Your post is a perfect example of why designers constantly need to be kept in check. Looking really good is an admirable aim but is not an "excellent reason" to harm functionality.
It really depends on the market you are trying to reach. Beauty is valuable and it has a price and a market. For some sites, such as financial services, cosmetics take a back seat to functionality. However, for other sites, where you are trying to create an experience for the use, or to do some sort of an ad campaign, then cosmetics and designers come first and foremost.
Now, your citation of cars is interesting because cosmetics matter a great deal in the segment. No matter how feature rich or well engineered a car is, people aren't going to buy it if it looks like crap. The car -must- look good, and, quite often, looks add a considerable premium to the price of the vehicle. I guarantee that the per vehicle margin on a Bentley is a lot higher than that of the Ford Taurus. Or, to put it another way.. you might be paying 10x as much for the Bentley as the Ford, but that Bentley doesn't drive 10x faster or 10x farther on the same tank of gas. Instead, people with that kind of money buy a Bentley because it looks -good- AND it happens to go faster than a Ford.. but the looks and the design of the thing matters first and foremost.
The downside is that processes are a lot heavier than threads.
How much heavier are they? Off the top of my head, the big internal advantage of threads is that they share the same page tables whereas separate processes have their own... but, each thread is still going to have its own stack and its own state block for when its task gets switched out.
Correct my own stone age knowledge of the Linux kernel, but, aren't threads and processes practically the same thing internally anyway?
1. Threads are Hard 2. Threads are not magic bullets 3. Threads introduce WHOLE NEW CLASSES of bugs
Threading is only as hard as a bad design makes them. If you have to share data among threads so much that you have to put locks all over the place, that's really a tell-tale sign that the design isn't all that good to begin with. Really, the best threaded designs are almost like lightweight processes to begin with. Keep the number of points where data must be shared across execution chains low, and everything tends to fall into place.
You know, if I had a nickel for every new technology that we monkeyed with that we thought we could just push to unlimited bounds without somehow screwing ourselves, I'd be pretty rich.
I mean, if scientists are so certain that something bad won't happen when they set about "recreating the initial conditions of the universe", then, why do they have to do any experiments at all. But they don't genuinely know what is going to happen... do they?
It may not happen now, but eventually, there will be an experiment that someone will do that will cause significant loss of life.
There is literally no phase of his life wherein his experience doesn't totally outstrip Palin's.
So I just see it differently you. Education is a prepatory thing, not a success in and of itself. Palin got some schooling and stepped into the ring and made herself a success against determined opposition. She was tested. She ran a budget of a small town, engaged in the political arena and then has become a governor with several thousand people working for her.
If the contest were one of who might be the best prepared to serve on someone's staff, then yeah, Obama's education stands out. But, this is a contest of leadership and part of that leadership is in initiative, and Palin has showed way more initiative and zeal by the mere act of stepping into the policy ring and just leading. Obama's been selected for various things but he's never really lead until the primary.
You cannot just chalk that up to Delawares GOP being 'utterly hopeless'. I mean, you can, but there is no evidence supporting it
Yeah you can. Just go look at the web site for the GOP's US Senate candidate in Delaware and tell me how you do not see hopeless!:-)
leftist unless you're willing to front some evidence.
There's plenty of evidence to say that Obama is leftist. The whole appeal of Obama to the left is that he is unashamedly leftist and he even argues in favor of it in his book and in his speeches. He argues against businesses, he frames his thinking in terms of a class struggle, he fondly recalls his discussions with communists in college and he runs with a leftist crowd.
Palin is as inexperienced as national level politicians get. A governor of two years does not a VP make - and that's about her only credential.
And, what, really, is Obama's experience? All we've heard from the Obama camp is how inexperience Palin is, but Obama has done -NOTHING-. What has he accomplished? It's a joke.
Biden may not be your favorite person, but he has a great deal of experience backing him. Further, he has a lot of blue collar people on his side - and has fought for that class well for a long time
There's absolutely no evidence for that statement on the national level. Biden's been running for President for a billion years and he's not been able to get more than 2% of the vote. The only reason he succeeds in Delaware is because the GOP in the 1st state is just utterly hopeless, not because Biden is anything special.
What I hear consistently from the right is that Obama is 'maniacal', 'messianic', 'too leftist', 'egotistical', 'desperate'. Where these claims can be supported or refuted by evidence, they're refuted.
That's an absurd statement on its face. You can't refute an opinion of a person. If the right wing thinks Obama is too egotistical or too leftists for their taste, then he is. All you can say is that he's not too leftist or egotistical for you. It's like you are trying to persuade people to vote for the guy by telling them their opinions are wrong.
I wasn't arguing the experience angle - I was intending to rebut your argument that Democrats were the ones primarily misrepresenting the facts
Fair enough. Oh, well, my bad then. Both sides are making stuff up at this point. Before too long, we'll have Obama linked to guys that believe in UFOs brought white people to destroy the black man and Palin will be linked to people wanting to launch a nuclear war for Jesus and McCain will be painted as mentally unstable lunatic and Biden probably a guy that somehow had his wife whacked.
That's American politics. Sigh.
I even agree that Biden was probably a poor choice for a VP. That said, I think Palin was a much worse choice for a VP, at least from the POV of her actually serving (rather than as a campaign tactic).
See, I don't see Biden as capable of being an effective President at all.... It will be very interesting to see how he does vs Palin in the debates. I don't think Biden knows as much as he says he does... is his problem.
There are so many better people for VP that Obama could have picked, politically. Biden's just the worst. If Obama wanted statesmen like gravitas, he could have gone Bill Richardson, who, in one swoop, is a successful governor, a diplomat, experienced in the Clinton administration (but without the Bill baggage), brings southwest votes towards the ticket AND also has impeccable credentials for the 2nd amendment crowd. Worst of all, Biden is useless for fundraising.
Palin is the governor of a state that has a smaller population ( 700k) than many cities
And Obama hasn't been the governor or mayor or leader of -anything-. Had he not been a dope and picked Biden, his campaign wouldn't have to be in the absurd position of defending itself as having less experience than a governor of Alaska. But, oh no, he passed over the likes of Corzine, Richardson, or, for christ sakes, the enormously popular Ed Rendell of PA.. and instead he went for Joe Biden.
Look, at this point, the more stuff Democrats make up about Palin's religious views, the more stuff Republicans can make up about Obama's church and Chicago connections with radicals...
Now, Chicago is a nutty town and there's no way that you can be a Democrat without talking to the likes of Reverend Wright and Ayers and company, but, nationally, that's going to play out far worse than Palin trying to yank a couple of books out of the library because tagging Obama as a racist terrorist AND a religious fruitcake will trump tagging Palin merely being a religious fruitcake.
Only that does not contradict my statement about her being an extremist. I think you need to educate yourself on her history, and not just fall for republican spin.
Oh, really? Did you learn that from Obama's buddies "I hate white people" Reverend Wright or Louis Farrakahn, or, did you learn that from "I'm not sorry for being a terrorist", William Ayers?
While mayor of Wasilla she injected national politics into a small town, removing democratic officials purely because they were democrats.
I'm sure that must be the absolute truth.
Do you think managing a state of 670k people for only 2 years, where the federal government owns and manages 65% of the territory, somehow qualifies her as more able than Obama is ludicrous.
What exactly did Obama do where he was the executive of anything more than 670k people? That's the whole point. Obama hasn't done anything except for get a fancy degree, spend twenty years at a racist, communist, church that despises the USA, and then runs for office.
The fact of the matter is, while Barrack Obama was running around trying to win a popularity contest a bunch of guys that hate white people, Sarah Palin was balancing budgets first as mayor, and then as governor.
If Obama loses the next democratic candidate (presumably Hillary Clinton) will hopefully go on the offensive.
Ah, Palin has managed a budget as an executive much larger than Obama ever has. She's balanced a budget, she's actually gotten more money from "big oil"... she's cut checks to everyone in Alaska out of a surplus that she created... So, when Obama manages anything that has nearly 20 billion a year in revenue, you let me know. The fact of the matter is, she has more experience than -anyone- else on the ticket as an executive. If Obama had picked a VP governor from any state - even New Jersey... he'd be totally immune to this criticism. But, tsk, tsk, he picked another Senator and opened himself up on this front.
In politics, the first rule is to not believe your own propaganda. Painting Palin as a small town extremist is just as intellectually honest as painting Obama as a terrorist sympathizer. Truth is, both people are going to say whatever they want to get elected. You can believe MoveOn.org and DailyKos as much as some people believe in NationalReview, but, at the end of the day, most people see it for the mud slinging as it is, unless you come up with something really good, like Swift Boats.
I think you're giving yourself and the Republican party a bit too much credit.
In an election year? No way!!!:-)
If you always voted for the most radical candidate, then how did the Democrats wind up with John Kerry in 2004?
He's a lot more to the left than Howard Dean was... but, then again, you are right...nobody needed to help Dean implode with his ultimate warrior speech.
"Don't be evil" is just an advertising slogan, like "At Pontiac we build excietement" (bad brakes, crappy handling), "Chevy - Like A Rock" (damned thing won't start), "At Ford, Quality is job 1" (Got their work cut out for them).
Pontiac's handling has gotten a lot better. The GTO was a bit squishy but the new G8 is said to be a worthy challenger to the M5. If that's not good brakes and good handling, then I do not know what is.
Similarly, Ford is now routinely winning various quality rankings in it car offerings... but Ford's problem is that it has too much debt and can't build enough of the cars it is selling all too well while at the same time has a lot of people building big trucks that no one wants.
We Republicans did rig this election. You guys always look trying to think we're screwing up votes in Ohio but our strategy has always been to vote for the most radical Democratic candidate in all too many open primaries. Because Democrats have proportional representation, this strategy ALWAYS works.
We registered Democrat in many states and voted for Obama in droves. Then, when it looked like it was over for Hillary, we supported her just enough to drag the race out and bleed Democrats dry. But at the end, Hillary was always the big problem for us as she can appeal to our bread and butter middle class people but Obama is just another George McGovern. Instinctively for us, Hillary was a bigger problem because when we say a woman is a b---, that means we admire her fighting spirit even as we loath her policies. She has -always- terrified us.
Now, that Obama and company genuinely believe that a bunch of Republicans who've made a lifetime of supporting free trade really, seriously, crossed the line to support his quasi-socialistic policies is all too good for us. He's not even aware of the danger that he is in come November. Hillary gets it though.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
So, I would look for McCain to be someone in the mold of a Teddy Roosevelt, whom he has publicly said that he idolizes. As a president, I would probably look to see McCain do some of the progressive things that T.R. did, while still working to bolster Pax Americana. If McCain lives up to his fiscal promises and the way he's generally voted, I think there's probably enough libertarian and fiscal Republicans (as opposed to the religious right), and right of center Democrats to actually put together a governing coalition that for 4 all too brief years sheds the lunatics on both sides of the aisle.
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office
Obama is doomed in this election. It's not even that he's black that's the problem, its his politics and his pick of VP. Then, there's a character test here. Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
He's running too far to the left in the general election. Obama's plan is and always was to get all the black vote plus the liberals and the problem is that there's not enough liberals in the states he needs. He's just misread the USA at a national level, and so he has a hard time seeing the need shed his own maniacal base to succeed publicly in a way that Clinton would have surely done.
I thought he gave a fantastic speech, but, since then his moves almost smack of desperation... he's almost devolving into a sort of a classic class war candidate and that's not a good thing to do when American for the most part tend to prefer to keep open the doors of opportunity for the rich just on the offbeat chance that they get rich themselves. I would say that Sarah Palin's retort on drilling (borrowed from Paris Hilton - we Republicans have no pride), was absolutely devastating.
Obama's pick of Biden as a VP was just a disaster. Nobody likes Joe Biden, even in Delaware, but here in the 1st state our GOP is so retarded that Biden always wins. Obama let himself get talked into thinking that he needed a foreign policy wonk added to the ticket and really, that's just stupid. Most people get the sense that foreign policy is really about being fair but firm and Obama already had foreign policy sewn up after his wildly successful European trip.
Worst of all, Obama's success is his own enemy. He's got himself surrounded by so many leaches flocking to all that campaign money he's raising that he's becoming almost Carter like in his perceived obligation to take heed of all them. The left wing has this obsession that a leader needs to listen to all of his counsellers, whereas, if Obama just borrowed a small page from Bush and listened to his own gut, he'd more effective in getting what we wants. As it is, the Obama posse is just dragging him down.
If you had an idea you knew would make billions, would you just give it away? Would you? Most businesses thrive or die based on their founding "ideas"...
Not really. They just keep building around the founding idea, knowing that competitors will jump on the same. The best companies keep building their ideas out, so that, by the time a competitor has mimicked the founding idea, they are onto the next big thing. So long as the founding idea company doesn't stumble, they should stay out in front.
you've obviously never had to file for bankruptcy or lived in a household on the verge of being bankrupt.
Well, actually, I have. My wife got sick when she was pregnant, our income plummeted, we spent too much on credit cards, and the phones rang off the hook. We stopped paying the cards, focused on the mortgage and the cars, sold the house in a very difficult economy, slashed expenses, worked out payment plans with all the lenders, and are gradually digging our way out.
I looked at bankruptcy and I qualified for sure but it was just a terrible option. Having thought it through, it occurred to me that bankruptcy from credit card debt actually benefits credit card companies more than it does consumers. The thing is, if you have a house or a car loan, then, the house and the car can get taken and you'd prefer to avoid that.. and you really have little leverage with the lender because they have an asset to recover. But, in the case of credit card companies, they have no assets that they can recover and they factor that into their interest rates and other fees. Sure, you can get sued by a credit card company and they can attach a lien, but, even then, you STILL have some leverage with them.
I had a lien on my house for like a lot of money, and, while jiggering the money to try and make the sale of the house work, I went and called the lenders and said, look, we can either drag this out forever with payments, or, you can get the proceeds now when I sell the house, if you accept this price. It worked.
The moral of the story is this. If you are in financial trouble, pay the things that the banks can take first, and forget about the rest of the loans. They will put you through hell but at the end of the day, you have nothing they can take and you know it, and they know it, and therefor, you have ALL the leverage when it comes to making settlements.
Avoid those "debt counselling services" like the plague. They flat out don't work, and ultimately, they really just try and convince you to do a payment stream that is simply unaffordable, and again, they make you think that they are holding all the cards, and really, you, as the debtor are.
So, when I say, yeah, I got a ton of free stuff for a year, and I got to live in a house for free for a year, well, I'm saying it from the perspective of someone who has gotten harrassed by collections agencies, lawyers, and even got sued on Christmas Day. But, at the end of the day, the way the laws are stacked now, if you have balls of brass and nerves of steel, is that truly, you have all the cards once the bank lends you money, and, if you really didn't care about the honor of a debt, in fact, you really could just not pay them back and accept having a lot of "free stuff".
All this talk about consumers being victims really only serves to reinforce the perception that they have no power, when, at the end of the day, the debtor is the one holding ALL of the cards.
I think that the sanest alternative, given the separation of church and state and that the church does not pay taxes, is that materials published by any non-profit or charitable organization should not be copyrightable.
As far as IP patents go. All a music player does, at its heart, when you go back this far, is maintain a file system for various sorts of files, and plays them back. To that end, one might well argue that unmanned spacecraft have been doing that at least through the 1970s, indeed, computers have been maintaining files and playing them back, even before. Digital music goes way, way back...
If anything is novel about the iPod, it is the user interface, and its bundling with iTunes. But the idea of a multimedia playback device being unique or patentable is utterly absurd. They are just computers, that's all.
Far be it from me to question the impartiality and objectivity of the Journal's OpEd (web) pages, but this is basically bollocks.
You can see the same in Financial Times as well, and they have hardly been supportive of the Bush administration. Yes, yeah and verily, Dems put up the shields for sloppy accounting at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It goes all the way back to when Raines was in there.
What Democrats have been resisting is efforts to deregulate Mae/Mac even more. Given how well deregulating the rest of the mortgage market has worked, they seem to be right in doing so.
Actually, nobody has actually been calling to deregulate Fannie Mae more. In general, Republicans have been calling for Fannie Mae to have the same liquidity, capital and reporting requirements that private banks must have.
Paulson is right, though. Mae/Mac should either be 100% public or 100% private. Any quasi-public scheme where the stockholders reap all the profits while the taxpayers assume all the risk is going to end badly for the latter.
You can blame Bush as much as you want for the Fannie Mae debacle, but if you actually have been following the issue for twenty years, you would find in the Op Ed web pages of the Wall Streetn Journal a steady stream of Republican voices arguing that the finances of these two institutions are basically crap and have been that way for decades. Democrats have resisted any sort of legislative effort to bring reform to these two agencies. In fact, if you look at whose donating to whose campaign you could see that Wall Street overwhelming prefers Obama because they are look for the big handout to shareholders whereas Republicans are always more inclined to let companies simply fail.
Therefore even if we burned all of the oil in all of the earth's crust right now, we'd only recreate the athmospheric situation of the age of the dinosaurs
Well no, we'd release the CO2 accumulated by 200 million years of dinosaurs...
Actually its very plausible. Read about TEMPEST and TEMPEST certification. The computer is essentially a giant radio transmitter. The port lines might give you a better signal.
How can you say that these people are victims when they got to live in a house for free for a couple of years, got to ring up big credit card debts and walk away?
I got news for you. I'd bet that for every supposed victim of supposed predatory lending, you've got 10 guys that probably bought a house with absolutely no intention of paying the mortgage.
Yeah, the corporations were really evil. They passed out a ton of money to poor people, and they didn't get a dime of it back.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post is a perfect example of why designers constantly need to be kept in check. Looking really good is an admirable aim but is not an "excellent reason" to harm functionality.
It really depends on the market you are trying to reach. Beauty is valuable and it has a price and a market. For some sites, such as financial services, cosmetics take a back seat to functionality. However, for other sites, where you are trying to create an experience for the use, or to do some sort of an ad campaign, then cosmetics and designers come first and foremost.
Now, your citation of cars is interesting because cosmetics matter a great deal in the segment. No matter how feature rich or well engineered a car is, people aren't going to buy it if it looks like crap. The car -must- look good, and, quite often, looks add a considerable premium to the price of the vehicle. I guarantee that the per vehicle margin on a Bentley is a lot higher than that of the Ford Taurus. Or, to put it another way .. you might be paying 10x as much for the Bentley as the Ford, but that Bentley doesn't drive 10x faster or 10x farther on the same tank of gas. Instead, people with that kind of money buy a Bentley because it looks -good- AND it happens to go faster than a Ford.. but the looks and the design of the thing matters first and foremost.
The downside is that processes are a lot heavier than threads.
How much heavier are they? Off the top of my head, the big internal advantage of threads is that they share the same page tables whereas separate processes have their own... but, each thread is still going to have its own stack and its own state block for when its task gets switched out.
Correct my own stone age knowledge of the Linux kernel, but, aren't threads and processes practically the same thing internally anyway?
1. Threads are Hard
2. Threads are not magic bullets
3. Threads introduce WHOLE NEW CLASSES of bugs
Threading is only as hard as a bad design makes them. If you have to share data among threads so much that you have to put locks all over the place, that's really a tell-tale sign that the design isn't all that good to begin with. Really, the best threaded designs are almost like lightweight processes to begin with. Keep the number of points where data must be shared across execution chains low, and everything tends to fall into place.
But you have to weigh that against the lives saved by science. antibiotics, vaccines, surgical techniques, etc.
Oh yeah, but, with the earth 4 hours away from cracking in half, antibiotics aren't looking so good... :-)
You know, if I had a nickel for every new technology that we monkeyed with that we thought we could just push to unlimited bounds without somehow screwing ourselves, I'd be pretty rich.
I mean, if scientists are so certain that something bad won't happen when they set about "recreating the initial conditions of the universe", then, why do they have to do any experiments at all. But they don't genuinely know what is going to happen... do they?
It may not happen now, but eventually, there will be an experiment that someone will do that will cause significant loss of life.
There is literally no phase of his life wherein his experience doesn't totally outstrip Palin's.
So I just see it differently you. Education is a prepatory thing, not a success in and of itself. Palin got some schooling and stepped into the ring and made herself a success against determined opposition. She was tested. She ran a budget of a small town, engaged in the political arena and then has become a governor with several thousand people working for her.
If the contest were one of who might be the best prepared to serve on someone's staff, then yeah, Obama's education stands out. But, this is a contest of leadership and part of that leadership is in initiative, and Palin has showed way more initiative and zeal by the mere act of stepping into the policy ring and just leading. Obama's been selected for various things but he's never really lead until the primary.
You cannot just chalk that up to Delawares GOP being 'utterly hopeless'. I mean, you can, but there is no evidence supporting it
Yeah you can. Just go look at the web site for the GOP's US Senate candidate in Delaware and tell me how you do not see hopeless! :-)
leftist unless you're willing to front some evidence.
There's plenty of evidence to say that Obama is leftist. The whole appeal of Obama to the left is that he is unashamedly leftist and he even argues in favor of it in his book and in his speeches. He argues against businesses, he frames his thinking in terms of a class struggle, he fondly recalls his discussions with communists in college and he runs with a leftist crowd.
Palin is as inexperienced as national level politicians get. A governor of two years does not a VP make - and that's about her only credential.
And, what, really, is Obama's experience? All we've heard from the Obama camp is how inexperience Palin is, but Obama has done -NOTHING-. What has he accomplished? It's a joke.
Biden may not be your favorite person, but he has a great deal of experience backing him. Further, he has a lot of blue collar people on his side - and has fought for that class well for a long time
There's absolutely no evidence for that statement on the national level. Biden's been running for President for a billion years and he's not been able to get more than 2% of the vote. The only reason he succeeds in Delaware is because the GOP in the 1st state is just utterly hopeless, not because Biden is anything special.
What I hear consistently from the right is that Obama is 'maniacal', 'messianic', 'too leftist', 'egotistical', 'desperate'. Where these claims can be supported or refuted by evidence, they're refuted.
That's an absurd statement on its face. You can't refute an opinion of a person. If the right wing thinks Obama is too egotistical or too leftists for their taste, then he is. All you can say is that he's not too leftist or egotistical for you. It's like you are trying to persuade people to vote for the guy by telling them their opinions are wrong.
I wasn't arguing the experience angle - I was intending to rebut your argument that Democrats were the ones primarily misrepresenting the facts
Fair enough. Oh, well, my bad then. Both sides are making stuff up at this point. Before too long, we'll have Obama linked to guys that believe in UFOs brought white people to destroy the black man and Palin will be linked to people wanting to launch a nuclear war for Jesus and McCain will be painted as mentally unstable lunatic and Biden probably a guy that somehow had his wife whacked.
That's American politics. Sigh.
I even agree that Biden was probably a poor choice for a VP. That said, I think Palin was a much worse choice for a VP, at least from the POV of her actually serving (rather than as a campaign tactic).
See, I don't see Biden as capable of being an effective President at all.... It will be very interesting to see how he does vs Palin in the debates. I don't think Biden knows as much as he says he does... is his problem.
There are so many better people for VP that Obama could have picked, politically. Biden's just the worst. If Obama wanted statesmen like gravitas, he could have gone Bill Richardson, who, in one swoop, is a successful governor, a diplomat, experienced in the Clinton administration (but without the Bill baggage), brings southwest votes towards the ticket AND also has impeccable credentials for the 2nd amendment crowd. Worst of all, Biden is useless for fundraising.
Palin is the governor of a state that has a smaller population ( 700k) than many cities
And Obama hasn't been the governor or mayor or leader of -anything-. Had he not been a dope and picked Biden, his campaign wouldn't have to be in the absurd position of defending itself as having less experience than a governor of Alaska. But, oh no, he passed over the likes of Corzine, Richardson, or, for christ sakes, the enormously popular Ed Rendell of PA.. and instead he went for Joe Biden.
Look, at this point, the more stuff Democrats make up about Palin's religious views, the more stuff Republicans can make up about Obama's church and Chicago connections with radicals...
Now, Chicago is a nutty town and there's no way that you can be a Democrat without talking to the likes of Reverend Wright and Ayers and company, but, nationally, that's going to play out far worse than Palin trying to yank a couple of books out of the library because tagging Obama as a racist terrorist AND a religious fruitcake will trump tagging Palin merely being a religious fruitcake.
Checkmate. McCain wins because Obama blew it.
Only that does not contradict my statement about her being an extremist. I think you need to educate yourself on her history, and not just fall for republican spin.
Oh, really? Did you learn that from Obama's buddies "I hate white people" Reverend Wright or Louis Farrakahn, or, did you learn that from "I'm not sorry for being a terrorist", William Ayers?
While mayor of Wasilla she injected national politics into a small town, removing democratic officials purely because they were democrats.
I'm sure that must be the absolute truth.
Do you think managing a state of 670k people for only 2 years, where the federal government owns and manages 65% of the territory, somehow qualifies her as more able than Obama is ludicrous.
What exactly did Obama do where he was the executive of anything more than 670k people? That's the whole point. Obama hasn't done anything except for get a fancy degree, spend twenty years at a racist, communist, church that despises the USA, and then runs for office.
The fact of the matter is, while Barrack Obama was running around trying to win a popularity contest a bunch of guys that hate white people, Sarah Palin was balancing budgets first as mayor, and then as governor.
If Obama loses the next democratic candidate (presumably Hillary Clinton) will hopefully go on the offensive.
Hillary Clinton can't help but be offensive! :-)
Palin is a small-town extremist
Ah, Palin has managed a budget as an executive much larger than Obama ever has. She's balanced a budget, she's actually gotten more money from "big oil"... she's cut checks to everyone in Alaska out of a surplus that she created... So, when Obama manages anything that has nearly 20 billion a year in revenue, you let me know. The fact of the matter is, she has more experience than -anyone- else on the ticket as an executive. If Obama had picked a VP governor from any state - even New Jersey... he'd be totally immune to this criticism. But, tsk, tsk, he picked another Senator and opened himself up on this front.
In politics, the first rule is to not believe your own propaganda. Painting Palin as a small town extremist is just as intellectually honest as painting Obama as a terrorist sympathizer. Truth is, both people are going to say whatever they want to get elected. You can believe MoveOn.org and DailyKos as much as some people believe in NationalReview, but, at the end of the day, most people see it for the mud slinging as it is, unless you come up with something really good, like Swift Boats.
I think you're giving yourself and the Republican party a bit too much credit.
In an election year? No way!!! :-)
If you always voted for the most radical candidate, then how did the Democrats wind up with John Kerry in 2004?
He's a lot more to the left than Howard Dean was... but, then again, you are right...nobody needed to help Dean implode with his ultimate warrior speech.
"Don't be evil" is just an advertising slogan, like "At Pontiac we build excietement" (bad brakes, crappy handling), "Chevy - Like A Rock" (damned thing won't start), "At Ford, Quality is job 1" (Got their work cut out for them).
Pontiac's handling has gotten a lot better. The GTO was a bit squishy but the new G8 is said to be a worthy challenger to the M5. If that's not good brakes and good handling, then I do not know what is.
Similarly, Ford is now routinely winning various quality rankings in it car offerings... but Ford's problem is that it has too much debt and can't build enough of the cars it is selling all too well while at the same time has a lot of people building big trucks that no one wants.
We Republicans did rig this election. You guys always look trying to think we're screwing up votes in Ohio but our strategy has always been to vote for the most radical Democratic candidate in all too many open primaries. Because Democrats have proportional representation, this strategy ALWAYS works.
We registered Democrat in many states and voted for Obama in droves. Then, when it looked like it was over for Hillary, we supported her just enough to drag the race out and bleed Democrats dry. But at the end, Hillary was always the big problem for us as she can appeal to our bread and butter middle class people but Obama is just another George McGovern. Instinctively for us, Hillary was a bigger problem because when we say a woman is a b---, that means we admire her fighting spirit even as we loath her policies. She has -always- terrified us.
Now, that Obama and company genuinely believe that a bunch of Republicans who've made a lifetime of supporting free trade really, seriously, crossed the line to support his quasi-socialistic policies is all too good for us. He's not even aware of the danger that he is in come November. Hillary gets it though.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
So, I would look for McCain to be someone in the mold of a Teddy Roosevelt, whom he has publicly said that he idolizes. As a president, I would probably look to see McCain do some of the progressive things that T.R. did, while still working to bolster Pax Americana. If McCain lives up to his fiscal promises and the way he's generally voted, I think there's probably enough libertarian and fiscal Republicans (as opposed to the religious right), and right of center Democrats to actually put together a governing coalition that for 4 all too brief years sheds the lunatics on both sides of the aisle.
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office
Obama is doomed in this election. It's not even that he's black that's the problem, its his politics and his pick of VP. Then, there's a character test here. Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
He's running too far to the left in the general election. Obama's plan is and always was to get all the black vote plus the liberals and the problem is that there's not enough liberals in the states he needs. He's just misread the USA at a national level, and so he has a hard time seeing the need shed his own maniacal base to succeed publicly in a way that Clinton would have surely done.
I thought he gave a fantastic speech, but, since then his moves almost smack of desperation... he's almost devolving into a sort of a classic class war candidate and that's not a good thing to do when American for the most part tend to prefer to keep open the doors of opportunity for the rich just on the offbeat chance that they get rich themselves. I would say that Sarah Palin's retort on drilling (borrowed from Paris Hilton - we Republicans have no pride), was absolutely devastating.
Obama's pick of Biden as a VP was just a disaster. Nobody likes Joe Biden, even in Delaware, but here in the 1st state our GOP is so retarded that Biden always wins. Obama let himself get talked into thinking that he needed a foreign policy wonk added to the ticket and really, that's just stupid. Most people get the sense that foreign policy is really about being fair but firm and Obama already had foreign policy sewn up after his wildly successful European trip.
Worst of all, Obama's success is his own enemy. He's got himself surrounded by so many leaches flocking to all that campaign money he's raising that he's becoming almost Carter like in his perceived obligation to take heed of all them. The left wing has this obsession that a leader needs to listen to all of his counsellers, whereas, if Obama just borrowed a small page from Bush and listened to his own gut, he'd more effective in getting what we wants. As it is, the Obama posse is just dragging him down.
I'm absolutely against this sort of terrible thing, but, um... it is the kind of contract with more immunity to outsourcing.
If you had an idea you knew would make billions, would you just give it away? Would you? Most businesses thrive or die based on their founding "ideas" ...
Not really. They just keep building around the founding idea, knowing that competitors will jump on the same. The best companies keep building their ideas out, so that, by the time a competitor has mimicked the founding idea, they are onto the next big thing. So long as the founding idea company doesn't stumble, they should stay out in front.
you've obviously never had to file for bankruptcy or lived in a household on the verge of being bankrupt.
Well, actually, I have. My wife got sick when she was pregnant, our income plummeted, we spent too much on credit cards, and the phones rang off the hook. We stopped paying the cards, focused on the mortgage and the cars, sold the house in a very difficult economy, slashed expenses, worked out payment plans with all the lenders, and are gradually digging our way out.
I looked at bankruptcy and I qualified for sure but it was just a terrible option. Having thought it through, it occurred to me that bankruptcy from credit card debt actually benefits credit card companies more than it does consumers. The thing is, if you have a house or a car loan, then, the house and the car can get taken and you'd prefer to avoid that.. and you really have little leverage with the lender because they have an asset to recover. But, in the case of credit card companies, they have no assets that they can recover and they factor that into their interest rates and other fees. Sure, you can get sued by a credit card company and they can attach a lien, but, even then, you STILL have some leverage with them.
I had a lien on my house for like a lot of money, and, while jiggering the money to try and make the sale of the house work, I went and called the lenders and said, look, we can either drag this out forever with payments, or, you can get the proceeds now when I sell the house, if you accept this price. It worked.
The moral of the story is this. If you are in financial trouble, pay the things that the banks can take first, and forget about the rest of the loans. They will put you through hell but at the end of the day, you have nothing they can take and you know it, and they know it, and therefor, you have ALL the leverage when it comes to making settlements.
Avoid those "debt counselling services" like the plague. They flat out don't work, and ultimately, they really just try and convince you to do a payment stream that is simply unaffordable, and again, they make you think that they are holding all the cards, and really, you, as the debtor are.
So, when I say, yeah, I got a ton of free stuff for a year, and I got to live in a house for free for a year, well, I'm saying it from the perspective of someone who has gotten harrassed by collections agencies, lawyers, and even got sued on Christmas Day. But, at the end of the day, the way the laws are stacked now, if you have balls of brass and nerves of steel, is that truly, you have all the cards once the bank lends you money, and, if you really didn't care about the honor of a debt, in fact, you really could just not pay them back and accept having a lot of "free stuff".
All this talk about consumers being victims really only serves to reinforce the perception that they have no power, when, at the end of the day, the debtor is the one holding ALL of the cards.
I think that the sanest alternative, given the separation of church and state and that the church does not pay taxes, is that materials published by any non-profit or charitable organization should not be copyrightable.
As far as IP patents go. All a music player does, at its heart, when you go back this far, is maintain a file system for various sorts of files, and plays them back. To that end, one might well argue that unmanned spacecraft have been doing that at least through the 1970s, indeed, computers have been maintaining files and playing them back, even before. Digital music goes way, way back...
If anything is novel about the iPod, it is the user interface, and its bundling with iTunes. But the idea of a multimedia playback device being unique or patentable is utterly absurd. They are just computers, that's all.
Far be it from me to question the impartiality and objectivity of the Journal's OpEd (web) pages, but this is basically bollocks.
You can see the same in Financial Times as well, and they have hardly been supportive of the Bush administration. Yes, yeah and verily, Dems put up the shields for sloppy accounting at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It goes all the way back to when Raines was in there.
What Democrats have been resisting is efforts to deregulate Mae/Mac even more. Given how well deregulating the rest of the mortgage market has worked, they seem to be right in doing so.
Actually, nobody has actually been calling to deregulate Fannie Mae more. In general, Republicans have been calling for Fannie Mae to have the same liquidity, capital and reporting requirements that private banks must have.
Paulson is right, though. Mae/Mac should either be 100% public or 100% private. Any quasi-public scheme where the stockholders reap all the profits while the taxpayers assume all the risk is going to end badly for the latter.
I agree with you completely.
You can blame Bush as much as you want for the Fannie Mae debacle, but if you actually have been following the issue for twenty years, you would find in the Op Ed web pages of the Wall Streetn Journal a steady stream of Republican voices arguing that the finances of these two institutions are basically crap and have been that way for decades. Democrats have resisted any sort of legislative effort to bring reform to these two agencies. In fact, if you look at whose donating to whose campaign you could see that Wall Street overwhelming prefers Obama because they are look for the big handout to shareholders whereas Republicans are always more inclined to let companies simply fail.
Therefore even if we burned all of the oil in all of the earth's crust right now, we'd only recreate the athmospheric situation of the age of the dinosaurs
Well no, we'd release the CO2 accumulated by 200 million years of dinosaurs...
Of course, this is complete and utter horseshit.
Actually its very plausible. Read about TEMPEST and TEMPEST certification. The computer is essentially a giant radio transmitter. The port lines might give you a better signal.
How can you say that these people are victims when they got to live in a house for free for a couple of years, got to ring up big credit card debts and walk away?
I got news for you. I'd bet that for every supposed victim of supposed predatory lending, you've got 10 guys that probably bought a house with absolutely no intention of paying the mortgage.
Yeah, the corporations were really evil. They passed out a ton of money to poor people, and they didn't get a dime of it back.