> Actually Mac laptops are now quite competitive for the same feature set with other offerings.
Except the most desirable feature is now PRICE. Any new laptop is powerful enough to do what 90% of prospective users need. Go to store.apple.com, read em and weep. Starting at $1099 is starting about three hundred dollars out of the ballpark.
And I'd even dispute the competitive part. Go price out a Thinkpad R60 with roughly the same specs as the Mac and notice the there is a pretty brisk discounted trade of owners selling off their older models to discount new purchases.
Who cares, I certainly don't want a second hand laptop that I don't know the history on. You damned near can't repair one so unless you KNOW it has been treated gently you can't go used unless the price is REAL CHEEP and even then it is a gamble. And if you are talking second hand PCs are going for next to nothing because of pressure from falling prices on new gear.
> Getting someone to use OOo doesn't make it one bit easier to switch from Win32 to Linux on the desktop.
Oh hell yes it does, especially in an organization. If all of an organization's data is in Office format that organization will probably stay on Windows. Crossover Office ain't going to cut it (Office license + CX Office license and forget getting a sweet deal on the Office licensing) and neither will OO.o's import filters. First time a document doesn't work 100% in the initial testing a MS fanboy (MCSE type afraid of learning) will raise holy hell.
Get everyone off of Office and IE first and swapping out the underlying OS is a lot easier. Remember, people don't run an OS they run applications.
> Although I am a little bit skeptical about news that states large organisations will be switching to open source.
Of course it won't go through, they will talk tough and then surrender to Microsoft! This isn't just a French outfit, this is the fricking French Government. They know it is in their national best interest but they won't be able to help themselves.
Ok, now that I have done the o.b. French bashing......
Like all of the other large rollouts that get announced to great fanfare and then get abandoned to even greater press releases, white papers and case studies, Microsoft will go in and make em an offer they won't refuse. Before losing such a high profile installation they will be willing to give it away (so long as the terms stay 'undisclosed') with free support and who would turn that deal down? Anyone with half a brain and/or a concern for the public good would, but last time I checked Parliments (or Congress/Legislatures) are filled with politicians so there ya are.
So far the almost all of the high profile large rollouts outside the server space that have made it to reality have been in point of sale competing against DOS, SCO or hoary old embedded platforms. Seeing a lot of pos installs though, getting fairly common to see a redhat logo or kde gear in the corner with a terminal emulator filling the bulk of the desktop. Apparently Microsoft won't give freebies away to keep those installs.
> What kind of experiment can you perform to test the accuracy of plate tectonics?
None are needed. On the other hand if a bunch of geologists announced that based on their studies of plate tectonics that they could now project that a massive disaster was almost certain to befall Tokyo (why Tokyo? fool, don't you know Tokyo is always being trampled by Godzilla or fending off some other disaster?) and the only answer was to abandon the city and relocate everyone that would be a valid comparison.
Then it would be a matter of trying to evaluate the odds their prediction was likely to come true, the cost of moving Tokyo and the potential cost of not moving Tokyo.
And one factor in the analysis for most people would be the credibility of the group of scientists making the prediction along with the scientists and politicians who began promoting the theory against scientists and politicians who didn't buy in. Another factor would be to consider any alterior motives of the principal advocates. If they are buying up all the real estate as people move out it would be a big red flag.:)
Now consider the GW crowd. Morons like Al Gore as spokespeople, dubious politics masquerading around as science, touting one world government socialism as the ONLY answer. We are expected to believe it is a total conincidence that almost every one of the GW proponents was promoting socialism long before GW became the latest fashionable wave. Why is it considered unreasonable and anti-intellectual to ask, "Is Al Gore pushing Socialism as the answer to Global Warming or is he proposing Global Warming as the justification for Socialism?"
> You take their money, you drink their kool-aid, you sacrifice your principles, and you produce biased research.
Ok, lets follow the money. So who funded Al Gore's little horror flick? Somebody fronted the money to produce it, fly Algore and an entire crew all over the world during principle photography, generate state of the art CG, make 500 prints to ship out, etc.
Either it was done as a profit making venture, making Al Gore as big a whore as someone producing a documentary/pr event for Exxon or somebody ponied up the money with little hope of even recovering the investment, meaning it was financed as propaganda for somebody. So which is it?
> We can't tell, right now, for certain, whether the scientists are right or wrong. We'll only know that in hindsight.
No, we won't even have hindsight. If we destroy western civilization fighting manbearpig we still won't know what would have happened had we done absolutely nothing or done something different. Only IF we do nothing AND manbearpig destroys us THEN we will know, in hindsight, that that Al Gore was right.
> You don't have to be 100% convinced that man-made emissions are causing global warming to believe in reducing them.
Wrong argument. It is a question of risk management.
> Heck, I'd say you don't even have to be 10% convinced.
Ok, lets run with your 10% risk factor. If manbearpig attacks we lose several coastal cities and assorted other assets. Lets go really high and rate it a 100 trillion loss spread over fifty years starting in fifty years. Now all we have to do is look at the cost of the proposed mitigation program and compare the cost over the same 100 year time horizon, factoring in the time value of money, etc and come up with an assessment. Anything that is going to cost hundreds of billions per year starting NOW isn't going to be cost effective unless that 10% risk factor goes up.
And yes, that is THE only rational way to approach the problem.
Example: We know that the odds of a civilization ending asteroid collision with the Earth approximate 100% given a long enough time horizon. So why aren't we bending every available resource in constructing a defense? But we are expending a few resources to locate potential threats, conduct conferences to discuss the problem, etc. In other words, sensible risk management.
Example: We know a pandemic could kill millions, even billions. AIDS is already killing millions. Are we stopping everything and working on that problem? No, but we are expending resources approximately equal to the threat.
> If the consequences are severe enough, you don't need to be sure that a bad thing is going to happen, > you just don't take the chance in the first place.
Yes, sometimes you do. Or close to it. It all depends on the odds.
> Newt's not elected to anything, though he is talking about a 2008 presidential run.
Which is what this attack piece is all about, a preemptive strike to make Newt radioactive again and prevent him tossing his hat into the ring. I'm sure within a day the full text will appear and make a lot more sense. I'm also certain it won't receive a tenth the exposure this hit job gets.
Newt isn't some Bob (Klansman) Byrd fossil who doesn't understand what the net is.
> in other news NSTA rejects KKK film for fear of angering everyone. whats the difference?
No you hayseed retard, Algore's movie is the TRITH, says so right there in the title. Rejecting it means science teachers are against the Truth. My god (little G, don't send me to the camps) if one of the Democratic Party's core groups are rejecting Global Warming Theology what is the world coming to. What the hell was the point of taking Congress.
Amen to that. If that list were really the best the female of the species could manage I'd say it is time to stop these efforts to attract girls into tech, forget the various outreach efforts in the open source/free software world, etc and just declare they ain't got the gift for geek stuff. That list is such a bad joke I'd mod it troll.
Fortunately I happen to know better. Where I work it is just the security guy and me in a library full of women. The IT Dept is me and two ladies, my boss taught herself this stuff same way I learned it. She survived SCO Xenix, that is more horror than I want to ponder.:)
> In the film, it is stated that out of 928 scientific studies on global warming, zero had any doubt > that A) it exists and B) we are causing it. So it depends on if you want to listen to science, or politics.
You almost saved yourself with the "in the film" but the second sentence damns you. You know, I know and everyone reading slashdot knows that, while greatly outnumbered and outfunded, there ARE global warming skeptics with real degrees who are doing real science and that some of them have actually been published. So to say the score is 928 to 0 is not a distortion of the facts, and it isn't bias. It is a lie. Which makes you a goddamned liar and (haven't seen the film) if Al Gore really said that he is also a goddamned liar.
And that is the problem with believing the GW crowd, listen to any of you watermellons long enough and you will tell a whopper big enough that I have to disregard EVERYTHING you have ever said. You can't seem to help it, having apparently taken to heart the teachings of Lenin and Gobbels regarding the political effectiveness of the Big Lie.
Idiot! How dare you bring facts into bush hatred!
on
An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> The US Senate signaled in 1997 that it would reject ratification of the treaty by a vote of 95-0 before it was even > signed (essentially symbolically) by Al Gore in 1998.
How dare you attempt to introduce historical fact into today's Hate. I mean, like we all know who is responsible for all the world's ills. He heats the Earth in league with Big Oil and Haliburton. He is waging war on poor innocent brown people with the Milirary Industrial Complex and Haliburton. We know who the problem is.
BUSH!
Seriously though; it is way past time for a new/. catagory, Op-ed.
Personally the Global Warming hoax is far from 'beyond debate'. If there is any science in the arguments it is buried so far in the noise of the politics that no instrument exists capable of seperating the two. And as a political debate all I need to see is the rogue's gallery on the Warming side and their proposed solutions and contrast with the skeptics to know I will fight Al Gore and Jamie with my last living breath.
We defeated Communisism once, we will defeat it again even if we don't have Ronald Reagan leading us this time. And we will do it while defeating Islamic Fascism. Because we must.
> Wont this open up the system to many more phishing attacks involving addresses which include non-latin characters which look similar to latin ones?
Even worse, although your problem is reason enough to postpone doing this change. It will break the very idea of the Internet as a common when URLs can't even be typed in on all keyboards. There are good reasons why DNS didn't even include the whole ASCII set. Least common denominator is a good design decision. Every character currently allowed is easy to generate on ALL keyboards, can be printed in an unambigious way by EVERY printing system, etc. Remember that a lot of wire services aren't even 7-bit ASCII clean, email addresses on a lot of news wires have to use (at) instead of @.
More bluntly, of what use is the parts of the Internet I can't even type the domain name for? As things now stand I CAN, and have, snarfed firmware directly from.com.tw sites where I couldn't read any of the text. Learned things from sites where I couldn't read anything but the code text and command lines. Seen images and understood even when the captions were meaningless to me. I'm sure the reverse is equally true, that those who do not speak English still benefit from the English majority of the Internet the same way. All this because DNS is currently universal. Break that universal access feature and, frankly they can just as easy ingore ICANN and just get the hell off the Internet and make their own walled garden network based in IPv6 technology.
At a minimum, unicode DNS should be restricted to IPv6 ONLY. No sense wasting scarce IPv4 resources on supporting walled off ghettos.
> Not so much for having to use Windows, but for having to live with an IT staff like that one.
Exactly. The difference is an incompetent deployment of Windows looks pretty much like a competent one because they both suck hard. (I know a truly competent IT staff CAN, with enough effort, make Windows tolerable but that obviously isn't an option for these clowns.)
Seriously, if you are thinking of doing a difficult migration you do your homework BEFORE you deploy the first machine. They didn't so the blame MUST rest with their IT dept. Step one is list all of the mission critical apps and have an answer for EVERY one, even if it is VMWare, Xen, QEMU or Crossover Office. Then make sure you have the hardware compatibility issues solved, either by doing the migration in sync with a hardware refresh or by testing all hardware in the field and kmowing what needs to be replaced.
Done by competent people there is no chance a migration to ANY non-microsoft solution can end up costing more. Because if it did it would have never been attempted. Of course then there is the question of total cost of ownership. On a 500,000 deal a 100,000 premium to be free of Microsoft would be a bargain over the long haul. No more annual payments for software assurance, anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, forced upgrades to Vista, lower IT staff/pc ratio, etc.
> Wasn't that the point of the original ARPANET? To route around broken parts of the network? BBN was involved > in that, too. What, have they been double-billing the DoD this whole time?
Not really, the Internet assumes nodes can change but there is an end to end link possible, if not instantly within a couple of seconds of reconfiguring or outage. This is more like reinventing packet radio or meteor scatter. Mebe they should go talk to some old hams to get some ideas instead of spending millions to reinvent the wheel.
I'm remembering old QST articles where it was a cool thing that they could pass a message via packet radio all the way up the coast of CA most days.
> Well according to this link we will start seeing 100 mbps downloads much sooner than that.
Well reality says otherwise. I have 3Mbps ADSL now, can soon get 6. Period end of story. BellSouth won't be upgrading their plant here in the forseeable future. They only installed DSL because the State told them to make it available in every parish seat. Outside those towns it doesn't exist, even when towns are bigger than some parish seats. Cities do pretty much all have DSL. We also have cable modems as an option and they have at least made a big show of installing fiber around town. Pointless because they are bottlenecked at the exit to a fractional T3 from BellSouth to get out of town.
Moore's Law doesn't apply to connect speeds in the US because the limit isn't tech, it is AT&T's renewed monopoly.
Now with that reality in mind, BlueRay or HD-DVD will find a ready market because Netflix over USPS will have a better throughput than the fastest bitrate IPTV over DSL or Cable are likely to provide the average home in the next decade.
And as for the article positing hard drives for delivery thst is just daft and show someone with no knowledge of how the industry actually works. Take his example of The West Wing. 45 DVDs can be pressed and boxed for less than $30. HD-DVD is a contender for the reason it doesn't cost any more to make, only a few more patent royalties to pay. BlueRay DOES cost a little more now but won't in another year or two when it will matter, but assume it would cost $50 to put the whole series on. Exactly when will hard drives drop down to that pricepoint?
And why would they be insane enough to popularize such a format? Think about it from their POV, they don't want a format to have too much capacity, lest customers expect it to be used. The second you ship an entire series on one piece of media who will buy a season set and not realize most of the space is blank. And a series set won't be able to be sold for nearly as much as the sum of the season boxes, especially if it comes on the same single piece of media in the same small DVD case.
> Er... you post to and (I assume) continue to visit (if you don't then you won't read this and it won't matter that I'm wrong) a website > you are quite clearly disgusted with (slashdot)?
Well when the topic on/. is ONTOPIC, i.e. tech related it is often very useful to read. When it goes political it highlights everything wrong with higher education. But I, and a growing cadre of defenders of liberty, do our part to expose the users here to new (to them) ideas that were left out of their formal educations. Two years ago the parent both of my longer posts in this thread would have ended at -1 flamebait yet we have now been through a night and even the euroweenie contingent didn't have enough mod points to silence all disent.
> We can see that with with equal odds of climate change then you should be all for stopping climate change. (I know there aren't "odds", and > they aren't argueably "equal", but as you said, we need at least 20 years to find out. If there is climate change we don't have 20 years) .
Let me reuse your numbers and arguments with an asteroid impact:
The cost of acting now (if climate change) == 1% GDP The cost of acting later (if climate change) == 50-90% GDP (Asteroid impact much more deadly than GW) The cost of acting now (if no climate change) == (1% GDP) The cost of acting later (if no climate change) == ($0)
We can see that with with equal odds of asteroid impact then you should be all for stopping asteroids. (I know there aren't "odds", and they aren't argueably "equal", but...
So why are we worrying about a minor problem like GW when we should be worrying about another extinction level impact? Because assuming 50-50 odds between normal and a doomsday scenario is usually the first warning sign of a bad argument in favor of something dumb. Should we be doing something about long range detection of asteroids? Yup, and we are. Should we be working towards tech that reduces our net carbon emissions. Yup, and if for no other reason to stop sending Sagan's of dollars to Islamic dicattorships who we will soon be a war with.
> it's all about risk management from here on in, and any individual's 'opinion' regarding the 'facts' > should be ignored.
Exactly. RISK MANAGEMENT and FACTS are the last things the GW faithful want to discuss. Before we get to risk management we have to get down to real facts so that we can determine the ODDS of each proposed action, the cost of implementing it and the potential costs of not implementing. And Paul Erlich had a lot better 'facts' on his side than Al Gore does and was still WRONG, WRONG WRONG.
> If the nay sayers are right, and there really isn't this terrible threat to our planet, then the worst that > can happen is that nothing will happen, whether we choose to change our world dramatically or not to > accommodate... we'll get cleaner air and a whole stack of other benefits for free.
In your land of Fairie perhaps. Here on planet Earth nothing is "free", not even Free Software. (Said as a 90% Pure member of the GNU Generation.) Poverty, lost productivity, millions dead when resources are diverted away from lifting the third world into the 20th Century, high probability of a new Dark Age when it is realized the only way to force the required measures on people is to remove what little liberty remains in the West. Perhaps you don't consider these things to be a 'cost.' I do.
> If on the other hand the tree hugging socialist swine you refer to are right, then not doing anything > about the problem MAY cause our civilization to suffer irreparably, or worse.
The fallacy of a binary choice with an assumption of 50-50 odds. Almost as stupid as any argument that begins with "if it saves just one life...." or when they have to invoke "the children" to sell a crackpot idea. By your logic we should say screw global warming and devote all our industrial output to building an asteroid defense. We KNOW there is a danger there and that the odds of another strike approach 100% eventually.
But we don't do that because sane people know the game of life is about risk management, not risk elimination. Is man made change to our environment a problem? Probably. Important enough, at this time, to kill millions over? No. Important enough to divert resources from other more pressing problems? No. And that is exactly what the choice you propose is all about. You utopians get these grand notions so you can feel better about yourselves... because YOU are enlightened.... because YOU care more. Same sort of binary decision insanity that banned DDT and caused tens of millions of dead bodies in the third world from malaria. Was/is DDT a problem? Yup, but one that with proper RISK MANAGEMENT could have still saved millions AND kept concentrations low enough to keep secondary effects to managable levels.
> Try and pick somebody who isn't a complete loon next time.
Yea, someone else noticed that. And went straight to -1 same as my post will go. You can't rationally discuss religious issues with fanatics and most of slashdot fits that description when it comes to socialism and it's pet front causes.
Good grief, Slashdot thinks (from the way the posted it it is clear the editor is advancing this drivel as an "answer" to the earlier article) an op-ed in the freaking Guardian! by a socialist mouthpiece who thinks writing a book makes him an expert.
Ok, other than hearing the name pop up in moonbat circles on a regular basis all I know about the guy I just pulled from Wikipedia. But it is generally held to be a leftist dominated site so it is probably being biased for him and not against. Other than what looks like a politically motivated "environmental science" gig his other formal education is all fuzzy/political/socialist stuff except a degree in Zoology. And he is criticizing his opponent for not being an expert. Pot, meet kettle.
This only reenforces the asstertion I made in the thread for the original piece that in the end all us laymen can do is evaluate the credibility of the proponents for each side. On the pro GW side we have an assortment of socialists and marxists who, coincidence of course, are preaching that if we don't all adopt a one world socialist government that will be powerful enough to save us from Global Warming that we are all going to die. Meanwhile the GW believer who also belives in individual liberty and Repreventetive governments is all but unheard of.
Now combine with the fact that all the leading lights in the political face of GW have been WRONG on every other major issue they have championed and it gets hard to buy into it. You name the failed idea, they pushed it. Appeasement of the Soviets, Nuke Freeze, Alar scare, Fat nazis, hell a lot of em were on board the Ice Age scare of the seventies. Then you get the ones who fell for Paul Erlich's doomsday scenarios like the population bomb who are now sure GW is going to kill us all... unless we abandon free markets and liberty.
Plus we get what looks like blatent supression of alternate theories and contrary evidence on these political science theories. Somewhat related example: I was watching Nove recently, the ep about the impending magnetic pole reversal. They showed a map of localized distortions in the field. Guess where the biggest one is? Right about where the Ozone Hole is. Now a weak spot would allow more radiation in and radiation breaks up ozone. Plausable enough that even if there is a hole in that reasoning they should have anticipated it and added a few seconds to deal with it. Silence, nary a word. Considering the political bent of the show it tells me there is probably something being covered up.
But back to GW. Solar output is up, temp increases are being observed on planets other than the Earth. No computer model to date have made an accurate PREDICTION of future longterm patterns. Managing, with enough massaging, to roughly reproduce past datasets isn't good enough to justify the sort of upheavals in society the GW faithful are proposing. We haven't had powerful computers long enough, period. Do a run today that predicts the weather patterns twenty years from now and in twenty years I'll consider the theory... IF it gets it right.
Right now we have two theories. The earth is warming slightly along with the rest of the solar system, perhaps with some influence from us but it has both warmed and cooled in the past and will almost certainly continue to do both in the future. The other says it is all our fault and will spiral out of control unless we act NOW and only socialism can save us. Occam's razor makes short work of this decision.
> What the people who believed this will never happen are saying now?
I'm rather busy right now..... a large flock of flying pigs is buzzing past and making a ruckus.:)
Seriously, I'm one of those who doubted Sun would ever do this. Never liked Java before, looked like as much of a trap as Mono and had most of the same performance issues. Guess like all that changes soon. When they free it up GCJ will take Sun's classpath, solving most of the compatibility issues in one big code dump. Native binaries should provide the speed and the license change solves the package availibility and the nagging worries. And the JVM, with the sandbox, will be there for use in browsers right out of the box in all the major distributions. Yay!
Mono in GNOME scared the hell out of me, but now if they go with Java instead it would be a no brainer.
Unless one really knows what is what one would read this/. post and think a tech savy but otherwise neutral party is doing a review. But of course this ain't so. Of course had Zonk wrote it up as David Pogue, author of "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition" and numerous other Mac books, it just wouldn't have been much of a story now would it? It would have been seen as yet another of the "Mac zealot bashes Microsoft, prefers Apple; film at 11." story that seems to be becoming a regular staple around here.
> I'd say most people who vote a straight ticket are uninformed. What are the chances that EVERY > Democratic candidate is the best choice?
Sorry, I defer to RAH's logic on this one. Don't have the book handy for an exact quote but here is the basics from memory.
"As a general rule I vote the party not the man. I will vote for a dunderhead of my party vs a genius of the party opposed. After all, if the dunderhead is subject to party discpline he should be able to represent me reasonably well while the genius is likely to acomplish many things... that I will disagree with in all the ways that the parties differ. As an exception I will not vote for a person with such a gross moral defect as to present a menace to the Republic, regardless of party affiliation."
What would be the point of me, as a (nominal, L leaning) Republican, voting for a Democrat even if he/she were a stirring speaker, wonderful statesman and generally agreeable with my own positions on policy? Being dependent on Democrat money she/she WILL vote party line on most important issues, will caucus with the Democrats (in the election meaning potential change of control) and in every other way be a member of a party resolutely opposed to every philosophical ideal I value. No, let the guy either change parties or run as an I and I will think about it.
Normally I tend to agree with ya Batman, but not on this one. If someone is asking the question TODAY I'd say it is a little late to get informed. They should sit this one out and plan to finish growing up by the next election and then take their place in the company of adults.
A little harsh? No, Freedom isn't Free people. It requires sacrifice in exchange for Citizenship. Millions of people will live or die, billion of dollars will change hands and the very existance of the Republic itself just might depend on what we adults do in our voting booths today. Is it really too much to ask for those wanting to exercise the franchise be expected to spend a couple of hours over the next two years learning a little about how a Republic is supposed to function, the current issues Congress is likely to be dealing with and figure out where you stand and the probable positions of the candidates you must pick from?
Here is my thumb rules for who should NOT vote. Personally I'd like to see voters face a Civics pop quiz in the voting booth but know that isn't likely.... no Democrat could ever be elected and most R's would be toast.:)
1. If the only thing you know about the candidates came from TV ads, don't vote.
2. If the only thing you know about the election/politics in general came from the nightly news, don't vote.
3. If your primary source for information is the Daily Show, don't vote. It's comedy people, yes it is also leftist twaddle, but the point is it ain't a real discussion of issues; it's primary purpose is to make you laugh not inform you. It is the inability to tell the difference that makes you a menace to the Republic in a voting booth.
4. Explain, in a one paragraph summary the difference between the two major political parties without simply declaring one evil and one good. What are the ideas they represent, why are they so opposed to each other. If you can't do this you have no business in a voting booth. Bonus points though if you can also explain the Libertarian position and why they differ from the other two. After all they ARE in all fifty states now.
5. Describe the difference between Democracy and a Republic. Which form of government is the US supposed to be?
6. Can you name your current elected officials? Congresscritter, both Senators, President and Vice President, Governor, State Rep and Senator? Less than a 50% score and you probably need to wait this one out and study.
7. Can you name a recent (last year) vote of one of your elected reps you strongly agreed with? Disagreed with? If no, you probably haven't been paying attention and might want to sit this one out.
Ok, first up let me make a quick statement to head off SOME of the flames. I'm a libertarian (small L because the LP is clueless, hope they eventually grow up....) so what consenting adults do isn't really my business and certainly shouldn't be the government's.
> I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was > saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity > perverted like this.
But it is an unescapable consequence because of the WAY the queers (and the Democrats) played the game. The only way they could turn it into a 'Civil Rights' issue was to have the unspoken requirement that behaviour, even that which almost all 'decent and moral folk' considered perversion, was no longer subject to criticism in exactly the same way as a consensus was developing that sex and race were off limits. In other words, behaviour was an accident of birth or caused 'by society' and the individual was not responsible. Thus if a person can't be criticized for being 'born gay' why should they be criticized for being born with an inability to be sexually aroused by adults or desiring to have sex with sheep? Even if we decide that shildren and sheep can't give consent, eveb if we ban kiddie porn because the production must involve a criminal act, thus making any attempt to act on these inpulses illegal there is no possible argument for criminalizing talking about it. And since we can't say these people are WRONG, eventually they will gain enough political strength (obviously within the Democratic party in the US) to push for coming 'out', demanding tolerance and eventually acceptance.
If instead the argument had been that being a homosexual, while it might or might not be a minor mental disorder, it shouldn't be grounds for the widespread discrimination that used to be practiced when the person is otherwise mentally stable. After all until quite recently alchohol addiction carried little social stigma even though everyone then and now rightly believed it a disorder. No that path would have never lead to the kind of political power to do things like redefine the English language, but it wouldn't have set up the political ground for the coming 'coming out' of the truly diseased sexual deviants.
More bluntly, had the argument been that homosexuality IS abnormal but when confined to consenting adults not trying to ram it down everyone else's throats it isn't harmful enough to society to warrent discrimination outside a few narrow limits, we could have retained the moral clarity to say fucking kids is RIGHT OUT.
> To be quite honest, if scientists doctored data to remove some data that would seem to provide a counterexample, > I would think that it is targetted at the majority of people that will stick their head in the sand...
In an earlier post in this topic I said you have to judge the people behind a movement. Thank you for illustrating my point that I had noticed an almost perfect correlation between belief in GW and disbelief in Freedom and representive government. It is truly rare for one on your side to so openly state their belief that lying is moral if it helps to herd the 'sheep' to where the annointed few need them to go, for their own good of course.
Problem is that once you admit the truth isn't important in political discourse you really can't blame me when I apply Occam's Razor thus:
1. Almost all 'leftists' yearn for a world government to impose socialism at the barrel of a gun. Because admitting this loses elections, few admit these yearnings in public anymore... at least not if they plan to seek public office or influence the general public opinion in most civilized countries.
2. Almost all 'leftists' believe in Global Warming with a fervor normally associated with religious fundamentalism.
3. The universal 'solution' proposed for Global Warming is a massive power transfer from individuals to national governments and from national governments to a world government, usually proposed as a greatly empowered UN.
Once it is admitted that lying is OK to solve Global Warming it is a pretty logical jump to assume lying to achive the even greater 'good' of world socialism is also OK. Thus the idea that Global Warming is itself a lie to promote socialism must be entertained and from the available evidence the case looks pretty solid.
Slashdot Mirror
> Actually Mac laptops are now quite competitive for the same feature set with other offerings.
Except the most desirable feature is now PRICE. Any new laptop is powerful enough to do what 90% of prospective users need. Go to store.apple.com, read em and weep. Starting at $1099 is starting about three hundred dollars out of the ballpark.
And I'd even dispute the competitive part. Go price out a Thinkpad R60 with roughly the same specs as the Mac and notice the there is a pretty brisk discounted trade of owners selling off their older models to discount new purchases.
Who cares, I certainly don't want a second hand laptop that I don't know the history on. You damned near can't repair one so unless you KNOW it has been treated gently you can't go used unless the price is REAL CHEEP and even then it is a gamble. And if you are talking second hand PCs are going for next to nothing because of pressure from falling prices on new gear.
> Getting someone to use OOo doesn't make it one bit easier to switch from Win32 to Linux on the desktop.
Oh hell yes it does, especially in an organization. If all of an organization's data is in Office format that organization will probably stay on Windows. Crossover Office ain't going to cut it (Office license + CX Office license and forget getting a sweet deal on the Office licensing) and neither will OO.o's import filters. First time a document doesn't work 100% in the initial testing a MS fanboy (MCSE type afraid of learning) will raise holy hell.
Get everyone off of Office and IE first and swapping out the underlying OS is a lot easier. Remember, people don't run an OS they run applications.
> Although I am a little bit skeptical about news that states large organisations will be switching to open source.
Of course it won't go through, they will talk tough and then surrender to Microsoft! This isn't just a French outfit, this is the fricking French Government. They know it is in their national best interest but they won't be able to help themselves.
Ok, now that I have done the o.b. French bashing......
Like all of the other large rollouts that get announced to great fanfare and then get abandoned to even greater press releases, white papers and case studies, Microsoft will go in and make em an offer they won't refuse. Before losing such a high profile installation they will be willing to give it away (so long as the terms stay 'undisclosed') with free support and who would turn that deal down? Anyone with half a brain and/or a concern for the public good would, but last time I checked Parliments (or Congress/Legislatures) are filled with politicians so there ya are.
So far the almost all of the high profile large rollouts outside the server space that have made it to reality have been in point of sale competing against DOS, SCO or hoary old embedded platforms. Seeing a lot of pos installs though, getting fairly common to see a redhat logo or kde gear in the corner with a terminal emulator filling the bulk of the desktop. Apparently Microsoft won't give freebies away to keep those installs.
> What kind of experiment can you perform to test the accuracy of plate tectonics?
:)
None are needed. On the other hand if a bunch of geologists announced that based on their studies of plate tectonics that they could now project that a massive disaster was almost certain to befall Tokyo (why Tokyo? fool, don't you know Tokyo is always being trampled by Godzilla or fending off some other disaster?) and the only answer was to abandon the city and relocate everyone that would be a valid comparison.
Then it would be a matter of trying to evaluate the odds their prediction was likely to come true, the cost of moving Tokyo and the potential cost of not moving Tokyo.
And one factor in the analysis for most people would be the credibility of the group of scientists making the prediction along with the scientists and politicians who began promoting the theory against scientists and politicians who didn't buy in. Another factor would be to consider any alterior motives of the principal advocates. If they are buying up all the real estate as people move out it would be a big red flag.
Now consider the GW crowd. Morons like Al Gore as spokespeople, dubious politics masquerading around as science, touting one world government socialism as the ONLY answer. We are expected to believe it is a total conincidence that almost every one of the GW proponents was promoting socialism long before GW became the latest fashionable wave. Why is it considered unreasonable and anti-intellectual to ask, "Is Al Gore pushing Socialism as the answer to Global Warming or is he proposing Global Warming as the justification for Socialism?"
> You take their money, you drink their kool-aid, you sacrifice your principles, and you produce biased research.
Ok, lets follow the money. So who funded Al Gore's little horror flick? Somebody fronted the money to produce it, fly Algore and an entire crew all over the world during principle photography, generate state of the art CG, make 500 prints to ship out, etc.
Either it was done as a profit making venture, making Al Gore as big a whore as someone producing a documentary/pr event for Exxon or somebody ponied up the money with little hope of even recovering the investment, meaning it was financed as propaganda for somebody. So which is it?
> We can't tell, right now, for certain, whether the scientists are right or wrong. We'll only know that in hindsight.
No, we won't even have hindsight. If we destroy western civilization fighting manbearpig we still won't know what would have happened had we done absolutely nothing or done something different. Only IF we do nothing AND manbearpig destroys us THEN we will know, in hindsight, that that Al Gore was right.
> You don't have to be 100% convinced that man-made emissions are causing global warming to believe in reducing them.
Wrong argument. It is a question of risk management.
> Heck, I'd say you don't even have to be 10% convinced.
Ok, lets run with your 10% risk factor. If manbearpig attacks we lose several coastal cities and assorted other assets. Lets go really high and rate it a 100 trillion loss spread over fifty years starting in fifty years. Now all we have to do is look at the cost of the proposed mitigation program and compare the cost over the same 100 year time horizon, factoring in the time value of money, etc and come up with an assessment. Anything that is going to cost hundreds of billions per year starting NOW isn't going to be cost effective unless that 10% risk factor goes up.
And yes, that is THE only rational way to approach the problem.
Example: We know that the odds of a civilization ending asteroid collision with the Earth approximate 100% given a long enough time horizon. So why aren't we bending every available resource in constructing a defense? But we are expending a few resources to locate potential threats, conduct conferences to discuss the problem, etc. In other words, sensible risk management.
Example: We know a pandemic could kill millions, even billions. AIDS is already killing millions. Are we stopping everything and working on that problem? No, but we are expending resources approximately equal to the threat.
> If the consequences are severe enough, you don't need to be sure that a bad thing is going to happen,
> you just don't take the chance in the first place.
Yes, sometimes you do. Or close to it. It all depends on the odds.
> Newt's not elected to anything, though he is talking about a 2008 presidential run.
Which is what this attack piece is all about, a preemptive strike to make Newt radioactive again and prevent him tossing his hat into the ring. I'm sure within a day the full text will appear and make a lot more sense. I'm also certain it won't receive a tenth the exposure this hit job gets.
Newt isn't some Bob (Klansman) Byrd fossil who doesn't understand what the net is.
> in other news NSTA rejects KKK film for fear of angering everyone. whats the difference?
:(
No you hayseed retard, Algore's movie is the TRITH, says so right there in the title. Rejecting it means science teachers are against the Truth. My god (little G, don't send me to the camps) if one of the Democratic Party's core groups are rejecting Global Warming Theology what is the world coming to. What the hell was the point of taking Congress.
I'm off to pout on DU.
Amen to that. If that list were really the best the female of the species could manage I'd say it is time to stop these efforts to attract girls into tech, forget the various outreach efforts in the open source/free software world, etc and just declare they ain't got the gift for geek stuff. That list is such a bad joke I'd mod it troll.
:)
Fortunately I happen to know better. Where I work it is just the security guy and me in a library full of women. The IT Dept is me and two ladies, my boss taught herself this stuff same way I learned it. She survived SCO Xenix, that is more horror than I want to ponder.
> In the film, it is stated that out of 928 scientific studies on global warming, zero had any doubt
> that A) it exists and B) we are causing it. So it depends on if you want to listen to science, or politics.
You almost saved yourself with the "in the film" but the second sentence damns you. You know, I know and everyone reading slashdot knows that, while greatly outnumbered and outfunded, there ARE global warming skeptics with real degrees who are doing real science and that some of them have actually been published. So to say the score is 928 to 0 is not a distortion of the facts, and it isn't bias. It is a lie. Which makes you a goddamned liar and (haven't seen the film) if Al Gore really said that he is also a goddamned liar.
And that is the problem with believing the GW crowd, listen to any of you watermellons long enough and you will tell a whopper big enough that I have to disregard EVERYTHING you have ever said. You can't seem to help it, having apparently taken to heart the teachings of Lenin and Gobbels regarding the political effectiveness of the Big Lie.
> The US Senate signaled in 1997 that it would reject ratification of the treaty by a vote of 95-0 before it was even
/. catagory, Op-ed.
> signed (essentially symbolically) by Al Gore in 1998.
How dare you attempt to introduce historical fact into today's Hate. I mean, like we all know who is responsible for all the world's ills. He heats the Earth in league with Big Oil and Haliburton. He is waging war on poor innocent brown people with the Milirary Industrial Complex and Haliburton. We know who the problem is.
BUSH!
Seriously though; it is way past time for a new
Personally the Global Warming hoax is far from 'beyond debate'. If there is any science in the arguments it is buried so far in the noise of the politics that no instrument exists capable of seperating the two. And as a political debate all I need to see is the rogue's gallery on the Warming side and their proposed solutions and contrast with the skeptics to know I will fight Al Gore and Jamie with my last living breath.
We defeated Communisism once, we will defeat it again even if we don't have Ronald Reagan leading us this time. And we will do it while defeating Islamic Fascism. Because we must.
> Wont this open up the system to many more phishing attacks involving addresses which include non-latin characters which look similar to latin ones?
.com.tw sites where I couldn't read any of the text. Learned things from sites where I couldn't read anything but the code text and command lines. Seen images and understood even when the captions were meaningless to me. I'm sure the reverse is equally true, that those who do not speak English still benefit from the English majority of the Internet the same way. All this because DNS is currently universal. Break that universal access feature and, frankly they can just as easy ingore ICANN and just get the hell off the Internet and make their own walled garden network based in IPv6 technology.
Even worse, although your problem is reason enough to postpone doing this change. It will break the very idea of the Internet as a common when URLs can't even be typed in on all keyboards. There are good reasons why DNS didn't even include the whole ASCII set. Least common denominator is a good design decision. Every character currently allowed is easy to generate on ALL keyboards, can be printed in an unambigious way by EVERY printing system, etc. Remember that a lot of wire services aren't even 7-bit ASCII clean, email addresses on a lot of news wires have to use (at) instead of @.
More bluntly, of what use is the parts of the Internet I can't even type the domain name for? As things now stand I CAN, and have, snarfed firmware directly from
At a minimum, unicode DNS should be restricted to IPv6 ONLY. No sense wasting scarce IPv4 resources on supporting walled off ghettos.
> Not so much for having to use Windows, but for having to live with an IT staff like that one.
Exactly. The difference is an incompetent deployment of Windows looks pretty much like a competent one because they both suck hard. (I know a truly competent IT staff CAN, with enough effort, make Windows tolerable but that obviously isn't an option for these clowns.)
Seriously, if you are thinking of doing a difficult migration you do your homework BEFORE you deploy the first machine. They didn't so the blame MUST rest with their IT dept. Step one is list all of the mission critical apps and have an answer for EVERY one, even if it is VMWare, Xen, QEMU or Crossover Office. Then make sure you have the hardware compatibility issues solved, either by doing the migration in sync with a hardware refresh or by testing all hardware in the field and kmowing what needs to be replaced.
Done by competent people there is no chance a migration to ANY non-microsoft solution can end up costing more. Because if it did it would have never been attempted. Of course then there is the question of total cost of ownership. On a 500,000 deal a 100,000 premium to be free of Microsoft would be a bargain over the long haul. No more annual payments for software assurance, anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, forced upgrades to Vista, lower IT staff/pc ratio, etc.
> Wasn't that the point of the original ARPANET? To route around broken parts of the network? BBN was involved
> in that, too. What, have they been double-billing the DoD this whole time?
Not really, the Internet assumes nodes can change but there is an end to end link possible, if not instantly within a couple of seconds of reconfiguring or outage. This is more like reinventing packet radio or meteor scatter. Mebe they should go talk to some old hams to get some ideas instead of spending millions to reinvent the wheel.
I'm remembering old QST articles where it was a cool thing that they could pass a message via packet radio all the way up the coast of CA most days.
> Well according to this link we will start seeing 100 mbps downloads much sooner than that.
Well reality says otherwise. I have 3Mbps ADSL now, can soon get 6. Period end of story. BellSouth won't be upgrading their plant here in the forseeable future. They only installed DSL because the State told them to make it available in every parish seat. Outside those towns it doesn't exist, even when towns are bigger than some parish seats. Cities do pretty much all have DSL. We also have cable modems as an option and they have at least made a big show of installing fiber around town. Pointless because they are bottlenecked at the exit to a fractional T3 from BellSouth to get out of town.
Moore's Law doesn't apply to connect speeds in the US because the limit isn't tech, it is AT&T's renewed monopoly.
Now with that reality in mind, BlueRay or HD-DVD will find a ready market because Netflix over USPS will have a better throughput than the fastest bitrate IPTV over DSL or Cable are likely to provide the average home in the next decade.
And as for the article positing hard drives for delivery thst is just daft and show someone with no knowledge of how the industry actually works. Take his example of The West Wing. 45 DVDs can be pressed and boxed for less than $30. HD-DVD is a contender for the reason it doesn't cost any more to make, only a few more patent royalties to pay. BlueRay DOES cost a little more now but won't in another year or two when it will matter, but assume it would cost $50 to put the whole series on. Exactly when will hard drives drop down to that pricepoint?
And why would they be insane enough to popularize such a format? Think about it from their POV, they don't want a format to have too much capacity, lest customers expect it to be used. The second you ship an entire series on one piece of media who will buy a season set and not realize most of the space is blank. And a series set won't be able to be sold for nearly as much as the sum of the season boxes, especially if it comes on the same single piece of media in the same small DVD case.
> Er... you post to and (I assume) continue to visit (if you don't then you won't read this and it won't matter that I'm wrong) a website
/. is ONTOPIC, i.e. tech related it is often very useful to read. When it goes political it highlights everything wrong with higher education. But I, and a growing cadre of defenders of liberty, do our part to expose the users here to new (to them) ideas that were left out of their formal educations. Two years ago the parent both of my longer posts in this thread would have ended at -1 flamebait yet we have now been through a night and even the euroweenie contingent didn't have enough mod points to silence all disent.
> you are quite clearly disgusted with (slashdot)?
Well when the topic on
> We can see that with with equal odds of climate change then you should be all for stopping climate change. (I know there aren't "odds", and
> they aren't argueably "equal", but as you said, we need at least 20 years to find out. If there is climate change we don't have 20 years) .
Let me reuse your numbers and arguments with an asteroid impact:
The cost of acting now (if climate change) == 1% GDP
The cost of acting later (if climate change) == 50-90% GDP (Asteroid impact much more deadly than GW)
The cost of acting now (if no climate change) == (1% GDP)
The cost of acting later (if no climate change) == ($0)
We can see that with with equal odds of asteroid impact then you should be all for stopping asteroids. (I know there aren't "odds", and they aren't argueably "equal", but...
So why are we worrying about a minor problem like GW when we should be worrying about another extinction level impact? Because assuming 50-50 odds between normal and a doomsday scenario is usually the first warning sign of a bad argument in favor of something dumb. Should we be doing something about long range detection of asteroids? Yup, and we are. Should we be working towards tech that reduces our net carbon emissions. Yup, and if for no other reason to stop sending Sagan's of dollars to Islamic dicattorships who we will soon be a war with.
> it's all about risk management from here on in, and any individual's 'opinion' regarding the 'facts'
> should be ignored.
Exactly. RISK MANAGEMENT and FACTS are the last things the GW faithful want to discuss. Before we get to risk management we have to get down to real facts so that we can determine the ODDS of each proposed action, the cost of implementing it and the potential costs of not implementing. And Paul Erlich had a lot better 'facts' on his side than Al Gore does and was still WRONG, WRONG WRONG.
> If the nay sayers are right, and there really isn't this terrible threat to our planet, then the worst that
> can happen is that nothing will happen, whether we choose to change our world dramatically or not to
> accommodate... we'll get cleaner air and a whole stack of other benefits for free.
In your land of Fairie perhaps. Here on planet Earth nothing is "free", not even Free Software. (Said as a 90% Pure member of the GNU Generation.) Poverty, lost productivity, millions dead when resources are diverted away from lifting the third world into the 20th Century, high probability of a new Dark Age when it is realized the only way to force the required measures on people is to remove what little liberty remains in the West. Perhaps you don't consider these things to be a 'cost.' I do.
> If on the other hand the tree hugging socialist swine you refer to are right, then not doing anything
> about the problem MAY cause our civilization to suffer irreparably, or worse.
The fallacy of a binary choice with an assumption of 50-50 odds. Almost as stupid as any argument that begins with "if it saves just one life...." or when they have to invoke "the children" to sell a crackpot idea. By your logic we should say screw global warming and devote all our industrial output to building an asteroid defense. We KNOW there is a danger there and that the odds of another strike approach 100% eventually.
But we don't do that because sane people know the game of life is about risk management, not risk elimination. Is man made change to our environment a problem? Probably. Important enough, at this time, to kill millions over? No. Important enough to divert resources from other more pressing problems? No. And that is exactly what the choice you propose is all about. You utopians get these grand notions so you can feel better about yourselves... because YOU are enlightened.... because YOU care more. Same sort of binary decision insanity that banned DDT and caused tens of millions of dead bodies in the third world from malaria. Was/is DDT a problem? Yup, but one that with proper RISK MANAGEMENT could have still saved millions AND kept concentrations low enough to keep secondary effects to managable levels.
> Try and pick somebody who isn't a complete loon next time.
Yea, someone else noticed that. And went straight to -1 same as my post will go. You can't rationally discuss religious issues with fanatics and most of slashdot fits that description when it comes to socialism and it's pet front causes.
Good grief, Slashdot thinks (from the way the posted it it is clear the editor is advancing this drivel as an "answer" to the earlier article) an op-ed in the freaking Guardian! by a socialist mouthpiece who thinks writing a book makes him an expert.
Ok, other than hearing the name pop up in moonbat circles on a regular basis all I know about the guy I just pulled from Wikipedia. But it is generally held to be a leftist dominated site so it is probably being biased for him and not against. Other than what looks like a politically motivated "environmental science" gig his other formal education is all fuzzy/political/socialist stuff except a degree in Zoology. And he is criticizing his opponent for not being an expert. Pot, meet kettle.
This only reenforces the asstertion I made in the thread for the original piece that in the end all us laymen can do is evaluate the credibility of the proponents for each side. On the pro GW side we have an assortment of socialists and marxists who, coincidence of course, are preaching that if we don't all adopt a one world socialist government that will be powerful enough to save us from Global Warming that we are all going to die. Meanwhile the GW believer who also belives in individual liberty and Repreventetive governments is all but unheard of.
Now combine with the fact that all the leading lights in the political face of GW have been WRONG on every other major issue they have championed and it gets hard to buy into it. You name the failed idea, they pushed it. Appeasement of the Soviets, Nuke Freeze, Alar scare, Fat nazis, hell a lot of em were on board the Ice Age scare of the seventies. Then you get the ones who fell for Paul Erlich's doomsday scenarios like the population bomb who are now sure GW is going to kill us all... unless we abandon free markets and liberty.
Plus we get what looks like blatent supression of alternate theories and contrary evidence on these political science theories. Somewhat related example: I was watching Nove recently, the ep about the impending magnetic pole reversal. They showed a map of localized distortions in the field. Guess where the biggest one is? Right about where the Ozone Hole is. Now a weak spot would allow more radiation in and radiation breaks up ozone. Plausable enough that even if there is a hole in that reasoning they should have anticipated it and added a few seconds to deal with it. Silence, nary a word. Considering the political bent of the show it tells me there is probably something being covered up.
But back to GW. Solar output is up, temp increases are being observed on planets other than the Earth. No computer model to date have made an accurate PREDICTION of future longterm patterns. Managing, with enough massaging, to roughly reproduce past datasets isn't good enough to justify the sort of upheavals in society the GW faithful are proposing. We haven't had powerful computers long enough, period. Do a run today that predicts the weather patterns twenty years from now and in twenty years I'll consider the theory... IF it gets it right.
Right now we have two theories. The earth is warming slightly along with the rest of the solar system, perhaps with some influence from us but it has both warmed and cooled in the past and will almost certainly continue to do both in the future. The other says it is all our fault and will spiral out of control unless we act NOW and only socialism can save us. Occam's razor makes short work of this decision.
> It was really irritating having to build a 32-bit Firefox on an x86-64 system specifically to use crap like
> the Java plugin and Flash plugin....
Dude, that problem is just so 2005. Now like there is this plugin for 64bit FF that loads 32bit plugins. Get it. Look for nspluginwrapper.
> What the people who believed this will never happen are saying now?
:)
I'm rather busy right now..... a large flock of flying pigs is buzzing past and making a ruckus.
Seriously, I'm one of those who doubted Sun would ever do this. Never liked Java before, looked like as much of a trap as Mono and had most of the same performance issues. Guess like all that changes soon. When they free it up GCJ will take Sun's classpath, solving most of the compatibility issues in one big code dump. Native binaries should provide the speed and the license change solves the package availibility and the nagging worries. And the JVM, with the sandbox, will be there for use in browsers right out of the box in all the major distributions. Yay!
Mono in GNOME scared the hell out of me, but now if they go with Java instead it would be a no brainer.
Unless one really knows what is what one would read this /. post and think a tech savy but otherwise neutral party is doing a review. But of course this ain't so. Of course had Zonk wrote it up as David Pogue, author of "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition" and numerous other Mac books, it just wouldn't have been much of a story now would it? It would have been seen as yet another of the "Mac zealot bashes Microsoft, prefers Apple; film at 11." story that seems to be becoming a regular staple around here.
> I'd say most people who vote a straight ticket are uninformed. What are the chances that EVERY
> Democratic candidate is the best choice?
Sorry, I defer to RAH's logic on this one. Don't have the book handy for an exact quote but here is the basics from memory.
"As a general rule I vote the party not the man. I will vote for a dunderhead of my party vs a genius of the party opposed. After all, if the dunderhead is subject to party discpline he should be able to represent me reasonably well while the genius is likely to acomplish many things... that I will disagree with in all the ways that the parties differ. As an exception I will not vote for a person with such a gross moral defect as to present a menace to the Republic, regardless of party affiliation."
What would be the point of me, as a (nominal, L leaning) Republican, voting for a Democrat even if he/she were a stirring speaker, wonderful statesman and generally agreeable with my own positions on policy? Being dependent on Democrat money she/she WILL vote party line on most important issues, will caucus with the Democrats (in the election meaning potential change of control) and in every other way be a member of a party resolutely opposed to every philosophical ideal I value. No, let the guy either change parties or run as an I and I will think about it.
> Get Informed.
:)
Normally I tend to agree with ya Batman, but not on this one. If someone is asking the question TODAY I'd say it is a little late to get informed. They should sit this one out and plan to finish growing up by the next election and then take their place in the company of adults.
A little harsh? No, Freedom isn't Free people. It requires sacrifice in exchange for Citizenship. Millions of people will live or die, billion of dollars will change hands and the very existance of the Republic itself just might depend on what we adults do in our voting booths today. Is it really too much to ask for those wanting to exercise the franchise be expected to spend a couple of hours over the next two years learning a little about how a Republic is supposed to function, the current issues Congress is likely to be dealing with and figure out where you stand and the probable positions of the candidates you must pick from?
Here is my thumb rules for who should NOT vote. Personally I'd like to see voters face a Civics pop quiz in the voting booth but know that isn't likely.... no Democrat could ever be elected and most R's would be toast.
1. If the only thing you know about the candidates came from TV ads, don't vote.
2. If the only thing you know about the election/politics in general came from the nightly news, don't vote.
3. If your primary source for information is the Daily Show, don't vote. It's comedy people, yes it is also leftist twaddle, but the point is it ain't a real discussion of issues; it's primary purpose is to make you laugh not inform you. It is the inability to tell the difference that makes you a menace to the Republic in a voting booth.
4. Explain, in a one paragraph summary the difference between the two major political parties without simply declaring one evil and one good. What are the ideas they represent, why are they so opposed to each other. If you can't do this you have no business in a voting booth. Bonus points though if you can also explain the Libertarian position and why they differ from the other two. After all they ARE in all fifty states now.
5. Describe the difference between Democracy and a Republic. Which form of government is the US supposed to be?
6. Can you name your current elected officials? Congresscritter, both Senators, President and Vice President, Governor, State Rep and Senator? Less than a 50% score and you probably need to wait this one out and study.
7. Can you name a recent (last year) vote of one of your elected reps you strongly agreed with? Disagreed with? If no, you probably haven't been paying attention and might want to sit this one out.
Ok, first up let me make a quick statement to head off SOME of the flames. I'm a libertarian (small L because the LP is clueless, hope they eventually grow up....) so what consenting adults do isn't really my business and certainly shouldn't be the government's.
> I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was
> saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity
> perverted like this.
But it is an unescapable consequence because of the WAY the queers (and the Democrats) played the game. The only way they could turn it into a 'Civil Rights' issue was to have the unspoken requirement that behaviour, even that which almost all 'decent and moral folk' considered perversion, was no longer subject to criticism in exactly the same way as a consensus was developing that sex and race were off limits. In other words, behaviour was an accident of birth or caused 'by society' and the individual was not responsible. Thus if a person can't be criticized for being 'born gay' why should they be criticized for being born with an inability to be sexually aroused by adults or desiring to have sex with sheep? Even if we decide that shildren and sheep can't give consent, eveb if we ban kiddie porn because the production must involve a criminal act, thus making any attempt to act on these inpulses illegal there is no possible argument for criminalizing talking about it. And since we can't say these people are WRONG, eventually they will gain enough political strength (obviously within the Democratic party in the US) to push for coming 'out', demanding tolerance and eventually acceptance.
If instead the argument had been that being a homosexual, while it might or might not be a minor mental disorder, it shouldn't be grounds for the widespread discrimination that used to be practiced when the person is otherwise mentally stable. After all until quite recently alchohol addiction carried little social stigma even though everyone then and now rightly believed it a disorder. No that path would have never lead to the kind of political power to do things like redefine the English language, but it wouldn't have set up the political ground for the coming 'coming out' of the truly diseased sexual deviants.
More bluntly, had the argument been that homosexuality IS abnormal but when confined to consenting adults not trying to ram it down everyone else's throats it isn't harmful enough to society to warrent discrimination outside a few narrow limits, we could have retained the moral clarity to say fucking kids is RIGHT OUT.
> To be quite honest, if scientists doctored data to remove some data that would seem to provide a counterexample,
> I would think that it is targetted at the majority of people that will stick their head in the sand...
In an earlier post in this topic I said you have to judge the people behind a movement. Thank you for illustrating my point that I had noticed an almost perfect correlation between belief in GW and disbelief in Freedom and representive government. It is truly rare for one on your side to so openly state their belief that lying is moral if it helps to herd the 'sheep' to where the annointed few need them to go, for their own good of course.
Problem is that once you admit the truth isn't important in political discourse you really can't blame me when I apply Occam's Razor thus:
1. Almost all 'leftists' yearn for a world government to impose socialism at the barrel of a gun. Because admitting this loses elections, few admit these yearnings in public anymore... at least not if they plan to seek public office or influence the general public opinion in most civilized countries.
2. Almost all 'leftists' believe in Global Warming with a fervor normally associated with religious fundamentalism.
3. The universal 'solution' proposed for Global Warming is a massive power transfer from individuals to national governments and from national governments to a world government, usually proposed as a greatly empowered UN.
Once it is admitted that lying is OK to solve Global Warming it is a pretty logical jump to assume lying to achive the even greater 'good' of world socialism is also OK. Thus the idea that Global Warming is itself a lie to promote socialism must be entertained and from the available evidence the case looks pretty solid.