I apologize in advance for the long and rambling nature of this reply. I've not invested the time to succinctly organize my thoughts.
For me, politics is important, but, having gone to school as a writer and still write myself, as a hobby, truth in art trumps politics. To a great extent, I can set aside political differences to see someone who is genuinely skilled in the craft of writing, and obversely, I find it difficult for me to ignore bad writing when the skill and attention to detail isn't there.
I think we can at least both agree that the quality of journalism has plummetted over the last 40 years as broadcasters have abandoned the genuinely important stories in an effort to get ratings. I would say the decline really began in the 1970s and early 1980s, with Conkrites departure from CBS Evening News, and the subsequent gutting of an organization that once made the BBC seem puny and week. People forget that CBS News didn't just do the news. They had a huge documentary program as well, and as a kid on Saturday mornings I absolutely loved all the stories they did in depth about any number of issues, from the space program, to science and the environment.
Other sources have declined as well. Time Magazine, I think, has gone from a college down to a 4th grade reading level. Newsweek is retarded, and locally, the Philly Inquirer has just gone south. All of this, of course, is because the best writers and editors are getting trashed. It used to be impossible to find a grammatical error or a logical error in a top flight journal, but now, they are remarkably common. Even advertising copy has gotten worse.
Fox News, to me, is just a manifestation of a trend that has been going on since baby boomers decided to sell out what was important to get more ratings. Rather is a guilty for places like Fox as anyone else is, by injecting the peril of sensationalism into the news in order to score advertising points. I myself don't actually dwell on Fox News even though I am obviously a Republican. If I see one more story about a missing white child, I'm going to throw up.
I understand to a degree where liberal writers come. I alluded to an exposure in journalism in college, I did a few semesters then. The vast majority of writers that graduate in English, the friends that you leave behind, don't wind up writing for the Washington Post, don't anchor the evening news, and in general have very difficult lives at least early in their careers. One of the best writers I went to school with graduated to work at a restaurant. You can't help but look at that and think that there is something wrong with a society that values the written word so little as to throw so much talent away. I find that the conservative assault on NPR and the arts to be troubling, as, it is conservatives that argue that western culture should be preserved, and yet, they would have us condemn the institutions that might produce the Lockes and Voltaires of today before they even get their careers off the ground. I fund NPR, even if I don't agree with the politics, for that reason.
The comment was allegorical. The 6502 was a very simplistic processor, or "brain" if you will. Any algorithm or being built around a 6502 would be limited only the tiniest of critical analysis, if such a thing could be built.
In other words, what I am really saying is that people do not tend to think too much about what they read. They assume, to a degree, that the thinking has been done for them and therefor they can just accept it. Liberals err to this more than right wingers do, assuming that they trust the source.
If a liberal reads an article that says Dupont is dumping nuclear waste into children's candy, they would tend to believe it without really questioning it, but, on the other hand, if you have 10,000 people saying the climate is changing and mankind is probably the cause, conservatives would still probably not trust it or believe it.
So, to summarize, liberals need to learn critical reading skills, and conservatives, well, need to learn to trust more of what they read.
All organized entity have a legal "persona" under which they operate. Churches, unions, not-for-profits, even things like MoveOn.org and others have that. If you want to eliminate the notion of a legal persona for an institution, then, do you propose running it as if there was no notion of limited liability? If that were the case, then you have permanently stacked the deck in favor of the government, which, of course, operates under the notion of soverieign immunity.
I think you are getting too caught up in the corporation as a person legalism. The larger point is that a corporation is a willing assembly of like minded people. To deny corporations, or any organization, a seat at the table, is a defacto restriction of the freedom of assembly and association.
I don't think you should confuse irritation with France for its difference of opinion with a genuine hatred for it.:-)
I should note that the entire argument liberals made before the war was that it was not necessary or even right to remove Saddam Hussein from power - even though he squelched free speech, had no free elections, and pretty much was the exact opposite of what a "liberal" society is supposed to be. How much can liberals believe in these values when they also hold to a moral relativism that says every culture is the same? What's the point of a revolution in human rights if you are not willing to export it?
For christ's sake, Bush's doctrine of spreading freedom abroad was in fact cooked up by the twin arch liberals themselves - Wilson and Roosevelt.
Where Bush erred, among many ways, was that he based the war on WMD and not on values from the get go, and, because of his own conservative biases, failed to recognize that an invasion of another nation was a big government project and would require a big government response. In other words, the invasion of Iraq should have been a project that demanded national sacrifice from everyone so as to guarantee its rapid success, instead of the half-assed and divisive effort that we got. To that extent, Bush's vision of the middle east is a story of an initial military success followed on by civilian failure - the same mistake that Wilson made post World War I. It will take another President, of Roosevelt's brains and stature, to both recognize the real commitment needed to remake the middle east into a democratic region, and have the gumption to manipulate world events to provide the pretext for the massive war needed to do so.
Even at home, liberals, because of a perceived need to be "organized" against the conservative menace, have gone off the deep end and have become much more machinelike and vitriolic rather than contemplative and intelligent. You look at any liberal chat, and there's no discussion about the worth of things, just this blind hatred of anything that doesn't fit into an increasingly narrow ideology. Liberals on the internet are a feedback loop of hysterical reinforcement. This isn't just my perception, but one noted by a noted liberal writer in a noted liberal paper.
The bottom line is, the next President that does come along and does succeed in bringing down the mullahs and genuinely transforming the middle east is all but guaranteed to be a Republican, not a Democrat, because today's liberals are really more like yesterday's conservatives, isolationists that would prefer to avoid making trouble across the globe for silly things like freedom, and meanwhile, todays conservatives are more like yesterdays liberals, ideologues willing to learn from their mistakes but remaining determined to spread liberty's light across the globe.
Well, at least it sounds pretty eloquent. But, for it to be believable, Gitmo must be closed and the USA PATRIOT act repealed.
No? Then quit talking about tax cuts. That's exactly the deal you got with the tax cuts. i.e. it was no sort of a cut. I got no checks from the government and my taxes have gone up, so I don't even have the ignorant delusion that there was anything good about them.
So, as long as people keep repeating the tax cut bullshit when the only thing that happened is that Bush took out massive high interest loans from China in your name, we'll continue to have a debate totally unrelated to reality.
As a percentage of GDP, the overall debt of Bush is low relative to the rest of the world. Borrowing a few hundred billion dollars to try and take over potentially the largest oil reserve in the world is a pretty pragmatic bet for a nation whose GDP approaches 15 trillion a year. In other words, from a dollars and cents perspective, the Iraq war was a pretty good bet with no real consequence if we lose. If only the leaders now were to start gambling with their heads and not their hearts, we'd be outta there by now, having taken our roll of the dice and come up snake eyes.
But, had the invasion of Iraq worked, and the USA had sweatheart deals to all of that oil, we would not only have the economic benefit of extremely low fuel prices for ourselves, we would also be able to dictate to the rest of the world IT'S fuel prices, and that would have been a pretty damned good spot to be in. Granted, its total imperialism, but absence the proof of God, you can't really say it is wrong.
Corporations are the ultimate expression of by the people for the people. If you want the benefit of a corporation, purchase stock into it. If you don't like the corporation, you can choose not to participate, or can participate in a rival. Corporations are like virtual countries, where you can participate in the profits of each through the acquisition of stock, beyond commerce and employment.
You can't easily be a 10% citizen of the US, a 20% citizen of France, and so on, but you could easily own 10% of your portfolio in Exxon Mobil, 20% in Total Fina Elf, 5% of EADS, 10% of Boeing, and so on. So, membership of a corporation is in some ways better than being a member of a nation state because membership of a nationstate is assigned to you by birth and is dependent upon geography, whereas a corporation has none of those restrictions. And, best of all, you as a corporate owner aren't responsible for the debt of that corporation, but you certainly are for a country.
I have to disagree with this. Corporations are certainly accountable to their shareholders, and in today's society, that really means all of the people worldwide who invest in them. In a sense, corporations are virtual countries, meaning, you can elect to become a citizen of one simply by acquiring a share.
This has its pros and cons.
The pros are numerous. Thanks to international relationships and trade fostered by corporations, racism and sexism are not socially acceptable, religious disputes are frowned upon, merit rules first and foremost, competition matters. These values have been forged by the corporations need to attract the best people for the job, regardless of race, creed, or nation of origin.
As a result, the entire world is enjoying a rise in standard of living unparalleled in human history. Look at the emergence of India and China. There are more middle class people on the planet earth than there have ever been. Sure, Africa and Latin America remain screwed up, but those regions of the world have essentially no laws whatsover, only the capricious will of various strongmen.
The downside, of course, is that the idea of geographic unity matters less. But that doesn't matter to me so much, so long as the United States remains a continental power that controls the world's seas, sky and the space above us, so that we can continue the project of free trade.
Ironically, corporations have achieved many of the goals that liberals sue to obtain in other sectors. Truly, if you wanted to have the simplistic world of Lennon's Imagine, where "Imagine there's no country, etc", you would Imagine a corporation. You tell me, which motivates more: "put aside your religious and cultural differences to land a contract that will pay each of you 100k a year, or put aside your religious and cultural differences because it was cool on Star Trek".
Your caution about generalizing liberals applies to conservatives as well. Conservatives, despite all of the press, and unfortunately, all the so-called conservative leaders, actually come in several flavors. Yes, there is the religious right wing, but there are also the Ayn Rand conservatives who tend to be more libertarian, and then there's various mixes or shades. For every Republican who claims to answer to God and cares about stupid things like what language a person speaks or who they sleep with, there are the real leaders of the party that care more about how much money can a person make you. I see the USA as a team and I don't care what they believe as long as they are productive.
So, incidentally, if you bemused lefties wonder why Bush is pressing ahead with immmigration reform despite all of the doom and gloom by talk radio leaders and the National Review, it is because people like me think immigration should by merit, that building a big fence across the USA is bad for business, that we should have more H1's, and it should be easier, not harder, for someone to come to America. I'd like to see the country speak a single language, but that happens as long as we adequately fund public schools.
It's all about freedom baby. Freedom to get rich, freedom to keep your own stuff and keep your own beliefs. As long as you can do your job and and I can do mine, or even, as long as you we don't blame each other for our own mistakes, all is well.
So, your version of democracy by definition excludes the commercial sector. That's cute. I guess I don't buy into the notion that a corporation is inherently evil, as you do. If corporations are evil, then, why not unions? For that matter, what about political organizations such as moveon or the sierra club or even the democratic party. Bottom line is, you can't make that call to exclude an organization from participating because you don't like them. It's either everyone, or none at all.
It's a crime if you favor one company over another because they are your donors. It's a crime if you favor one industry over another because they are your friends. It's a crime if you favor one part of society over another because they are your meal ticket
You've just killed the very idea of representative democracy. You've just torched the notion of a Republican and argued for a benevolent strong man.
Each of those things are what a Republic is for. Each interest in a nation, from coal mine owner to union organizer, from church leader to teacher, has the right to put representatives in that favor their interests, if not the duty. When you see unions lobbying the government to do their card vote, halliburton trying to get asbestos laws taken off the books, teachers arguing for more money, artists arguing for free speech and so on, you aren't seeing corruption, you are seeing that democracy works. The alternative is to have people squelched, and ultimately invite civil war.
I first learned assembly on a 6502. LDX, LDY, LDA... two index and one accumulator... never could understand why Atari went with the 6502 when the Z-80 was the better part.
Supine to corporate interests? Business is the backbone of America. You don't get to sit around and post on slashdot with some moolah coming in. What interests would you have a political party be responsive to? "The people". Jeez, most people either work for corporations or have their own, well, corporation.
Do you people even think about your slogans, or do you just prattle them off. What interest would you want your political party to be supine too. Or do you want them to not be supine to anything? Or, would rather go back to family owned trusts circa 1890, like John Rockefeller, or, would you go back to an agraraian society. The Khmer Rouge tried that - take a budding industrial society, deliberately ratchet everything back 100 years, and watch everyone starve to death. So what, prey tell, do you want?
You don't even know.
It's even worse that you get mod'd up as +5, when all you did was prattle off a meaningless slogan that makes no sense when subject to even a 6502's level of critical examination.
Incompetent third party technician, or deliberate cover up? Could go either way. That's my point. All of this just politics, and everyone getting bent out of shape over investigations over Bush are just as stupid as we were when we were out to get Clinton. These scandals aren't about the law, and hasn't been since Chappaquidick. It's only about power.
The thing is, the law is a political football at that level. Do you want to lock Bush up? Sure, go ahead. But then, why isn't Hillary in jail for flat out lying about using fundraising in the white house. Why is Barrack Bin Osama still running when he broke the law about using Senate offices for political activities and it was on Newsweek? How the hell is Michael Moore in Cuba to make a movie (aka, engage in Commerce), when that is clearly against the law? And look at how Patrick Kennedy gets off the hook for a DUI, like family member Ted.
Seriously, I'm one of those rare people that think Scooter Libby should NOT be pardoned, but I'm far past the point of believing that either party is interested in law and order. Democrats don't care about right or wrong, and if, that is state of affairs, why should Republicans disarm themselves to the same?
America is a nation based on historical European culture, a capitalist meritocracy, a revolution in private ownership that seeks to spread that revolution to the rest of the world because the people that founded it, inherited and run it today think that results of that revolution are better.
Liberals condemn European culture, deplore capitalism, prefer a stabler society to the dynamism of individual accomplishment, think it is morally wrong to seek to advance one's values, and disagree that any culture can better than another and hate those that feel that way. If that's not hating America, then what is?
Liberalism USED to be all of the above, and it is endlessly ironic that George W Bush has picked up the liberal torch where Wilson and FDR left off. FDR had no problem saying that American democracy was BETTER than Nazism or Japanese militarism, and there is no problem in saying that American democracy is better than an islamic society.
Money is freedom, and liberals don't believe in money and certainly not the individual right to have it. If you did believe in private ownership, then, why have the GPL? Who is really more free, the guy who wrote the first Wizard at Microsoft and retired off of his stock, or Richard Stallman or any of the other open source people, who are hamstrung by the constant need to beg for money and form a consensus. I'll give you a hint. You aren't free when you have to enslave yourselves to a committee.
So, yeah, Bush screwed up the war in Iraq, and the gay marriage amendment was bullshit. But, his tax cuts and consistent deregulation were an excellent thing to do that no genuine liberal would be in favor of. Go ahead, put Hitlery in the White House, if you can, and cheer as she takes money from other people to do the things you want to do, because you can't do them for yourselves. At the end of the day, liberals aren't about freedom, because, to do what they want, they have to enslave the whole of the nation in taxes and political correctness.
Clinton's staff DELETED ALL of their e-mail, and not a peep was made out of it. This was in response to an investigation about using the white house for fundraising.
Note that the article said: "Democrats say". The fact of the matter is that this so much Democratic fish hunting.
As if, they tell the truth.
Democrats haven't even tried to keep the promises that they were elected in Nov 2006. They promised to end the war, and didn't. They promised to clean up earmarks, and they won't. Bottom line is, all you liberals that flocked to Democrats like zombies do to living brains have been had just as much as we conservatives were that ate the public line of the RNC.
Idiots. Keep reading your MoveOn.org "press releases", er um, Propaganda, and drop your pants for Grandmaster Kos.
The only thing, though, is that in the ultimate end of things, being completely knowledgable versus being completely ignorant won't do a damn thing to stop the end of the universe. So, while science may make the ride more enjoyable, or at least help ensure that we will make to the end, when the last atoms decay. When the big breakdown comes, there's no science that can save us, and that would probably be a real good time to hope there really is a God.
Ok, all your story says is that the guy in the smaller car loses in an accident. Therefor, as a car buyer, the safest new vehicle for ME to buy is an SUV. Your argument does not refute that point.
Truth be told, though, the ultimate safest vehicle design might well be an early 70's American luxury sedan, albiet one updated with better seatbelts and airbags. They used a stronger grade of steel than is used in today's cars, along with body on frame construction, making these cars very strong. However, both the stronger steel and body on frame were jettisoned to save weight during the dash to greater fuel efficiency, proving, yet again, that lighter cars are not as safe.
They just aren't.
All you really can say is that if everyone drove lighter cars, the roads might be safer, but that is not the same as saying the smaller car is actually safer.
The left wing tells plenty of lies about George Bush, and vice versa, but you don't see Bush throwing the likes of Michael Moore in jail.
That's the one key difference.
Another other is that socialism as an economic policy has so completely and consistently failed to make really positive advances in the living standards of the world that it really ought to be as wrong to advocate it as much it might be wrong to advocate a return to feudalism and serfdom (which, incidentally, is the same as socialism anyway).
Dicators and socialists have to go. Even Chomskey concedes that tolerance for dictatorships helps sew the seeds of 9/11. Thus, while I do not agree with Bush's USA PATRIOT act, or his handling of the war in Iraq, the application of the Wilsonian idea to bring freedom to the world is a damned good one.
For a sci-fi writer, he sure missed the obvious answer.
What if humans lived longer?
We're making some astonishing medical progress and unlocking many secrets of how biology actually works. While physics says that we can't travel faster than the speed of light, as far as I know, there's no inherent law of physics that says man cannot live for 1000 years. If you could live that long, then, taking 100 years to travel to another star at.1c suddenly seems a lot more tenable, and furthermore, if you have scientists that can accumulate that much knowledge, then, surely, they would contribute an incredible amount more.
I'm not convinced, either, that.1c is an upper limit. If we hit higher fractions of the speed of light, then time dilation does become a factor, and the crew could get there with a ship time of a few months or years, rather than decades.
It's a bit premature to say that advances in technology are impossible. Even now, more than a few researchers are going straight for the best known holy grail of advanced propulsion and are studying anti-matter drives. These drives could produce a specific impulse of 50,000 or more, as oppossed to just shy of 400 for chemical rockets. 100 grams of anti-matter equals the propulsive power of the space shuttle, which, you might have noticed, weighs considerably more.
There yet remain some holes in known physics. There could be any number of breakthroughs that allow us to produce exotic kinds of matter that might prove useful for advanced propulsive systems.
The bottom line is, that, while Gene Roddenberry might have gotten a lot of the science wrong, he got the most important thing right : I wouldn't bet against humanity.
The only point to ask the author is this: what technology is really magical? Computers changed our lives completely, and I'm old enough to have seen how we lived before PCs. Things have changed, dramatically, but are they magic? Don't think so.
Even worse, but everyone knows that drinking a small amount of mercury will render your blood immune to the effects of these rays, but the government conspiracy has already declared that mercury is a poison that makes you insane, in order to keep people mentally controlled.
True... but, the thing is, there are a lot of systems out there where the code is ugly, but, mostly works. Sure, it is less expensive to design a system right the first time around, but what often happens is that the system is well designed, but the company has already spent a giant chunk of money on all the testing needed to overcome the bad design. So yeah, you have a bad system, but one that does work. In their eyes, a rewrite is to incur the risk of going back to the beginning of a project. For everyone that rolls those dice and gets a clean, well designed system, there's another couple that get more delays brought on by a design as bad as the original one was to begin with, just in different ways.
While it is true that 90% of the cost of a program is in "maintenance", a lot of time, maintenance is a much smaller team than the original development team was. You can quickly go from a dozen developers down to 2, so, from a budget perspective, that doesn't seem so bad. Maintenance too, is often an addition of features and screens and tables. You aren't rewriting or refactoring existing code as much as you are tweaking it to allow for the big new thing to work. In the end, you can put your "good design" into your new stuff, and leave the old stuff alone. Then, the next guy comes along and puts his "good design" in. Quite often you wind up with a project that has a number of different personalities to it.
Slashdot Mirror
What version of Visual C++ are you talking about? 6? The MS compiler has gotten a lot better since VC6.
I apologize in advance for the long and rambling nature of this reply. I've not invested the time to succinctly organize my thoughts.
For me, politics is important, but, having gone to school as a writer and still write myself, as a hobby, truth in art trumps politics. To a great extent, I can set aside political differences to see someone who is genuinely skilled in the craft of writing, and obversely, I find it difficult for me to ignore bad writing when the skill and attention to detail isn't there.
I think we can at least both agree that the quality of journalism has plummetted over the last 40 years as broadcasters have abandoned the genuinely important stories in an effort to get ratings. I would say the decline really began in the 1970s and early 1980s, with Conkrites departure from CBS Evening News, and the subsequent gutting of an organization that once made the BBC seem puny and week. People forget that CBS News didn't just do the news. They had a huge documentary program as well, and as a kid on Saturday mornings I absolutely loved all the stories they did in depth about any number of issues, from the space program, to science and the environment.
Other sources have declined as well. Time Magazine, I think, has gone from a college down to a 4th grade reading level. Newsweek is retarded, and locally, the Philly Inquirer has just gone south. All of this, of course, is because the best writers and editors are getting trashed. It used to be impossible to find a grammatical error or a logical error in a top flight journal, but now, they are remarkably common. Even advertising copy has gotten worse.
Fox News, to me, is just a manifestation of a trend that has been going on since baby boomers decided to sell out what was important to get more ratings. Rather is a guilty for places like Fox as anyone else is, by injecting the peril of sensationalism into the news in order to score advertising points. I myself don't actually dwell on Fox News even though I am obviously a Republican. If I see one more story about a missing white child, I'm going to throw up.
I understand to a degree where liberal writers come. I alluded to an exposure in journalism in college, I did a few semesters then. The vast majority of writers that graduate in English, the friends that you leave behind, don't wind up writing for the Washington Post, don't anchor the evening news, and in general have very difficult lives at least early in their careers. One of the best writers I went to school with graduated to work at a restaurant. You can't help but look at that and think that there is something wrong with a society that values the written word so little as to throw so much talent away. I find that the conservative assault on NPR and the arts to be troubling, as, it is conservatives that argue that western culture should be preserved, and yet, they would have us condemn the institutions that might produce the Lockes and Voltaires of today before they even get their careers off the ground. I fund NPR, even if I don't agree with the politics, for that reason.
The comment was allegorical. The 6502 was a very simplistic processor, or "brain" if you will. Any algorithm or being built around a 6502 would be limited only the tiniest of critical analysis, if such a thing could be built.
In other words, what I am really saying is that people do not tend to think too much about what they read. They assume, to a degree, that the thinking has been done for them and therefor they can just accept it. Liberals err to this more than right wingers do, assuming that they trust the source.
If a liberal reads an article that says Dupont is dumping nuclear waste into children's candy, they would tend to believe it without really questioning it, but, on the other hand, if you have 10,000 people saying the climate is changing and mankind is probably the cause, conservatives would still probably not trust it or believe it.
So, to summarize, liberals need to learn critical reading skills, and conservatives, well, need to learn to trust more of what they read.
All organized entity have a legal "persona" under which they operate. Churches, unions, not-for-profits, even things like MoveOn.org and others have that. If you want to eliminate the notion of a legal persona for an institution, then, do you propose running it as if there was no notion of limited liability? If that were the case, then you have permanently stacked the deck in favor of the government, which, of course, operates under the notion of soverieign immunity.
I think you are getting too caught up in the corporation as a person legalism. The larger point is that a corporation is a willing assembly of like minded people. To deny corporations, or any organization, a seat at the table, is a defacto restriction of the freedom of assembly and association.
I don't think you should confuse irritation with France for its difference of opinion with a genuine hatred for it. :-)
I should note that the entire argument liberals made before the war was that it was not necessary or even right to remove Saddam Hussein from power - even though he squelched free speech, had no free elections, and pretty much was the exact opposite of what a "liberal" society is supposed to be. How much can liberals believe in these values when they also hold to a moral relativism that says every culture is the same? What's the point of a revolution in human rights if you are not willing to export it?
For christ's sake, Bush's doctrine of spreading freedom abroad was in fact cooked up by the twin arch liberals themselves - Wilson and Roosevelt.
Where Bush erred, among many ways, was that he based the war on WMD and not on values from the get go, and, because of his own conservative biases, failed to recognize that an invasion of another nation was a big government project and would require a big government response.
In other words, the invasion of Iraq should have been a project that demanded national sacrifice from everyone so as to guarantee its rapid success, instead of the half-assed and divisive effort that we got. To that extent, Bush's vision of the middle east is a story of an initial military success followed on by civilian failure - the same mistake that Wilson made post World War I. It will take another President, of Roosevelt's brains and stature, to both recognize the real commitment needed to remake the middle east into a democratic region, and have the gumption to manipulate world events to provide the pretext for the massive war needed to do so.
Even at home, liberals, because of a perceived need to be "organized" against the conservative menace, have gone off the deep end and have become much more machinelike and vitriolic rather than contemplative and intelligent. You look at any liberal chat, and there's no discussion about the worth of things, just this blind hatred of anything that doesn't fit into an increasingly narrow ideology. Liberals on the internet are a feedback loop of hysterical reinforcement. This isn't just my perception, but one noted by a noted liberal writer in a noted liberal paper.
The bottom line is, the next President that does come along and does succeed in bringing down the mullahs and genuinely transforming the middle east is all but guaranteed to be a Republican, not a Democrat, because today's liberals are really more like yesterday's conservatives, isolationists that would prefer to avoid making trouble across the globe for silly things like freedom, and meanwhile, todays conservatives are more like yesterdays liberals, ideologues willing to learn from their mistakes but remaining determined to spread liberty's light across the globe.
Well, at least it sounds pretty eloquent. But, for it to be believable, Gitmo must be closed and the USA PATRIOT act repealed.
No? Then quit talking about tax cuts. That's exactly the deal you got with the tax cuts. i.e. it was no sort of a cut. I got no checks from the government and my taxes have gone up, so I don't even have the ignorant delusion that there was anything good about them.
So, as long as people keep repeating the tax cut bullshit when the only thing that happened is that Bush took out massive high interest loans from China in your name, we'll continue to have a debate totally unrelated to reality.
As a percentage of GDP, the overall debt of Bush is low relative to the rest of the world. Borrowing a few hundred billion dollars to try and take over potentially the largest oil reserve in the world is a pretty pragmatic bet for a nation whose GDP approaches 15 trillion a year. In other words, from a dollars and cents perspective, the Iraq war was a pretty good bet with no real consequence if we lose. If only the leaders now were to start gambling with their heads and not their hearts, we'd be outta there by now, having taken our roll of the dice and come up snake eyes.
But, had the invasion of Iraq worked, and the USA had sweatheart deals to all of that oil, we would not only have the economic benefit of extremely low fuel prices for ourselves, we would also be able to dictate to the rest of the world IT'S fuel prices, and that would have been a pretty damned good spot to be in. Granted, its total imperialism, but absence the proof of God, you can't really say it is wrong.
Corporations are the ultimate expression of by the people for the people. If you want the benefit of a corporation, purchase stock into it. If you don't like the corporation, you can choose not to participate, or can participate in a rival. Corporations are like virtual countries, where you can participate in the profits of each through the acquisition of stock, beyond commerce and employment.
You can't easily be a 10% citizen of the US, a 20% citizen of France, and so on, but you could easily own 10% of your portfolio in Exxon Mobil, 20% in Total Fina Elf, 5% of EADS, 10% of Boeing, and so on. So, membership of a corporation is in some ways better than being a member of a nation state because membership of a nationstate is assigned to you by birth and is dependent upon geography, whereas a corporation has none of those restrictions. And, best of all, you as a corporate owner aren't responsible for the debt of that corporation, but you certainly are for a country.
I have to disagree with this. Corporations are certainly accountable to their shareholders, and in today's society, that really means all of the people worldwide who invest in them. In a sense, corporations are virtual countries, meaning, you can elect to become a citizen of one simply by acquiring a share.
This has its pros and cons.
The pros are numerous. Thanks to international relationships and trade fostered by corporations, racism and sexism are not socially acceptable, religious disputes are frowned upon, merit rules first and foremost, competition matters. These values have been forged by the corporations need to attract the best people for the job, regardless of race, creed, or nation of origin.
As a result, the entire world is enjoying a rise in standard of living unparalleled in human history. Look at the emergence of India and China. There are more middle class people on the planet earth than there have ever been. Sure, Africa and Latin America remain screwed up, but those regions of the world have essentially no laws whatsover, only the capricious will of various strongmen.
The downside, of course, is that the idea of geographic unity matters less. But that doesn't matter to me so much, so long as the United States remains a continental power that controls the world's seas, sky and the space above us, so that we can continue the project of free trade.
Ironically, corporations have achieved many of the goals that liberals sue to obtain in other sectors. Truly, if you wanted to have the simplistic world of Lennon's Imagine, where "Imagine there's no country, etc", you would Imagine a corporation. You tell me, which motivates more: "put aside your religious and cultural differences to land a contract that will pay each of you 100k a year, or put aside your religious and cultural differences because it was cool on Star Trek".
Your caution about generalizing liberals applies to conservatives as well. Conservatives, despite all of the press, and unfortunately, all the so-called conservative leaders, actually come in several flavors. Yes, there is the religious right wing, but there are also the Ayn Rand conservatives who tend to be more libertarian, and then there's various mixes or shades. For every Republican who claims to answer to God and cares about stupid things like what language a person speaks or who they sleep with, there are the real leaders of the party that care more about how much money can a person make you. I see the USA as a team and I don't care what they believe as long as they are productive.
So, incidentally, if you bemused lefties wonder why Bush is pressing ahead with immmigration reform despite all of the doom and gloom by talk radio leaders and the National Review, it is because people like me think immigration should by merit, that building a big fence across the USA is bad for business, that we should have more H1's, and it should be easier, not harder, for someone to come to America. I'd like to see the country speak a single language, but that happens as long as we adequately fund public schools.
It's all about freedom baby. Freedom to get rich, freedom to keep your own stuff and keep your own beliefs. As long as you can do your job and and I can do mine, or even, as long as you we don't blame each other for our own mistakes, all is well.
I leave you to argue the cons.
So, your version of democracy by definition excludes the commercial sector. That's cute. I guess I don't buy into the notion that a corporation is inherently evil, as you do. If corporations are evil, then, why not unions? For that matter, what about political organizations such as moveon or the sierra club or even the democratic party. Bottom line is, you can't make that call to exclude an organization from participating because you don't like them. It's either everyone, or none at all.
Read carefully what you are saying.
It's a crime if you favor one company over another because they are your donors.
It's a crime if you favor one industry over another because they are your friends.
It's a crime if you favor one part of society over another because they are your meal ticket
You've just killed the very idea of representative democracy. You've just torched the notion of a Republican and argued for a benevolent strong man.
Each of those things are what a Republic is for. Each interest in a nation, from coal mine owner to union organizer, from church leader to teacher, has the right to put representatives in that favor their interests, if not the duty. When you see unions lobbying the government to do their card vote, halliburton trying to get asbestos laws taken off the books, teachers arguing for more money, artists arguing for free speech and so on, you aren't seeing corruption, you are seeing that democracy works. The alternative is to have people squelched, and ultimately invite civil war.
I first learned assembly on a 6502. LDX, LDY, LDA... two index and one accumulator... never could understand why Atari went with the 6502 when the Z-80 was the better part.
Supine to corporate interests? Business is the backbone of America. You don't get to sit around and post on slashdot with some moolah coming in. What interests would you have a political party be responsive to? "The people". Jeez, most people either work for corporations or have their own, well, corporation.
Do you people even think about your slogans, or do you just prattle them off. What interest would you want your political party to be supine too. Or do you want them to not be supine to anything? Or, would rather go back to family owned trusts circa 1890, like John Rockefeller, or, would you go back to an agraraian society. The Khmer Rouge tried that - take a budding industrial society, deliberately ratchet everything back 100 years, and watch everyone starve to death. So what, prey tell, do you want?
You don't even know.
It's even worse that you get mod'd up as +5, when all you did was prattle off a meaningless slogan that makes no sense when subject to even a 6502's level of critical examination.
Incompetent third party technician, or deliberate cover up? Could go either way. That's my point. All of this just politics, and everyone getting bent out of shape over investigations over Bush are just as stupid as we were when we were out to get Clinton. These scandals aren't about the law, and hasn't been since Chappaquidick. It's only about power.
The thing is, the law is a political football at that level. Do you want to lock Bush up? Sure, go ahead. But then, why isn't Hillary in jail for flat out lying about using fundraising in the white house. Why is Barrack Bin Osama still running when he broke the law about using Senate offices for political activities and it was on Newsweek? How the hell is Michael Moore in Cuba to make a movie (aka, engage in Commerce), when that is clearly against the law? And look at how Patrick Kennedy gets off the hook for a DUI, like family member Ted.
Seriously, I'm one of those rare people that think Scooter Libby should NOT be pardoned, but I'm far past the point of believing that either party is interested in law and order. Democrats don't care about right or wrong, and if, that is state of affairs, why should Republicans disarm themselves to the same?
They do hate America.
America is a nation based on historical European culture, a capitalist meritocracy, a revolution in private ownership that seeks to spread that revolution to the rest of the world because the people that founded it, inherited and run it today think that results of that revolution are better.
Liberals condemn European culture, deplore capitalism, prefer a stabler society to the dynamism of individual accomplishment, think it is morally wrong to seek to advance one's values, and disagree that any culture can better than another and hate those that feel that way. If that's not hating America, then what is?
Liberalism USED to be all of the above, and it is endlessly ironic that George W Bush has picked up the liberal torch where Wilson and FDR left off. FDR had no problem saying that American democracy was BETTER than Nazism or Japanese militarism, and there is no problem in saying that American democracy is better than an islamic society.
Money is freedom, and liberals don't believe in money and certainly not the individual right to have it. If you did believe in private ownership, then, why have the GPL? Who is really more free, the guy who wrote the first Wizard at Microsoft and retired off of his stock, or Richard Stallman or any of the other open source people, who are hamstrung by the constant need to beg for money and form a consensus. I'll give you a hint. You aren't free when you have to enslave yourselves to a committee.
So, yeah, Bush screwed up the war in Iraq, and the gay marriage amendment was bullshit. But, his tax cuts and consistent deregulation were an excellent thing to do that no genuine liberal would be in favor of. Go ahead, put Hitlery in the White House, if you can, and cheer as she takes money from other people to do the things you want to do, because you can't do them for yourselves. At the end of the day, liberals aren't about freedom, because, to do what they want, they have to enslave the whole of the nation in taxes and political correctness.
Clinton's staff DELETED ALL of their e-mail, and not a peep was made out of it. This was in response to an investigation about using the white house for fundraising.
Note that the article said: "Democrats say". The fact of the matter is that this so much Democratic fish hunting.
As if, they tell the truth.
Democrats haven't even tried to keep the promises that they were elected in Nov 2006. They promised to end the war, and didn't. They promised to clean up earmarks, and they won't. Bottom line is, all you liberals that flocked to Democrats like zombies do to living brains have been had just as much as we conservatives were that ate the public line of the RNC.
Idiots. Keep reading your MoveOn.org "press releases", er um, Propaganda, and drop your pants for Grandmaster Kos.
Hey, if someone wants to pay me 50 million bucks, I'd write for any platform they want. Don't see anything wrong with that at all!
The only thing, though, is that in the ultimate end of things, being completely knowledgable versus being completely ignorant won't do a damn thing to stop the end of the universe. So, while science may make the ride more enjoyable, or at least help ensure that we will make to the end, when the last atoms decay. When the big breakdown comes, there's no science that can save us, and that would probably be a real good time to hope there really is a God.
Ok, all your story says is that the guy in the smaller car loses in an accident. Therefor, as a car buyer, the safest new vehicle for ME to buy is an SUV. Your argument does not refute that point.
Truth be told, though, the ultimate safest vehicle design might well be an early 70's American luxury sedan, albiet one updated with better seatbelts and airbags. They used a stronger grade of steel than is used in today's cars, along with body on frame construction, making these cars very strong. However, both the stronger steel and body on frame were jettisoned to save weight during the dash to greater fuel efficiency, proving, yet again, that lighter cars are not as safe.
They just aren't.
All you really can say is that if everyone drove lighter cars, the roads might be safer, but that is not the same as saying the smaller car is actually safer.
Truth please!
The left wing tells plenty of lies about George Bush, and vice versa, but you don't see Bush throwing the likes of Michael Moore in jail.
That's the one key difference.
Another other is that socialism as an economic policy has so completely and consistently failed to make really positive advances in the living standards of the world that it really ought to be as wrong to advocate it as much it might be wrong to advocate a return to feudalism and serfdom (which, incidentally, is the same as socialism anyway).
Dicators and socialists have to go. Even Chomskey concedes that tolerance for dictatorships helps sew the seeds of 9/11. Thus, while I do not agree with Bush's USA PATRIOT act, or his handling of the war in Iraq, the application of the Wilsonian idea to bring freedom to the world is a damned good one.
For a sci-fi writer, he sure missed the obvious answer.
.1c suddenly seems a lot more tenable, and furthermore, if you have scientists that can accumulate that much knowledge, then, surely, they would contribute an incredible amount more.
.1c is an upper limit. If we hit higher fractions of the speed of light, then time dilation does become a factor, and the crew could get there with a ship time of a few months or years, rather than decades.
t ml
What if humans lived longer?
We're making some astonishing medical progress and unlocking many secrets of how biology actually works. While physics says that we can't travel faster than the speed of light, as far as I know, there's no inherent law of physics that says man cannot live for 1000 years. If you could live that long, then, taking 100 years to travel to another star at
I'm not convinced, either, that
It's a bit premature to say that advances in technology are impossible. Even now, more than a few researchers are going straight for the best known holy grail of advanced propulsion and are studying anti-matter drives. These drives could produce a specific impulse of 50,000 or more, as oppossed to just shy of 400 for chemical rockets. 100 grams of anti-matter equals the propulsive power of the space shuttle, which, you might have noticed, weighs considerably more.
http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/introduction.h
There yet remain some holes in known physics. There could be any number of breakthroughs that allow us to produce exotic kinds of matter that might prove useful for advanced propulsive systems.
The bottom line is, that, while Gene Roddenberry might have gotten a lot of the science wrong, he got the most important thing right : I wouldn't bet against humanity.
The only point to ask the author is this: what technology is really magical? Computers changed our lives completely, and I'm old enough to have seen how we lived before PCs. Things have changed, dramatically, but are they magic? Don't think so.
Even worse, but everyone knows that drinking a small amount of mercury will render your blood immune to the effects of these rays, but the government conspiracy has already declared that mercury is a poison that makes you insane, in order to keep people mentally controlled.
True... but, the thing is, there are a lot of systems out there where the code is ugly, but, mostly works. Sure, it is less expensive to design a system right the first time around, but what often happens is that the system is well designed, but the company has already spent a giant chunk of money on all the testing needed to overcome the bad design. So yeah, you have a bad system, but one that does work. In their eyes, a rewrite is to incur the risk of going back to the beginning of a project. For everyone that rolls those dice and gets a clean, well designed system, there's another couple that get more delays brought on by a design as bad as the original one was to begin with, just in different ways.
While it is true that 90% of the cost of a program is in "maintenance", a lot of time, maintenance is a much smaller team than the original development team was. You can quickly go from a dozen developers down to 2, so, from a budget perspective, that doesn't seem so bad. Maintenance too, is often an addition of features and screens and tables. You aren't rewriting or refactoring existing code as much as you are tweaking it to allow for the big new thing to work. In the end, you can put your "good design" into your new stuff, and leave the old stuff alone. Then, the next guy comes along and puts his "good design" in. Quite often you wind up with a project that has a number of different personalities to it.