badly, but that is another story.