Here's the thing. I look at a lot of Obama supporters today and I see in them a lot of the same things I saw in myself when I was big into the Republican Party.
The moral of the story is that you can't buy into any single party's message, and that you need to make either political party work hard for your vote. Nobody gets screwed over by a political party more than its most loyal supporters...
We need to get past the game that we are being worked towards, where we see Democrats and Republican as enemies, and re-learn to appreciate each other as citizens. We need to tell ourselve that it is as ok to be a redneck with his cars up on blocks (that's me), as it is to be a gay couple getting married, that a man has as much right to own rifle as he does to burn the flag, that, we together have natural rights that encompass not just the bill of rights, but beyond them. And, we need to understand that when someone else is trying to get us caught up in a civil war of even a political sort, they are only doing so that in the cause of protecting us from these imagined fellow citizens as enemies, that they are taking the rights of everyone.
DR-DOS and CP/M are not even remotely the same product. CP/M was an operating system for personal computers that pre-dated DOS. IBM offered both operating systems for the IBM-PC, but DOS was a lot cheaper and while CP/M may have had some minor advantages, DOS was bundled with a good BASIC for it day and was much less expensive, so CP/M died.
DR-DOS came about much later. I think a product has a right to refuse to work with other products. I mean, building in interoperability with another product is a cost that someone has to pay, so, if Microsoft didn't want Windows to run on another verion of DOS, that's their perogative. Really, the failure to answer Windows in the marketplace was more the fault of companies like Lotus, who had the resource to develop a Windows product but never really did, and Visicorp, whose Visi-on product never materialized except for buggy and way too late. Even if IBM had made a graphical TopView for DOS, that could have given them a big lead... but they didn't. And why did Lotus let a rather remarkable Magellan product totally wither on the vine and die?
Let's look at some of Microsoft's early competitors and the dumb decisions they made. Ironically, though, for each and every point I list, you can see that Microsoft has learned all the dumb answers of its competitors.
1. CP/M, ultimately crushed by DOS. Microsoft basically gave DOS away to every OEM there was, while CP/M stuck to its higher priced format. Now, Linux is making inroads on Microsoft because its free, whereas Microsoft is increasingly a stickler for Windows licensing.
2. Borland vs Microsoft. Borland struck an early lead in Microsoft in tools by making a Pascal that was better than DOS BASIC, and then, by making a C++ that was better than Microsoft's. But, Microsoft came up with VB, whose scripting style made it easier to work with than Borland's Pascal, and negated the advantages of Borland C++, and then, for C++, Microsoft's Visual C++'s 2.0 was hands down a better IDE than Borland's C++ IDE was.
Now, Microsoft is losing tools mindshare to Linux, because, interpreted languages such as Python, Ruby and Perl / PHP are easier to do quick and dirty RAD style web apps with, while Microsoft's own offerings are getting increasingly complicated... and Microsoft's letting their own C++ product languish while the GNU compiler keeps getting better and better, and Linux IDE's such as KDevelop actually now surpass Visual Studio for C++ development. Microsoft needs to realize that the.NET one platform fits all approach is ultimately a loser, but, we Linux fans hope they don't realize it until it is too late!
3. Borland vs Microsoft Round 2. Borland's Quattro Pro was an early favorite over Excel, but Excel wound up carrying the day just through a sheer weight of features. But the really telling battle came when Borland bought Ashton Tate, and Microsoft bought a tiny company that made an Ashton Tate clone called FoxPro. FoxPro was, way, way faster than dBASE and Borland was late with its dBASE anyway. Microsoft would later seal the deal with MS Access, which was easier for quick and dirty database projects than either xBASE product.
Now, Microsoft's own office products are late, and Open Office continues to make inroads. Nobody has really answered Access yet, but... MySQL has quietly dominated the enterprise for quick and dirty databases in the same sort of way Access snuck into the desktop.
4. Microsoft vs IBM. Oh, let's see, how did IBM screw up OS/2, let me count the ways. IBM wanted to tie OS/2 to PS/2 offerings... IBM's OS/2 marketing was hamfisted whereas Microsoft basically let everyone copy Windows like the plague... whereas Microsoft wanted Windows to run on all sorts of PCs... Windows wasn't "as good", but it did have a better message queue than OS/2 and didn't require users to throw away DOS completely at a time when that mattered...
Nowadays, Microsoft is the company that ties Windows to specific hardware, whereas Linux runs on just about everything. While Microsoft still has a stranglehold on PCs, in every other kind of computer out there, from cell phones to digital control devices to routers and set top boxes, Linux actually has a growing presence. And, ironically, if you want to write for POWER Linux, IBM will be more than happy to set you up with an account at an IBM data center... what will Microsoft do, hmmmm?
4. Microsoft vs Apple, round 1. Windows color, Macintosh, black and white. Woops... but even today, we can see Linux rolling out with better and better eye candy and graphic effects. When Vista first threatened integrated 3d graphics ala OS/X, Linux people could have almost panicked, yet, they rolled up their sleeves and by the time Vista arrived, Compviz was here and many Linux desktops actually look better than Windows. Can you say Ubuntu?
5. Openness. Microsoft came to being in a day when Microsoft's level of documentation gave it a more open feel over what software bundled by hardware makers would give. While we think of Microsoft as being hard nosed and closed today, 20 years ago, they were
First off, let me say that I don't disagree with your desire to improve the level of freedom in society. I am not all the kind of person that likes to follow orders or authority of any kind. However, I think you are taken by propaganda stirred up by lawyers to get more money, and there's a better way to achieve your end.
Uhm - if they can't, that means you live in a fascist state. Fascism does not equate directly to 'more government control over eg. taxes' but to government and big business working so tightly together that it really makes no sense to differentiate.
You miss the point that fascism is evil because it concentrates power, and so does socialism, for that matter. If corporations are operating independently of the government, then you do not have a fascist state. Conversely, if you have no corporations and just the government, you have a very evil state because power is concentrated.
In the ideal case, from the perspective of freedom and power distribution, one would have lots of little corporations and a little government, but instead, we have an enormous government and a lot of big corporations. But, we don't, and so, you have to weight things in terms of balances of power..
So, what's the way?
You say that you should be allowed to sue the corporation for complying with the government request. I'd say, let's have legislation that waives sovereign immunity for damages caused by warrantless wiretapping, and let all your rich lawyers waive sovereign immunity and go after the government, instead.
It's not AT&T's fault, that they complied with the orders of a bunch of Feds. When you've got any number of federal agencies that could come down on the AT&T, AT&T doesn't have any choice, really, any more than Krupp had any choices to make when the SS walked in and said, we think a few party members should be on the board. Government has armies and prisons and corporations do not.
I understand the logic to go after AT&T... they have deep pockets and little power to resist a subpoena to "protect" the government. But the problem here is the government, not the corporation, and that's where you need to go with it.
Besides, even if they were, why would you want to save money for fascists that have violated your Constitutional rights?
My point is that if people cared so much about the constitution, as they blather about telecomm immunity, they might actually be more concerned about the government collecting ALL of our financial data. In the case of telecomm immunity, we're really arguing about whether or not a corporation can be sued for complying with a government surveillance request. How this helps anyone is utterly beyond me, other than lawyers getting rich. And that's what its all about, its just getting lawyers getting rich. Quite honestly, given a regulatory regime that requires people to turn over all sorts of information to the government, or have other people's information get collected by the government, your charge of fascism is really a red herring. If you wanted to get rid of fascism in the United States, then you ought to get rid of the IRS! After all, while Bush might be required to get a FISA warrant to do a wiretap, the IRS needs no warrant at all to demand you incriminate yourself every April 15th!
Haven't even bothered to notice that Chris Dodd has slipped a provision into the housing bill that requires all internet businesses and payment providers to report their transactions to the IRS.
The reason loco's turned to Disel is because they didn't have to carry water
There's more to it than the water.
First is that while diesels might have been more expensive while running, coal trains take a -long- time to get ready to make steam. As a practical matter, this meant that railroads had to keep steam engines more or less operating all the time, but a diesel would just start.
Second is that steamers required way more maintenance. You don't have to do too much to a diesel engine, but you have to get into the boiler and clean out all the soot and crap in the firebox and around the tubes, and the insides of the tubes themselves would get scaled up.
The water was the icing on the cake. Sucks to have your water supply freeze, or to have to rail it into desert towns.
Speaking as a free-spending political liberal, that's too much even for me. I'd be all for giving some government grants and regulatory relief to enable several pilot plants for new technologies to be built, to help the industry get back on its feet. But after that, they're on their own. I'm for technology research (which conservatives view as interfering with the market), but at least I don't think the government should be in the business of putting nuclear power's competitors out of business. --
You need to have a look at what the arch liberal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. He not only built power plants, but he built an entire utility called the Tennessee Valley Authority. Put a lot of people to work, brought power to rural America.... and, it's remarkably efficient and works pretty well. Not too shabby for you socialists... so, why not do the same the with nukes? I mean, the conservative knock on socialism is that, it doesn't work, but, if you got a case where the Feds can do something efficiently, then, why not let them do it and accrue the benefits of public ownership?
A gas engine is about 30% efficient at best. Coal, you're looking at 50% for the old crappy ones or up to about 80% with the latest designs.
coal fired steam generators are not anywhere close to 50% efficient and are certainly not 80% efficient. If that were the case, then you would see coal fired locomotives everywhere, and you simply don't.
The reason coal is used is that it is dirt cheap and it is close. Go look at the price of powder river basin for coal. If you buy it by the rail car, you can get coal delivered to your rail siding for under $50 a ton. In terms of $ per joule, coal wins hands down, but in terms of absolute efficiency, coal is a pig. Coal requires huge maintenance to clean out boilers, its dirty and the soot gets into everything, you have to have loads of water to boil... all of that, is why they switched like droves from coal trains to diesel trains in the 1930s and tried to phase out coal boilers in favor of oil boilers. Coal is cheap, but you get what you pay for.
We lose a total of 5% in the US due to transmission. I CALL SHENANIGANS. You are either promoting an agenda or simply do not know what you are talking about.
I call ignorance. The reason we have relatively low losses is because we tend not to move power very far. Once you start trying to ship power from the spot in the country that happens to be sunny or windy, losses will go up and by quite a bit. Having power being produced where you want it, and when you want it, has enormous advantages and, up until quite recently, is what separated the industrial world from the third world. Now we'll all be praying to the Wind Gods to come... humanity renders itself helpless again. Hell of a future you got there for us.
This is mixing two separate issues. Oil is not the problem as far as producing electricity, its coal.
1. There's a fair number of oil fired plants. They were built in the 1950s as they are cheaper to maintain than coal plants and it was before natural gas turbine plants came into vogue. They operate any more as a power provider of last resort because they are expensive to operate.
2. You want nuclear is that if you are going to have a lot of electric cars, demand for electricity is going to go through the roof. That power needs to come from somewhere. Shall we burn more coal?
I mean, if you got a lot of money, and you are infringing on the terms of the GPL license, why not just go for broke and get the whole dang thing tossed out of court? Right now, a lot of GPL cases are being settled behind the scenes but no one has ever really made a fantastic push to just gut the license.
Right off the wheel, if they were infringing, they could argue that:
a) Putting something into GPL is the same as putting it into the public domain because there is no control over distribution and no economic damages associated with infringement. Does Bells use of GPL code actually cause economic harm to the developers, and the answer is arguably no.
b) Third parties cannot file or sue on behalf of GPL'd items because they do not suffer economic loss. Basically, this would mean that in order to bring a GPL case, the authors of the GPL code would actually have to file the complaint.
Point a would basically render the GPL useless, and point b would at least make it impractical to enforce.
But how do you know your senses tell you anything useful, and that life is not one big VR game, like in the Matrix.. credentials... etc
Well, this is actually not a new idea at all. Decartes struggled with this concept quite a few hundred years ago, and, I think he ultimately came up with that, if you are being put into some sort of a world that is a lie, then you have to be exist with some sort of free will in order to be lied to. What we would call virtual reality today, he would call, "an evil God". Thus, you don't need to have virtual reality as a framework to ask, is "reality real". Religion works quite nicely, and, to some extent, one could even say that the Matrix was, in a way, about religion.
AS far as credentials go, I think the university system is important. However, science doesn't require that people -have- Phds in order to make contributions. You do, however, have to have that knowledge, and the university system is the quickest way that man has devised that gives people some sort of a way to prove that they have expertise in a particular field and can thus be taken seriously. Still, science is ultimately about building things, so, if you can build it, they will come.
For example, there is a great web page of some of the great unsolved problems on science. There's the question of complexity - does P = NP? And, honestly, if you can even understand what the question really means, can go through the math about it, you will find that probably self study will take longer than would otherwise be required by going through an academic setting. However, science is about results, first, and credentials second, so if you walked into any university with a computer program that could, say, factor a 200 digit number on a PC, you'd be fairly well noted. Or, in physics, if you came up with a device that actually changed the mass of an object, that would get you noticed. IF you could alter that repulsive force that keeps atoms from fusing into another that would get you noticed.. But, you have to do something physical, real, and novel... and to understand what novel is, means, you have to educate yourself, in some way.
I know this may sound crazy, because, yeah, the business world places such a premium on advanced degrees... but, just pick up any text book on any topic in any scientific field. You will find all sorts of blurbs about various pioneers in fields, Bohr, Einstein, Fermat, Laplace, Maxwell, Newton, and all of those blurbs are about what the guys did, not, where they went to college, if they did at all!
In the USA, the burden is on the person supposedly being slandered to prove that they were actually slandered. Usually, this means that one has to show some sort of an actual economic loss caused by the speech AND, that the speech has to be untrue. Even with all of that, its still pretty hard to actually prevail in court and there's been some pretty famous cases where the media has won. That doesn't mean that we should drop our diligence against those who would claim liability as an excuse to censor, but it does mean that despite the admittedly awful example of domestic security legislation set by the USA, there are still some areas where we are doing ok.
Hey, if the government is putting together a report for its own purposes, and there's no state secret involved, there's really no reason to NOT publish the data...
Joe Blow is paying a pretty good chunk of taxes for this report. Indeed, given that the government is in debt such that each and every American is at least 20k in hoc, the least the FCC can do is publish the report it already paid for. Is it really cost that much to put a link on its web site and upload it?
The real problem is that there are too many programmers that can kinda write code, but really can't read it. They see all the little pieces but can't build a progressively more abstract picture in their heads as to what the program is doing. I guess, ultimately, you have to ask, if they can't do that, then, why are the programming?
Of course its all crap, but just remember, that if women want to start with the sexism crap, the last time that we did that, women cooked and cleaned for 20,000 years. Hey lady, I'm getting hungry.
Sure, women might be more considerate and write better documentation and pay attention to a corporate process more, but that's all maintenance work. At some point, somebody has to sit down and actually write the first instance of Unix, DOS, Windows, C, C++, Java, SQL Server, Oracle, Netware, or any other system, and we have to ask, where's the one that a woman wrote?
See, I think there is another stereotype, is that, there is a subset of men that are iconoclastic tinkers. Men don't express themselves, often, in speech, and self actualize themselves more based on what they build or make rather than how they appear or communicate. Sexual competitive pressures matter too. Men -MUST- differentiate, or they cannot further their genetic destiny through breeding.
So, its more likely that a man's going to be inventive and do something like it. It's evolutionary more sound, and backed by current knowledge.
hat is, no one ever really knows anything about the Universe other than what they're told, and what they can work out in terms of internal consistency checks on what they're told.
I have to disagree with this statement. Science, properly applied, gives mankind the tools to know things based directly on his or her experience.
The beauty of good science is that you DON'T have to trust someone else's eyes. You can trust your own. While you may not discover the Higg's Boson or some other exotic subatomic particle in your own home, there is a surprising amount of fairly important experimental evidence that is cheap to do, that you can do yourself.
Take for instance the solar system. Sure, Ptolemy could be ok if all you wanted was planetary timetables, but, then there's the occasional cases where they would be wrong, and for increased accuracy, you need Kepler for the ellipse and then Newton ultimately for calculus based gravity, and then when you want to get really accurate, you need Einstein to consider various relativistic effects. In each of those cases, the edges are well defined and serve as a model of where to look, and in all of the above cases, all you are doing is taking a decent telescope and a CCD camera and seeing where things are in the sky.
Even at the smaller levels of physics, you can decide for yourself. You don't have to say that you are not sure if Maxwell or others were on the mark - you can take iron filings on top of a magnet and a piece of paper, move the thing around, and see that, yeah, all he's doing is describing in calculus the field that you see. You can follow in Einstein's footsteps and see the photoelectric effect by yourself - with a simple solar cell. You can perform the double slit experiment with sand and with water and then even light, and that's basically going to give you a pretty good heads up on quantum physics. Even the gold foil experiment is probably not out of reach for the determined amateur.
You claim that he is lying based on your own supposition that his future actions will not match the perception that he has "created" with his statement.
I think that it is pretty accurate to say that Democrats have created a perception that Bush is terrible for domestic spying, while, at the same time, they have not sought to overturn those laws themselves. Talking about "perceptions" does not deny the fundamental truth of what Obama said. His essential promise is not end to government spying, but to be "better" at it, and "better" is just another way of saying that he's going to keep doing it. I'm still infuriated at fellow conservatives for suddenly falling in line about the war on terror and throwing out every fear of government they ever had, just because "our guy", was in there. I wonder how many dems will equally flip on issues such as spying, when the cause is something they believe in, like complying with global warming. If President Obama orders the shut down or confiscation of a coal plant or spies on a man that it suspects of being unenvironmentally friendly, will that really be any different in your mind than Bush spying on someone for being a suspected terrorist? Structurally, nothing has changed, and nothing will change - the government will retain the power to declare people enemies of the state through its surveillance and nothing Obama has promised will alter that proposition. So yes, I do think he is lying.
It is because my interests, and our national interests, will be better served by his election that I support Obama.
Your interests will be better served by Obama, of that, I can't argue, as, it's beyond me to say what your interests are. However, you can't say my interests would be served by Obama, especially since his platform is as divisive as it is. What if I work for Exxon Mobil, or own stock in a coal company? Clearly, anyone in the commodities sector is going to take a beating if Obama gets elected. Even the energy sector is going to take a beating. He wants to modernize the national power grid and energy infrastructure, and its true, we have a lot of old coal plants that could be modernized. But, those same plants employ a lot of union workers that have a pretty cozy relationship with management - in that, you get a management that wants to keep the old plants going as much as possible because they are paid for, and the higher labor costs are unpleasant, but still cheaper than the massive capital costs of modernizing. Anyway, you slap a carbon tax on these plants, and modernize, and you are going to find a lot of machinists, tool and die guys, boiler people, all out of work, because, the new stuff is better and requires less people. For someone that claims to be in the "national interest", that's an awful lot of jobs you've just thrown under the bus.
So, yeah, Obama might create 5 million jobs by making everyone upgrade their stuff to "solve" his global warming problem, but, there's going to be a lot of jobs lost as well. It's not the win win that he paints it as. The last time we did a federally mandated tech upgrade in the early 1970s, if you recall, much American manufacturing was wiped out because the capital to do those upgrades simply wasn't there, and, its certainly not there now.
Yes, Obama, in any case, probably will win the election largely because McCain is not only unable but is unwilling to make the Republican case. He's not able to talk about the free market when he's condemned it himself. He won't talk about how the free market and free trade has been spectacularly successful at preventing another world war over access to markets and resources or about how much of Asia is being lifting out of poverty by the American idea of free trade.
McCain doesn't have the imagination to say that, instead of raising taxes for all of this infrastructure upgrades that Obama wants (in the form of carbon taxes and increased income and capital gains taxes), we might instead nationalize offshore oil, shale, and anwr resource
I don't see anything where Obama is advocating spying on or collecting data on *all* Americans, although he doesn't condemn it explicitly, I do grant you.
See, I read that, by describing a process for how government data collection and spying should legally and fairly take place, that, in his mind, the government still needs to spy on its own people. It's not, that, to him, its wrong, its more that, its spying on his people, when he would rather have them spy on someone else's. It's that, really, Obama is -lying-. He's creating one perception, but plans on engaging in another. It might be prudent, might be wise, balanced, and all of that, but the fact is, he's -lying-.
If libertarians were to focus on creating control systems, usage limitations and transparency in these matters, I think libertarian goals would be better served. And I doubt that McCain would be any more likely than Obama to seek balance in this area.
It's not about that to me, its more about honesty. Obama and the Democrats are seeking to create the perception that they won't engage in the same sort of domestic spying that Bush did, and really, they will. They might do it under the rule of law, but at the end, the emotional aspect of the charge they bring : "Bush is spying on you", is something they plan on doing too.
And I doubt that McCain would be any more likely than Obama to seek balance in this area.
I don't disagree with that at all. McCain sucks for this sort of thing too.
Would you consider that because you were wrong about this that you may also be wrong about the other things that you wrote? I encourage you to "face facts" (as you put it).
You aren't facing facts. Read exactly what Obama said, and think about it without getting so stupidly getting caught up in feel good niceness.
a) Obama supports the USA government continuing to collect databases on all Americans. b) Obama supports the existing of a security apparatus that allows the USA government to spy on all of its citizens.
Points c & d are a joke. Like some Russian guy is going to care one rat's behind about what Obama says about spam.
So basically, at the end of the day, you have a guy who promises to do the same thing Bush is reviled for doing - spying on US citizens, except that, he'll be "nicer about it." Sorry, tone doesn't cut it.
Give me a pledge that says that he will vote to
a) REPEAL the FISA law. b) REPEAL the USA PATRIOT act.
And then you have something. But, as it stands, he's not doing anything more than George Bush is doing, functionally, except that he might get the cover of a law to make it feel better. Big deal. In the Soviet Union, spying on citizens was legal too. It didn't make it right.
35% of tax money comes from taxes specifically to fund Social Security and Medicare...
Social Security and Medicare only makeup 33% of expenditure...
If the government is making a 2% profit on Social Security, well...
Well, the problem is that the government is supposed to be escrowing that overage to pay for social security when more people hit the system. Unfortunately, the government has instead been spending that money, leaving "IOUs" in the social security trust fund account. In a few years, social security will continue to rise, and will need those "IOUs" back. As a result, the government will have to further curtail other services in order to meet its social security obligations. So, there is no profit per say, just an accumulated debt. Even Clinton's "balanced budgets" achieved a balance partially by spending social security money... all in all, its been a huge bipartisan cluster you-know-what. Bush's privatization proposal would have fixed this, but by telling gen-x and gen-y that they wouldn't get a guaranteed social security payment, rather, something they would invest over their lives. Thus, our gen-x taxes would have paid for the baby boomers, and we would have gotten some stock. If the stock market goes up, we would make out like bandits. However, if it doesn't, well, we're eating dog food. AS it stands, I think gen-x and gen-y are only going to be able to collect less than 50% of their earnings because the money has already been spent.
n order, they were fired for: enforcing school plagiarism policy, fraternizing with students, student thought the course was too difficult, and student thought the course was too difficult. (Remember the latter two are the ones that empirically were, in statewide and national comparisons, highly successful in teaching the material.)
Students thought the work was too hard? That's the craziest thing I ever heard of. Criminy, education is a gift and students need to elevate themselves.
In spite of the fact that I would probably call myself a libertarian rather than a liberal or a conservative, I do see the merit of the government creating a level playing field for economic competition that discourages the concentration of power in any one social or economic group. Obama is new because it has been almost 50 years at least since we have had a president (Eisenhower? maybe Johnson?) who would see *basic fairness* as being an important goal for government.
Here's the thing. There's plenty of fairness in American society today and more opportunity than ever but we have a generation that is too lazy to see it or to reach for it.
I'm son of a trucking company manager who is the son of a coal miner. We're hardly unique but every step of the way, I have found that if you work extremely hard, you can get ahead, and I've not seen anything about America today that says that statement isn't true. If you talk to a lot of people who aren't succeeding in America today, quite honestly, they are not working nearly as hard as the people did a generation before. You have gen-xr's and gen-yr's going around and playing video games and listening to i-tunes and driving new cars, watching movies, complaining about how poor they are. It's utterly absurd. You can't spend your 20's partying, without paying an economic price, and that's what too many people have done. Economic success is not something that is handed to you, it is something that is earned.
I've made more than a few mistakes. I bought cars that used too much gas and a house that was more than I could afford. I spend too much on credit cards and I took a beating selling my house to extricate myself from a financial disaster that I made for myself, and so, when I see people blame George Bush for their problems, to me, I think they just can't own up to making mistakes. Everyone has to be a victim these days and no one can just say: "I f---- up." Big deal. You f---- up sometimes in life. Deal with it, like an adult, and move on. I know people that have gotten rich, rather rich, because they didn't make mistakes. They got a product out the door, they worked the really hard hours, or they got an education in a field that is actually demanded.
It's really simple, actually, and its the ugly truth of disparity. In a technological society, you don't just get 10% richer when you get a leg up, you get 100%. It's like skill sets in programming - programmers aren't just 5% better than each other...some are just magnitudes better than each other. At the top of the heap you got guys like Bill Joy that right entire operating systems... so yeah, inequality in wealth is going to be a fact of life, but it is an inequality based on intelligence and workmanship, not on some nefarious scheme. So long as the people at the bottom are buying flat screen tv's, ps3's, $100 shoes, new cars (and suv's at that), and above all, the country is by and large obese, then, I'm not seeing the victimization that you are, and I think this class warfare being waged by the likes of Obama and company is so much demagoguery, the product of a community that likes to blame everyone else for their mistakes, and admits to none of their own.
A shill is someone pretending to be neutral. Are you asserting that you are a neutral observer?
Oh, i thought a shill was an advocate. Me neutral, no!
And one more thing: Do you really have to drag race into this discussion? "Rich white kids"? Seriously?
It's a joke. You don't get it. Obama probably is a bit racist, but it doesn't matter. Richard Nixon couldn't stand jewish people but wound up saving Israel in its greatest hour of need.
As it is, I'm really disappointed about the manned mission to Mars being on the chopping block. Its important to me and to the USA for nationalistic reasons. Those things matter. Twenty years from now, when we finally get there, we aren't going to care about some poor slob not getting his teeth filled becuase he didn't have the money... we're going to care about the US Flag on Mars. It's going to be a good time and a great feat. On the other hand, pure and basic research is interesting, if it leads to new products for consumers... but, if it doesn't, then, you know, its not that big of a deal.
As for media decentralization goes, see, you guys put the cart before the horse. The media is what it is because of the internet. Newspapers took a beating from radio, and then TV, and adjusted and consolidated. Now computers make them pointless. Sucks, but that's just life. Radio has a role, but it will adjust, and when you have netradio and sirius and terrestrial radio you have a lot more choice than you did before. universal broadband access is just socialism.... what it basically means is that everyone else's broadband bill is going to go up so that poor people can get broadband and maybe if it doesn't go up too much, it will be ok...
But, if you really wanted to have money for inner city schools, then look at the whole USA budget. The lion's share of it is going to old people. if you really wanted to help the kids, you should have supported us when we wanted to privatize social security and medicare and capped the expenses. It would have screwed the elderly, but money would be pouring down on children, where its needed, and in droves. Cutting a few space ships out isn't going to cut it.
In general, I'm really disappointed with Obama's leftist leanings being repackaged as something new. He's really not doing anything all that dramatic or great. I can agree that the country tilts left or right depending on the challenges that face it and at this point, it looks like a federal response is more useful than a free market one. With that said, why not just go for the jugular then and really solve some basic problems? Let's take 50 billion dollars and have the Feds buy back a bunch of SUVs in exchange for American made small cars? Jeez, that would cut our gasoline bill in -half- and pay for itself in one year. For a deep thinker, Obama just doesn't cut it.... the idea of a strong and progressive government is to rally people around the flag, accomplish a national purpose. He should be saying, "yeah, we're going to rebuild America and then put a man on mars, to show the world how Americans do things."... but for him to say that manned flight isn't necessary tells me that he's not even really a good liberal. Nationalism is ESSENTIAL to good liberalism and paradoxically, the most successful "liberal" in the classic redistribution of wealth sense was none other than Bush.
FDR and Jack Kennedy are rolling over in their graves.
I'm a lifelong Republican, a Bush supporter, and a McCain supporter, but if Obama puts a man on Mars, he's got my vote.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing. I look at a lot of Obama supporters today and I see in them a lot of the same things I saw in myself when I was big into the Republican Party.
The moral of the story is that you can't buy into any single party's message, and that you need to make either political party work hard for your vote. Nobody gets screwed over by a political party more than its most loyal supporters...
We need to get past the game that we are being worked towards, where we see Democrats and Republican as enemies, and re-learn to appreciate each other as citizens. We need to tell ourselve that it is as ok to be a redneck with his cars up on blocks (that's me), as it is to be a gay couple getting married, that a man has as much right to own rifle as he does to burn the flag, that, we together have natural rights that encompass not just the bill of rights, but beyond them. And, we need to understand that when someone else is trying to get us caught up in a civil war of even a political sort, they are only doing so that in the cause of protecting us from these imagined fellow citizens as enemies, that they are taking the rights of everyone.
DR-DOS and CP/M are not even remotely the same product. CP/M was an operating system for personal computers that pre-dated DOS. IBM offered both operating systems for the IBM-PC, but DOS was a lot cheaper and while CP/M may have had some minor advantages, DOS was bundled with a good BASIC for it day and was much less expensive, so CP/M died.
DR-DOS came about much later. I think a product has a right to refuse to work with other products. I mean, building in interoperability with another product is a cost that someone has to pay, so, if Microsoft didn't want Windows to run on another verion of DOS, that's their perogative. Really, the failure to answer Windows in the marketplace was more the fault of companies like Lotus, who had the resource to develop a Windows product but never really did, and Visicorp, whose Visi-on product never materialized except for buggy and way too late. Even if IBM had made a graphical TopView for DOS, that could have given them a big lead... but they didn't. And why did Lotus let a rather remarkable Magellan product totally wither on the vine and die?
Let's look at some of Microsoft's early competitors and the dumb decisions they made. Ironically, though, for each and every point I list, you can see that Microsoft has learned all the dumb answers of its competitors.
1. CP/M, ultimately crushed by DOS. Microsoft basically gave DOS away to every OEM there was, while CP/M stuck to its higher priced format. Now, Linux is making inroads on Microsoft because its free, whereas Microsoft is increasingly a stickler for Windows licensing.
2. Borland vs Microsoft. Borland struck an early lead in Microsoft in tools by making a Pascal that was better than DOS BASIC, and then, by making a C++ that was better than Microsoft's. But, Microsoft came up with VB, whose scripting style made it easier to work with than Borland's Pascal, and negated the advantages of Borland C++, and then, for C++, Microsoft's Visual C++'s 2.0 was hands down a better IDE than Borland's C++ IDE was.
Now, Microsoft is losing tools mindshare to Linux, because, interpreted languages such as Python, Ruby and Perl / PHP are easier to do quick and dirty RAD style web apps with, while Microsoft's own offerings are getting increasingly complicated... and Microsoft's letting their own C++ product languish while the GNU compiler keeps getting better and better, and Linux IDE's such as KDevelop actually now surpass Visual Studio for C++ development. Microsoft needs to realize that the .NET one platform fits all approach is ultimately a loser, but, we Linux fans hope they don't realize it until it is too late!
3. Borland vs Microsoft Round 2. Borland's Quattro Pro was an early favorite over Excel, but Excel wound up carrying the day just through a sheer weight of features. But the really telling battle came when Borland bought Ashton Tate, and Microsoft bought a tiny company that made an Ashton Tate clone called FoxPro. FoxPro was, way, way faster than dBASE and Borland was late with its dBASE anyway. Microsoft would later seal the deal with MS Access, which was easier for quick and dirty database projects than either xBASE product.
Now, Microsoft's own office products are late, and Open Office continues to make inroads. Nobody has really answered Access yet, but... MySQL has quietly dominated the enterprise for quick and dirty databases in the same sort of way Access snuck into the desktop.
4. Microsoft vs IBM. Oh, let's see, how did IBM screw up OS/2, let me count the ways. IBM wanted to tie OS/2 to PS/2 offerings... IBM's OS/2 marketing was hamfisted whereas Microsoft basically let everyone copy Windows like the plague... whereas Microsoft wanted Windows to run on all sorts of PCs... Windows wasn't "as good", but it did have a better message queue than OS/2 and didn't require users to throw away DOS completely at a time when that mattered...
Nowadays, Microsoft is the company that ties Windows to specific hardware, whereas Linux runs on just about everything. While Microsoft still has a stranglehold on PCs, in every other kind of computer out there, from cell phones to digital control devices to routers and set top boxes, Linux actually has a growing presence. And, ironically, if you want to write for POWER Linux, IBM will be more than happy to set you up with an account at an IBM data center... what will Microsoft do, hmmmm?
4. Microsoft vs Apple, round 1. Windows color, Macintosh, black and white. Woops... but even today, we can see Linux rolling out with better and better eye candy and graphic effects. When Vista first threatened integrated 3d graphics ala OS/X, Linux people could have almost panicked, yet, they rolled up their sleeves and by the time Vista arrived, Compviz was here and many Linux desktops actually look better than Windows. Can you say Ubuntu?
5. Openness. Microsoft came to being in a day when Microsoft's level of documentation gave it a more open feel over what software bundled by hardware makers would give. While we think of Microsoft as being hard nosed and closed today, 20 years ago, they were
First off, let me say that I don't disagree with your desire to improve the level of freedom in society. I am not all the kind of person that likes to follow orders or authority of any kind. However, I think you are taken by propaganda stirred up by lawyers to get more money, and there's a better way to achieve your end.
Uhm - if they can't, that means you live in a fascist state. Fascism does not equate directly to 'more government control over eg. taxes' but to government and big business working so tightly together that it really makes no sense to differentiate.
You miss the point that fascism is evil because it concentrates power, and so does socialism, for that matter. If corporations are operating independently of the government, then you do not have a fascist state. Conversely, if you have no corporations and just the government, you have a very evil state because power is concentrated.
In the ideal case, from the perspective of freedom and power distribution, one would have lots of little corporations and a little government, but instead, we have an enormous government and a lot of big corporations. But, we don't, and so, you have to weight things in terms of balances of power..
So, what's the way?
You say that you should be allowed to sue the corporation for complying with the government request. I'd say, let's have legislation that waives sovereign immunity for damages caused by warrantless wiretapping, and let all your rich lawyers waive sovereign immunity and go after the government, instead.
It's not AT&T's fault, that they complied with the orders of a bunch of Feds. When you've got any number of federal agencies that could come down on the AT&T, AT&T doesn't have any choice, really, any more than Krupp had any choices to make when the SS walked in and said, we think a few party members should be on the board. Government has armies and prisons and corporations do not.
I understand the logic to go after AT&T... they have deep pockets and little power to resist a subpoena to "protect" the government. But the problem here is the government, not the corporation, and that's where you need to go with it.
Besides, even if they were, why would you want to save money for fascists that have violated your Constitutional rights?
My point is that if people cared so much about the constitution, as they blather about telecomm immunity, they might actually be more concerned about the government collecting ALL of our financial data. In the case of telecomm immunity, we're really arguing about whether or not a corporation can be sued for complying with a government surveillance request. How this helps anyone is utterly beyond me, other than lawyers getting rich. And that's what its all about, its just getting lawyers getting rich. Quite honestly, given a regulatory regime that requires people to turn over all sorts of information to the government, or have other people's information get collected by the government, your charge of fascism is really a red herring. If you wanted to get rid of fascism in the United States, then you ought to get rid of the IRS! After all, while Bush might be required to get a FISA warrant to do a wiretap, the IRS needs no warrant at all to demand you incriminate yourself every April 15th!
Haven't even bothered to notice that Chris Dodd has slipped a provision into the housing bill that requires all internet businesses and payment providers to report their transactions to the IRS.
just all financial transactions
So you guys are all worrying about Bush wiretapping a few conversations so you can sue AT&T, while the government just grabbed all the financial data.
Way to go Democrats! You guys are the best!
The reason loco's turned to Disel is because they didn't have to carry water
There's more to it than the water.
First is that while diesels might have been more expensive while running, coal trains take a -long- time to get ready to make steam. As a practical matter, this meant that railroads had to keep steam engines more or less operating all the time, but a diesel would just start.
Second is that steamers required way more maintenance. You don't have to do too much to a diesel engine, but you have to get into the boiler and clean out all the soot and crap in the firebox and around the tubes, and the insides of the tubes themselves would get scaled up.
The water was the icing on the cake. Sucks to have your water supply freeze, or to have to rail it into desert towns.
Speaking as a free-spending political liberal, that's too much even for me. I'd be all for giving some government grants and regulatory relief to enable several pilot plants for new technologies to be built, to help the industry get back on its feet. But after that, they're on their own. I'm for technology research (which conservatives view as interfering with the market), but at least I don't think the government should be in the business of putting nuclear power's competitors out of business.
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You need to have a look at what the arch liberal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. He not only built power plants, but he built an entire utility called the Tennessee Valley Authority. Put a lot of people to work, brought power to rural America.... and, it's remarkably efficient and works pretty well. Not too shabby for you socialists... so, why not do the same the with nukes? I mean, the conservative knock on socialism is that, it doesn't work, but, if you got a case where the Feds can do something efficiently, then, why not let them do it and accrue the benefits of public ownership?
A gas engine is about 30% efficient at best. Coal, you're looking at 50% for the old crappy ones or up to about 80% with the latest designs.
coal fired steam generators are not anywhere close to 50% efficient and are certainly not 80% efficient. If that were the case, then you would see coal fired locomotives everywhere, and you simply don't.
The reason coal is used is that it is dirt cheap and it is close. Go look at the price of powder river basin for coal. If you buy it by the rail car, you can get coal delivered to your rail siding for under $50 a ton. In terms of $ per joule, coal wins hands down, but in terms of absolute efficiency, coal is a pig. Coal requires huge maintenance to clean out boilers, its dirty and the soot gets into everything, you have to have loads of water to boil... all of that, is why they switched like droves from coal trains to diesel trains in the 1930s and tried to phase out coal boilers in favor of oil boilers. Coal is cheap, but you get what you pay for.
We lose a total of 5% in the US due to transmission. I CALL SHENANIGANS. You are either promoting an agenda or simply do not know what you are talking about.
I call ignorance. The reason we have relatively low losses is because we tend not to move power very far. Once you start trying to ship power from the spot in the country that happens to be sunny or windy, losses will go up and by quite a bit. Having power being produced where you want it, and when you want it, has enormous advantages and, up until quite recently, is what separated the industrial world from the third world. Now we'll all be praying to the Wind Gods to come... humanity renders itself helpless again. Hell of a future you got there for us.
This is mixing two separate issues. Oil is not the problem as far as producing electricity, its coal.
1. There's a fair number of oil fired plants. They were built in the 1950s as they are cheaper to maintain than coal plants and it was before natural gas turbine plants came into vogue. They operate any more as a power provider of last resort because they are expensive to operate.
2. You want nuclear is that if you are going to have a lot of electric cars, demand for electricity is going to go through the roof. That power needs to come from somewhere. Shall we burn more coal?
I mean, if you got a lot of money, and you are infringing on the terms of the GPL license, why not just go for broke and get the whole dang thing tossed out of court? Right now, a lot of GPL cases are being settled behind the scenes but no one has ever really made a fantastic push to just gut the license.
Right off the wheel, if they were infringing, they could argue that:
a) Putting something into GPL is the same as putting it into the public domain because there is no control over distribution and no economic damages associated with infringement. Does Bells use of GPL code actually cause economic harm to the developers, and the answer is arguably no.
b) Third parties cannot file or sue on behalf of GPL'd items because they do not suffer economic loss. Basically, this would mean that in order to bring a GPL case, the authors of the GPL code would actually have to file the complaint.
Point a would basically render the GPL useless, and point b would at least make it impractical to enforce.
Seriously. why not just get the law settled?
But how do you know your senses tell you anything useful, and that life is not one big VR game, like in the Matrix.. credentials... etc
Well, this is actually not a new idea at all. Decartes struggled with this concept quite a few hundred years ago, and, I think he ultimately came up with that, if you are being put into some sort of a world that is a lie, then you have to be exist with some sort of free will in order to be lied to. What we would call virtual reality today, he would call, "an evil God". Thus, you don't need to have virtual reality as a framework to ask, is "reality real". Religion works quite nicely, and, to some extent, one could even say that the Matrix was, in a way, about religion.
AS far as credentials go, I think the university system is important. However, science doesn't require that people -have- Phds in order to make contributions. You do, however, have to have that knowledge, and the university system is the quickest way that man has devised that gives people some sort of a way to prove that they have expertise in a particular field and can thus be taken seriously. Still, science is ultimately about building things, so, if you can build it, they will come.
For example, there is a great web page of some of the great unsolved problems on science. There's the question of complexity - does P = NP? And, honestly, if you can even understand what the question really means, can go through the math about it, you will find that probably self study will take longer than would otherwise be required by going through an academic setting. However, science is about results, first, and credentials second, so if you walked into any university with a computer program that could, say, factor a 200 digit number on a PC, you'd be fairly well noted. Or, in physics, if you came up with a device that actually changed the mass of an object, that would get you noticed. IF you could alter that repulsive force that keeps atoms from fusing into another that would get you noticed.. But, you have to do something physical, real, and novel... and to understand what novel is, means, you have to educate yourself, in some way.
I know this may sound crazy, because, yeah, the business world places such a premium on advanced degrees... but, just pick up any text book on any topic in any scientific field. You will find all sorts of blurbs about various pioneers in fields, Bohr, Einstein, Fermat, Laplace, Maxwell, Newton, and all of those blurbs are about what the guys did, not, where they went to college, if they did at all!
In the USA, the burden is on the person supposedly being slandered to prove that they were actually slandered. Usually, this means that one has to show some sort of an actual economic loss caused by the speech AND, that the speech has to be untrue. Even with all of that, its still pretty hard to actually prevail in court and there's been some pretty famous cases where the media has won. That doesn't mean that we should drop our diligence against those who would claim liability as an excuse to censor, but it does mean that despite the admittedly awful example of domestic security legislation set by the USA, there are still some areas where we are doing ok.
Hey, if the government is putting together a report for its own purposes, and there's no state secret involved, there's really no reason to NOT publish the data...
Joe Blow is paying a pretty good chunk of taxes for this report. Indeed, given that the government is in debt such that each and every American is at least 20k in hoc, the least the FCC can do is publish the report it already paid for. Is it really cost that much to put a link on its web site and upload it?
The real problem is that there are too many programmers that can kinda write code, but really can't read it. They see all the little pieces but can't build a progressively more abstract picture in their heads as to what the program is doing. I guess, ultimately, you have to ask, if they can't do that, then, why are the programming?
Of course its all crap, but just remember, that if women want to start with the sexism crap, the last time that we did that, women cooked and cleaned for 20,000 years. Hey lady, I'm getting hungry.
Sure, women might be more considerate and write better documentation and pay attention to a corporate process more, but that's all maintenance work. At some point, somebody has to sit down and actually write the first instance of Unix, DOS, Windows, C, C++, Java, SQL Server, Oracle, Netware, or any other system, and we have to ask, where's the one that a woman wrote?
See, I think there is another stereotype, is that, there is a subset of men that are iconoclastic tinkers. Men don't express themselves, often, in speech, and self actualize themselves more based on what they build or make rather than how they appear or communicate. Sexual competitive pressures matter too. Men -MUST- differentiate, or they cannot further their genetic destiny through breeding.
So, its more likely that a man's going to be inventive and do something like it. It's evolutionary more sound, and backed by current knowledge.
hat is, no one ever really knows anything about the Universe other than what they're told, and what they can work out in terms of internal consistency checks on what they're told.
I have to disagree with this statement. Science, properly applied, gives mankind the tools to know things based directly on his or her experience.
The beauty of good science is that you DON'T have to trust someone else's eyes. You can trust your own. While you may not discover the Higg's Boson or some other exotic subatomic particle in your own home, there is a surprising amount of fairly important experimental evidence that is cheap to do, that you can do yourself.
Take for instance the solar system. Sure, Ptolemy could be ok if all you wanted was planetary timetables, but, then there's the occasional cases where they would be wrong, and for increased accuracy, you need Kepler for the ellipse and then Newton ultimately for calculus based gravity, and then when you want to get really accurate, you need Einstein to consider various relativistic effects. In each of those cases, the edges are well defined and serve as a model of where to look, and in all of the above cases, all you are doing is taking a decent telescope and a CCD camera and seeing where things are in the sky.
Even at the smaller levels of physics, you can decide for yourself. You don't have to say that you are not sure if Maxwell or others were on the mark - you can take iron filings on top of a magnet and a piece of paper, move the thing around, and see that, yeah, all he's doing is describing in calculus the field that you see. You can follow in Einstein's footsteps and see the photoelectric effect by yourself - with a simple solar cell. You can perform the double slit experiment with sand and with water and then even light, and that's basically going to give you a pretty good heads up on quantum physics. Even the gold foil experiment is probably not out of reach for the determined amateur.
You claim that he is lying based on your own supposition that his future actions will not match the perception that he has "created" with his statement.
I think that it is pretty accurate to say that Democrats have created a perception that Bush is terrible for domestic spying, while, at the same time, they have not sought to overturn those laws themselves. Talking about "perceptions" does not deny the fundamental truth of what Obama said. His essential promise is not end to government spying, but to be "better" at it, and "better" is just another way of saying that he's going to keep doing it. I'm still infuriated at fellow conservatives for suddenly falling in line about the war on terror and throwing out every fear of government they ever had, just because "our guy", was in there. I wonder how many dems will equally flip on issues such as spying, when the cause is something they believe in, like complying with global warming. If President Obama orders the shut down or confiscation of a coal plant or spies on a man that it suspects of being unenvironmentally friendly, will that really be any different in your mind than Bush spying on someone for being a suspected terrorist? Structurally, nothing has changed, and nothing will change - the government will retain the power to declare people enemies of the state through its surveillance and nothing Obama has promised will alter that proposition. So yes, I do think he is lying.
It is because my interests, and our national interests, will be better served by his election that I support Obama.
Your interests will be better served by Obama, of that, I can't argue, as, it's beyond me to say what your interests are. However, you can't say my interests would be served by Obama, especially since his platform is as divisive as it is. What if I work for Exxon Mobil, or own stock in a coal company? Clearly, anyone in the commodities sector is going to take a beating if Obama gets elected. Even the energy sector is going to take a beating. He wants to modernize the national power grid and energy infrastructure, and its true, we have a lot of old coal plants that could be modernized. But, those same plants employ a lot of union workers that have a pretty cozy relationship with management - in that, you get a management that wants to keep the old plants going as much as possible because they are paid for, and the higher labor costs are unpleasant, but still cheaper than the massive capital costs of modernizing. Anyway, you slap a carbon tax on these plants, and modernize, and you are going to find a lot of machinists, tool and die guys, boiler people, all out of work, because, the new stuff is better and requires less people. For someone that claims to be in the "national interest", that's an awful lot of jobs you've just thrown under the bus.
So, yeah, Obama might create 5 million jobs by making everyone upgrade their stuff to "solve" his global warming problem, but, there's going to be a lot of jobs lost as well. It's not the win win that he paints it as. The last time we did a federally mandated tech upgrade in the early 1970s, if you recall, much American manufacturing was wiped out because the capital to do those upgrades simply wasn't there, and, its certainly not there now.
Yes, Obama, in any case, probably will win the election largely because McCain is not only unable but is unwilling to make the Republican case. He's not able to talk about the free market when he's condemned it himself. He won't talk about how the free market and free trade has been spectacularly successful at preventing another world war over access to markets and resources or about how much of Asia is being lifting out of poverty by the American idea of free trade.
McCain doesn't have the imagination to say that, instead of raising taxes for all of this infrastructure upgrades that Obama wants (in the form of carbon taxes and increased income and capital gains taxes), we might instead nationalize offshore oil, shale, and anwr resource
I don't see anything where Obama is advocating spying on or collecting data on *all* Americans, although he doesn't condemn it explicitly, I do grant you.
See, I read that, by describing a process for how government data collection and spying should legally and fairly take place, that, in his mind, the government still needs to spy on its own people. It's not, that, to him, its wrong, its more that, its spying on his people, when he would rather have them spy on someone else's. It's that, really, Obama is -lying-. He's creating one perception, but plans on engaging in another. It might be prudent, might be wise, balanced, and all of that, but the fact is, he's -lying-.
If libertarians were to focus on creating control systems, usage limitations and transparency in these matters, I think libertarian goals would be better served. And I doubt that McCain would be any more likely than Obama to seek balance in this area.
It's not about that to me, its more about honesty. Obama and the Democrats are seeking to create the perception that they won't engage in the same sort of domestic spying that Bush did, and really, they will. They might do it under the rule of law, but at the end, the emotional aspect of the charge they bring : "Bush is spying on you", is something they plan on doing too.
And I doubt that McCain would be any more likely than Obama to seek balance in this area.
I don't disagree with that at all. McCain sucks for this sort of thing too.
Would you consider that because you were wrong about this that you may also be wrong about the other things that you wrote? I encourage you to "face facts" (as you put it).
You aren't facing facts. Read exactly what Obama said, and think about it without getting so stupidly getting caught up in feel good niceness.
a) Obama supports the USA government continuing to collect databases on all Americans.
b) Obama supports the existing of a security apparatus that allows the USA government to spy on all of its citizens.
Points c & d are a joke. Like some Russian guy is going to care one rat's behind about what Obama says about spam.
So basically, at the end of the day, you have a guy who promises to do the same thing Bush is reviled for doing - spying on US citizens, except that, he'll be "nicer about it." Sorry, tone doesn't cut it.
Give me a pledge that says that he will vote to
a) REPEAL the FISA law.
b) REPEAL the USA PATRIOT act.
And then you have something. But, as it stands, he's not doing anything more than George Bush is doing, functionally, except that he might get the cover of a law to make it feel better. Big deal. In the Soviet Union, spying on citizens was legal too. It didn't make it right.
Duh.
35% of tax money comes from taxes specifically to fund Social Security and Medicare...
Social Security and Medicare only makeup 33% of expenditure...
If the government is making a 2% profit on Social Security, well...
Well, the problem is that the government is supposed to be escrowing that overage to pay for social security when more people hit the system. Unfortunately, the government has instead been spending that money, leaving "IOUs" in the social security trust fund account. In a few years, social security will continue to rise, and will need those "IOUs" back. As a result, the government will have to further curtail other services in order to meet its social security obligations. So, there is no profit per say, just an accumulated debt. Even Clinton's "balanced budgets" achieved a balance partially by spending social security money... all in all, its been a huge bipartisan cluster you-know-what. Bush's privatization proposal would have fixed this, but by telling gen-x and gen-y that they wouldn't get a guaranteed social security payment, rather, something they would invest over their lives. Thus, our gen-x taxes would have paid for the baby boomers, and we would have gotten some stock. If the stock market goes up, we would make out like bandits. However, if it doesn't, well, we're eating dog food. AS it stands, I think gen-x and gen-y are only going to be able to collect less than 50% of their earnings because the money has already been spent.
n order, they were fired for: enforcing school plagiarism policy, fraternizing with students, student thought the course was too difficult, and student thought the course was too difficult. (Remember the latter two are the ones that empirically were, in statewide and national comparisons, highly successful in teaching the material.)
Students thought the work was too hard? That's the craziest thing I ever heard of. Criminy, education is a gift and students need to elevate themselves.
In spite of the fact that I would probably call myself a libertarian rather than a liberal or a conservative, I do see the merit of the government creating a level playing field for economic competition that discourages the concentration of power in any one social or economic group. Obama is new because it has been almost 50 years at least since we have had a president (Eisenhower? maybe Johnson?) who would see *basic fairness* as being an important goal for government.
Here's the thing. There's plenty of fairness in American society today and more opportunity than ever but we have a generation that is too lazy to see it or to reach for it.
I'm son of a trucking company manager who is the son of a coal miner. We're hardly unique but every step of the way, I have found that if you work extremely hard, you can get ahead, and I've not seen anything about America today that says that statement isn't true. If you talk to a lot of people who aren't succeeding in America today, quite honestly, they are not working nearly as hard as the people did a generation before. You have gen-xr's and gen-yr's going around and playing video games and listening to i-tunes and driving new cars, watching movies, complaining about how poor they are. It's utterly absurd. You can't spend your 20's partying, without paying an economic price, and that's what too many people have done. Economic success is not something that is handed to you, it is something that is earned.
I've made more than a few mistakes. I bought cars that used too much gas and a house that was more than I could afford. I spend too much on credit cards and I took a beating selling my house to extricate myself from a financial disaster that I made for myself, and so, when I see people blame George Bush for their problems, to me, I think they just can't own up to making mistakes. Everyone has to be a victim these days and no one can just say: "I f---- up." Big deal. You f---- up sometimes in life. Deal with it, like an adult, and move on. I know people that have gotten rich, rather rich, because they didn't make mistakes. They got a product out the door, they worked the really hard hours, or they got an education in a field that is actually demanded.
It's really simple, actually, and its the ugly truth of disparity. In a technological society, you don't just get 10% richer when you get a leg up, you get 100%. It's like skill sets in programming - programmers aren't just 5% better than each other...some are just magnitudes better than each other. At the top of the heap you got guys like Bill Joy that right entire operating systems... so yeah, inequality in wealth is going to be a fact of life, but it is an inequality based on intelligence and workmanship, not on some nefarious scheme. So long as the people at the bottom are buying flat screen tv's, ps3's, $100 shoes, new cars (and suv's at that), and above all, the country is by and large obese, then, I'm not seeing the victimization that you are, and I think this class warfare being waged by the likes of Obama and company is so much demagoguery, the product of a community that likes to blame everyone else for their mistakes, and admits to none of their own.
A shill is someone pretending to be neutral. Are you asserting that you are a neutral observer?
Oh, i thought a shill was an advocate. Me neutral, no!
And one more thing: Do you really have to drag race into this discussion? "Rich white kids"? Seriously?
It's a joke. You don't get it. Obama probably is a bit racist, but it doesn't matter. Richard Nixon couldn't stand jewish people but wound up saving Israel in its greatest hour of need.
As it is, I'm really disappointed about the manned mission to Mars being on the chopping block. Its important to me and to the USA for nationalistic reasons. Those things matter. Twenty years from now, when we finally get there, we aren't going to care about some poor slob not getting his teeth filled becuase he didn't have the money... we're going to care about the US Flag on Mars. It's going to be a good time and a great feat. On the other hand, pure and basic research is interesting, if it leads to new products for consumers... but, if it doesn't, then, you know, its not that big of a deal.
As for media decentralization goes, see, you guys put the cart before the horse. The media is what it is because of the internet. Newspapers took a beating from radio, and then TV, and adjusted and consolidated. Now computers make them pointless. Sucks, but that's just life. Radio has a role, but it will adjust, and when you have netradio and sirius and terrestrial radio you have a lot more choice than you did before. universal broadband access is just socialism.... what it basically means is that everyone else's broadband bill is going to go up so that poor people can get broadband and maybe if it doesn't go up too much, it will be ok...
But, if you really wanted to have money for inner city schools, then look at the whole USA budget. The lion's share of it is going to old people. if you really wanted to help the kids, you should have supported us when we wanted to privatize social security and medicare and capped the expenses. It would have screwed the elderly, but money would be pouring down on children, where its needed, and in droves. Cutting a few space ships out isn't going to cut it.
In general, I'm really disappointed with Obama's leftist leanings being repackaged as something new. He's really not doing anything all that dramatic or great. I can agree that the country tilts left or right depending on the challenges that face it and at this point, it looks like a federal response is more useful than a free market one. With that said, why not just go for the jugular then and really solve some basic problems? Let's take 50 billion dollars and have the Feds buy back a bunch of SUVs in exchange for American made small cars? Jeez, that would cut our gasoline bill in -half- and pay for itself in one year. For a deep thinker, Obama just doesn't cut it.... the idea of a strong and progressive government is to rally people around the flag, accomplish a national purpose. He should be saying, "yeah, we're going to rebuild America and then put a man on mars, to show the world how Americans do things."... but for him to say that manned flight isn't necessary tells me that he's not even really a good liberal. Nationalism is ESSENTIAL to good liberalism and paradoxically, the most successful "liberal" in the classic redistribution of wealth sense was none other than Bush.
FDR and Jack Kennedy are rolling over in their graves.
I'm a lifelong Republican, a Bush supporter, and a McCain supporter, but if Obama puts a man on Mars, he's got my vote.