The USA is not a member of the International Criminal Court Convention. No Republican or reasonable Democrat in their right mind would sign onto such nonsense.
It's really that simple, is that, USA pays its people too much relative to the rest of the world, and the easiest way to fix that is to devalue the dollar.
Even at its relately "low" versus the EU of $1.30 - $1.50 vs 1EU, there's no way that a worker in detroit who does not get paid the same benefits (incl natl health care), as his german counterpart, and current economics says it does.
Beyond that, we need to invest what dollars we have in education. Stop throwing so many people into prison and build more schools. Infrastructure needs money too, and honestly, some form of national health care is obviously useful. If National Health Care is such an economic drag, how the hell does the EU actually able to export its goods to the USA and not the other way around? Why is a BMW so frigging cheap?
Currency yes, needs to be fixed, but we need to take care of business at home too.
The one thing I really like about Linux is that it adheres more to a Unix tradition of doing things continually and incrementally. Like, it drives me nuts that on Windows, to talk to SQL Server in C++, one has had to go from db-library to odbc to either OLE-DB or ADO... whereas, in a Unixy type mindset, one might ask, what really needed to change about db-library that required a whole new way of talking to databases? And, the answer is, not a lot. It is absolutely wonderful that in Linux there is a core set of APIs that always work, aren't suddenly abandoned to make a new feature that frankly, most people don't need.
So, in my mind, to say that there won't be a Linux Kernel 3.0 or a Linux 4.0 or something like that, is actually a GOOD THING. If you want dramatic, shocking, breaking releases that require you to rewrite 95% of your code to do the same thing, if you want to find that what you used suddenly can't work largely because it isn't supported any more, then Microsoft has plenty of that.
So three cheers for point releases, and here's to the death of "major" releases.
Seriously, why do you need to even know this stuff? Was the public harmed? No. Were workers harmed? No. No harm, no foul. There's no need to cover up becuase there is nothing to report. Just another industrial accident, move along.
If you ask me, this minor incident was probably leaked and sensationalized for reasons more political than actually any public good. So... what are you going to do about it knowing this that hurts you?
It is absolutely insane that there is a shortage of energy, and it is even more insane that a people whose hallmark is to figure out how to use more, is instead embarking on impoverishing themselves by obsessing about how to use less. Nuclear power is there, fusion can be researched. But oh no, we upset ourselves over the potential of a nuclear boogeyman when the gradual economic loss caused by energy impoverishment wrecks more and more lives each day. Over time, the lack of energy will ruin more people than any occasional nuclear meltdown would - if it hasn't already!
Sure, we can live a life with lights that aren't as good, cars that aren't as strong, houses that are not as warm and toilets that do not flush as well in the name of the environment, but, at the end of the day, the real reality is, we are all -getting poorer-. Conservation is crap. We need to figure out how to completely dominate our ecosystem, spread into the oceans and into space, and get back on the track of having cars that are better, lights that you can actually see with, and cars that don't crinkle like alumnimum foil whenever you hit some gaia worshipping dope on a bike.
Captain Kirk never asked Scotty for "Less Power! Less Power!", and we shouldn't be asking ourselves that either. Accepting the inevitability of less for everyone sucks, because, at some point, we always have the option of just having a war and keeping it all for ourselves.
Please go ahead and troll me. I don't care. I actually find that I get more feedback the worse my karma gets. Invent a new karma thing called "Bastion of Hell", to rate me as. But when you are sitting there trying to rub your hands around a.5 watt bulb that shows just enough light to see you need to wash your fingers but can't because you've used up your water ration, you go right ahead and preach the virtues of conservation.
Good technology gives us more energy and more resources for less money. Conservation is a waste of human investment, and environmentalism and its conservation, at its heart, is the worst social lie and course ever invented in the history of humanity. Not even the Dark Ages Church made the argument that people had to have less energy to succeed.
It's really no surprise. The 9th circuit's one of the most liberal courts in the country and so people looking for them to assert the right to liberal activities usually try and sue through them, and class action lawsuits are about as liberal as you can get.
One is that it is possible to be industrialized and not destroy the environment in the process. Its more expensive, but that research and expence will lead to more growth, not somehow throw us back to the stone age.
That's just a cheap slogan which has absolutely no proof. Having a path devoted to using less and less is just one that makes people poorer and poorer, as everyone haves less. Environmentalism's goal is to make humanity poorer, pure and simple. If you advocate a value and legal system that denies more and more people the right to shelter, energy, water, and food, all in favor of the animals or insects, which is what environmentalists do, you are making them poorer. At the end of the day, a light bulb that saves 50% of its energy by being not as bright has made the person who bought it poorer, not richer.
Face it, environmentalism is another stupid religion designed to convince people that they should fork over their rights in favor of an abstraction whose meaning is giong to be interpreted by an increasingly well paid committee.
The fact is, the entire environmental movement is part of an overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations so that the third world can be "equal
Take the movement for itself. Name one industrial activity that has not been condemned by the environmental movement. Just one. You can't build a brick shack in the USA without getting sued by some environmentalist somewhere and they have completely screwed the country up.
Here's a sample quote:
"Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."
And more...
"International environmental watchdog Greenpeace yesterday called on the coal industry to stop producing coal and to invest instead in clean and renewable energy. "
Finally, the call for an 80% reduction in energy usage per person takes us back to a nearly pre-industrial era. Instead of having 300 hp cars, we'll have one horsepower cars, if not just a flat out horse. Of course, horses would come under fire as much as cows are...Instead of having bright lights at night, we'll all have dim lights - no candles of course.
In fact, in the perfect environmental view, we'd probably even go FARTHER back than pre-industrial, to pre-historic, simply because so many environmentalists would have us not burn anything at all.
To put it simply, because the benefits of processes which cause pollution, accrue to the individual or groups of individuals which create the pollution, but the costs of pollution are paid by all. Duh. Basic ethics.
It's not basic ethics.... in fact, the entire moral framework is debatable. If you can sue Mattel for putting lead paint on their toys, than isn't it also reasonable that the provider of the fuel is liable for creating such a CO2 emitting energy solution?
The fact of the matter is, if you really wanted to manage the atmosphere, the most prudent way to do it would be through sequestration, rather than trying to hold the 1st world economy down through either reduced emissions or depopulation (as is the case in Europe). You would see a federal program to buy nuclear power plants for coal plant operators, and just switch to nuclear power. But you don't see either of those things. Instead, you have this crazy idea that the USA should effectively have to pay poor nations for the right to use energy.
You morons who have bought into the whole "CO2 tax" thing are just too stupid to think.
Go bend over and let Al Gore butt rape you some more, commie drone.
Good God. People are pathetic, listening to Linus as if he has great insights as to the mysteries of the universe. He's just a kernel developer that was in the right place at the right time to do the right thing.
I'll keep it short. The point is, we have to fix the UN but in a climate where the world resents the past abuses of American Power, through both political parties, therefor, it is a hell of a problem.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this. The Bush Administration has had no problems in skewing information to match their political agenda, and clearly discounting the science around climate change is part of that agenda. One article sitting on some blogger's site isn't enough to convince me. Moreover, I immediately discount any statement that contains:
Oh good lord. Look at you. The fact is, the entire environmental movement is part of an overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations so that the third world can be "equal". You guys on the left have your zealots too. Why else would the first world have to pay the third world for the "right to pollute". The whole argument is absurd.
A terrorist is someone who causes harm in order to achieve an end. Viruses do cause harm - economic harm. They subvert law enforcement because they hide in countries that sanction those attacks. Thus, stopping the terrorist requires some form of violent action, as that nation who hosts those attacks uses the implicit violence of its sovereignty to hide him.
Gitmo is not one of the "worst abuses in history" as you claim. I would suggest that you research topics from the Holocaust, before you make such an absurdly alarmist claim.
Doing it right, means not listening to a word that you say.
The whole problem with the internet is that our anti-malware strategy is defensive, and honestly, its just getting downright annoying and expensive. We need to go after people that actually create malware, and with some serious tools. It is increasingly reckless to let a few bad eggs hold the entire world hostage.
a) It's time to design the internet so that anonymous traffic is not possible. Make it possible to track the spread of this malware back from to the source. Make malware not just the crime of malware itself, but of identity theft as well.
a) Declare any writer of malware to be a Terrorist Enemy Combatant. If someone is writing an attack on an American computer system from offshore, we should have the CIA / FBI, etc, sending them to Gitmo as well. If foreign nations are not willing to enforce or do something about computer crime laws, then the United States has to enforce those laws for them. Send a few malicious geeks off to Guantinomo, I say. Cyberware IS terrorism.
Really, I'm way past hackers and security people being portrayed as some black and white struggle that we all must take part in. I'd much rather have my good guys in government going and killing all of the bad guys, without me having to even think about it.
I have in one of my numerical methods books, dating from I want to say the early 1990s, a fairly lengthy discussion on how an analog computer made out of a rope could theoretically be used to solve TSP. The point, and honestly, I might not understand this correctly, was that computational complexity is a function of computers being based on a Turing model. So, an analog "computer" you could dream up could theoretically "solve" TSP, because, it's really not the same sort of machine. But it would never solve it exactly... per se.
I agree with that point. But there are those that argue that science is measured by something higher than its utility. They would, to defend the opposite point of view, would argue that both you and I confuse science and technology.
Applications like this make me in favor of DRM if it can be used to protect the rights of artists to retain the creative content of their work. I'm getting more than sick of people that seem to think its ok to just go and copy an image off the web like it is nothing. If these images were so easy to make, then, why not make them yourselves! It takes work to make an image, whether it is a photograph, painting, or some other likeness thereof. This stuff on the internet, is not just yours to take.
I would make the argument that the Red Cross shouldn't even be trademarkable. It's a symbol that has to be thousands of years old. If anything, some lawyer ought to be able to dredge up a Knightly Order and determine that the symbol really belongs to neither J&J or the ARC.
That is complete nonsense. It is their job to discover what truth is, not to determine it.
Uh no. The truth is in the thing itself. A rock is a rock and it doesn't need our help to attain its own truth. All science does is arrange new tidbits of observation about that rock, into our own classification system.
We put names on things that already exist, and organize those names in a way that is convenient for us as humans to use. But the truth is already in the thing itself, and it is entirely possible that another civilization could theoretically come up with an entirely different scheme of organizing its information such that what it holds to be "true" would be completely different from our own "truths".
The underpinning of science is the faith that the pursuit of knowledge can better the human condition, that, at some level, there is an objective truth. It follows that you must also believe that mankind is honest enough to have a class of people whose job is to determine what truth is.
All of those points are debatable, depending on what one's values are.
History is told at each point in time by people who complain the most. So, we say that middle ages life sucks from our perspective, as, we're sold on the idea that living longer and disease free is the ultimate way to live, and the people that sold us on that idea were those peasants that weren't happy about being peasants. One has to imagine that, for much of history, there were plenty of peasants that were pretty happy, otherwise, people would not have been peasants.
I am endlessly shocked by those on the left wing that cannot imagine this simple point. To them, of all of all people, the idea of having a scientific community more or less running things is non-negotiable. In their defense of that concept, liberals have to point become the real religious fanatics of our time. One look at the nominating process for a Democratic president can tell you that the Inquisition is alive and well on the left wing.
Conservatives, on the other hand, can take science as another faith, simply because they can affix a dollar value on the value of knowledge versus their own enjoyment of a particular cultural tradition. So, in a sense, today's conservatives, by seeing science as another choice, have, at some level, a much wider and healthier view of the human condition than do their fanatical liberal counterparts. Unfortunately, conservatives bring that package with a lot of cultural package when it comes to asserting the rights of others. So, we are afflicted with liberals who lack the imagination to see a whole world view, and conservatives that see that world view, but really, only for themselves.
For software, consider $0.25 for the media, $1 to print the box, maybe $2 for some basic printed materials (not sure what comes with Vista) and a $66 price tag. That is a 2000% markup!
Yeah, and, once you toss in a hundred million or more dollars to pay the thousands of people required to actually develop it, then, your 2000% markup is really a fantasy. Trying to exclude the R&D costs from software profit percentages is like trying to explain Lucy without evolution. Sounds ok on paper, but really, just a bunch of ignorant babble that doesn't make much sense.
How about, you shoot yourself in the head. You would make yourself smarter if you cleared all that sh--- that's clogging up your pea brain.
Quite literally the governement is letting bridges fall down so that rich people and powerful corprorations can get more money that they didn't earn.
Great rhetoric, but how did that money not get earned? Last time I checked, it was Comcast and other companies laying down the fiber optics, buying the network switches, launching satellites, and doing every other thing to build a physical infrastructure. You have every right to raise capital to do the same thing yourself. Certainly, since you feel that Comcast and the likes are so horrible, you should be able to make a sufficient business case for a better, more open communications system that consumers will love....
but you don't... because you and your liberal likes are either too lazy or too unconfident or both, to do so. So instead, you basically want to take someone else's communications system and use it for your ends, and throw up a bunch of smoke and mirrors about freedom, when you are really arguing about is rationalized theft, based on the absurd idea that all the risk and investment that other people put into this thing somehow belongs to you.
You didn't risk anything. You didn't invent anything. You didn't buy anything. That network is NOT yours.
Thief. All of you socialists should be rounded up and shot, because really, in the end, you are all criminals.
I mean really.. Puhlease... the YearlyKos Convention? Yet another band of wild eyed liberals looking to try and steal taxpayer dollars and write laws to force people to do things that they are unable to do themselves.
But then again, maybe not. I know people who pay more for bottled water price-per-gallon than gasoline... and they complain about the price of gasoline
Yeah, but most people don't drink as much water as cars do gas.
Slashdot Mirror
The USA is not a member of the International Criminal Court Convention. No Republican or reasonable Democrat in their right mind would sign onto such nonsense.
It's really that simple, is that, USA pays its people too much relative to the rest of the world, and the easiest way to fix that is to devalue the dollar.
Even at its relately "low" versus the EU of $1.30 - $1.50 vs 1EU, there's no way that a worker in detroit who does not get paid the same benefits (incl natl health care), as his german counterpart, and current economics says it does.
Beyond that, we need to invest what dollars we have in education. Stop throwing so many people into prison and build more schools. Infrastructure needs money too, and honestly, some form of national health care is obviously useful. If National Health Care is such an economic drag, how the hell does the EU actually able to export its goods to the USA and not the other way around? Why is a BMW so frigging cheap?
Currency yes, needs to be fixed, but we need to take care of business at home too.
The one thing I really like about Linux is that it adheres more to a Unix tradition of doing things continually and incrementally. Like, it drives me nuts that on Windows, to talk to SQL Server in C++, one has had to go from db-library to odbc to either OLE-DB or ADO... whereas, in a Unixy type mindset, one might ask, what really needed to change about db-library that required a whole new way of talking to databases? And, the answer is, not a lot. It is absolutely wonderful that in Linux there is a core set of APIs that always work, aren't suddenly abandoned to make a new feature that frankly, most people don't need.
So, in my mind, to say that there won't be a Linux Kernel 3.0 or a Linux 4.0 or something like that, is actually a GOOD THING. If you want dramatic, shocking, breaking releases that require you to rewrite 95% of your code to do the same thing, if you want to find that what you used suddenly can't work largely because it isn't supported any more, then Microsoft has plenty of that.
So three cheers for point releases, and here's to the death of "major" releases.
Seriously, why do you need to even know this stuff? Was the public harmed? No. Were workers harmed? No. No harm, no foul. There's no need to cover up becuase there is nothing to report. Just another industrial accident, move along.
If you ask me, this minor incident was probably leaked and sensationalized for reasons more political than actually any public good. So... what are you going to do about it knowing this that hurts you?
It is absolutely insane that there is a shortage of energy, and it is even more insane that a people whose hallmark is to figure out how to use more, is instead embarking on impoverishing themselves by obsessing about how to use less. Nuclear power is there, fusion can be researched. But oh no, we upset ourselves over the potential of a nuclear boogeyman when the gradual economic loss caused by energy impoverishment wrecks more and more lives each day. Over time, the lack of energy will ruin more people than any occasional nuclear meltdown would - if it hasn't already!
.5 watt bulb that shows just enough light to see you need to wash your fingers but can't because you've used up your water ration, you go right ahead and preach the virtues of conservation.
Sure, we can live a life with lights that aren't as good, cars that aren't as strong, houses that are not as warm and toilets that do not flush as well in the name of the environment, but, at the end of the day, the real reality is, we are all -getting poorer-. Conservation is crap. We need to figure out how to completely dominate our ecosystem, spread into the oceans and into space, and get back on the track of having cars that are better, lights that you can actually see with, and cars that don't crinkle like alumnimum foil whenever you hit some gaia worshipping dope on a bike.
Captain Kirk never asked Scotty for "Less Power! Less Power!", and we shouldn't be asking ourselves that either. Accepting the inevitability of less for everyone sucks, because, at some point, we always have the option of just having a war and keeping it all for ourselves.
Please go ahead and troll me. I don't care. I actually find that I get more feedback the worse my karma gets. Invent a new karma thing called "Bastion of Hell", to rate me as. But when you are sitting there trying to rub your hands around a
Good technology gives us more energy and more resources for less money. Conservation is a waste of human investment, and environmentalism and its conservation, at its heart, is the worst social lie and course ever invented in the history of humanity. Not even the Dark Ages Church made the argument that people had to have less energy to succeed.
It's really no surprise. The 9th circuit's one of the most liberal courts in the country and so people looking for them to assert the right to liberal activities usually try and sue through them, and class action lawsuits are about as liberal as you can get.
One is that it is possible to be industrialized and not destroy the environment in the process. Its more expensive, but that research and expence will lead to more growth, not somehow throw us back to the stone age.
That's just a cheap slogan which has absolutely no proof. Having a path devoted to using less and less is just one that makes people poorer and poorer, as everyone haves less. Environmentalism's goal is to make humanity poorer, pure and simple. If you advocate a value and legal system that denies more and more people the right to shelter, energy, water, and food, all in favor of the animals or insects, which is what environmentalists do, you are making them poorer. At the end of the day, a light bulb that saves 50% of its energy by being not as bright has made the person who bought it poorer, not richer.
Face it, environmentalism is another stupid religion designed to convince people that they should fork over their rights in favor of an abstraction whose meaning is giong to be interpreted by an increasingly well paid committee.
The fact is, the entire environmental movement is part of an overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations so that the third world can be "equal
Take the movement for itself. Name one industrial activity that has not been condemned by the environmental movement. Just one. You can't build a brick shack in the USA without getting sued by some environmentalist somewhere and they have completely screwed the country up.
Here's a sample quote:
"Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."
And more...
"International environmental watchdog Greenpeace yesterday called on the coal industry to stop producing coal and to invest instead in clean and renewable energy. "
Finally, the call for an 80% reduction in energy usage per person takes us back to a nearly pre-industrial era. Instead of having 300 hp cars, we'll have one horsepower cars, if not just a flat out horse. Of course, horses would come under fire as much as cows are...Instead of having bright lights at night, we'll all have dim lights - no candles of course.
In fact, in the perfect environmental view, we'd probably even go FARTHER back than pre-industrial, to pre-historic, simply because so many environmentalists would have us not burn anything at all.
To put it simply, because the benefits of processes which cause pollution, accrue to the individual or groups of individuals which create the pollution, but the costs of pollution are paid by all. Duh. Basic ethics.
It's not basic ethics.... in fact, the entire moral framework is debatable. If you can sue Mattel for putting lead paint on their toys, than isn't it also reasonable that the provider of the fuel is liable for creating such a CO2 emitting energy solution?
The fact of the matter is, if you really wanted to manage the atmosphere, the most prudent way to do it would be through sequestration, rather than trying to hold the 1st world economy down through either reduced emissions or depopulation (as is the case in Europe). You would see a federal program to buy nuclear power plants for coal plant operators, and just switch to nuclear power. But you don't see either of those things. Instead, you have this crazy idea that the USA should effectively have to pay poor nations for the right to use energy.
You morons who have bought into the whole "CO2 tax" thing are just too stupid to think.
Go bend over and let Al Gore butt rape you some more, commie drone.
Good God. People are pathetic, listening to Linus as if he has great insights as to the mysteries of the universe. He's just a kernel developer that was in the right place at the right time to do the right thing.
Perspective, please!
I'll keep it short. The point is, we have to fix the UN but in a climate where the world resents the past abuses of American Power, through both political parties, therefor, it is a hell of a problem.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this. The Bush Administration has had no problems in skewing information to match their political agenda, and clearly discounting the science around climate change is part of that agenda. One article sitting on some blogger's site isn't enough to convince me. Moreover, I immediately discount any statement that contains:
Oh good lord. Look at you. The fact is, the entire environmental movement is part of an overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations so that the third world can be "equal". You guys on the left have your zealots too. Why else would the first world have to pay the third world for the "right to pollute". The whole argument is absurd.
A terrorist is someone who causes harm in order to achieve an end. Viruses do cause harm - economic harm. They subvert law enforcement because they hide in countries that sanction those attacks. Thus, stopping the terrorist requires some form of violent action, as that nation who hosts those attacks uses the implicit violence of its sovereignty to hide him.
Gitmo is not one of the "worst abuses in history" as you claim. I would suggest that you research topics from the Holocaust, before you make such an absurdly alarmist claim.
Doing it right, means not listening to a word that you say.
The whole problem with the internet is that our anti-malware strategy is defensive, and honestly, its just getting downright annoying and expensive. We need to go after people that actually create malware, and with some serious tools. It is increasingly reckless to let a few bad eggs hold the entire world hostage.
a) It's time to design the internet so that anonymous traffic is not possible. Make it possible to track the spread of this malware back from to the source. Make malware not just the crime of malware itself, but of identity theft as well.
a) Declare any writer of malware to be a Terrorist Enemy Combatant. If someone is writing an attack on an American computer system from offshore, we should have the CIA / FBI, etc, sending them to Gitmo as well. If foreign nations are not willing to enforce or do something about computer crime laws, then the United States has to enforce those laws for them. Send a few malicious geeks off to Guantinomo, I say. Cyberware IS terrorism.
Really, I'm way past hackers and security people being portrayed as some black and white struggle that we all must take part in. I'd much rather have my good guys in government going and killing all of the bad guys, without me having to even think about it.
I have in one of my numerical methods books, dating from I want to say the early 1990s, a fairly lengthy discussion on how an analog computer made out of a rope could theoretically be used to solve TSP. The point, and honestly, I might not understand this correctly, was that computational complexity is a function of computers being based on a Turing model. So, an analog "computer" you could dream up could theoretically "solve" TSP, because, it's really not the same sort of machine. But it would never solve it exactly... per se.
Geez, German taxpayers aren't supporting NASA. US Taxpayers are. So, why couldn't NASA do this with an American car?
Come on.
What a joke.
I agree with that point. But there are those that argue that science is measured by something higher than its utility. They would, to defend the opposite point of view, would argue that both you and I confuse science and technology.
Applications like this make me in favor of DRM if it can be used to protect the rights of artists to retain the creative content of their work. I'm getting more than sick of people that seem to think its ok to just go and copy an image off the web like it is nothing. If these images were so easy to make, then, why not make them yourselves! It takes work to make an image, whether it is a photograph, painting, or some other likeness thereof. This stuff on the internet, is not just yours to take.
I would make the argument that the Red Cross shouldn't even be trademarkable. It's a symbol that has to be thousands of years old. If anything, some lawyer ought to be able to dredge up a Knightly Order and determine that the symbol really belongs to neither J&J or the ARC.
That is complete nonsense. It is their job to discover what truth is, not to determine it.
Uh no. The truth is in the thing itself. A rock is a rock and it doesn't need our help to attain its own truth. All science does is arrange new tidbits of observation about that rock, into our own classification system.
We put names on things that already exist, and organize those names in a way that is convenient for us as humans to use. But the truth is already in the thing itself, and it is entirely possible that another civilization could theoretically come up with an entirely different scheme of organizing its information such that what it holds to be "true" would be completely different from our own "truths".
You need to think more broadly about things.
The underpinning of science is the faith that the pursuit of knowledge can better the human condition, that, at some level, there is an objective truth. It follows that you must also believe that mankind is honest enough to have a class of people whose job is to determine what truth is.
All of those points are debatable, depending on what one's values are.
History is told at each point in time by people who complain the most. So, we say that middle ages life sucks from our perspective, as, we're sold on the idea that living longer and disease free is the ultimate way to live, and the people that sold us on that idea were those peasants that weren't happy about being peasants. One has to imagine that, for much of history, there were plenty of peasants that were pretty happy, otherwise, people would not have been peasants.
I am endlessly shocked by those on the left wing that cannot imagine this simple point. To them, of all of all people, the idea of having a scientific community more or less running things is non-negotiable. In their defense of that concept, liberals have to point become the real religious fanatics of our time. One look at the nominating process for a Democratic president can tell you that the Inquisition is alive and well on the left wing.
Conservatives, on the other hand, can take science as another faith, simply because they can affix a dollar value on the value of knowledge versus their own enjoyment of a particular cultural tradition. So, in a sense, today's conservatives, by seeing science as another choice, have, at some level, a much wider and healthier view of the human condition than do their fanatical liberal counterparts. Unfortunately, conservatives bring that package with a lot of cultural package when it comes to asserting the rights of others. So, we are afflicted with liberals who lack the imagination to see a whole world view, and conservatives that see that world view, but really, only for themselves.
For software, consider $0.25 for the media, $1 to print the box, maybe $2 for some basic printed materials (not sure what comes with Vista) and a $66 price tag. That is a 2000% markup!
Yeah, and, once you toss in a hundred million or more dollars to pay the thousands of people required to actually develop it, then, your 2000% markup is really a fantasy. Trying to exclude the R&D costs from software profit percentages is like trying to explain Lucy without evolution. Sounds ok on paper, but really, just a bunch of ignorant babble that doesn't make much sense.
Go fuck yourself
How about, you shoot yourself in the head. You would make yourself smarter if you cleared all that sh--- that's clogging up your pea brain.
Quite literally the governement is letting bridges fall down so that rich people and powerful corprorations can get more money that they didn't earn.
Great rhetoric, but how did that money not get earned? Last time I checked, it was Comcast and other companies laying down the fiber optics, buying the network switches, launching satellites, and doing every other thing to build a physical infrastructure. You have every right to raise capital to do the same thing yourself. Certainly, since you feel that Comcast and the likes are so horrible, you should be able to make a sufficient business case for a better, more open communications system that consumers will love....
but you don't... because you and your liberal likes are either too lazy or too unconfident or both, to do so. So instead, you basically want to take someone else's communications system and use it for your ends, and throw up a bunch of smoke and mirrors about freedom, when you are really arguing about is rationalized theft, based on the absurd idea that all the risk and investment that other people put into this thing somehow belongs to you.
You didn't risk anything. You didn't invent anything. You didn't buy anything. That network is NOT yours.
Thief. All of you socialists should be rounded up and shot, because really, in the end, you are all criminals.
I mean really.. Puhlease... the YearlyKos Convention? Yet another band of wild eyed liberals looking to try and steal taxpayer dollars and write laws to force people to do things that they are unable to do themselves.
But then again, maybe not. I know people who pay more for bottled water price-per-gallon than gasoline... and they complain about the price of gasoline
Yeah, but most people don't drink as much water as cars do gas.