I've been reading this alternative fuels debate for going on 10 years now. (actually, it's gone on much longer) - and while, I think biodiesel is probably our best bet in the short term (given the large quantity of vehicles on the road that can already utilize it) - you Hydrogen guys are actually winning me over. There are a lot of arguments against Hydrogen - I'm still not convinced that there aren't going to be some thorny safety issues (with H2+O2 pockets forming in garage ceilings, waiting for an HVAC system motor to throw a spark) - but on the other hand, the biggest argument against it, in my mind, has always been that the only "green" method of hydrogen generation is really solar-electrolysis. And only in the last 12 months or so, have there been significant advances in nanotechnology and catalysts that have made this look even remotely attractive.
On the biofuels side - the economics of seed-derived fuels is turning out to look pretty terrible, and may end up not even being carbon neutral (especially if we don't figure out how to manage the Nitrogen cycle). The viable channel here, is looking like algae-derived biodiesel. And progress there seems to have stalled in the last 5 years. *sigh*
On the bright side - guys like me, who have spent time sharpening our bicycle-mechanics skills, are going to be in great demand in the next 10-15 years!
Except that in Soviet America, the Oil Company nationalizes YOU. (welcome to the Army - now please go "over there" and fight for our right to the wells).
If your carbon credits are priced in dollars - which is a currency based on. . . um, NOTHING - it is FIAT MONEY, whose value rises and falls depending on how nervous oil futures traders get when the cowboys go shootin' their sixguns off in mesopotamia, or depending on whether an Ayn Rand-ite happens to be the Fed Chairman, well, then your carbon credits are a moot point, aren't they?
If a government passes a law that carbon credits are $2000 per million tons of CO2, then they go and inflate the crap out of their currency by passing massive tax cuts, forcing congress into a borrowing spree, then that million tons of CO2 isn't really $2000 anymore now is it? Nor is the hard cap on social security tax contributions. Nor is the linear cut-off for the estate-tax. Or Alternative Minimum Tax. Or the limit for house prices in "Conforming Loans" - or any one of a zillion other idiotic benchmarks that are not indexed for inflation - in an economy where even the way we measure inflation is pretty much meaningless, because we ephasise some sectors, and ignore others.
So - while yes - carbon credits are a step in the right direction, they're a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and guess what? That's EXACTLY what millions of people are going to be driving straight through that loophole too.
#1 Most important thing that NEEDS to be said about SSRI's: DO NOT QUIT THEM COLD TURKEY! Many people have some fairly serious side effects - dizziness, nausea, sleeplessness, "buzzing" sensations inside the head, and these side effects can last anywhere from a week to YEARS - so it is important to consult your doctor, and get off them slowly. The most serious side-effect (coupled with the sleeplessness) is SEVERE IRRITABILITY. People with no violent tendencies have been known to react with violence, to normal, everyday frustrations.
#2: sure, they're prescribed in many cases where they don't need to be - that does not mean they don't "work" - they'll have some effect. They are powerful drugs. They can mask all sorts of neurotic and anxiety-related symptoms and syndromes. But people with Compulsions and related disorders may still act out in other ways, because those anxieties and feelings are still there, just suppressed. These drugs can be great tools for getting someone with a severe anxiety issue to "come out of their shell" to get therapy, or other help. But they should NEVER be used for long-term treatment of an anxiety disorder - ESPECIALLY anger-management issues. (which is a very popular usage, and VERY DANGEROUS - in fact, I'd say it constitutes a negligent public health threat). People with these kinds of disorders need to learn cognitive tools to manage their thoughts and feelings. Taking a drug to suppress them is NOT a constructive way to deal with this problem.
#3: I'm sure they work just fine for severely depressed people. That's what this study shows. That's not the point.
The point is: They've been prescribed way too often for inappropriate purposes, by doctors who have no idea what they are or how they work, as a means for them to quickly treat a symptom for which they are not qualified to treat, and for which they otherwise would not get paid to treat; or quite possibly - they might otherwise not be able to get treated AT ALL - given the way insurance companies throw up a bureaucratic wall of red-tape for any referral, or REAL handling of a patient's problem..
This is a direct result of the structure of our national health care system: from our drug-patents, our insurance regulations and loopholes, and the way they force doctors into making treatment choices that are not the best for their patients. The end result is tens, even hundreds of thousands of patients who are now on long-term regimes of dangerous mind-altering drugs they should not be on - risking these severe withdraw symptoms, AND, paying elevated, patent-protected prices for drugs, which is sucking the life-blood out of our struggling national economy. (as companies struggle to provide health insurance for working employees!)
The Republicans, OTOH, are happy to borrow trillions of dollars from Japan and China. This is a good idea why, exactly?
Many reasons:
1. It ties China and Japan to our economy, such that they cannot afford to let us default; ie. BAILOUT.
2. Who pays? US Workers do, as China and Japan enforce austerity policies on our economy (see Argentina about 5 years back. . . ) - Thus: Already marginalized (politically) US working-class people are now even weaker, as they have less money to spend on donating to political candidates to support their causes in the upcoming elections. . .
3. Who benefits? The Politicians who handed out all the largesse - and the corporate majority shareholders who bought up commodities and socked away their profits into offshore accounts in the Caymans.
This was a strategic move by the ultra wealthy, who don't really give a crap what happens in the US, as long as the money is moving, and they get a cut. The strategy is to socialize risk, and privatize profit. And it worked very well. And it is a well-supported strategy on BOTH sides of the political fence, right now. The middle class in the US has built up a tremendous amount of wealth and power from the 1950's; and the upper class has decided that it's long overdue to cull the herd.
I dunno; Java was in pretty high demand about 5 years ago, and guess what? It's still pretty much in demand now.
Windows Registry Swashbuckling will also, probably, never go out of style, until Microsoft delivers an OS that no longer uses a registry. (Windows 2009, right?).
This should be a CLEAR example to anyone who is frustrated that there is no difference between the candidates:
Clinton will campaign on change, and then bow-out when it counts. Her record has shown this very consistently.
McCain will campaign on "straight talk" - and then go and do what he thinks is the right thing (Protect America!) for the wrong reasons (Telecom Money in his Pocket!).
Obama will fight on principle, even if he knows he will lose - even if it is likely that his opponents can use his vote to politically damage him (See?! He voted for TERRORISM!).
In the end: Which one gets elected President - I guarantee you, will not make one damn bit of difference. Nobody can fix this busted-ass country.
But which one you vote for will make all the difference in the world.
When the baby boomers age, retire, and die, there will be no more Americans who can afford service (because we'll all be serv-ANTS) - and American serv-ANTS have the LOWEST rate of foreign language adoption of any nation in the world. So wealthy Chinese will be happy to pay Americans $2 a day to answer phone banks, IN ENGLISH? Yeah, right.
We may be a service economy now.
In half a generation, we're going to be the "emigrate to Canada" economy.
Did a DVD project with iDVD last week on my Mac, which failed, repeatedly, after encoding, but prior to burning, with a cryptic error message. (IIRC, it was like "-35456" or something like that).
I've used iDVD successfully for many projects before, but not in about a year. In this case, I guess an update got installed somewhere along the line that broke something. This error is pretty common, when you google for it. Turns out to be just some weird "bug" in iDVD's video encoding, and the workaround was to reduce the video quality from "best" (next lowest setting was acceptable) - but there were also a lot of suggested workarounds like "repair permissions" "delete preference files" etc.
Wasted a lot of time, and it was very discouraging for me to be having such a PC-like experience on my Mac, when I was on such a tight deadline for what had started out as a casual fun project, and turned into a major hassle.
No, Macintosh is *not* the end of all pain-in-the-ass computer problems.
Well, as a veteran of this industry (tape backup), I can tell you that the regulatory agencies completely ignored the consolidation that went on. The story goes; Palindrome Backup and Arcada Backup used to be small, independent players, both were bought by hard drive companies (Seagate and Conner), then Seagate bought Conner, and you had Seagate Software, who bought NetBackup, TeleBackup, (and I think two others whose names I don't recall), then Seagate Software was sold by Seagate to Veritas, which later got bought by Symantec.
Along the way, a lot of good, viable companies were eaten, solutions and technologies eliminated from the marketplace - via positioning and financial finagling, not technical superiority. Customers were locked-in via proprietary tape formats, proprietary catalog formats, proprietary remote agents and communication protocols, and in many cases, "migration tools" were promised, and never delivered. Customers would be forced to switch over, losing their ability to restore archived history, because features were updated on one product while the competing product that was bought, was abandoned. This includes abandonment of hardware support - I know of customers that shitcanned a $100,000 robotic tape loader because the legacy product supported it, but the "new" product from the same company would not; and the support amounted to getting someone to add a SCSI advertisement string into a resource file.
If I were an IT manager, I sure as hell would NOT invest in tape backup. I would roll my own system, based on RAID and NAS. Offsite storage would be done using hot-swappable DASD. Tape, and tape backup software is for SUCKERS.
For a long period of time, when one of the abortion clinic bombers (a doctor sniper, actually) was finally prosecuted, and he became a fugitive (because the local police refused to cooperate in his arrest), and the feds had to go after him; it was later found that - for YEARS while he was hiding out in the woods, many of the locals would give him food and shelter him through storms.
This is not all that much different than what is going on in Pakistan's border regions right now, in principle. Except that it's going on here, in America, with Christians - supporting a cold-blooded murderer.
It is a crime in MOST countries - (socially, if not legalistically) to be gay. Punishable by emotional torture, ostracism, and in almost all cases, abridged rights (like right to marry). I, myself, am personally squeamish about issues like gay adoption, and public displays of affection. I'll admit that. But just because Iran hangs a few gays a year, does not mean that we, in the West, are all enlightened and advanced either. Gays are much better off in America - this is true. But it would be SO easy for us, as a culture, to treat them as equals. Yet we do not. For no damn good reason.
Bah - Josef Stalin didn't use religion as an excuse to be a monster. He was a human being. Human beings can imagine all kinds of other excuses. Like "for the greater good" or "mother Russia" - etc. This is what we do. We rationalize our behaviors, which are really the same behaviors that have been with us from the time of pack animals; self-interest, dominance/submission, territoriality, etc. We'll rationalize these behaviors through xenophobic religious "law", and we'll rationalize them through perverted political movements like (small-c) communism.
It is basic human nature.
Our greatest flaw is that we tend to use language as a tool to map cognitive states (ideas) to symbols, to words, and assign values to these states like "Truth" or "Falsehood" - when, in reality, very very few of these states can be crammed into a duality like that with any degree of accuracy. The overwhelming majority of truths, unfortunately, must be EXPLAINED. And a sufficiently skillful explainer (ie. Lawyer, Politician, Priest, Salesman) can often explain things one way or another to suit a rationalization. . . and it's generally all about power. Personal power, or tribal power. Which is rooted in trying to satisfy a need for security. There is no framework of thought that can not be twisted and perverted, other than, maybe mathematics. Unfortunately, mathematics is not sufficient for describing, with nuance, many concrete, necessary ideas. So we can't really replace our flawed human languages with it.
People were brainwashed by DECADES of Rush Limbaugh, FoxNews, Focus on the Family, The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, (etc. ad nauseum).
This is the consequence of living in a Free and Open society - where money talks, and concentrated money talks LOUDLY.
The elimination of the media Fairness Doctrine, and ownership rules, under Ronald Reagan in the 1980's played a big role, but this process was already well under way in this country.
I don't know what the solution is, because the obvious alternatives involve the curtailment of free speech, and free commerce. Maybe there are some un-obvious alternatives out there.
Well, there are catalytic routes to generating hydrogen that are currently in development, and look promising.
But something we haven't figured out yet, is how to burn hydrogen in AIR, without producing lots of nasty Nitrogen-Hydrogen type compounds. You burn Hyrdrogen in pure Oxygen, you get water. That's fine and dandy. You burn it in air, which is like 70% Nitrogen, you get water, ammonia, and lord knows what other nasty crap, floating around in the upper layers of the atmosphere, doing who knows what to our already messed up environment.
You may not want that. I may not want that.
The shareholders of the company collecting $100k/ticket (and the politicians into whose pockets a small percentage of that money will go) probably don't give a flying fuck what we want.
No, they would have burned me at the stake 314.159265 years ago, at a temperature of 314.159265 degrees F (Celcius is the work of Satan).
Frankly, I think we should tell the Biblical Inerrancists that their voting precinct is 3.14159265 (it says so, in the book of Yehob, chaper 3.14159265, verse 3.14159265), and be done with it. They'll never find their polling office, and we'll finally be safe from their nonsense.
That's because Edwards was something that neither Obama nor Clinton was. An even MORE hated group, in America: A LOSER. A QUITTER.
True - it was not Edwards fault that Kerry quit after he vowed to keep fighting for a recount. But Edwards just clammed up, and didn't say a word. He looked bad. Nobody wants to say it - but Dem voters are afraid of having their vote stolen again, and they're afraid that Edwards won't fight it.
Don't get exited, my fine fellow. After eight years of insanity and stupidity, your kind of level-headed thinking is NOT what this nation needs right now.
I *won* an iPhone - I jailbroke it, and I use it for everything except as a cell phone (until my Verizon contract runs out). I run sshd on it, an apache web server - I can't wait until someone finally ports Flash and a JRE to it (and a decent web browser, which Mobile Safari - is *not*).
I agree that it's an awesome device, in just about every regard. It's got great potential. (wish it had real GPS). Though I do think that the lack of tactile feedback for data entry is still an issue - despite how great their touch screen is.
Samsung has a nice smartphone, the u740, that has a lot of potential as a PDA - unfortunately, it's so locked-down that all of the really cool "potential features" are useless. But the keyboard, and dual-mode screen for text-entry are awesome. Truly a device that missed its potential due to ignorant and greedy marketing assholes at Verizon.
Is the u740 the equivalent of an iPhone? Hell no. But it has the mechanical potential to hit about 60-70% of the important functionality, plus, physical buttons for text-entry. Just as the iPhone has a lot of interesting potential (some of which must be HACKED to get at - if I didn't hack my iPhone, it would be a useless brick right now).
Slashdot Mirror
I've been reading this alternative fuels debate for going on 10 years now. (actually, it's gone on much longer) - and while, I think biodiesel is probably our best bet in the short term (given the large quantity of vehicles on the road that can already utilize it) - you Hydrogen guys are actually winning me over. There are a lot of arguments against Hydrogen - I'm still not convinced that there aren't going to be some thorny safety issues (with H2+O2 pockets forming in garage ceilings, waiting for an HVAC system motor to throw a spark) - but on the other hand, the biggest argument against it, in my mind, has always been that the only "green" method of hydrogen generation is really solar-electrolysis. And only in the last 12 months or so, have there been significant advances in nanotechnology and catalysts that have made this look even remotely attractive.
On the biofuels side - the economics of seed-derived fuels is turning out to look pretty terrible, and may end up not even being carbon neutral (especially if we don't figure out how to manage the Nitrogen cycle). The viable channel here, is looking like algae-derived biodiesel. And progress there seems to have stalled in the last 5 years. *sigh*
On the bright side - guys like me, who have spent time sharpening our bicycle-mechanics skills, are going to be in great demand in the next 10-15 years!
nationalize the oil company?
Except that in Soviet America, the Oil Company nationalizes YOU.
(welcome to the Army - now please go "over there" and fight for our right to the wells).
Screw that.
They've had their stooge in office; handing them all the candy they've ever wanted for the past 8 years.
And they STILL dragged their feet in building pipelines and refineries.
Oil went from $20/bbl to $100/bbl.
Bring on the pitchforks, I say!
If your carbon credits are priced in dollars - which is a currency based on. . . um, NOTHING - it is FIAT MONEY, whose value rises and falls depending on how nervous oil futures traders get when the cowboys go shootin' their sixguns off in mesopotamia, or depending on whether an Ayn Rand-ite happens to be the Fed Chairman, well, then your carbon credits are a moot point, aren't they?
If a government passes a law that carbon credits are $2000 per million tons of CO2, then they go and inflate the crap out of their currency by passing massive tax cuts, forcing congress into a borrowing spree, then that million tons of CO2 isn't really $2000 anymore now is it? Nor is the hard cap on social security tax contributions. Nor is the linear cut-off for the estate-tax. Or Alternative Minimum Tax. Or the limit for house prices in "Conforming Loans" - or any one of a zillion other idiotic benchmarks that are not indexed for inflation - in an economy where even the way we measure inflation is pretty much meaningless, because we ephasise some sectors, and ignore others.
So - while yes - carbon credits are a step in the right direction, they're a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and guess what? That's EXACTLY what millions of people are going to be driving straight through that loophole too.
#1 Most important thing that NEEDS to be said about SSRI's: DO NOT QUIT THEM COLD TURKEY!
Many people have some fairly serious side effects - dizziness, nausea, sleeplessness, "buzzing" sensations inside the head, and these side effects can last anywhere from a week to YEARS - so it is important to consult your doctor, and get off them slowly. The most serious side-effect (coupled with the sleeplessness) is SEVERE IRRITABILITY. People with no violent tendencies have been known to react with violence, to normal, everyday frustrations.
#2: sure, they're prescribed in many cases where they don't need to be - that does not mean they don't "work" - they'll have some effect. They are powerful drugs. They can mask all sorts of neurotic and anxiety-related symptoms and syndromes. But people with Compulsions and related disorders may still act out in other ways, because those anxieties and feelings are still there, just suppressed. These drugs can be great tools for getting someone with a severe anxiety issue to "come out of their shell" to get therapy, or other help. But they should NEVER be used for long-term treatment of an anxiety disorder - ESPECIALLY anger-management issues. (which is a very popular usage, and VERY DANGEROUS - in fact, I'd say it constitutes a negligent public health threat). People with these kinds of disorders need to learn cognitive tools to manage their thoughts and feelings. Taking a drug to suppress them is NOT a constructive way to deal with this problem.
#3: I'm sure they work just fine for severely depressed people. That's what this study shows. That's not the point.
The point is: They've been prescribed way too often for inappropriate purposes, by doctors who have no idea what they are or how they work, as a means for them to quickly treat a symptom for which they are not qualified to treat, and for which they otherwise would not get paid to treat; or quite possibly - they might otherwise not be able to get treated AT ALL - given the way insurance companies throw up a bureaucratic wall of red-tape for any referral, or REAL handling of a patient's problem..
This is a direct result of the structure of our national health care system: from our drug-patents, our insurance regulations and loopholes, and the way they force doctors into making treatment choices that are not the best for their patients. The end result is tens, even hundreds of thousands of patients who are now on long-term regimes of dangerous mind-altering drugs they should not be on - risking these severe withdraw symptoms, AND, paying elevated, patent-protected prices for drugs, which is sucking the life-blood out of our struggling national economy. (as companies struggle to provide health insurance for working employees!)
Why do public institutes like the LoC get influenced by companies?
You have to ask?
It's because Americans elected a "CEO-President". (who then appointed the persons who made this decision)
We got precisely the government we voted for. (49 million of us, anyway). Duh.
The Republicans, OTOH, are happy to borrow trillions of dollars from Japan and China. This is a good idea why, exactly?
Many reasons:
1. It ties China and Japan to our economy, such that they cannot afford to let us default; ie. BAILOUT.
2. Who pays? US Workers do, as China and Japan enforce austerity policies on our economy (see Argentina about 5 years back. . . ) - Thus: Already marginalized (politically) US working-class people are now even weaker, as they have less money to spend on donating to political candidates to support their causes in the upcoming elections. . .
3. Who benefits? The Politicians who handed out all the largesse - and the corporate majority shareholders who bought up commodities and socked away their profits into offshore accounts in the Caymans.
This was a strategic move by the ultra wealthy, who don't really give a crap what happens in the US, as long as the money is moving, and they get a cut. The strategy is to socialize risk, and privatize profit. And it worked very well. And it is a well-supported strategy on BOTH sides of the political fence, right now. The middle class in the US has built up a tremendous amount of wealth and power from the 1950's; and the upper class has decided that it's long overdue to cull the herd.
I dunno; Java was in pretty high demand about 5 years ago, and guess what? It's still pretty much in demand now.
Windows Registry Swashbuckling will also, probably, never go out of style, until Microsoft delivers an OS that no longer uses a registry. (Windows 2009, right?).
where does that quote in your .sig come from?
This should be a CLEAR example to anyone who is frustrated that there is no difference between the candidates:
Clinton will campaign on change, and then bow-out when it counts. Her record has shown this very consistently.
McCain will campaign on "straight talk" - and then go and do what he thinks is the right thing (Protect America!) for the wrong reasons (Telecom Money in his Pocket!).
Obama will fight on principle, even if he knows he will lose - even if it is likely that his opponents can use his vote to politically damage him (See?! He voted for TERRORISM!).
In the end: Which one gets elected President - I guarantee you, will not make one damn bit of difference.
Nobody can fix this busted-ass country.
But which one you vote for will make all the difference in the world.
Service?
Who the fuck are we going to serve?
When the baby boomers age, retire, and die, there will be no more Americans who can afford service (because we'll all be serv-ANTS) - and American serv-ANTS have the LOWEST rate of foreign language adoption of any nation in the world. So wealthy Chinese will be happy to pay Americans $2 a day to answer phone banks, IN ENGLISH? Yeah, right.
We may be a service economy now.
In half a generation, we're going to be the "emigrate to Canada" economy.
Did a DVD project with iDVD last week on my Mac, which failed, repeatedly, after encoding, but prior to burning, with a cryptic error message. (IIRC, it was like "-35456" or something like that).
I've used iDVD successfully for many projects before, but not in about a year. In this case, I guess an update got installed somewhere along the line that broke something. This error is pretty common, when you google for it. Turns out to be just some weird "bug" in iDVD's video encoding, and the workaround was to reduce the video quality from "best" (next lowest setting was acceptable) - but there were also a lot of suggested workarounds like "repair permissions" "delete preference files" etc.
Wasted a lot of time, and it was very discouraging for me to be having such a PC-like experience on my Mac, when I was on such a tight deadline for what had started out as a casual fun project, and turned into a major hassle.
No, Macintosh is *not* the end of all pain-in-the-ass computer problems.
Well, as a veteran of this industry (tape backup), I can tell you that the regulatory agencies completely ignored the consolidation that went on. The story goes; Palindrome Backup and Arcada Backup used to be small, independent players, both were bought by hard drive companies (Seagate and Conner), then Seagate bought Conner, and you had Seagate Software, who bought NetBackup, TeleBackup, (and I think two others whose names I don't recall), then Seagate Software was sold by Seagate to Veritas, which later got bought by Symantec.
Along the way, a lot of good, viable companies were eaten, solutions and technologies eliminated from the marketplace - via positioning and financial finagling, not technical superiority. Customers were locked-in via proprietary tape formats, proprietary catalog formats, proprietary remote agents and communication protocols, and in many cases, "migration tools" were promised, and never delivered. Customers would be forced to switch over, losing their ability to restore archived history, because features were updated on one product while the competing product that was bought, was abandoned. This includes abandonment of hardware support - I know of customers that shitcanned a $100,000 robotic tape loader because the legacy product supported it, but the "new" product from the same company would not; and the support amounted to getting someone to add a SCSI advertisement string into a resource file.
If I were an IT manager, I sure as hell would NOT invest in tape backup. I would roll my own system, based on RAID and NAS. Offsite storage would be done using hot-swappable DASD. Tape, and tape backup software is for SUCKERS.
Yes; I know of a keypad like that, used at a former employer, as well. Very secure.
Except that they gave everybody and their brother the code.
And over the two years I was there, it was never changed.
For a long period of time, when one of the abortion clinic bombers (a doctor sniper, actually) was finally prosecuted, and he became a fugitive (because the local police refused to cooperate in his arrest), and the feds had to go after him; it was later found that - for YEARS while he was hiding out in the woods, many of the locals would give him food and shelter him through storms.
This is not all that much different than what is going on in Pakistan's border regions right now, in principle. Except that it's going on here, in America, with Christians - supporting a cold-blooded murderer.
It is a crime in MOST countries - (socially, if not legalistically) to be gay. Punishable by emotional torture, ostracism, and in almost all cases, abridged rights (like right to marry). I, myself, am personally squeamish about issues like gay adoption, and public displays of affection. I'll admit that. But just because Iran hangs a few gays a year, does not mean that we, in the West, are all enlightened and advanced either. Gays are much better off in America - this is true. But it would be SO easy for us, as a culture, to treat them as equals. Yet we do not. For no damn good reason.
We have a long, long way to go.
Bah - Josef Stalin didn't use religion as an excuse to be a monster. He was a human being. Human beings can imagine all kinds of other excuses. Like "for the greater good" or "mother Russia" - etc. This is what we do. We rationalize our behaviors, which are really the same behaviors that have been with us from the time of pack animals; self-interest, dominance/submission, territoriality, etc. We'll rationalize these behaviors through xenophobic religious "law", and we'll rationalize them through perverted political movements like (small-c) communism.
It is basic human nature.
Our greatest flaw is that we tend to use language as a tool to map cognitive states (ideas) to symbols, to words, and assign values to these states like "Truth" or "Falsehood" - when, in reality, very very few of these states can be crammed into a duality like that with any degree of accuracy. The overwhelming majority of truths, unfortunately, must be EXPLAINED. And a sufficiently skillful explainer (ie. Lawyer, Politician, Priest, Salesman) can often explain things one way or another to suit a rationalization. . . and it's generally all about power. Personal power, or tribal power. Which is rooted in trying to satisfy a need for security. There is no framework of thought that can not be twisted and perverted, other than, maybe mathematics. Unfortunately, mathematics is not sufficient for describing, with nuance, many concrete, necessary ideas. So we can't really replace our flawed human languages with it.
Bush's Government didn't brainwash people.
People were brainwashed by DECADES of Rush Limbaugh, FoxNews, Focus on the Family, The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, (etc. ad nauseum).
This is the consequence of living in a Free and Open society - where money talks, and concentrated money talks LOUDLY.
The elimination of the media Fairness Doctrine, and ownership rules, under Ronald Reagan in the 1980's played a big role, but this process was already well under way in this country.
I don't know what the solution is, because the obvious alternatives involve the curtailment of free speech, and free commerce. Maybe there are some un-obvious alternatives out there.
Well, there are catalytic routes to generating hydrogen that are currently in development, and look promising.
But something we haven't figured out yet, is how to burn hydrogen in AIR, without producing lots of nasty Nitrogen-Hydrogen type compounds. You burn Hyrdrogen in pure Oxygen, you get water. That's fine and dandy. You burn it in air, which is like 70% Nitrogen, you get water, ammonia, and lord knows what other nasty crap, floating around in the upper layers of the atmosphere, doing who knows what to our already messed up environment.
You may not want that. I may not want that.
The shareholders of the company collecting $100k/ticket (and the politicians into whose pockets a small percentage of that money will go) probably don't give a flying fuck what we want.
No, they would have burned me at the stake 314.159265 years ago, at a temperature of 314.159265 degrees F (Celcius is the work of Satan).
Frankly, I think we should tell the Biblical Inerrancists that their voting precinct is 3.14159265 (it says so, in the book of Yehob, chaper 3.14159265, verse 3.14159265), and be done with it. They'll never find their polling office, and we'll finally be safe from their nonsense.
Yep. That's the Republicans.
The party of Haters.
They used to just hate Liberals. They got through with that, now they're eating their own.
And yet, so many of the other candidates have failed to clear it!
Including McCain - when it really counted.
He stood by, and let Bush do it. And he didn't say a word.
Only when he's running for office, does he voice his opinion.
But when it counts, he's as spineless as any of them.
Straight talk my ass.
That's because Edwards was something that neither Obama nor Clinton was. An even MORE hated group, in America: A LOSER. A QUITTER.
True - it was not Edwards fault that Kerry quit after he vowed to keep fighting for a recount. But Edwards just clammed up, and didn't say a word. He looked bad. Nobody wants to say it - but Dem voters are afraid of having their vote stolen again, and they're afraid that Edwards won't fight it.
Don't get exited, my fine fellow. After eight years of insanity and stupidity, your kind of level-headed thinking is NOT what this nation needs right now.
I *won* an iPhone - I jailbroke it, and I use it for everything except as a cell phone (until my Verizon contract runs out). I run sshd on it, an apache web server - I can't wait until someone finally ports Flash and a JRE to it (and a decent web browser, which Mobile Safari - is *not*).
I agree that it's an awesome device, in just about every regard. It's got great potential. (wish it had real GPS). Though I do think that the lack of tactile feedback for data entry is still an issue - despite how great their touch screen is.
Samsung has a nice smartphone, the u740, that has a lot of potential as a PDA - unfortunately, it's so locked-down that all of the really cool "potential features" are useless. But the keyboard, and dual-mode screen for text-entry are awesome. Truly a device that missed its potential due to ignorant and greedy marketing assholes at Verizon.
Is the u740 the equivalent of an iPhone? Hell no. But it has the mechanical potential to hit about 60-70% of the important functionality, plus, physical buttons for text-entry. Just as the iPhone has a lot of interesting potential (some of which must be HACKED to get at - if I didn't hack my iPhone, it would be a useless brick right now).