There's tons of Windows users out there who are only a hard disk away from running linux. They get to keep all their old data, they don't have to shell out big bucks for the latest bloatware, etc.
Well, given the size of a Linux distro, I wouldn't be so hesitant to call it something other than bloatware. Face it, all software is fat these days. Even C++, supposedly lean and mean, seduces us with the bloat of STL.
If every linux user did this for just 2 people this Christmas, Microsofts' stranglehold on the market would be over in a year.
Why take that attitude? Consider the example of Mr. Toyoda, or Mr. Honda. Mr. Honda didn't even make cars at first - he did motorized bicycles. After the war, both guys gradually built up their businesses, and then kept on working and improving, until they arrived rather successfully in the USA against a supposedly invincible GM.
Nope, you don't need everyone in the Linux camp handing out hard drives like Scientologists hand out Dianetics. Instead, you need a handful of really motivated Linux folks selling Linux PCs. If you do that, and you can sell consumers on the advantages of Linux, then, you have yourselves a product, and from there, that company could go and invest in Linux open source. Really, all you need to do is set up a Linux PC company and run it kinda like the way Apple does..
Actually, I think you're missing the point - competition only works when there is no pre-existing monopoly that got there via illegal means
You are making excuses. You want Linux powered PCs, make them and sell them. Microsoft does not control CPUs, motherboards, or cases or keyboards. You can go right ahead and make PCs, and put Linux on them, and sell them. There's absolutely no reason a consumer could not benefit from that offering, and its not Microsoft's fault that you Linux people are too big of pussies to actually sell your own offerings.
The craziest part is, you obsess over Dell PCs, and Dell's are the biggest stock part PCs of them all. They don't do anything special - stock motherboards, stock CPUs, stock graphics cards. There's nothing Dell puts into a PC that you could not put into yours when you sell it.
What's the mental inhibition that precludes any of you from making a Linux powered PC, picking up the phone, calling Walmart, or hell, even a smaller store, and selling them?
Most people don't even know about the possibility of alternatives. To them, a PC is any computer that runs Windows, same as, for a long time, the Internet was Internet Explorer or AOL.
You miss the point. Buy a thousand motherboards, chips and cases, put Linux onto them, then walk into computer stores and sell them. There's nothing that precludes you from selling Linux PCs of your own brand.
Surely, someone could sell Linux PCs, preloaded off the Internet, or even through a catalog. At one time, Michael Dell built PCs in his dorm room and sold them over a catalog. Instead of trying to get the government to force Mr. Dell what to sell, why can't you sell what you think should be sold.
Please, spare me the excuses. Microsoft has no monopoly power over you, if you sell Linux powered PCs.
There was a group trying to get people to sign a petition that would stop free inoculations for the children of illegal immigrants
My question would be, if the vaccines are so important, then, why do not the parents pay for them? The innoculations aren't -free-. They are paid for out of the taxes. So, that means less for the people of the country who actually, you know, are legal, or at least respect our immigration laws and get the proper H1s, green cards, etc.
If I had been there when you showed up, I would have invited you to pay for the innoculations yourself, and take up a collection yourself. I have my own kids to vaccinate, educate, and cloth, and if illegal immigrants would take the same level of responsibility, then, jeez, we wouldn't have this problem now, would we.
A creative liberal, however, doesn't need to worry about things they have already created... because once it's done, it's boring.....So don't cry for us liberals: we will always innovate, always adapt, always overcome. And all you conservatives will still wind up traveling in the trails we blaze.
What you are really saying is that you believe everything you do is worthless, and well, 99% of the time, I'd be inclined to agree. At the end of every liberal thing is, "geez, I can't sell people on this, so lets make a law and make people do it", because they can't get 'er done themselves. Without conservatives, liberals would be floundering, starving, and helpless, a culture of NPR beggar's night people in a world without phones.
So what exactly have YOU innovated? I conservative has a web site full of stuff and I've got a billion ideas out there. I think by the end of next year, I will have finished an IDE that will be the next killer application for Windows, and I'll be a millionaire many, many times over.
That's one of the more interesting ideas I've read in a while. So liberalism concerns deeper issues and representing them in our fast clip world is harder these days, but conservitive issues are easier to stuff in an "angry block
I could write pages on this, as, I think the issue is a lot deeper than one might realize. To put it simply, conservatives eschew from an oral tradition, and liberals the written. Just look at the traditional liberal base - university types, as contrasted with conservative types - salesman, preachers - people that are quick on their feet. Conservatives tend to be blindingly confident people, the guys that liberals tend to hate, not particularly brilliant, but street smart, optimistic, quick on their feet and above all, very aggressive.
There are a lot of interesting things to draw from this, but I give you this anecdotal example. If you see a more conservative family, you'll see people trying to continuously sell each other, and often from an early age. My family, is all Republican, and everything really is subjective. My Dad is the consumate conservative salesmen - immaculately dressed and so confident that you'd think the man was made of brick. I remember talking to him about George Orwell, and 1984, and I mentioned something about the famous 2+2=5, and he, just to fence with me, asked, in sort of a way, "well, why the hell not?" And the point that he made was, that at some point, somebody sold someone else on the idea that 2+2=4 and 2+3=5, and it could have just as easily been 2+2=5 and 2+3=4, and that everything, really, is a sort of a sales pitch. With liberals, on the other hand, 2+2=4, and its always 4, and its kind of unthinkable that it would be anything other than 4, so much that the famous liberal, George Orwell, ascribed to the socialists he came to despise something really more applicable to conservatives - that 2+2 really could be anything we want it to be, so long as we were consistent with it.
Contrast that with a story that I heard on NPR. They had Richard Dawkins and a couple of other famous scientists and science writers, discussing creationism and global warming. Callers called in and asked, "why not just debate these things with the skeptics". And the answer was surprising - it was that, the "good guys" always lose. By and large, if you put a university professor, up against a used car salesman, in a debate on anything, you'll find that the used car salesman will usually win. He has to. On the other hand, university professors can rarely collect their thoughts enough to be effective or even interesting public speakers.
Somehow I think you'll reconsider your position when you or someone you know survives a car accident
I did survive a car accident. I rolled a car going 50 miles per hour. But, I wore a seat belt, the frame bent and absorbed the blow, and I walked away, unharmed. No doctor required.
As are other rankings. It's all about "how socialist" is your medicine, and not a valid comparison. I for one thought that if "the children" were so important, that parents might actually be motivated to pay for their health care. Obviously, "the children" are not so important, and so, somebody else should be responsible for their health care.
If you have insurance in the USA, or a wad of cash, and you need an MRI, for example, you can get one. If you have insurance, and a wad of cash, you wind up getting the best medical care in the world, and most people who live in the USA and have been from abroad will say exactly that.
I for one am sick of hearing about the superior European quality of life brought about by socialism. If the quality of the European world was so great, why do not more Europeans bring children into it. The only thing going on on that side of the world is the smell of decay, an ideologically dead, creatively spent, aging population gradually withering into oblivion, too lacking in will or drive to even reproduce itself. \
The transition will be bumpy, perhaps painful, but that's life: what's convenient for some will be an impediment for others.
So, from a vehicle of personal expression, what you are saying is that all of the written and visual arts will be completely destroyed, and that's just a change we'll live with. Why create when there's no point to do it? But hey, if you can live in a world where the only discourse about civilization that is profitable is Rush Limbaugh, go right ahead. Maybe the next Van Gogh should try and explain himself on talk radio, if that's what you want.
It seems like, we never ask that question with every medical breakthrough. Should we really be more inclined to wait for "the mass produced heart corset with McDonald's like installation service"
Lest yeah laugh at my McDonald's surgery reference, ask yourself this. Does getting a sandwich at a fast food restaurant have a lower risk of error than getting open heart surgery? I would be willing to bet that there are a higher percentage of people that get a bad open heart surgery result than there are people that get bad sandwiches. And that, my friends, is why medicine costs so much, for so little, in the United States.
Over a computer? Dude, you truly are a geek. In my case women elicit that reaction, but each to their own. I won't judge. Feel free to get married too, you have my approval.
I am married now, but in my past, women were always pretty easy for me to get. So, there was no need to shake in my shoes over one, because there was always another one. But Amigas, wow, those were pretty special.
Western Civilization is a spectrum, and even though I'm a conservative, I'd rather thought that we ought to have a place of value for our crazy liberal friends, because, at the end of the day, they do amazing work.
We have before us, a class of people whose livelihood depends on control over the mechanical means of producing a copy of a work, and that means is stripped away from them. So, yeah, the internet screws writers, along with phographers, artists, musicians, and anyone else who used to make a living selling copies of their work.
Who are these people getting screwed?
They are really, liberals. And, as a right winger, I have to admit, I find this funny and sad at the same time. It's funny, because all of the people really leading the charge to get rid of copyrights and the writing class, are those who tend to have a leftist bent themselves. It's sad though, because by the same token, those people do make good work. I may not like all of Bob Dylan's politics, or Vonneguts tirades against Reagan, but, I love Highway 61 and Slaughterhouse 5.
Today's liberals owe their political lives and the way they think to a literary tradition and they are destroying for reasons that are positively vain. "Free beer" for Steinbeck? Dickens? Vonnegut? Without the likes of a number of great liberal writers, there could be no liberalism, and honestly, there could be no western culture. Conservatism can't exist by itself, any more than liberalism can.
Liberalism, in its truest (that is, pan political party sense), is based on ideas that are deeply contemplative, and, you can't stuff that into an angry blog post. It's about images and ideas and emotions, and, really, the arts is what drives it. Daily Kos and liberal blogs cannot hold a candle to the likes of Steinbeck or a Dickens, to just name two great progressive (gasp liberal) writers, and it is reckless and irresponsible to pretend they can. This culture that the internet is trashing is -important-, and it is a downright disgrace that liberals own leaders of today are doing the trashing of their own roots, and, viewed broadly enough, are undermining the very basis for western culture.
We are what we Art. Is art really so expensive that it must be free? Are songs really that mundane that you need to have thousands of them? Are images so cheap? Must they be?
I counsel my liberal patriots to think carefully before you act, and I don't think that you are.
So I clearly have at least a similar form of brain-damage as the disciples of Zeus, and am curious if there are people that come out of the womb without that kind of problem. It'd be interesting
I think you do, and I think most hardcore leftist atheist environmentalists do as well. I would not be shocked at all if what goes off in your brain is the exact same thing as what goes off in a religious person's brain as well, and with that you get benefit of the highest form of motivation and a deep love of things, and the downside is, you wind up organizing yourselves into "religions" the same way the followers of Zeus do.
If you study history, you'd know that in fact they were ready to give up. Some of the generals didn't want to give up, but the emperor did and was ready to surrender. The nuclear bombs were entirely unnecessary and just caused a large and needless loss of civilian life.
That's actually not true at all. The fact of the matter is, and this was actually corroborated by a British study taken by a bunch of liberals seeks to prove American war guilt in the 1990s, and they themselves (being scientists first, and politicians second), came to the shocking conclusion that:
a) Emperor Hirohito was actually one of the prime movers behind the war, and the whole "crazy general" thing is something McArthur cooked up in the occupation.
b) Japan was sending out peace feelers through Russia, but there peace offers would have left Japan with China, Singapore, and more.
c) The Japanese, unlike the Germans, had actually correct guessed the locations of where a theoretical American landing (Operation Olympic) would have been, and had prepared a large number of kamikaze aircraft (also unlike the Germans), to contest those landings.
d) The atomic bomb removed, in the Japanese eyes, the thought of any island defense. If the Americans could simply destroy Japan from the air with the atomic bomb, there could be no resistance.
The bottom line is, the Emperor started the war, fought it, and ultimately only surrendered when it was clear that the atomic bomb made it utterly impossible for Japan to continue fighting. Without the bomb, the Emperor would have never surrendered. Thus, bomb the city, let the Japanese emperor off the hook but hang all of his generals, and made him a puppet of Douglas MacArthur, in order to get legitimacy for all the changes MacArthur rammed through the Japanese system.
The a-bomb was good. It ended the war early, and put Japan well on her way to becoming a more modern nation.
Unfortunately, current American foreign policy of demonizing foreign leaders actually precludes us from winning the peace whereever we fight. Imagine how little resistance there would be if we had invaded Iraq, actually KEPT SADDAM IN POWER, and made him an American puppett to quell a Sunni uprising before it started.
In his book, Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran mentions this device in his discussion of psychological disorders. IIRC, he compares the sensation to those symptoms that are exhibited by individuals with a messiah complex.
I don't think the problem is that those people with these religious sensations, it is with the people that don't. Clearly, non-religious people are depressing the world, describing something as beautiful and intense as a walk in the park and reducing it to something mundane. Thanks to the "god helmet", we can finally hunt down these mutants that are wrecking society and adjust their thinking.
I bought the Amiga Hardware Reference Guide before the computer was even released, read it cover to cover, many times, all about the sound, video, and other hardware, and I knew had to have this hardware. The Amiga legend was really born because of absolutely the best documentation any computer system has ever had, and, then fostered by the execution. I read the documentation. I walked into a Sears, saw the King Tut image in Deluxe Paint, and I so blown away that I literally shook in my shoes. It all came together - great documentation, beautiful hardware, and an ok operating system, in one moment, where I could see the demo, understand completely what it meant, and I had to have one. I opened up a credit card that I couldn't possibly pay for and I bought the thing. It was one of the best days of my life and I feel fortunate to have lived solely to have been there for that moment.
But, those days are gone. If anyone could make anything like Amiga, it would be AMD (Apple is more marketing than any real hardware expertise on its own) - but AMD would also have to hire not just good, but great writers, and document everything the way the Amiga was documented. You would have to have AMD rolling out with a pretty good CPU, next generation hardware, all in a consumer friendly case with a completely new operating system. Part of Amiga's appeal was that the whole thing was different. For AMD to pump that kind of money into some new consumer / geek box would almost certainly demand that it run Windows or Linux, and we already know enough about both to not really get excited over either. A souped up / updated version of BeOS is what that kind of hardware needs - really, the coolest new OS ever made, and I doubt seriously that AMD could take that risk.
Again? This is not an excuse for not wiring major cities. There is fiber already in place between the cities
Well-to-do people in the USA do not live in major cities. They take the trains in from the suburbs, where comcast and verizon are competing extremely hard. In a lot of suburbs, you increasingly have a choice between FIOS, Digital Cable, and DSL. Corporations in the cities, for the most part, already have broadband, so there's no need.
Let's face it. RIAA is doing a lot of the dirty work for the open source movement. IF, a judge were to rule, or the congress were to decide, that copyrights did not somehow apply to electronic documents, or that, users could freely copy a digital image without having to abide by any sort of license or royalty restriction, the OSS movement would be screwed because the GPL would become utterly meaningless. That is, if the little consumer can steal a song, then mega corporation can also violate the GPL, as both are based on copyrights. You could, when the dust all settles, be allowed to copy music legally, but then, you would also have to allow companies to grab all the GPL code, commercialize it, and do exactly the very thing that spawned the GPL to begin with.
The notion that Japan's ability to roll out broadband everywhere is somehow the result of strategic, and forward thinking lacking in the west is so much hype.
Japan is a tiny island. The United States consists of the fairly large part of the North American continent and Europe, taken together, is not entirely tiny either. Of course it will be easier to wire Japan than it would be the USA or Europe.
People that argue that Japan is somehow doing something "unprofitable" to get a strategic gain need to wonder why Japan protects its telecommunications sector to the extent it does. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and other telecommunications concerns would love to get into Japan, and have been pushing the governments of the USA to get Japan to open its communications backplane to foreign competition, but, really, to no avail, as evidenced by the following cites:
That would be cool. We Yanks could gather 'round the edge of our continent and piss on the rest of you from low earth orbit. So, instead of bitching about 50 million Republicans pissing on the world in some figurative sense, you would get splashed in the face by the real deal!
As for powerful Texan presidents, I wish that W had been able to spend his term pushing us into space with the same vigor that he has pushed us in "the war on terror"
If W had spent the kind of energy, money and political capital on space that he did on Iraq, we would have a base on Mars by now, and fusion powered spaceships. I think, ironically, history will record that people underestimated W's ability, the same way they underestimated LBJ. However, history will also record that both took us into expensive and divisive wars that ultimately yielded little by the way of spoils, and teaches never to elect a president from Texas again!
It wasn't JFK that pushed it through, it was LBJ. Most of Jack's legislation was dead in the Congress, but once Jack died, Lyndon went to work.
Now, Lyndon Johnson wasn't much of a popular guy like Jack. There wasn't an ounce of Camelot in him. But Lyndon had a few advantages, in that, he was a physically big guy, a real bear of a man, and, he was really a lot more connected in with the still important Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party - much more so than Jack did. He was relentless on the phone, cunning as a lobbyist, could cut deals with the best of them, and if none of that worked, he was a frigging big guy and he could just hover over you and intimidate you.
LBJ was one of the most powerful President, legislatively, that this country has had, until the current President George W Bush. It's a Texas thing. No President between LBJ and W got asserted the executive nearly as much, both utterly dominated their own political parties like no other leader could (Carter comes to mind), and both, well, were very divisive presidents in times of great national consequence.
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There's tons of Windows users out there who are only a hard disk away from running linux. They get to keep all their old data, they don't have to shell out big bucks for the latest bloatware, etc.
Well, given the size of a Linux distro, I wouldn't be so hesitant to call it something other than bloatware. Face it, all software is fat these days. Even C++, supposedly lean and mean, seduces us with the bloat of STL.
If every linux user did this for just 2 people this Christmas, Microsofts' stranglehold on the market would be over in a year.
Why take that attitude? Consider the example of Mr. Toyoda, or Mr. Honda. Mr. Honda didn't even make cars at first - he did motorized bicycles. After the war, both guys gradually built up their businesses, and then kept on working and improving, until they arrived rather successfully in the USA against a supposedly invincible GM.
Nope, you don't need everyone in the Linux camp handing out hard drives like Scientologists hand out Dianetics. Instead, you need a handful of really motivated Linux folks selling Linux PCs. If you do that, and you can sell consumers on the advantages of Linux, then, you have yourselves a product, and from there, that company could go and invest in Linux open source. Really, all you need to do is set up a Linux PC company and run it kinda like the way Apple does..
Actually, I think you're missing the point - competition only works when there is no pre-existing monopoly that got there via illegal means
You are making excuses. You want Linux powered PCs, make them and sell them. Microsoft does not control CPUs, motherboards, or cases or keyboards. You can go right ahead and make PCs, and put Linux on them, and sell them. There's absolutely no reason a consumer could not benefit from that offering, and its not Microsoft's fault that you Linux people are too big of pussies to actually sell your own offerings.
The craziest part is, you obsess over Dell PCs, and Dell's are the biggest stock part PCs of them all. They don't do anything special - stock motherboards, stock CPUs, stock graphics cards. There's nothing Dell puts into a PC that you could not put into yours when you sell it.
What's the mental inhibition that precludes any of you from making a Linux powered PC, picking up the phone, calling Walmart, or hell, even a smaller store, and selling them?
You people are lazy!
Most people don't even know about the possibility of alternatives. To them, a PC is any computer that runs Windows, same as, for a long time, the Internet was Internet Explorer or AOL.
You miss the point. Buy a thousand motherboards, chips and cases, put Linux onto them, then walk into computer stores and sell them. There's nothing that precludes you from selling Linux PCs of your own brand.
Surely, someone could sell Linux PCs, preloaded off the Internet, or even through a catalog. At one time, Michael Dell built PCs in his dorm room and sold them over a catalog. Instead of trying to get the government to force Mr. Dell what to sell, why can't you sell what you think should be sold.
Please, spare me the excuses. Microsoft has no monopoly power over you, if you sell Linux powered PCs.
There was a group trying to get people to sign a petition that would stop free inoculations for the children of illegal immigrants
My question would be, if the vaccines are so important, then, why do not the parents pay for them? The innoculations aren't -free-. They are paid for out of the taxes. So, that means less for the people of the country who actually, you know, are legal, or at least respect our immigration laws and get the proper H1s, green cards, etc.
If I had been there when you showed up, I would have invited you to pay for the innoculations yourself, and take up a collection yourself. I have my own kids to vaccinate, educate, and cloth, and if illegal immigrants would take the same level of responsibility, then, jeez, we wouldn't have this problem now, would we.
I would think that if Linux was that much better than Windows, that consumers would demand Linux powered PCs. If you build it, they will come.
A creative liberal, however, doesn't need to worry about things they have already created... because once it's done, it's boring.....So don't cry for us liberals: we will always innovate, always adapt, always overcome. And all you conservatives will still wind up traveling in the trails we blaze.
What you are really saying is that you believe everything you do is worthless, and well, 99% of the time, I'd be inclined to agree. At the end of every liberal thing is, "geez, I can't sell people on this, so lets make a law and make people do it", because they can't get 'er done themselves. Without conservatives, liberals would be floundering, starving, and helpless, a culture of NPR beggar's night people in a world without phones.
So what exactly have YOU innovated? I conservative has a web site full of stuff and I've got a billion ideas out there. I think by the end of next year, I will have finished an IDE that will be the next killer application for Windows, and I'll be a millionaire many, many times over.
That's one of the more interesting ideas I've read in a while. So liberalism concerns deeper issues and representing them in our fast clip world is harder these days, but conservitive issues are easier to stuff in an "angry block
I could write pages on this, as, I think the issue is a lot deeper than one might realize. To put it simply, conservatives eschew from an oral tradition, and liberals the written. Just look at the traditional liberal base - university types, as contrasted with conservative types - salesman, preachers - people that are quick on their feet. Conservatives tend to be blindingly confident people, the guys that liberals tend to hate, not particularly brilliant, but street smart, optimistic, quick on their feet and above all, very aggressive.
There are a lot of interesting things to draw from this, but I give you this anecdotal example. If you see a more conservative family, you'll see people trying to continuously sell each other, and often from an early age. My family, is all Republican, and everything really is subjective. My Dad is the consumate conservative salesmen - immaculately dressed and so confident that you'd think the man was made of brick. I remember talking to him about George Orwell, and 1984, and I mentioned something about the famous 2+2=5, and he, just to fence with me, asked, in sort of a way, "well, why the hell not?" And the point that he made was, that at some point, somebody sold someone else on the idea that 2+2=4 and 2+3=5, and it could have just as easily been 2+2=5 and 2+3=4, and that everything, really, is a sort of a sales pitch. With liberals, on the other hand, 2+2=4, and its always 4, and its kind of unthinkable that it would be anything other than 4, so much that the famous liberal, George Orwell, ascribed to the socialists he came to despise something really more applicable to conservatives - that 2+2 really could be anything we want it to be, so long as we were consistent with it.
Contrast that with a story that I heard on NPR. They had Richard Dawkins and a couple of other famous scientists and science writers, discussing creationism and global warming. Callers called in and asked, "why not just debate these things with the skeptics". And the answer was surprising - it was that, the "good guys" always lose. By and large, if you put a university professor, up against a used car salesman, in a debate on anything, you'll find that the used car salesman will usually win. He has to. On the other hand, university professors can rarely collect their thoughts enough to be effective or even interesting public speakers.
Somehow I think you'll reconsider your position when you or someone you know survives a car accident
I did survive a car accident. I rolled a car going 50 miles per hour. But, I wore a seat belt, the frame bent and absorbed the blow, and I walked away, unharmed. No doctor required.
As are other rankings. It's all about "how socialist" is your medicine, and not a valid comparison. I for one thought that if "the children" were so important, that parents might actually be motivated to pay for their health care. Obviously, "the children" are not so important, and so, somebody else should be responsible for their health care.
If you have insurance in the USA, or a wad of cash, and you need an MRI, for example, you can get one. If you have insurance, and a wad of cash, you wind up getting the best medical care in the world, and most people who live in the USA and have been from abroad will say exactly that.
I for one am sick of hearing about the superior European quality of life brought about by socialism. If the quality of the European world was so great, why do not more Europeans bring children into it. The only thing going on on that side of the world is the smell of decay, an ideologically dead, creatively spent, aging population gradually withering into oblivion, too lacking in will or drive to even reproduce itself.
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Seriously. What's next? A toilet that looks at my poop and tries to recommend the right kind of diet, brought to you by Google?
People that think services are "free" if advertisers pay for them are pretty silly. In the end, we still pay for them.
The transition will be bumpy, perhaps painful, but that's life: what's convenient for some will be an impediment for others.
So, from a vehicle of personal expression, what you are saying is that all of the written and visual arts will be completely destroyed, and that's just a change we'll live with. Why create when there's no point to do it? But hey, if you can live in a world where the only discourse about civilization that is profitable is Rush Limbaugh, go right ahead. Maybe the next Van Gogh should try and explain himself on talk radio, if that's what you want.
It seems like, we never ask that question with every medical breakthrough. Should we really be more inclined to wait for "the mass produced heart corset with McDonald's like installation service"
Lest yeah laugh at my McDonald's surgery reference, ask yourself this. Does getting a sandwich at a fast food restaurant have a lower risk of error than getting open heart surgery? I would be willing to bet that there are a higher percentage of people that get a bad open heart surgery result than there are people that get bad sandwiches. And that, my friends, is why medicine costs so much, for so little, in the United States.
Over a computer? Dude, you truly are a geek. In my case women elicit that reaction, but each to their own. I won't judge. Feel free to get married too, you have my approval.
I am married now, but in my past, women were always pretty easy for me to get. So, there was no need to shake in my shoes over one, because there was always another one. But Amigas, wow, those were pretty special.
jeesh! how can a bunch of OSS GPL people not know that copyrights do not need to be registered under the Berne Convention.... RMS is laughing at us!
Western Civilization is a spectrum, and even though I'm a conservative, I'd rather thought that we ought to have a place of value for our crazy liberal friends, because, at the end of the day, they do amazing work.
We have before us, a class of people whose livelihood depends on control over the mechanical means of producing a copy of a work, and that means is stripped away from them. So, yeah, the internet screws writers, along with phographers, artists, musicians, and anyone else who used to make a living selling copies of their work.
Who are these people getting screwed?
They are really, liberals. And, as a right winger, I have to admit, I find this funny and sad at the same time. It's funny, because all of the people really leading the charge to get rid of copyrights and the writing class, are those who tend to have a leftist bent themselves. It's sad though, because by the same token, those people do make good work. I may not like all of Bob Dylan's politics, or Vonneguts tirades against Reagan, but, I love Highway 61 and Slaughterhouse 5.
Today's liberals owe their political lives and the way they think to a literary tradition and they are destroying for reasons that are positively vain. "Free beer" for Steinbeck? Dickens? Vonnegut? Without the likes of a number of great liberal writers, there could be no liberalism, and honestly, there could be no western culture. Conservatism can't exist by itself, any more than liberalism can.
Liberalism, in its truest (that is, pan political party sense), is based on ideas that are deeply contemplative, and, you can't stuff that into an angry blog post. It's about images and ideas and emotions, and, really, the arts is what drives it. Daily Kos and liberal blogs cannot hold a candle to the likes of Steinbeck or a Dickens, to just name two great progressive (gasp liberal) writers, and it is reckless and irresponsible to pretend they can. This culture that the internet is trashing is -important-, and it is a downright disgrace that liberals own leaders of today are doing the trashing of their own roots, and, viewed broadly enough, are undermining the very basis for western culture.
We are what we Art. Is art really so expensive that it must be free? Are songs really that mundane that you need to have thousands of them? Are images so cheap? Must they be?
I counsel my liberal patriots to think carefully before you act, and I don't think that you are.
So I clearly have at least a similar form of brain-damage as the disciples of Zeus, and am curious if there are people that come out of the womb without that kind of problem. It'd be interesting
I think you do, and I think most hardcore leftist atheist environmentalists do as well. I would not be shocked at all if what goes off in your brain is the exact same thing as what goes off in a religious person's brain as well, and with that you get benefit of the highest form of motivation and a deep love of things, and the downside is, you wind up organizing yourselves into "religions" the same way the followers of Zeus do.
If you study history, you'd know that in fact they were ready to give up. Some of the generals didn't want to give up, but the emperor did and was ready to surrender. The nuclear bombs were entirely unnecessary and just caused a large and needless loss of civilian life.
That's actually not true at all. The fact of the matter is, and this was actually corroborated by a British study taken by a bunch of liberals seeks to prove American war guilt in the 1990s, and they themselves (being scientists first, and politicians second), came to the shocking conclusion that:
a) Emperor Hirohito was actually one of the prime movers behind the war, and the whole "crazy general" thing is something McArthur cooked up in the occupation.
b) Japan was sending out peace feelers through Russia, but there peace offers would have left Japan with China, Singapore, and more.
c) The Japanese, unlike the Germans, had actually correct guessed the locations of where a theoretical American landing (Operation Olympic) would have been, and had prepared a large number of kamikaze aircraft (also unlike the Germans), to contest those landings.
d) The atomic bomb removed, in the Japanese eyes, the thought of any island defense. If the Americans could simply destroy Japan from the air with the atomic bomb, there could be no resistance.
The bottom line is, the Emperor started the war, fought it, and ultimately only surrendered when it was clear that the atomic bomb made it utterly impossible for Japan to continue fighting. Without the bomb, the Emperor would have never surrendered. Thus, bomb the city, let the Japanese emperor off the hook but hang all of his generals, and made him a puppet of Douglas MacArthur, in order to get legitimacy for all the changes MacArthur rammed through the Japanese system.
The a-bomb was good. It ended the war early, and put Japan well on her way to becoming a more modern nation.
Unfortunately, current American foreign policy of demonizing foreign leaders actually precludes us from winning the peace whereever we fight. Imagine how little resistance there would be if we had invaded Iraq, actually KEPT SADDAM IN POWER, and made him an American puppett to quell a Sunni uprising before it started.
In his book, Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran mentions this device in his discussion of psychological disorders. IIRC, he compares the sensation to those symptoms that are exhibited by individuals with a messiah complex.
I don't think the problem is that those people with these religious sensations, it is with the people that don't. Clearly, non-religious people are depressing the world, describing something as beautiful and intense as a walk in the park and reducing it to something mundane. Thanks to the "god helmet", we can finally hunt down these mutants that are wrecking society and adjust their thinking.
I bought the Amiga Hardware Reference Guide before the computer was even released, read it cover to cover, many times, all about the sound, video, and other hardware, and I knew had to have this hardware. The Amiga legend was really born because of absolutely the best documentation any computer system has ever had, and, then fostered by the execution. I read the documentation. I walked into a Sears, saw the King Tut image in Deluxe Paint, and I so blown away that I literally shook in my shoes. It all came together - great documentation, beautiful hardware, and an ok operating system, in one moment, where I could see the demo, understand completely what it meant, and I had to have one. I opened up a credit card that I couldn't possibly pay for and I bought the thing. It was one of the best days of my life and I feel fortunate to have lived solely to have been there for that moment.
But, those days are gone. If anyone could make anything like Amiga, it would be AMD (Apple is more marketing than any real hardware expertise on its own) - but AMD would also have to hire not just good, but great writers, and document everything the way the Amiga was documented. You would have to have AMD rolling out with a pretty good CPU, next generation hardware, all in a consumer friendly case with a completely new operating system. Part of Amiga's appeal was that the whole thing was different. For AMD to pump that kind of money into some new consumer / geek box would almost certainly demand that it run Windows or Linux, and we already know enough about both to not really get excited over either. A souped up / updated version of BeOS is what that kind of hardware needs - really, the coolest new OS ever made, and I doubt seriously that AMD could take that risk.
But, a man can dream.
Again? This is not an excuse for not wiring major cities. There is fiber already in place between the cities
Well-to-do people in the USA do not live in major cities. They take the trains in from the suburbs, where comcast and verizon are competing extremely hard. In a lot of suburbs, you increasingly have a choice between FIOS, Digital Cable, and DSL. Corporations in the cities, for the most part, already have broadband, so there's no need.
Let's face it. RIAA is doing a lot of the dirty work for the open source movement. IF, a judge were to rule, or the congress were to decide, that copyrights did not somehow apply to electronic documents, or that, users could freely copy a digital image without having to abide by any sort of license or royalty restriction, the OSS movement would be screwed because the GPL would become utterly meaningless. That is, if the little consumer can steal a song, then mega corporation can also violate the GPL, as both are based on copyrights. You could, when the dust all settles, be allowed to copy music legally, but then, you would also have to allow companies to grab all the GPL code, commercialize it, and do exactly the very thing that spawned the GPL to begin with.
The notion that Japan's ability to roll out broadband everywhere is somehow the result of strategic, and forward thinking lacking in the west is so much hype.
Japan is a tiny island. The United States consists of the fairly large part of the North American continent and Europe, taken together, is not entirely tiny either. Of course it will be easier to wire Japan than it would be the USA or Europe.
People that argue that Japan is somehow doing something "unprofitable" to get a strategic gain need to wonder why Japan protects its telecommunications sector to the extent it does. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and other telecommunications concerns would love to get into Japan, and have been pushing the governments of the USA to get Japan to open its communications backplane to foreign competition, but, really, to no avail, as evidenced by the following cites:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-3841226_ITM
http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org/legacy/050399-report-on-japan-deregulation.htm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5D6143DF937A15750C0A9669C8B63
So sure, you can buy into the hype, but the reality is, Japanese telecommunications are both anti-competitive and comparitively easy to do.
Hopefully the United States.
That would be cool. We Yanks could gather 'round the edge of our continent and piss on the rest of you from low earth orbit. So, instead of bitching about 50 million Republicans pissing on the world in some figurative sense, you would get splashed in the face by the real deal!
As for powerful Texan presidents, I wish that W had been able to spend his term pushing us into space with the same vigor that he has pushed us in "the war on terror"
If W had spent the kind of energy, money and political capital on space that he did on Iraq, we would have a base on Mars by now, and fusion powered spaceships. I think, ironically, history will record that people underestimated W's ability, the same way they underestimated LBJ. However, history will also record that both took us into expensive and divisive wars that ultimately yielded little by the way of spoils, and teaches never to elect a president from Texas again!
we don't have a JFK to push through it
It wasn't JFK that pushed it through, it was LBJ. Most of Jack's legislation was dead in the Congress, but once Jack died, Lyndon went to work.
Now, Lyndon Johnson wasn't much of a popular guy like Jack. There wasn't an ounce of Camelot in him. But Lyndon had a few advantages, in that, he was a physically big guy, a real bear of a man, and, he was really a lot more connected in with the still important Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party - much more so than Jack did. He was relentless on the phone, cunning as a lobbyist, could cut deals with the best of them, and if none of that worked, he was a frigging big guy and he could just hover over you and intimidate you.
LBJ was one of the most powerful President, legislatively, that this country has had, until the current President George W Bush. It's a Texas thing. No President between LBJ and W got asserted the executive nearly as much, both utterly dominated their own political parties like no other leader could (Carter comes to mind), and both, well, were very divisive presidents in times of great national consequence.