I've no idea about Gtk there, but what's wrong with Qt grid?
I think the Qt grid is slow and feels mushy. It just didn't feel right.
Erm, are you seriously saying that wxWidgets offer better widgets than Qt? esp. grid?..
You know, actually, I really do think wxWidgets offers better widgets than Qt. I will concede that I'm biased towards wxWidgets from the get go because I think its containment and event models works way more intuitively than Qt does and so its easier for me to discover the capabilities of wxWidgets forms.
You totally lose me there, given that native Win32 controls are very limited (they don't include dockable toolbars, for example, nor a proper grid). Comparing to VCL or WinForms would be more reasonable, though even then I don't see what they can offer that Qt does not.
That's true but the native Win32 controls are pretty darned fast and for read only purposes you can do pretty well with using the ListView as a poor man's grid. But above the thing I like the most about Win32 native is how easy it actually is to roll your own widget and use it. But the a lot of the native components do offer a lot. The listbox, textbox, are pretty good at what they do. And, above all, the common file dialogs in Vista are leagues beyond what Qt offers.
I can't stand WPF because it requires a managed framework and its slow as molasses.
Gambas doesn't even match VB 6. And what I mean by VB is an all in one integrated RAD development environment where Forms, Event Handling are built into the one thing. That pretty much means, Gambas...
Oh, and by the way, neither Qt or Gtk have a native grid that matches the grid controls used in Windows. The only Linux GUI kit that has even halfway decent widgets is WxWidgets and it falls short of what you can get out of Win32 native components...although I will say that Wx has a better document / component model than MFC does.
You mean the marketing thing they need to do because they're incapable of engineering something good themselves?
Uh, for the longest time, KDE and Gnome both looked a hell of a lot more like Windows 95 than they did Macintosh. Bottom line is, most of the people that bitch about Microsoft's engineering are the losers that claim that their product was better but they were somehow wronged. 9 times out of 10, their product sucked in some area and Microsoft exploited it with, tada, a better product.
Right off the wheel, I would say that if Microsoft is so terrible, why is no one in the FOSS movement able to come up with an IDE consistently as good as Visual Studio?
Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?
Why is it that Windows 3.1 GDI is still an all around better render / print system than just about anything Linux has put out, until Cairo...
Why is it that Linux clones TrueType fonts? If fonts were so easy, why can't FOSS innovate a better font system?
Why is that Linux uses Samba for File / Print? If networking were so easy, one would think Linux would have its own open and unique protocol, and just publish a Windows client driver like Novell did for IPX/SPX based file / print clients. And to think Novell got a client working in DOS...
If Microsoft is such a shoddy company, where's the VB for Linux?
If I look around Linux, the only big thing that's innovative is KDE 4.
Because really, the problem is, you can't just go and "disable enable" a user interface. A user interface is a rich experience tailored to its users. If you really wanted to have computers that were enabled for the disabled, you need to be prepared to have entirely different interaction experiences.
Like, blindness is the worst. Obviously. The whole you can go where you see it metaphor for forms is just wrong for blind people. What you really need, for them, is almost like menus were in the DOS apps of old - press 1 for this, press 2 for this... and so on. And, you need way more sound. Like, every keystroke should produce an audible click and different items should have different pitches so you don't have to wade through the a whole voice menu to do something. There's a million things you can do to make a user experience richer and tailor it to the user regardless of how many limbs they have... a load of details that you can account for, engineering to be done, and pretending that a few add on utilities or even tweaks to a U/I will do the trick is just beside the point. You need a whole new class of applications.
No, it was because the Canadians and British landed with the USA on D-Day in Normandy and the Australians fought with the USA in the Pacific, and all three countries ever since.
If South Korea actually did something with the USA, or Japan, I'd be more receptive to them, but I think overall they have been shitty and ungrateful allies.
Finally, what is wrong with having an alliance with nations that have similar values? Why the fuck are we supposed to like people that aren't like us?
However, the past few centuries have really been unprecedented in the sheer number and success of revolutions, especially ones which result in some form of democracy. There are certainly exceptions and I'm not saying we'll stay that way for thousands of years, but it wouldn't be incredibly surprising if one more country leans in a democratic direction.
There's reasons for this, economically and militarily.
1) Having a genuinely store-able and portable form of money definitely helps the cause of revolutionaries
2) In the despot era, only the despots were armed. Now, everyone is, relative to the government.
Some things are going to tip this back towards government. First off, the lack of a real currency stacks the ball in the governments court. Kinda hard to imagine a revolution against Uncle Sam, for example, if the act of having a revolution crashes the dollar. Secondly, scientists are grudgingly making better and better advances that could be used to control a populace. We're starting to see the first hints of obsolescence of kinetic weapons as lasers get better. I think its safe to say that at most 100 years from now guns will be completely obsolete as bullets will be shot down in flight. Thirdly, information technology is getting so powerful that governments will be able to monitor intent as well as parse all communications. Right now may well be the high point of the revolutionary, and the terrorist. From here on out, the state will reign supreme.
I guess the question here, is how much water is in the mantle? It seems like volcanic plumes from pretty deep within the earth's crust and below have -steam- pressure in them. One has to wonder if the earth is rather like a giant sponge...a big chunk of rock, yep, but saturated with water.
FWIW, Mars used to have water and may have at one point had a stronger magnetic field than the Earth
Actually, somebody published a paper this week that suggested that Earth's magnetic field might actually accelerate our loss of atmosphere relative to Mars. In fact, Earth right now is leaking atmosphere faster than Mars is, pound for pound. The ionosphere follows the magnetic field lines high up into space, and then the sun just whisks it away.
If this paper and the OP paper stack up, I'd say a good chunk of what we know about the atmosphere just got pissed on.
Look, the socialists are in control now. You can go and ask your comrade in chief for some bucks. What's the point of volunteering for anything when the jack booted thugs of America SSR are going to come and beat you into it anyway.
If they don't start focusing on their core search. Just because Microsoft has bumbled in search for the last ten years doesn't mean that they won't get it right. They are clearly patient and willing to keep the assault up, and even if you do not like Bing, it is a huge step in the right direction for MS, and honestly, having played with it, I think Bing is better than what Google does in some ways.
Everyone has made a mythology about VHS somehow losing to Sony Beta despite being inferior. If you lived in that day, and walked into a store, there was really no significant difference between picture quality between VHS and Beta on the average TV of the day. There just wasn't. And, everyone forgets that the superiority of Beta was achieved by making the tapes only an hour long. VHS vs Beta was a silly argument. Beta claimed superior picture quality on TV's nobody had, but, VHS could store entire movies. To most people, Beta's claims sounded a lot like BS, while VHS was clearly better.
The answer is not military intervention; the answer is to help them with their communications.
I think the United States should leave all of the military alliances it is in, except for the UK, Canada, and Australia. The rest of the world can go screw itself, for all I care.
Dude, pay attention, that's what they're doing. There's a huge difference between us invading Iraq to unseat Saddam and the Iranians standing up to overturn a massively corrupt election. The Iranian people are pissed, and this is their first step toward something less like a dictatorship.
They won't be successful on their own, unless they have outside support or there is some tremendous economic calamity that motivates people. At best we'll have a Tianeman square event and in a few years after that everyone will keep buying from the dictators..
For the most part, the historical record is pretty clear, once you have a dictatorship, you aren't going to "undictatorship". Just the natural order of things. From a stability of government perspective, democracy is better because it imposes rules about how regime change within the country should take place, but, there's never been a democracy that's been historically stable. The Atheniens cratered themselves. The Romans cratered themselves, and probably we'll crater ourselves. Meanwhile some asian style despot monarchy could have governments that last for a thousand years.
The Iranian people are pissed, and this is their first step toward something less like a dictatorship.
That's our assumption, because we want the present head of Iran to be the bad guy. But, for all we really know about Iran, it could be that these dissidents are actually worse in some way, that they are making a lot of noise to get world sympathy, and pretty much any support we show them might actually put Iran in a worse state because we don't know if they would be worse than the present regime.
For that matter, we don't even know if the opposition's arguments are political or merely economic. Iran has taken a beating in its domestic economy and it might well be that the present government is popular except for economic issues.
Except that it does work. It worked like a champ in World War II. Italy, Germany and Japan all became democratic.
To this day, I am amazed when I hear American Republicans support the war. It is the exact opposite of their platform, but they blindly follow it even against their own philosophy.
More history aware Republicans and conservatives are quite aware of the Wilsonian liberalism that was implicit in Bush's ideas. Indeed, if there was any President most like Wilson, in terms of foreign policy, it was W.
You are absolutely right, that, wars for liberation are a liberal idea. We felt that, liberals had given up the ghost on holding up the torch of freedom since their twin debacles of Korea and Vietnam, and everyone's disappointment even with World War II, and so, really, first with the Cold War under Nixon and Reagan, and then, more expansively under Bush, the right has come to accept Wilsonian adventurism even as the left wing has utterly rejected. Today's American left sounded more like Chas Lindbergh's reactionary America First movement and Bush sounded more like Wilson... historians would be shocked to find that Bush was even a Republican and Democrats were isolationist on this issue.
The really entertaining part of this is that its not even the only issue where the left and right have traded sides. Free trade is another. For more than a century Democrats were staunch free traders, but then they are gradually dropping the position, while Republicans at first reluctantly under Reagan, and then, most affirmitavely under W, have taken up that cause as well.
What's really interesting is that you could probably argue that these flips are because the Democrats and Republicans traded north for south in the late 1960s, and that each region retains the same ideals, just has different parties to represent them. While that could be true on social issues and matters of economics, the Wilson doctrine of Wilson, and Bush, and wars of liberation, is something now the South supports, not only supporting, but actively and proudly sending their sons and daughters off with their shields, almost spartan like. It's all very admirable but the crazy part is, they are still pissed off that the North invaded them to free the slaves, and its not even the freeing the slaves that bugs them, as much as it was, they were invaded.
I bought into this whole idea of helping out the dissident Iraqis who were trying to establish a democracy under Saddam. I supported President Bush's invasion of Iraq even though I knew the WMD was a crock because I thought the idea of kicking out a dictatorship and allowing a democracy to flourish was a good idea.
It turned out, after the invasion, that these people had little native support of their own and many people either liked Saddam or liked the Mullahs.
Having heard a bunch of leftists cry about how much better Saddam was for Iraq, and how wrong it was to actually try and get rid of a dictatorship, and seeing that the people on the ground really kinda liked their dictatorship, my ears for Iran are pretty deaf right now.
If the people of Iran want to get rid of their government, they can do it themselves. If the left wants to lament the death of democracy in Iraq, they can spare me the tears. They had no problem advocating tyranny in Iraq.
Because there is so much other evidence to show that fingerprints do help. The stupidest example is rubber gloves. Rubber gloves are often made with an increased surface area about the finger tips to help in gripping, and I think there are those who have had burns and stuff on their hands where their fingerprints are gone also have a harder time of gripping.
I don't want to sound elitist, but artists are good at what they do because they have a gift for and they practice. I used to know a writer for Valve way way before he ever hit it big time and the guy just had talent in spades. He was just an artist through and through and everything he did he imprinted with his own style that was usually just pretty damned funny. While it might be nice to think that anyone can go and create a great experience given a good editor, the reality is that these things are really more like another way to scrapbook, home movies or karoake, and likely to produce a great work is absurd. The people that make them are a league apart and they deserve to get paid for what they do.
No its not. If President Obama cannot keep discipline within his NSA, then one should question his leadership. Bush had no problem trying to purge the CIA of liberals, and if Obama wanted to purge the NSA of those who would spy on American citizens, then, he would.
The real issue is that, now President Obama is in the hot seat, he is being barraged daily by a bunch of threat reports, classified and unaccountable, that he finds himself, thanks to 9/11, incapable of entirely ignoring. On one hand, his instincts might tell them 99% are pure b.s., and, honestly an even higher percentage of them probably are, but, if one is actually not b.s., then he has a problem.
Thus, despite all of his feelings otherwise, all of his misgivings and suspicions, the lion's share of the security apparatus started by Roosevelt, that every administration has built on, will continue to grow.
One has to wonder how much this ex-CIA guy is just doing a hatchet job on a former interservice rival. Traditionally, CIA has been about black ops and human intelligence, and the NSA was about signals, but one wonders, just how much mission overlap is there. This, after all, a government that gives us an Army with ships and a Navy with tanks, and so on. I would be willing to bet that waving around civil liberties has just become another cynical tool that entrenched bureaucrats use to attack their rivals, and that, at the end of the day, no one in government actually cares about civil liberties with respect to their mission. The EPA, IRS, DOE, DEA, ATF will all spy on you and violate any right to privacy that you may perceive that you have because they would argue, and who knows, maybe even correctly, that they have to do it in order to do their job. What's really the difference, after all, between the CIA listening to your phone calls, the IRS plumbing your finances, the EPA sniffing your property and so on. They all spy on you.
It's just that, everyone has a different value system as to what sort of spying is allowed, and really, its just that, no one wants the gov't breathing down their backs on issues they are sensitive about. Conservatives don't like the EPA because they are trying to run their farms and their mines, the Liberals don't like wiretapping because the essence of their industry, be it media, arts or research, is communications, and no American likes the IRS because most people probably cheat on their taxes. Political parties exploit this to no end because they like to keep us divided so they can lock in their profits and screw us.
The only way we will really have a country that doesn't suck is in ourselves, and not in any political party. We need to have conservatives to not get bent out of shape about liberal antics in the media and liberals not get bent out of shape about conservative industries. Sometimes, we need to take the big plunge and actually start to trust each other. These culture wars serve no practical purpose other than to give tools in both political parties a paycheck.
I'm sure that liberals right now are hyped up about Obama thinking he might be their savior. You know what, we on the right were just as hyped up about Reagan and Bush Jr, and you know, we got pretty burned on the balanced budget we were promised. I'd be willing to bet that Obama won't live up to your expectations either.
And explicitly state the your constitution only gives the government the powers enumerated in the document, and the people have all the rest of the powers.
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I've no idea about Gtk there, but what's wrong with Qt grid?
I think the Qt grid is slow and feels mushy. It just didn't feel right.
Erm, are you seriously saying that wxWidgets offer better widgets than Qt? esp. grid?..
You know, actually, I really do think wxWidgets offers better widgets than Qt. I will concede that I'm biased towards wxWidgets from the get go because I think its containment and event models works way more intuitively than Qt does and so its easier for me to discover the capabilities of wxWidgets forms.
You totally lose me there, given that native Win32 controls are very limited (they don't include dockable toolbars, for example, nor a proper grid). Comparing to VCL or WinForms would be more reasonable, though even then I don't see what they can offer that Qt does not.
That's true but the native Win32 controls are pretty darned fast and for read only purposes you can do pretty well with using the ListView as a poor man's grid. But above the thing I like the most about Win32 native is how easy it actually is to roll your own widget and use it. But the a lot of the native components do offer a lot. The listbox, textbox, are pretty good at what they do. And, above all, the common file dialogs in Vista are leagues beyond what Qt offers.
I can't stand WPF because it requires a managed framework and its slow as molasses.
We tend not to like IDEs very much.
There's an awful lot of them, to say you don't like then, there's the Qt IDE, Sun's IDE, KDevelop, Anjuta...
Because it doesn't?
Um, look beyond the word processor. The spreadsheet is pretty rough and the Access-clone is terrible.
There: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html [sourceforge.net]. Or Python / Ruby with Qt / Gtk, depending what you mean by "VB". Or Mono.
Gambas doesn't even match VB 6. And what I mean by VB is an all in one integrated RAD development environment where Forms, Event Handling are built into the one thing. That pretty much means, Gambas...
Oh, and by the way, neither Qt or Gtk have a native grid that matches the grid controls used in Windows. The only Linux GUI kit that has even halfway decent widgets is WxWidgets and it falls short of what you can get out of Win32 native components...although I will say that Wx has a better document / component model than MFC does.
You mean the marketing thing they need to do because they're incapable of engineering something good themselves?
Uh, for the longest time, KDE and Gnome both looked a hell of a lot more like Windows 95 than they did Macintosh. Bottom line is, most of the people that bitch about Microsoft's engineering are the losers that claim that their product was better but they were somehow wronged. 9 times out of 10, their product sucked in some area and Microsoft exploited it with, tada, a better product.
Right off the wheel, I would say that if Microsoft is so terrible, why is no one in the FOSS movement able to come up with an IDE consistently as good as Visual Studio?
Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?
Why is it that Windows 3.1 GDI is still an all around better render / print system than just about anything Linux has put out, until Cairo...
Why is it that Linux clones TrueType fonts? If fonts were so easy, why can't FOSS innovate a better font system?
Why is that Linux uses Samba for File / Print? If networking were so easy, one would think Linux would have its own open and unique protocol, and just publish a Windows client driver like Novell did for IPX/SPX based file / print clients. And to think Novell got a client working in DOS...
If Microsoft is such a shoddy company, where's the VB for Linux?
If I look around Linux, the only big thing that's innovative is KDE 4.
Because really, the problem is, you can't just go and "disable enable" a user interface. A user interface is a rich experience tailored to its users. If you really wanted to have computers that were enabled for the disabled, you need to be prepared to have entirely different interaction experiences.
Like, blindness is the worst. Obviously. The whole you can go where you see it metaphor for forms is just wrong for blind people. What you really need, for them, is almost like menus were in the DOS apps of old - press 1 for this, press 2 for this... and so on. And, you need way more sound. Like, every keystroke should produce an audible click and different items should have different pitches so you don't have to wade through the a whole voice menu to do something. There's a million things you can do to make a user experience richer and tailor it to the user regardless of how many limbs they have... a load of details that you can account for, engineering to be done, and pretending that a few add on utilities or even tweaks to a U/I will do the trick is just beside the point. You need a whole new class of applications.
If you hate Apple so much, why did you buy the phone? You kinda got the gist that it was a touch phone from the ads, that was the gimmick...
No, it was because the Canadians and British landed with the USA on D-Day in Normandy and the Australians fought with the USA in the Pacific, and all three countries ever since.
If South Korea actually did something with the USA, or Japan, I'd be more receptive to them, but I think overall they have been shitty and ungrateful allies.
Finally, what is wrong with having an alliance with nations that have similar values? Why the fuck are we supposed to like people that aren't like us?
However, the past few centuries have really been unprecedented in the sheer number and success of revolutions, especially ones which result in some form of democracy. There are certainly exceptions and I'm not saying we'll stay that way for thousands of years, but it wouldn't be incredibly surprising if one more country leans in a democratic direction.
There's reasons for this, economically and militarily.
1) Having a genuinely store-able and portable form of money definitely helps the cause of revolutionaries
2) In the despot era, only the despots were armed. Now, everyone is, relative to the government.
Some things are going to tip this back towards government. First off, the lack of a real currency stacks the ball in the governments court. Kinda hard to imagine a revolution against Uncle Sam, for example, if the act of having a revolution crashes the dollar. Secondly, scientists are grudgingly making better and better advances that could be used to control a populace. We're starting to see the first hints of obsolescence of kinetic weapons as lasers get better. I think its safe to say that at most 100 years from now guns will be completely obsolete as bullets will be shot down in flight. Thirdly, information technology is getting so powerful that governments will be able to monitor intent as well as parse all communications. Right now may well be the high point of the revolutionary, and the terrorist. From here on out, the state will reign supreme.
I guess the question here, is how much water is in the mantle? It seems like volcanic plumes from pretty deep within the earth's crust and below have -steam- pressure in them. One has to wonder if the earth is rather like a giant sponge...a big chunk of rock, yep, but saturated with water.
FWIW, Mars used to have water and may have at one point had a stronger magnetic field than the Earth
Actually, somebody published a paper this week that suggested that Earth's magnetic field might actually accelerate our loss of atmosphere relative to Mars. In fact, Earth right now is leaking atmosphere faster than Mars is, pound for pound. The ionosphere follows the magnetic field lines high up into space, and then the sun just whisks it away.
If this paper and the OP paper stack up, I'd say a good chunk of what we know about the atmosphere just got pissed on.
Because financially, Google is NOT a search company, it's an advertising service.
Advertising services ultimately work best when they have quality content.
Look, the socialists are in control now. You can go and ask your comrade in chief for some bucks. What's the point of volunteering for anything when the jack booted thugs of America SSR are going to come and beat you into it anyway.
If they don't start focusing on their core search. Just because Microsoft has bumbled in search for the last ten years doesn't mean that they won't get it right. They are clearly patient and willing to keep the assault up, and even if you do not like Bing, it is a huge step in the right direction for MS, and honestly, having played with it, I think Bing is better than what Google does in some ways.
Everyone has made a mythology about VHS somehow losing to Sony Beta despite being inferior. If you lived in that day, and walked into a store, there was really no significant difference between picture quality between VHS and Beta on the average TV of the day. There just wasn't. And, everyone forgets that the superiority of Beta was achieved by making the tapes only an hour long. VHS vs Beta was a silly argument. Beta claimed superior picture quality on TV's nobody had, but, VHS could store entire movies. To most people, Beta's claims sounded a lot like BS, while VHS was clearly better.
The answer is not military intervention; the answer is to help them with their communications.
I think the United States should leave all of the military alliances it is in, except for the UK, Canada, and Australia. The rest of the world can go screw itself, for all I care.
Dude, pay attention, that's what they're doing. There's a huge difference between us invading Iraq to unseat Saddam and the Iranians standing up to overturn a massively corrupt election. The Iranian people are pissed, and this is their first step toward something less like a dictatorship.
They won't be successful on their own, unless they have outside support or there is some tremendous economic calamity that motivates people. At best we'll have a Tianeman square event and in a few years after that everyone will keep buying from the dictators..
For the most part, the historical record is pretty clear, once you have a dictatorship, you aren't going to "undictatorship". Just the natural order of things. From a stability of government perspective, democracy is better because it imposes rules about how regime change within the country should take place, but, there's never been a democracy that's been historically stable. The Atheniens cratered themselves. The Romans cratered themselves, and probably we'll crater ourselves. Meanwhile some asian style despot monarchy could have governments that last for a thousand years.
The Iranian people are pissed, and this is their first step toward something less like a dictatorship.
That's our assumption, because we want the present head of Iran to be the bad guy. But, for all we really know about Iran, it could be that these dissidents are actually worse in some way, that they are making a lot of noise to get world sympathy, and pretty much any support we show them might actually put Iran in a worse state because we don't know if they would be worse than the present regime.
For that matter, we don't even know if the opposition's arguments are political or merely economic. Iran has taken a beating in its domestic economy and it might well be that the present government is popular except for economic issues.
You're an idiot
I'll laugh when your kids get cancer.
Yeah... that rarely works
Except that it does work. It worked like a champ in World War II. Italy, Germany and Japan all became democratic.
To this day, I am amazed when I hear American Republicans support the war. It is the exact opposite of their platform, but they blindly follow it even against their own philosophy.
More history aware Republicans and conservatives are quite aware of the Wilsonian liberalism that was implicit in Bush's ideas. Indeed, if there was any President most like Wilson, in terms of foreign policy, it was W.
You are absolutely right, that, wars for liberation are a liberal idea. We felt that, liberals had given up the ghost on holding up the torch of freedom since their twin debacles of Korea and Vietnam, and everyone's disappointment even with World War II, and so, really, first with the Cold War under Nixon and Reagan, and then, more expansively under Bush, the right has come to accept Wilsonian adventurism even as the left wing has utterly rejected. Today's American left sounded more like Chas Lindbergh's reactionary America First movement and Bush sounded more like Wilson... historians would be shocked to find that Bush was even a Republican and Democrats were isolationist on this issue.
The really entertaining part of this is that its not even the only issue where the left and right have traded sides. Free trade is another. For more than a century Democrats were staunch free traders, but then they are gradually dropping the position, while Republicans at first reluctantly under Reagan, and then, most affirmitavely under W, have taken up that cause as well.
What's really interesting is that you could probably argue that these flips are because the Democrats and Republicans traded north for south in the late 1960s, and that each region retains the same ideals, just has different parties to represent them. While that could be true on social issues and matters of economics, the Wilson doctrine of Wilson, and Bush, and wars of liberation, is something now the South supports, not only supporting, but actively and proudly sending their sons and daughters off with their shields, almost spartan like. It's all very admirable but the crazy part is, they are still pissed off that the North invaded them to free the slaves, and its not even the freeing the slaves that bugs them, as much as it was, they were invaded.
I bought into this whole idea of helping out the dissident Iraqis who were trying to establish a democracy under Saddam. I supported President Bush's invasion of Iraq even though I knew the WMD was a crock because I thought the idea of kicking out a dictatorship and allowing a democracy to flourish was a good idea.
It turned out, after the invasion, that these people had little native support of their own and many people either liked Saddam or liked the Mullahs.
Having heard a bunch of leftists cry about how much better Saddam was for Iraq, and how wrong it was to actually try and get rid of a dictatorship, and seeing that the people on the ground really kinda liked their dictatorship, my ears for Iran are pretty deaf right now.
If the people of Iran want to get rid of their government, they can do it themselves. If the left wants to lament the death of democracy in Iraq, they can spare me the tears. They had no problem advocating tyranny in Iraq.
Because there is so much other evidence to show that fingerprints do help. The stupidest example is rubber gloves. Rubber gloves are often made with an increased surface area about the finger tips to help in gripping, and I think there are those who have had burns and stuff on their hands where their fingerprints are gone also have a harder time of gripping.
I don't want to sound elitist, but artists are good at what they do because they have a gift for and they practice. I used to know a writer for Valve way way before he ever hit it big time and the guy just had talent in spades. He was just an artist through and through and everything he did he imprinted with his own style that was usually just pretty damned funny. While it might be nice to think that anyone can go and create a great experience given a good editor, the reality is that these things are really more like another way to scrapbook, home movies or karoake, and likely to produce a great work is absurd. The people that make them are a league apart and they deserve to get paid for what they do.
It's the same concept with spy powers.
No its not. If President Obama cannot keep discipline within his NSA, then one should question his leadership. Bush had no problem trying to purge the CIA of liberals, and if Obama wanted to purge the NSA of those who would spy on American citizens, then, he would.
The real issue is that, now President Obama is in the hot seat, he is being barraged daily by a bunch of threat reports, classified and unaccountable, that he finds himself, thanks to 9/11, incapable of entirely ignoring. On one hand, his instincts might tell them 99% are pure b.s., and, honestly an even higher percentage of them probably are, but, if one is actually not b.s., then he has a problem.
Thus, despite all of his feelings otherwise, all of his misgivings and suspicions, the lion's share of the security apparatus started by Roosevelt, that every administration has built on, will continue to grow.
One has to wonder how much this ex-CIA guy is just doing a hatchet job on a former interservice rival. Traditionally, CIA has been about black ops and human intelligence, and the NSA was about signals, but one wonders, just how much mission overlap is there. This, after all, a government that gives us an Army with ships and a Navy with tanks, and so on. I would be willing to bet that waving around civil liberties has just become another cynical tool that entrenched bureaucrats use to attack their rivals, and that, at the end of the day, no one in government actually cares about civil liberties with respect to their mission. The EPA, IRS, DOE, DEA, ATF will all spy on you and violate any right to privacy that you may perceive that you have because they would argue, and who knows, maybe even correctly, that they have to do it in order to do their job. What's really the difference, after all, between the CIA listening to your phone calls, the IRS plumbing your finances, the EPA sniffing your property and so on. They all spy on you.
It's just that, everyone has a different value system as to what sort of spying is allowed, and really, its just that, no one wants the gov't breathing down their backs on issues they are sensitive about. Conservatives don't like the EPA because they are trying to run their farms and their mines, the Liberals don't like wiretapping because the essence of their industry, be it media, arts or research, is communications, and no American likes the IRS because most people probably cheat on their taxes. Political parties exploit this to no end because they like to keep us divided so they can lock in their profits and screw us.
The only way we will really have a country that doesn't suck is in ourselves, and not in any political party. We need to have conservatives to not get bent out of shape about liberal antics in the media and liberals not get bent out of shape about conservative industries. Sometimes, we need to take the big plunge and actually start to trust each other. These culture wars serve no practical purpose other than to give tools in both political parties a paycheck.
I'm sure that liberals right now are hyped up about Obama thinking he might be their savior. You know what, we on the right were just as hyped up about Reagan and Bush Jr, and you know, we got pretty burned on the balanced budget we were promised. I'd be willing to bet that Obama won't live up to your expectations either.
Bush is not President right now.
And explicitly state the your constitution only gives the government the powers enumerated in the document, and the people have all the rest of the powers.