They bastards at SCO are actually lucky they happen to be doing this under an out of control Republican administration. The worst that will happen is they could find themselves in Cuba as 'enemy combatants.' I think we all remember how Democrats like to hold kiddie roasts, shoot yer kids (and dog). (Reno vs the Branch Dividians, Reno vs Weaver family, etc.)
The one I have always wondered why there were not more examples of is flash bios infectors. Heard one tale from a source that MIGHT be telling the truth of encountering a machine where it just displayed a penis and hung in place of the BIOS banner, but that was early 90's. Lots of potential on a modern machine, BIOS, many hard drives, most CD-RW drives, some video boards. And if you don't need to display a penis you can ignore the problem of getting valid code in em and just blank the whole thing.
Talk about getting into the news. It would really boost Dell's stock (all that hardware to be replaced) except it would probably also cause a depression such that nobody would be buying much of anything for a few years.
But thankfully all we have had to date is illbehaved malware written by idiots. Sure it might be nice to watch Microsoft grilled before Congress and hounded out of business in the aftermath of a real destructive worm, but I wouldn't want to live through the sort of economic catastrophe it would take to get that sort of action. And if it is anything less than a total poochscrew, the victims will just eat the cost and keep buying more Dells preloaded with Windows.
No troll, they don't. The Florida mess had to be resolved and the Supremes were the ones with the responsibility to do it. Especially since none of the instituitions in Florida itself were incapable of doing so. The Governor was morally if not legally obligated to stay on th esidelines, the Florida courts had discarded even the illusion of impartiality, rendered them unfit to decide, and nobody wanted the Florida Legislature getting involved. That left Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress's makeup was equally in flux and they were out of session. And again I doubt anyone would have been satisfied with a Congressional decision. So the SCOTUS made a ruling and frankly proved themselves not much better than Congress in that it was a straight partyline vote. But somebody had to decide and they did.
And remember, that when the press finished their recount it didn't change anything. Don't talk about what might could have been without butterfly ballots (designed, approved and implemented by a Democrat machine county) or other BS. Elections count the ballots in the boxes. Anything else and we can just save the expense and let Gallop and the NYT pick our leaders.
While your position has merit, the new legal innovation is more about moving beyond judging legality or even what is 'fair' but into direct legislative activity. Deciding whether a DNC list is a good or bad thing is neither fair nor unfair. It is a matter of public policy and one that is the exclusive province of the legislature.
And I have big problems with judges deciding what is 'fair' when it involves tossing out laws on such a subjective basis. On th other hand I have zero problem with jury nulification because juries are not appointed for life and it provides a vital check against immoral laws.
In other words, blame Democrats. They are the ones who got the bright idea that judges should decide cases not on the law, but on the notion that courts should share policymaking powers with the legislature. On that new set of rules it makes perfect sense for judges to decide whether the economic costs of telemarketing outweighs the costs of outlawing the practice.
Nowadays judges hand down tax legislation from the bench. Once they can do that what other power can be denied them?
You must be new here. Disney has made the decision that they will spend any amount of cash to prevent _Steamboat Willie_ from entering the public domain. Therefore any item copyrighted from that point forward will never enter the public domain.
Although the Supremes have given a few hints that they just might draw the line at 99 years as the limit of beyond which Congress can't keep redefining the term 'limited duration' in the Constituition.
Why does Posix matter? The GNU tools are available on every major platform so apps compiled against them work anywhere. Just how much difference is there between a GNU environment hosted on Linux vs Win32 vs Solaris?
That is the difference between a spec that lives on dead trees vs one that is defined by free portable source.
An AC that can spell words like maelstrom, use reasonably correct grammer, etc. is improbable enough. One that also happens be slowwitted enough to be parroting the Gartner FUD (what is they are right, you just can't risk it) line is too improbable for a reasonable person to buy. So I call astroturf.
We don't have to wait for the evidence because we would be waiting forever. There IS no evidence because there was no copying. The features SCO claims were copied do not exist in the old UNIX codebase SCO may or may not own so they could not have been copied from that source. Further, were SCO to actually have a case they would have sent cease and desist orders by now. They have not.
This is a pump & dump stock swindle mixed with a little FUD for hire on the behalf of Sun and Microsoft to raise the money to retain Boises & Co and keep SCO's doors open long enough to dump the stock.
> Patent - Must be registered. Gives absolute protection over the use of > a mechanism. Example: firewire. Every firewire device pays Apple a > royalty.
Also, unlike copyrights, patents are for a limited duration. And Firewire was not protected by patents. ieee1394 is a published standard unencumbered by patents (as far as I know) but what Apple DOES have is a TradeMark on "FireWire". They used to charge $1 per connector to license usage of the trademark but have since dropped it.
> Example: Formula for Coca-cola.
The 'secret' formula has been known for some time but does no good because CocaCola used a different method to protect their product from cloning. The 'secret' ingredient is special coca leaves (sans the Cocaine) which requires a special dispensation from the FedGov to import since even without the narcotic the leaves are illegal to possess in the US. And by a coincidence only one such special dispensation has ever been granted and so long as Coke is a world power only one will ever be granted.
I was attempting to compare the worst UNIX program to the worst Windows one. I don't think you will find a more worthy candidate on either side than Sendmail and Outlook. And Outlook sucks far harder because it was DESIGNED to be broken.
Granted that after years of being a laughing stock, Microsoft has finally started fixing the more fatal flaws in Outlook/Outlook Express, but I still wouldn't ever trust it because it still just embeds IE to display messages, which is fatal.
I'd love to see an operating system that didn't get a security problem in a year, regardless of it's state of feature accretion. But even OpenBSD has had one exploit now and they play some real funny games to get it down to only one. Bind, fr example, isn't counted because the minimal install doesn't include it. But if you run a nameserver on OpenBSD BIND is the one that gets installed. So by that logic RedHat shouldn't count BIND bugs either since they also don't install it by default.
I want an OS that can go a year without an exploit in ANY of the software they consider part of their 'distribution'. And still have enough functionality to be useful as a general purpose Internet server. I realize a secure desktop is going to be a lot harder, but lets at least shoot for a real secure server.
Unless you running Linux, then make sure you have the latest mpg123 (and libmpg123, which powers xmms) or one of those mp3 files could be evil and 0wn3z your ass.
Nobody is 100% safe these days. I used to be confident and tell people to 'hit me with their best shot' because I wouldn't be running untrusted executables and data files couldn't carry nasties. Now we have mpg123 and in the past we had a buffer overflow in libtiff. Pine could get you owned with a bogus header once. Sendmail of course has been a security nightmare.
Yes *NIX is safer, sendmail in it's worst year never matched the horrors of Outlook, but never feel safe. Which sucks major ass because we shouldn't have to just accept as a given that the only safe computing is a sealed box with no external media or network connection. Personally I'd like to see a whole year set aside to making software SAFE instead of adding features.
In that case the users were developers who were distributing the disputed code to their customers. Since M$ didn't actually own the code they couldn't give the developers a license to redistribute which meant the developers were unknowingly distributing without a valid license. Of course in a sane world the courts would hold the developers blameless for any prior distribution and force Microsoft to eat that cost since they acted in good faith.
That depends. If you understand the way RedHat works you know to only deploy.2 versions on production machine if at all possible. 4.2, 5.2 and 6.2 were very usable and pretty darned stable. 7.2 was flaky which is why 7.3 was released. Guess they wanted to release one last stable version before switching to a string of eternal.0 releases.:(
Actually, they don't. Read their latest annual report released a few weeks ago (at least that is when mine showed up) and their new focus is spelled out in brutal detail. It is the Enterprise and only the Enterprise. They rightsized to zero every division focused on the small and medium business markets, Embedded is on the same course, and they wrote very defensive weseal words about maintaining the 'hobbiest' version, justifying it as required to keep the 'community' engaged and feeding them free errata and QA manhours.
I know some of the RH folks read/., so feel free to contradict my reading of the report & 10K, but be advised I'll quote chapter and verse back at ya to back up my reading of it. And unless you can show where I had my head up my butt and didn't read it right I'm going to take the official word to the shareholders over any 'insider' info spouted here.
The sad part is that the new focus is what allowed them to get within striking distance of being profitable. (Real GAAP numbers, not that.com pro forma crap) But I'm afraid they are doing it by eating their seed corn, the mindshare of the hordes of users and developers who make the RedHat brand valuable. Once they achieve their stated goal of only two groups of users, Large Enterprise accounts and a few diehard kids downloading the 'hobbiest version' every six months, which means few outside the glass house will be running RedHat, will the Enterprise customers keep thinking RedHat == Linux? If the corporate accounts start seeing SUSE == Linux or Mandrake == Linux I'll have a few more shares worth as much as my WorldCon stock.
Well this thread is fast scrolling into oblivion, but what the heck you posted a rational reply and it deserves a response even if thee, me and three other users end up reading it.;)
> Since when did the waste stand for capitalism?
Since the very idea of capitalism was invented and added to the Western tradition by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
> Its the truth, just like people are too stupid for a true democracy.
There is a subtle error there. Democracy is the stupid idea, and America's Founding Fathers were smart enough to give us a Republic instead. While I wouldn't trust Joe/Jane random neighbor to directly vote on most issues, I do trust them to elect representatives. In fact I MUST trust them as a article of faith, because the alternative is too horrible to consider. If "The People" are not fit to rule then some smaller subset must be selected, and WHO selects?
It is a matter of time and specialization more than intelligence. I am a computer geek with an interest in politics. I know nothing of auto repair, but manage to pick a mechanic. All Jo Bob is being expected to do is select from a list a candidate one that approximates their values. In spite of a dedicated century long effort to undermine our fair Republic by the left, a corrupt press and education system and other handicaps too numerous to list they have managed to keep the numbers of enemy congresscritters small enough they haven't voted our Republic out and created a Worker's Paradise. And it looks like the trend lines are actually getting better. We could actually be the first Republic in recorded history to descend as far into chaos and empire as we have and recover. (Not ready to bet serious quantities of FRNs yet, but hope springs eternal.)
> Not only that but people are also too stupid to know when to retire.
Free people are free to retire whenever the hell they want. Mandatory retirement laws are an abomination.
> IF people are really so responsible, Gore should be president because > he won the popular vote, drugs should be legal, and guess what, the > representative government should be destroyed in favor of having the > people decide all the laws.
See my comment above on direct democracy. If we must have a government, and I'm of the opinion we unfortunatly do, nobody has come up with anything better than a Republic. And by the established rules of our Republic the Electoral College is the law, and one I agree with because it succeeds in balancing the interests of the small population heavy states with the large resource heavy ones.
As for legalizing drugs I'm all for it but I suspect you would be disappointed were it put to a national referendum. Of course my support for abolishing the drug laws is conditional on abolishing the Welfare State. Do all the dope you want but don't send armed tax collectors to take my wealth to pay for your rehab/welfare/etc when you fuck up your life with crack.
> You want class warfare? If education is not free, thats what will > happen, either classwarfare, or most people in this country will move > to canada.
YOu won't find class warfare on my side. That is a specialty of the left. As for free state sponsored/mandated education being desirable, all I will say is LOOK AT THE RESULTS. If you can look at the horrors that the government is demanding parents submit their children to and not be dismayed, I pity you for being an uncaring bastard. And remember, children tended to get educated BEFORE the government started meddling. Your problem is you see issues in terms of the government, as in if the government doesn't not only provide education, but drag teh kids in by force then children just wouldn't get educated.
As for welfare clients moving to Canada, don't let the door hit ya on the way out. But don't expect Canada to actually ALLOW any significant numbers of deadbeats migrate. Harsh? Perhaps, but remember that most Ameri
I follow many and diverse news sources, both on the idiot box and online. As it happens CNN's Late Edition is playing back on my MythTV machine as I type this.:)
> I think social security is needed because people are too stupid to > save money.
And with that statement I am afraid I must declare you an enemy of everything the West stands for, and a supporter of everything wicked and wrong with Socialism. Sorry to make it personal, after all you are just a useful idiot in the bottom ranks of the forces of darkness, but you were the one that said something so stupid in public I feel little guilt in the whipping I gotta give ya.:)
[note to mods: This will likely wander into Flamebait, but screw it)
What you were dumb enough to SAY, but every Democrat BELIEVES but will not say, is that the great mass of the people are unfit for self government and must therefore be 'taken care of', being unable to care for themselves. The unspoken subtext is that there is a class of superior beings, here in the US known as Democratic Leaders, who possess a greater intelligence, knowledge and morality compared to the pitiful mass of the "The People" who are thereby justified in imposing their will by force on the obviously inferior people, "For their own good."
For if "The People" are "too stupid" to pick a retirement plan, how can they possibly be entrusted with the far more important and difficult prospect of choosing their own leaders and national policy? How can they be entrusted with sitting on Juries to determine the fate of their fellow Citizens or more bluntly, the fate of an annointed (Homo Superior) Democrat?
Of course we know the answer to these questions, having the example of 50+ years of Democratic misrule. We have an education system hellbent on doing ANYTHING other than educating, for an educated people might not want to be 'taken care of', while Party leaders send their own offspring to elite private schools so that they will be properly prepared to rule. Juries have been reduced to a vestigal role in courts while Judges have been given greatly increased powers to impose their arbitrary will and even to legislate from the bench.
> The premise of going to war was that there was *solid evidence* that > Iraq *did have* WMD's.
Exactly. All fifteen members of the UN Security Council voted that a) Iraq possessed WMD b) was refusing to honor the ceasefire that ended the first Iraq War and c) IRAQ must either take the final chance to comply being offered or suffer the consequences. The fact France, Germany and Russia later reneged and lead a concerted effort to undo that vote for crass economic reasons matters not because not even France denied in public the charges that Iraq possessed WMD. (Hell, of all people the French and Germans knew they possessed WMD since they sold them most of the equipment.)
But in the end, the war in Iraq was a good thing. Saddam needed removing, Iraq is better off for it, the whole situation in the Middle East is better for Saddam being gone.
All the back biting going on now is the same useful idiots who were protesting before the war still being against it, if only because the US was the one removing Saddam. Nothing to see here, move along.
And I can't help but laugh my butt off observing the overlap between those opposed to US involvement in Iraq under ANY circumstances and those in favor of the US military jumping into a quagmire in Liberia. If there were EVER a more vivid argument why Democrats should never be allowed near the levers of power I can't remember it.
This is a question I have had for years, why doesn't Sci_Fi channel actually run Science Fiction? Take a look at their schedule for a week and count up the hours actually running things that qualify as Sci-Fi and it comes up pretty damned short.
Freddy, Jason and Chuckie are NOT Sci-Fi.
Most of the other slasher flicks are NOT Sci-Fi either.
John Edwards is NOT Sci-Fi.
Beyond Belief is NOT Sci-Fi. (Having an actor from a Trek franchise as host does not make a show Sci-Fi.)
In Search of... is NOT SCi-Fi.
Scare Tactics is NOT Sci-Fi.
Braveheart is NOT Sci-Fi. (Yes they actually ran it.)
And I'm sorry, I want someone to explain how Dark Shadows is Sci-Fi. Being a cult classic doesn't make a show Sci-Fi. Let some other channel run it.
> there SHOULD be room to expand the keyboard and give us something > approaching ergonomic...
All of those ergo split keyboards have a hump in the middle. I suspect it won't work without that hump and good luck getting that into a laptop. IBM got away with the butterfly keyboard but it was a) expensive and b) still flat so the structure could still lay flat for support.
Doesn't have a thing to do with the specifics of this case or with Linux. If a business is going to refuse to accept my money I expect them to give me a reason. It is a matter of respect if anything else. This case smells too much like "We don't serve your kind here."
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, dropping one SouthPark reference is ok, but two in one post is just overkill. :)
They bastards at SCO are actually lucky they happen to be doing this under an out of control Republican administration. The worst that will happen is they could find themselves in Cuba as 'enemy combatants.' I think we all remember how Democrats like to hold kiddie roasts, shoot yer kids (and dog). (Reno vs the Branch Dividians, Reno vs Weaver family, etc.)
The one I have always wondered why there were not more examples of is flash bios infectors. Heard one tale from a source that MIGHT be telling the truth of encountering a machine where it just displayed a penis and hung in place of the BIOS banner, but that was early 90's. Lots of potential on a modern machine, BIOS, many hard drives, most CD-RW drives, some video boards. And if you don't need to display a penis you can ignore the problem of getting valid code in em and just blank the whole thing.
Talk about getting into the news. It would really boost Dell's stock (all that hardware to be replaced) except it would probably also cause a depression such that nobody would be buying much of anything for a few years.
But thankfully all we have had to date is illbehaved malware written by idiots. Sure it might be nice to watch Microsoft grilled before Congress and hounded out of business in the aftermath of a real destructive worm, but I wouldn't want to live through the sort of economic catastrophe it would take to get that sort of action. And if it is anything less than a total poochscrew, the victims will just eat the cost and keep buying more Dells preloaded with Windows.
No troll, they don't. The Florida mess had to be resolved and the Supremes were the ones with the responsibility to do it. Especially since none of the instituitions in Florida itself were incapable of doing so. The Governor was morally if not legally obligated to stay on th esidelines, the Florida courts had discarded even the illusion of impartiality, rendered them unfit to decide, and nobody wanted the Florida Legislature getting involved. That left Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress's makeup was equally in flux and they were out of session. And again I doubt anyone would have been satisfied with a Congressional decision. So the SCOTUS made a ruling and frankly proved themselves not much better than Congress in that it was a straight partyline vote. But somebody had to decide and they did.
And remember, that when the press finished their recount it didn't change anything. Don't talk about what might could have been without butterfly ballots (designed, approved and implemented by a Democrat machine county) or other BS. Elections count the ballots in the boxes. Anything else and we can just save the expense and let Gallop and the NYT pick our leaders.
While your position has merit, the new legal innovation is more about moving beyond judging legality or even what is 'fair' but into direct legislative activity. Deciding whether a DNC list is a good or bad thing is neither fair nor unfair. It is a matter of public policy and one that is the exclusive province of the legislature.
And I have big problems with judges deciding what is 'fair' when it involves tossing out laws on such a subjective basis. On th other hand I have zero problem with jury nulification because juries are not appointed for life and it provides a vital check against immoral laws.
In other words, blame Democrats. They are the ones who got the bright idea that judges should decide cases not on the law, but on the notion that courts should share policymaking powers with the legislature. On that new set of rules it makes perfect sense for judges to decide whether the economic costs of telemarketing outweighs the costs of outlawing the practice.
Nowadays judges hand down tax legislation from the bench. Once they can do that what other power can be denied them?
You must be new here. Disney has made the decision that they will spend any amount of cash to prevent _Steamboat Willie_ from entering the public domain. Therefore any item copyrighted from that point forward will never enter the public domain.
Although the Supremes have given a few hints that they just might draw the line at 99 years as the limit of beyond which Congress can't keep redefining the term 'limited duration' in the Constituition.
Why does Posix matter? The GNU tools are available on every major platform so apps compiled against them work anywhere. Just how much difference is there between a GNU environment hosted on Linux vs Win32 vs Solaris?
That is the difference between a spec that lives on dead trees vs one that is defined by free portable source.
An AC that can spell words like maelstrom, use reasonably correct grammer, etc. is improbable enough. One that also happens be slowwitted enough to be parroting the Gartner FUD (what is they are right, you just can't risk it) line is too improbable for a reasonable person to buy. So I call astroturf.
We don't have to wait for the evidence because we would be waiting forever. There IS no evidence because there was no copying. The features SCO claims were copied do not exist in the old UNIX codebase SCO may or may not own so they could not have been copied from that source. Further, were SCO to actually have a case they would have sent cease and desist orders by now. They have not.
This is a pump & dump stock swindle mixed with a little FUD for hire on the behalf of Sun and Microsoft to raise the money to retain Boises & Co and keep SCO's doors open long enough to dump the stock.
> Patent - Must be registered. Gives absolute protection over the use of
> a mechanism. Example: firewire. Every firewire device pays Apple a
> royalty.
Also, unlike copyrights, patents are for a limited duration. And Firewire was not protected by patents. ieee1394 is a published standard unencumbered by patents (as far as I know) but what Apple DOES have is a TradeMark on "FireWire". They used to charge $1 per connector to license usage of the trademark but have since dropped it.
> Example: Formula for Coca-cola.
The 'secret' formula has been known for some time but does no good because CocaCola used a different method to protect their product from cloning. The 'secret' ingredient is special coca leaves (sans the Cocaine) which requires a special dispensation from the FedGov to import since even without the narcotic the leaves are illegal to possess in the US. And by a coincidence only one such special dispensation has ever been granted and so long as Coke is a world power only one will ever be granted.
I was attempting to compare the worst UNIX program to the worst Windows one. I don't think you will find a more worthy candidate on either side than Sendmail and Outlook. And Outlook sucks far harder because it was DESIGNED to be broken.
Granted that after years of being a laughing stock, Microsoft has finally started fixing the more fatal flaws in Outlook/Outlook Express, but I still wouldn't ever trust it because it still just embeds IE to display messages, which is fatal.
I'd love to see an operating system that didn't get a security problem in a year, regardless of it's state of feature accretion. But even OpenBSD has had one exploit now and they play some real funny games to get it down to only one. Bind, fr example, isn't counted because the minimal install doesn't include it. But if you run a nameserver on OpenBSD BIND is the one that gets installed. So by that logic RedHat shouldn't count BIND bugs either since they also don't install it by default.
I want an OS that can go a year without an exploit in ANY of the software they consider part of their 'distribution'. And still have enough functionality to be useful as a general purpose Internet server. I realize a secure desktop is going to be a lot harder, but lets at least shoot for a real secure server.
Unless you running Linux, then make sure you have the latest mpg123 (and libmpg123, which powers xmms) or one of those mp3 files could be evil and 0wn3z your ass.
Nobody is 100% safe these days. I used to be confident and tell people to 'hit me with their best shot' because I wouldn't be running untrusted executables and data files couldn't carry nasties. Now we have mpg123 and in the past we had a buffer overflow in libtiff. Pine could get you owned with a bogus header once. Sendmail of course has been a security nightmare.
Yes *NIX is safer, sendmail in it's worst year never matched the horrors of Outlook, but never feel safe. Which sucks major ass because we shouldn't have to just accept as a given that the only safe computing is a sealed box with no external media or network connection. Personally I'd like to see a whole year set aside to making software SAFE instead of adding features.
> the company went after the end users as well.
In that case the users were developers who were distributing the disputed code to their customers. Since M$ didn't actually own the code they couldn't give the developers a license to redistribute which meant the developers were unknowingly distributing without a valid license. Of course in a sane world the courts would hold the developers blameless for any prior distribution and force Microsoft to eat that cost since they acted in good faith.
> Redhat has never been stable.
.2 versions on production machine if at all possible. 4.2, 5.2 and 6.2 were very usable and pretty darned stable. 7.2 was flaky which is why 7.3 was released. Guess they wanted to release one last stable version before switching to a string of eternal .0 releases. :(
That depends. If you understand the way RedHat works you know to only deploy
> If it doesn't come in a RPM, they can't manage to install it.
If I wanted to build critical components from scratch I'd run BSD or Gentoo. RedHat was supposed to be about known good stable software.
> Check to see what netblock the dsl line is in and let the provider
> know instead.
Report a SPAM incident to an asian ISP? Are you new here? They just don't give a shit.
> Tell me Red Hat, don't you want my money?
/., so feel free to contradict my reading of the report & 10K, but be advised I'll quote chapter and verse back at ya to back up my reading of it. And unless you can show where I had my head up my butt and didn't read it right I'm going to take the official word to the shareholders over any 'insider' info spouted here.
.com pro forma crap) But I'm afraid they are doing it by eating their seed corn, the mindshare of the hordes of users and developers who make the RedHat brand valuable. Once they achieve their stated goal of only two groups of users, Large Enterprise accounts and a few diehard kids downloading the 'hobbiest version' every six months, which means few outside the glass house will be running RedHat, will the Enterprise customers keep thinking RedHat == Linux? If the corporate accounts start seeing SUSE == Linux or Mandrake == Linux I'll have a few more shares worth as much as my WorldCon stock.
Actually, they don't. Read their latest annual report released a few weeks ago (at least that is when mine showed up) and their new focus is spelled out in brutal detail. It is the Enterprise and only the Enterprise. They rightsized to zero every division focused on the small and medium business markets, Embedded is on the same course, and they wrote very defensive weseal words about maintaining the 'hobbiest' version, justifying it as required to keep the 'community' engaged and feeding them free errata and QA manhours.
I know some of the RH folks read
The sad part is that the new focus is what allowed them to get within striking distance of being profitable. (Real GAAP numbers, not that
Well this thread is fast scrolling into oblivion, but what the heck you posted a rational reply and it deserves a response even if thee, me and three other users end up reading it. ;)
> Since when did the waste stand for capitalism?
Since the very idea of capitalism was invented and added to the Western tradition by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
> Its the truth, just like people are too stupid for a true democracy.
There is a subtle error there. Democracy is the stupid idea, and America's Founding Fathers were smart enough to give us a Republic instead. While I wouldn't trust Joe/Jane random neighbor to directly vote on most issues, I do trust them to elect representatives. In fact I MUST trust them as a article of faith, because the alternative is too horrible to consider. If "The People" are not fit to rule then some smaller subset must be selected, and WHO selects?
It is a matter of time and specialization more than intelligence. I am a computer geek with an interest in politics. I know nothing of auto repair, but manage to pick a mechanic. All Jo Bob is being expected to do is select from a list a candidate one that approximates their values. In spite of a dedicated century long effort to undermine our fair Republic by the left, a corrupt press and education system and other handicaps too numerous to list they have managed to keep the numbers of enemy congresscritters small enough they haven't voted our Republic out and created a Worker's Paradise. And it looks like the trend lines are actually getting better. We could actually be the first Republic in recorded history to descend as far into chaos and empire as we have and recover. (Not ready to bet serious quantities of FRNs yet, but hope springs eternal.)
> Not only that but people are also too stupid to know when to retire.
Free people are free to retire whenever the hell they want. Mandatory retirement laws are an abomination.
> IF people are really so responsible, Gore should be president because
> he won the popular vote, drugs should be legal, and guess what, the
> representative government should be destroyed in favor of having the
> people decide all the laws.
See my comment above on direct democracy. If we must have a government, and I'm of the opinion we unfortunatly do, nobody has come up with anything better than a Republic. And by the established rules of our Republic the Electoral College is the law, and one I agree with because it succeeds in balancing the interests of the small population heavy states with the large resource heavy ones.
As for legalizing drugs I'm all for it but I suspect you would be disappointed were it put to a national referendum. Of course my support for abolishing the drug laws is conditional on abolishing the Welfare State. Do all the dope you want but don't send armed tax collectors to take my wealth to pay for your rehab/welfare/etc when you fuck up your life with crack.
> You want class warfare? If education is not free, thats what will
> happen, either classwarfare, or most people in this country will move
> to canada.
YOu won't find class warfare on my side. That is a specialty of the left. As for free state sponsored/mandated education being desirable, all I will say is LOOK AT THE RESULTS. If you can look at the horrors that the government is demanding parents submit their children to and not be dismayed, I pity you for being an uncaring bastard. And remember, children tended to get educated BEFORE the government started meddling. Your problem is you see issues in terms of the government, as in if the government doesn't not only provide education, but drag teh kids in by force then children just wouldn't get educated.
As for welfare clients moving to Canada, don't let the door hit ya on the way out. But don't expect Canada to actually ALLOW any significant numbers of deadbeats migrate. Harsh? Perhaps, but remember that most Ameri
> Try turning off Fox News once in a while.
:)
I follow many and diverse news sources, both on the idiot box and online. As it happens CNN's Late Edition is playing back on my MythTV machine as I type this.
> I think social security is needed because people are too stupid to
:)
> save money.
And with that statement I am afraid I must declare you an enemy of everything the West stands for, and a supporter of everything wicked and wrong with Socialism. Sorry to make it personal, after all you are just a useful idiot in the bottom ranks of the forces of darkness, but you were the one that said something so stupid in public I feel little guilt in the whipping I gotta give ya.
[note to mods: This will likely wander into Flamebait, but screw it)
What you were dumb enough to SAY, but every Democrat BELIEVES but will not say, is that the great mass of the people are unfit for self government and must therefore be 'taken care of', being unable to care for themselves. The unspoken subtext is that there is a class of superior beings, here in the US known as Democratic Leaders, who possess a greater intelligence, knowledge and morality compared to the pitiful mass of the "The People" who are thereby justified in imposing their will by force on the obviously inferior people, "For their own good."
For if "The People" are "too stupid" to pick a retirement plan, how can they possibly be entrusted with the far more important and difficult prospect of choosing their own leaders and national policy? How can they be entrusted with sitting on Juries to determine the fate of their fellow Citizens or more bluntly, the fate of an annointed (Homo Superior) Democrat?
Of course we know the answer to these questions, having the example of 50+ years of Democratic misrule. We have an education system hellbent on doing ANYTHING other than educating, for an educated people might not want to be 'taken care of', while Party leaders send their own offspring to elite private schools so that they will be properly prepared to rule. Juries have been reduced to a vestigal role in courts while Judges have been given greatly increased powers to impose their arbitrary will and even to legislate from the bench.
> The premise of going to war was that there was *solid evidence* that
> Iraq *did have* WMD's.
Exactly. All fifteen members of the UN Security Council voted that a) Iraq possessed WMD b) was refusing to honor the ceasefire that ended the first Iraq War and c) IRAQ must either take the final chance to comply being offered or suffer the consequences. The fact France, Germany and Russia later reneged and lead a concerted effort to undo that vote for crass economic reasons matters not because not even France denied in public the charges that Iraq possessed WMD. (Hell, of all people the French and Germans knew they possessed WMD since they sold them most of the equipment.)
But in the end, the war in Iraq was a good thing. Saddam needed removing, Iraq is better off for it, the whole situation in the Middle East is better for Saddam being gone.
All the back biting going on now is the same useful idiots who were protesting before the war still being against it, if only because the US was the one removing Saddam. Nothing to see here, move along.
And I can't help but laugh my butt off observing the overlap between those opposed to US involvement in Iraq under ANY circumstances and those in favor of the US military jumping into a quagmire in Liberia. If there were EVER a more vivid argument why Democrats should never be allowed near the levers of power I can't remember it.
AMEN!
Preach it brother!
This is a question I have had for years, why doesn't Sci_Fi channel actually run Science Fiction? Take a look at their schedule for a week and count up the hours actually running things that qualify as Sci-Fi and it comes up pretty damned short.
Freddy, Jason and Chuckie are NOT Sci-Fi.
Most of the other slasher flicks are NOT Sci-Fi either.
John Edwards is NOT Sci-Fi.
Beyond Belief is NOT Sci-Fi. (Having an actor from a Trek franchise as host does not make a show Sci-Fi.)
In Search of... is NOT SCi-Fi.
Scare Tactics is NOT Sci-Fi.
Braveheart is NOT Sci-Fi. (Yes they actually ran it.)
And I'm sorry, I want someone to explain how Dark Shadows is Sci-Fi. Being a cult classic doesn't make a show Sci-Fi. Let some other channel run it.
> there SHOULD be room to expand the keyboard and give us something ...
> approaching ergonomic
All of those ergo split keyboards have a hump in the middle. I suspect it won't work without that hump and good luck getting that into a laptop. IBM got away with the butterfly keyboard but it was a) expensive and b) still flat so the structure could still lay flat for support.
Doesn't have a thing to do with the specifics of this case or with Linux. If a business is going to refuse to accept my money I expect them to give me a reason. It is a matter of respect if anything else. This case smells too much like "We don't serve your kind here."