I have this weird feeling that pervasive, high frequency radio needed to make wireless work is going to wind up with some unforseen bad side effect, the same way every other technology that we used too much had. My concern is that we lack the science to even understand the implications of all of this radiation we're creating upon our environment. Sure, you can put a frog in a box next to a wireless system and say, "oh, the frog lived", or jack up the energy by 100 times as some sort of a proxy for exposure over time, and say "the frog did not get cancer", but that's not really the same as saying that we will now saturate the biosphere with radiation of our own making.
The bottom line, when it comes to certain formats, you have to pay to use them without threat of a lawsuit, so, good Linux distributions need to capture a format fee for end users. This way, they can bundle the codecs without a bunch of threats telling people they might go to jail, and it would be simpler for the end users as well.
Just get the $20 already, and pay out the licensing fees. It's not like Linux distro vendors don't need money.
The thing is, a distro for Linux is shaping more and more to be a complete product out of the box. It has dev tools, office tools, web tools, games, whatever you want. While it would be nice to have a setup program that worked across all Linuxes that developers wrote too, it might be constraining too.
It makes sense, though, in a way, because if all the software is actually free, why not upgrade all of it at once and be done with it? I've downloaded a ton of stuff for Windows over the last year, but I've not really done anything with my Linux but -use it- over the same. Except, I blew away my X windows and I have no idea how to get it back... Time for a new distro.
No matter how you paint it, that's not the same as favoring "dictators and strongmen" or not thinking "that a society whose people are free is fundamentally better than a society whose people are not." There's this crazy belief that a society whose people are free can't be forced to be free - they have to choose to be free
I just disagree with that premise, even at the prime directive level. At some theoretical level, if everyone just stops supporting a dictator, he topples, but, the problem is, a smart dictator can keep a large enough minority happy while trampling a majority. The only way to get rid of that dictator is attack him and his minority. That's what happened to Sparta and the Helots, what Hannibal tried to do to Rome and its allies, all the way through history, including Hitler and the Nazis, the Klan in the US South, Apartheid in South America, and so on. You could theoretically try and apply sanctions, but rarely does that actually work, as the minority controlling the resources will just kill off the majority in droves, as resources diminish, as was the case in Iraq in the 1990s, and all over Africa really, from Ethiopia to the diamond nations to what's happening in Darfur today.
So to me, given that argument, the honest way someone opposed to interventions in all of these places really would say, "I don't really like dictatorships, but, I really don't give a shit enough about these other people to want to risk our own national resources on it." That's the honest answer, but, those who opposed the war, for the most part, would never really answer like that, because it boxes them in on other international goals. So they say something else.
Really, all of this talk about impeaching Bush because he "lied" is so much nonsense. Everyone has lied about the war, in one way or another, whether they are for or against it. Me, I think Bush is right about the freedom part, and I like that we're killing lots of islamists, but, also, I'm still holding out for 5 million bpd of crude oil being pumped out of Iraq into Exxon Mobil supertankers, and the $1/gallon gas that goes with it.
Because, even if global warming is caused by man, I want my 350hp V8 car so much that I just don't give a shit. Poor people on the world's coasts are just going to have to pack up their shanty towns and cardboard cities and move.
That pesky CO2 producing Amazon. Makes more CO2 than O2?! Let's get the chainsaws out and save mother earth before its too late! Give the young trees a chance!
I would never thought that I would live to see the day that the left wing sells out the idea of imposing democracy in favor of a Kissinger-esque RealPolitik. Back when I was a young Reagan supporter, young liberals that I argued with cringed at the notion of the USA even having a relationship with a dictatorial regime, and would argue that if the USA were to do anything, it ought to invade the middle east and topple all of these dictators once and for all. Of all the things I disagreed with from them, that struck me as ultimately the right thing, and so, when Bush set out to do that, I was shocked to hear that now the left has evolved to favor dictators and strongmen, and don't even believe that a society whose people are free is fundamentally better than a society whose people are not.
Seriously. You can say that OpenOffice word processor is pretty close, but the OpenOffice spreadsheet is just terrible compared to Excel. You get what you pay for, and if you want the best, then pay for Office.
Times like this make me realize that the end result of capitalistic software and open source software is really naught if you are on the losing end. If nobody likes your work, you are not going to be funded, and that's really what seems to be happening here.
The premise for shutting down the project is correct. Multiple cores all but eliminate the need for the most extreme clusters. Throw PCI-X graphics cards into the mix, and you have even that much more computing power. That's not to say that there aren't applications that require clustering, but, those who make those applications probably are going to wind up writing their own distributed processing framework anyway that is tailored to their needs.
Sometimes the turtles are just destined to be soup.
Launching rockets at cops during the height of the war on drugs in the 1980s, that was some fun stuff. I remember the outcries against it even now, and, I just had to play it. I think the game lead to a wave of "William Sessions of the FBI says don't do drugs", or some other crap, on arcade games thereafter.
I bet if you had a bunch of a people be made to kill cows, they would enjoy it eventually. People like to kill, its just that, killing is bad. Haven't you ever gone hunting just for the pleasure of snuffing out an innocent animal life?
I mean, Google Desk has access to your whole hard drive, because it indexes everything. Why couldn't they do the same thing first. So, not is the MS plan a bad idea, but a stolen one at that.
I don't mean to be rude, but, what they have seems a long way away from commercial applications.
Its one thing to move a magnet to and from a tub of liquid and watch it change colors, which is cool, but its another to have millions little magnetic fields inside of a display, not only switching on and off, but varying in intensity.
It just seems like it would be pretty hard to do, but, it is cool that it would not need a backlight.
It's all true. There's 50 million of us who support squadrons and air groups of these robot planes, all bombing Iran if they don't behave correctly as best judged by our President and his trusty sidekick, Dick Shoot-a-Lawyer.
Besides, for the price of one F-22, you can get a squadron of robots. How cool is that?
Maybe as a show of force, we could have thousands of robots dropping salmon rusdie books on the ayatollah, and maybe a bunch of barney dolls. no one gets hurt, and everyone knows whose boss.
The fact of the matter is, some Phd for some company somewhere came up with the idea that high fructose corn syrup was a better, lower cost way to sweeten food. While its great that, two generations of heart attacks down the road, that other scientists have stepped up to the plate and said that it wasn't, one has to ask, what else is new that is really safe? Cell phones, pervasive wireless, the use of plastics? It seems like every new technology that we've created has had a dark side discovered a generation later, and I wonder if, any more, the smart strategy is that, if something new does come out, to maybe not so blindly trust it?
I've thought about this more, or maybe, I'm just so damned tired that I don't care about politics. But the reality is that Indiana should do whatever it takes to get BP to build the refinery, and then, reneg on its dumping waivers so that BP can't dump in the Great Lakes any more.
I ask myself this. Conservatives need to be reminded that, if the Earth truly is a gift from God, then, why piss on it? If God created all the fish in all the seas and lakes, could it not possibly offend Him to kill them in droves simply because we are too lazy to trap what amounts to a truckload of waste per day? Isn't Sloth one of the seven deadly sins? And what about ignorance?
The bottom line is that, if you build your world view around the premise that God has created Man to do with what the world what he will, then, you must accept the idea that man in fact has the capacity within him to make permanent changes to the global climate ecology. If Man is so powerful, according to the Judeo Christian bible, that God himself said that Man could do anything as they constructed their tower of Babel, then, isn't it reasonable to believe that in fact, we really can? To me, as a conservative, the Right Wing radio argument that says that global warming is impossible because Man is so powerless is ultimately an insult to God. It's blasphemy, is what it is.
Now, I'm not some creationist or biblical literalist. Nor am I trying to preach to anyone. Take this as me, thinking aloud. If anything, what I write is really more directed to fellow conservatives that might also be looking on the Internet. Just as much as we conservatives call on muslim leaders to step up and take back their faith from the radicals, and just as much as we call on mainstream democrats to take back their faith from liberal extremists, we need to do the same things ourselves. It's not that Democrats should be muzzling talk radio or other conservative sites any more than the other way should occur. It's that, we ought to be able to tap fellow conservatives on the shoulder, when they are in the midst of making these heresies, and remind them, as they heatedly argue the right to dump heavy metals into God's waters, "is this what Jesus would do?"
Every mainstream has the obligation to police the radicals that would speak for it. I'm sure that Noam Chomskey doesn't speak for most liberals, even though they might find him entertaining, any more than Rush Limbaugh speaks for me. Funny guy sometimes, but, he's not what I'm about and he's not what most conservatives are about.
Left up to the blue state environmental types, the USA would have no jobs at all. We'd all be selling beads to each other, until they banned glass blowing because it was too dangerous.
But, let's ask ourselves? How many cubic miles of trash come out of NYC? How much recycling really goes on in Boston? Where's the big green farms in Trenton, NJ? Does the city of Philadelphia even make enough biofuels for its own cars?
It's really easy to live in a city and decry everyone else's environmental practices but cities are the filthiest places on the planet, and yet, in the United States, they produce no food, no manufactured goods, nothing but a bunch of lawyers pushing lawsuits back and forth and selling insurance to each other. Yeah, that's some economy.
Red staters might be polluters, but at least they aren't useless.
It seems that the favorite thing for both lefties and righties to do is to eschew an interpretation of the Constitution which suggests that it grants citizens rights. Strict Constructionalism and the Living Constitution Theories are both flat out wrong, and both sides are wrecking the country when they twist this document for their own political causes.
Madison, who wrote the document, along with everyone that passed it, saw that the Constitution grants the -government- some limited rights, with the assumption that the people have ALL the rights, and thus, we as a people are allowed to do anything that is NOT in the Constitution or, made illegal by the government in some limited way.
To wit, any reasonable court that actually cared about the Constitution would throw out a vast majority of federal statutes, left wing or right wing, largely because the only thing the federal government is allowed to do is roughly:
a) declare wars. b) make copyrights and patents, manage highways, and the mail. c) make laws to regulate commerce. d) tax income (16th amendment)
Anything else, from acts restricting gay marriage, to acts restricting guns, are simply unconstitutional at the federal level, as would be wiretapping, surveillance, environmental and some civil rights legislation (that which couldn't rest logically on the equal protection amendment, or the commerce clause). So affirmative action and reparations are illegal, but sending in the feds to bust some heads because of cops lynching a guy is legal.
Bottom line is, if you argue that someone doesn't have the right to do something, because it is not in the constitution, you have missed the boat on what the document is all about.
PCI Express has a maximum speed of 8GB/s, so my original point still stands. 40GB/s is way too much data for a home PC to credibly use at that kind of network speed.
That's an absurd thing to do, as, the fastest memory speed, I believe is nowhere even close to 40gb/sec and certainly no interface bus that I'm aware for PC's that can handle a network that fast. I don't even think PCI-Express is that quick, and that's only for graphics cards isn't it?
So... unless she has some sort of a big mainframe, she can't use that speed at all.
As a practical matter, most aspects of the current left wing agenda, from higher taxes on the rich (a progressive tax scale), more social services for the poor, etc, are all viewed as a subset of a larger socialist state. If you gave them all of that, they would continue to advocate for even more socialism.
As political spheres go, you are right. But we are in a political climate where a lot of people on this board post as Democrats == Good and Republicans == Evil, and really, without any context at all. I mean, you have people comparing Bush to Kim Jong Il.. and honestly, its more like people touting slogans than being any real leftists.
The fact of the matter is, 95% of all humans do not think of themselves, and probably %99.995 on slashdot. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to accept indoctrination, just because, you learn to trust as knowledge that which you read. So right now, America is a bunch of free thinkers in the right wing, who lack the educational tools to do so effectively, and a bunch of drones on the left, who have a lot of knowledge, but can't think at all. And the result is either the likes of Bush or Gore or Kerry... and worst of all, Bush actually has better grades in college than his Democratic opposition... How f--- up is that?
In a simplistic sense, that's true, but the data you leave behind on someone elses's server can be sold. It's their data that they've paid together, not yours, even though it is about you. So, sure, you might not trust Amazon, but, if I was a magazine company, I could always sell your data to them. And in fact, most companies probably DO sell this data they acquire about you.
Well, before you get all misty eyed about the pending end of the Bush administration, be advised that
1) No Democratic Presidential Candidate has promised to break up the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, Democrats in the US House actually ran on COMPLETE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 9/11 REPORT. This includes EXPANDED, not contracted, Federal Surveillance.
2) No Democratic Presidential Candidate has promised to repeal or refuse to enforce the USA PATRIOT Act.
WHEN WILL HARRY REID AND NANCY PELOSI INTRODUCE LEGISLATION TO REPEAL USA PATRIOT?
The answer is, they won't. Democrats aren't against the widening scope of federal powers under Bush, as much as they just want those powers for themselves. It's going to take a genuine conservative, who radically cuts the size of the government.
As much as you don't like George W Bush, you might want to rethink that. If Kim Jong Il won and became the President of the USA:
a) Anyone that criticized the Great Leader, via Internet, Phone, or even in a Public Place, or around a family member that supported him, would find themselves in a concentration camp and gradually worked to death.
b) The economy of the United States would completely collapse to a failed agrarian state. There would be no electricity, transportation, or food. Millions of people would starve. There would be no private companies. Instead of Apple vs Microsoft, there would be a single Kim Jong Il Glorious Operating System.
c) Adjusted for comparitive GDP, the US Military would have a budget of around 2 trillion dollars a year. Oh, and we would all be drafted up, yielding a standing army of around 10 to 20 million men under arms. What we do with that army? Well, forget about a war to liberate Iraq from Saddam, the USA would, under Kim Jong Il, have created an empire by conquering Canada and Mexico and probably into the south.
d) Pictures of Kim Jong Il would be on the currency and all documents. There would be no hollywood stars, or media or celebrity watch, becuase there could only be one celebrity, the Great Leader.
e) We would be in year 90, or something like that, as the calendar would be based on the anniversary of North Korea's original leader.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this weird feeling that pervasive, high frequency radio needed to make wireless work is going to wind up with some unforseen bad side effect, the same way every other technology that we used too much had. My concern is that we lack the science to even understand the implications of all of this radiation we're creating upon our environment. Sure, you can put a frog in a box next to a wireless system and say, "oh, the frog lived", or jack up the energy by 100 times as some sort of a proxy for exposure over time, and say "the frog did not get cancer", but that's not really the same as saying that we will now saturate the biosphere with radiation of our own making.
The bottom line, when it comes to certain formats, you have to pay to use them without threat of a lawsuit, so, good Linux distributions need to capture a format fee for end users. This way, they can bundle the codecs without a bunch of threats telling people they might go to jail, and it would be simpler for the end users as well.
Just get the $20 already, and pay out the licensing fees. It's not like Linux distro vendors don't need money.
The thing is, a distro for Linux is shaping more and more to be a complete product out of the box. It has dev tools, office tools, web tools, games, whatever you want. While it would be nice to have a setup program that worked across all Linuxes that developers wrote too, it might be constraining too.
It makes sense, though, in a way, because if all the software is actually free, why not upgrade all of it at once and be done with it? I've downloaded a ton of stuff for Windows over the last year, but I've not really done anything with my Linux but -use it- over the same. Except, I blew away my X windows and I have no idea how to get it back... Time for a new distro.
It's really simple.
No matter how you paint it, that's not the same as favoring "dictators and strongmen" or not thinking "that a society whose people are free is fundamentally better than a society whose people are not." There's this crazy belief that a society whose people are free can't be forced to be free - they have to choose to be free
I just disagree with that premise, even at the prime directive level. At some theoretical level, if everyone just stops supporting a dictator, he topples, but, the problem is, a smart dictator can keep a large enough minority happy while trampling a majority. The only way to get rid of that dictator is attack him and his minority. That's what happened to Sparta and the Helots, what Hannibal tried to do to Rome and its allies, all the way through history, including Hitler and the Nazis, the Klan in the US South, Apartheid in South America, and so on. You could theoretically try and apply sanctions, but rarely does that actually work, as the minority controlling the resources will just kill off the majority in droves, as resources diminish, as was the case in Iraq in the 1990s, and all over Africa really, from Ethiopia to the diamond nations to what's happening in Darfur today.
So to me, given that argument, the honest way someone opposed to interventions in all of these places really would say, "I don't really like dictatorships, but, I really don't give a shit enough about these other people to want to risk our own national resources on it." That's the honest answer, but, those who opposed the war, for the most part, would never really answer like that, because it boxes them in on other international goals. So they say something else.
Really, all of this talk about impeaching Bush because he "lied" is so much nonsense. Everyone has lied about the war, in one way or another, whether they are for or against it. Me, I think Bush is right about the freedom part, and I like that we're killing lots of islamists, but, also, I'm still holding out for 5 million bpd of crude oil being pumped out of Iraq into Exxon Mobil supertankers, and the $1/gallon gas that goes with it.
Because, even if global warming is caused by man, I want my 350hp V8 car so much that I just don't give a shit. Poor people on the world's coasts are just going to have to pack up their shanty towns and cardboard cities and move.
That pesky CO2 producing Amazon. Makes more CO2 than O2?! Let's get the chainsaws out and save mother earth before its too late! Give the young trees a chance!
I would never thought that I would live to see the day that the left wing sells out the idea of imposing democracy in favor of a Kissinger-esque RealPolitik. Back when I was a young Reagan supporter, young liberals that I argued with cringed at the notion of the USA even having a relationship with a dictatorial regime, and would argue that if the USA were to do anything, it ought to invade the middle east and topple all of these dictators once and for all. Of all the things I disagreed with from them, that struck me as ultimately the right thing, and so, when Bush set out to do that, I was shocked to hear that now the left has evolved to favor dictators and strongmen, and don't even believe that a society whose people are free is fundamentally better than a society whose people are not.
Seriously. You can say that OpenOffice word processor is pretty close, but the OpenOffice spreadsheet is just terrible compared to Excel. You get what you pay for, and if you want the best, then pay for Office.
Yeah, on the box it said that, but, in the heat of battle, you were just a killing machine. It was great.
Times like this make me realize that the end result of capitalistic software and open source software is really naught if you are on the losing end. If nobody likes your work, you are not going to be funded, and that's really what seems to be happening here.
The premise for shutting down the project is correct. Multiple cores all but eliminate the need for the most extreme clusters. Throw PCI-X graphics cards into the mix, and you have even that much more computing power. That's not to say that there aren't applications that require clustering, but, those who make those applications probably are going to wind up writing their own distributed processing framework anyway that is tailored to their needs.
Sometimes the turtles are just destined to be soup.
Launching rockets at cops during the height of the war on drugs in the 1980s, that was some fun stuff. I remember the outcries against it even now, and, I just had to play it. I think the game lead to a wave of "William Sessions of the FBI says don't do drugs", or some other crap, on arcade games thereafter.
I bet if you had a bunch of a people be made to kill cows, they would enjoy it eventually. People like to kill, its just that, killing is bad. Haven't you ever gone hunting just for the pleasure of snuffing out an innocent animal life?
And it is better to kill them with robots than American soldiers...
Now if only we could build robot riflemen.
I mean, Google Desk has access to your whole hard drive, because it indexes everything. Why couldn't they do the same thing first. So, not is the MS plan a bad idea, but a stolen one at that.
I don't mean to be rude, but, what they have seems a long way away from commercial applications.
Its one thing to move a magnet to and from a tub of liquid and watch it change colors, which is cool, but its another to have millions little magnetic fields inside of a display, not only switching on and off, but varying in intensity.
It just seems like it would be pretty hard to do, but, it is cool that it would not need a backlight.
It's all true. There's 50 million of us who support squadrons and air groups of these robot planes, all bombing Iran if they don't behave correctly as best judged by our President and his trusty sidekick, Dick Shoot-a-Lawyer.
Besides, for the price of one F-22, you can get a squadron of robots. How cool is that?
Maybe as a show of force, we could have thousands of robots dropping salmon rusdie books on the ayatollah, and maybe a bunch of barney dolls. no one gets hurt, and everyone knows whose boss.
The fact of the matter is, some Phd for some company somewhere came up with the idea that high fructose corn syrup was a better, lower cost way to sweeten food. While its great that, two generations of heart attacks down the road, that other scientists have stepped up to the plate and said that it wasn't, one has to ask, what else is new that is really safe? Cell phones, pervasive wireless, the use of plastics? It seems like every new technology that we've created has had a dark side discovered a generation later, and I wonder if, any more, the smart strategy is that, if something new does come out, to maybe not so blindly trust it?
I've thought about this more, or maybe, I'm just so damned tired that I don't care about politics. But the reality is that Indiana should do whatever it takes to get BP to build the refinery, and then, reneg on its dumping waivers so that BP can't dump in the Great Lakes any more.
I ask myself this. Conservatives need to be reminded that, if the Earth truly is a gift from God, then, why piss on it? If God created all the fish in all the seas and lakes, could it not possibly offend Him to kill them in droves simply because we are too lazy to trap what amounts to a truckload of waste per day? Isn't Sloth one of the seven deadly sins? And what about ignorance?
The bottom line is that, if you build your world view around the premise that God has created Man to do with what the world what he will, then, you must accept the idea that man in fact has the capacity within him to make permanent changes to the global climate ecology. If Man is so powerful, according to the Judeo Christian bible, that God himself said that Man could do anything as they constructed their tower of Babel, then, isn't it reasonable to believe that in fact, we really can? To me, as a conservative, the Right Wing radio argument that says that global warming is impossible because Man is so powerless is ultimately an insult to God. It's blasphemy, is what it is.
Now, I'm not some creationist or biblical literalist. Nor am I trying to preach to anyone. Take this as me, thinking aloud. If anything, what I write is really more directed to fellow conservatives that might also be looking on the Internet. Just as much as we conservatives call on muslim leaders to step up and take back their faith from the radicals, and just as much as we call on mainstream democrats to take back their faith from liberal extremists, we need to do the same things ourselves. It's not that Democrats should be muzzling talk radio or other conservative sites any more than the other way should occur. It's that, we ought to be able to tap fellow conservatives on the shoulder, when they are in the midst of making these heresies, and remind them, as they heatedly argue the right to dump heavy metals into God's waters, "is this what Jesus would do?"
Every mainstream has the obligation to police the radicals that would speak for it. I'm sure that Noam Chomskey doesn't speak for most liberals, even though they might find him entertaining, any more than Rush Limbaugh speaks for me. Funny guy sometimes, but, he's not what I'm about and he's not what most conservatives are about.
Left up to the blue state environmental types, the USA would have no jobs at all. We'd all be selling beads to each other, until they banned glass blowing because it was too dangerous.
But, let's ask ourselves? How many cubic miles of trash come out of NYC? How much recycling really goes on in Boston? Where's the big green farms in Trenton, NJ? Does the city of Philadelphia even make enough biofuels for its own cars?
It's really easy to live in a city and decry everyone else's environmental practices but cities are the filthiest places on the planet, and yet, in the United States, they produce no food, no manufactured goods, nothing but a bunch of lawyers pushing lawsuits back and forth and selling insurance to each other. Yeah, that's some economy.
Red staters might be polluters, but at least they aren't useless.
It seems that the favorite thing for both lefties and righties to do is to eschew an interpretation of the Constitution which suggests that it grants citizens rights. Strict Constructionalism and the Living Constitution Theories are both flat out wrong, and both sides are wrecking the country when they twist this document for their own political causes.
Madison, who wrote the document, along with everyone that passed it, saw that the Constitution grants the -government- some limited rights, with the assumption that the people have ALL the rights, and thus, we as a people are allowed to do anything that is NOT in the Constitution or, made illegal by the government in some limited way.
To wit, any reasonable court that actually cared about the Constitution would throw out a vast majority of federal statutes, left wing or right wing, largely because the only thing the federal government is allowed to do is roughly:
a) declare wars.
b) make copyrights and patents, manage highways, and the mail.
c) make laws to regulate commerce.
d) tax income (16th amendment)
Anything else, from acts restricting gay marriage, to acts restricting guns, are simply unconstitutional at the federal level, as would be wiretapping, surveillance, environmental and some civil rights legislation (that which couldn't rest logically on the equal protection amendment, or the commerce clause). So affirmative action and reparations are illegal, but sending in the feds to bust some heads because of cops lynching a guy is legal.
Bottom line is, if you argue that someone doesn't have the right to do something, because it is not in the constitution, you have missed the boat on what the document is all about.
PCI Express has a maximum speed of 8GB/s, so my original point still stands. 40GB/s is way too much data for a home PC to credibly use at that kind of network speed.
That's an absurd thing to do, as, the fastest memory speed, I believe is nowhere even close to 40gb/sec and certainly no interface bus that I'm aware for PC's that can handle a network that fast. I don't even think PCI-Express is that quick, and that's only for graphics cards isn't it?
So... unless she has some sort of a big mainframe, she can't use that speed at all.
As a practical matter, most aspects of the current left wing agenda, from higher taxes on the rich (a progressive tax scale), more social services for the poor, etc, are all viewed as a subset of a larger socialist state. If you gave them all of that, they would continue to advocate for even more socialism.
As political spheres go, you are right. But we are in a political climate where a lot of people on this board post as Democrats == Good and Republicans == Evil, and really, without any context at all. I mean, you have people comparing Bush to Kim Jong Il.. and honestly, its more like people touting slogans than being any real leftists.
The fact of the matter is, 95% of all humans do not think of themselves, and probably %99.995 on slashdot. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to accept indoctrination, just because, you learn to trust as knowledge that which you read. So right now, America is a bunch of free thinkers in the right wing, who lack the educational tools to do so effectively, and a bunch of drones on the left, who have a lot of knowledge, but can't think at all. And the result is either the likes of Bush or Gore or Kerry... and worst of all, Bush actually has better grades in college than his Democratic opposition... How f--- up is that?
In a simplistic sense, that's true, but the data you leave behind on someone elses's server can be sold. It's their data that they've paid together, not yours, even though it is about you. So, sure, you might not trust Amazon, but, if I was a magazine company, I could always sell your data to them. And in fact, most companies probably DO sell this data they acquire about you.
Well, before you get all misty eyed about the pending end of the Bush administration, be advised that
1) No Democratic Presidential Candidate has promised to break up the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, Democrats in the US House actually ran on COMPLETE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 9/11 REPORT. This includes EXPANDED, not contracted, Federal Surveillance.
2) No Democratic Presidential Candidate has promised to repeal or refuse to enforce the USA PATRIOT Act.
WHEN WILL HARRY REID AND NANCY PELOSI INTRODUCE LEGISLATION TO REPEAL USA PATRIOT?
The answer is, they won't. Democrats aren't against the widening scope of federal powers under Bush, as much as they just want those powers for themselves. It's going to take a genuine conservative, who radically cuts the size of the government.
As much as you don't like George W Bush, you might want to rethink that. If Kim Jong Il won and became the President of the USA:
a) Anyone that criticized the Great Leader, via Internet, Phone, or even in a Public Place, or around a family member that supported him, would find themselves in a concentration camp and gradually worked to death.
b) The economy of the United States would completely collapse to a failed agrarian state. There would be no electricity, transportation, or food. Millions of people would starve. There would be no private companies. Instead of Apple vs Microsoft, there would be a single Kim Jong Il Glorious Operating System.
c) Adjusted for comparitive GDP, the US Military would have a budget of around 2 trillion dollars a year. Oh, and we would all be drafted up, yielding a standing army of around 10 to 20 million men under arms. What we do with that army? Well, forget about a war to liberate Iraq from Saddam, the USA would, under Kim Jong Il, have created an empire by conquering Canada and Mexico and probably into the south.
d) Pictures of Kim Jong Il would be on the currency and all documents. There would be no hollywood stars, or media or celebrity watch, becuase there could only be one celebrity, the Great Leader.
e) We would be in year 90, or something like that, as the calendar would be based on the anniversary of North Korea's original leader.
After that, it only gets worse.
http://www.stat.ualberta.ca/people/schmu/nk.html
Take the time to have some understanding of what real dictators are, before you start comparing US Presidents to them.
I invite you to have a look at: