> But wasn't the GNOME project founded because KDE depends on Qt, which is not adequately "free?"
Sorta. Qt was totally not free when KDE began, it was only a 'free download, but only for the Linux version' sort of free. The same sort of ferret coders who couldn't get past "Qt shiny, me want!" are the sort who now want to handwave away all criticism of the non-code legal/political issues surrounding Mono. Back then enough people saw the danger of basing the entire Free Software desktop effort on a small commercial software house's unfree code that GNOME was founded in response. It is almost certainly a direct response to that pressure that eventually caused Qt to now be 100% Free.
No such response is required to Mono, only keeping it at arm's length. If we never allow it to become a standard part of our software base and build no major hard to replace flagship applications upon it the odds are Microsoft will never launch an attack.
Of course if we do this the critics will always insist we were fools to not avail ourselves of the incredible Microsoft technology and that we held back progress. But expenditures on defenses are always like that, it is hard to count the cost of the wars not fought while the ships, planes and tanks have measurable costs. Thus it is here, if Microsoft never attacks we will never know what costs we saved, but the odds of having the patent armegeddon are greatly increased if we lower our guard and make ourselves a target they can't refuse striking.
No, they might be useful someday. Today they are all semi-stable and almost totally undocumented black boxes that upend forty years of UNIX/POSIX tradition yet were pushed into production in this insane quest to be a better Windows than Windows and thus somehow bring about the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
So while all of the old understood ways of configuring a system have been tossed into the trash, the new replacements aren't ready for prime time. By ready I mean 'just works' at least 99% of the time and has clear documentation to permit a skilled UNIX admin to fix that last 1%.
Example: The hpt_37x driver has been broken[1] (massive data corruption) in Fedora's kernels since at least F8 and probably earlier. With a few tweaks the open source driver at Highpoint's website can be built and works. Your mission, get F11 to use it. I finally this did it this morning by editing/etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd and having it force the driver to load in the initrd phase before the *Kit bullcrap gets a chance to start.
[1] It isn't Fedora's fault. Kernel mailing list traffic shows a problem that has been fixed, regressed and fixed yet again, rinse and repeat a time or two. From what I can tell 2.6.30 may finally have it fixed but F11 shipped with 2.6.29.
You do know that attitude is what is killing us. It is an APPLET. Only 5-6megs.... Of course it could be much worse. Have a look at libgweather. It lets the clock applet show the local weather. On Fedora 10 it weighs in at 80MB, mostly a bunch of XML horror that nobody thought to gzip.
But with Tomboy/Mono it is the resident set that should be the dealbreaker. Applets should not consume more RAM at idle than an entire POSIX environment would need to happily run in a generation ago.
I think that is kinda the point. Michigan has been depopulating for decades. They are also talking about solving the vast wastelands of depoplulated cities by simply removing most of them and leaving small clusters of communities and returning most of the former cities to wilderness with a few parks sprinkled around.
It's what happens when Democrats rule an area for too long, everyone leaves. California will be dealing with these problems in just a couple more years at the current rate the productive population is fleeing.
>...disclosed for the first time today in a court filing...
If you are going to cut/paste from an MSNBC article from May '07 you might want to note that fact. You might also have noticed this in the middle:
"No one was ever charged with the leak of Plame's name itself, which would have been a crime only if someone knowingly gave our information about someone covered by a specific law protecting the identities of covert agents."
And since the whole Wilson thing smells like a CIA black op against their own country I'm really not sure I do trust their bull against the available evidence she had long since become a desk jockey. If she were REALLY covert er idiot husband wouldn't have been going around Washington blabbing about her being in the agency.
But forget all that debatable detail, the big question still remains. Fitzgerald knew Armitage was the primary source for Novak's report by day two. So what the hell was the investigation supposed to be investigating? I have asked this question a lot of times but nobody answers it.
I'm afraid it is you who are wrong... about a great many things.
> Plame WAS a covert agent,
Was being the key word, she had been riding a desk for years. She had been an analyst for years, which is why Richard Armitage was not charged for clueing Bob Novak in on a fairly open 'secret' in the DC party circuit. Idiot Joe got off on talking about his 'secret agent' spouse.
Remember, the special prosecuter knew it was Armitage from at most the second day he was on the job and never considered filing charges against him. Because he knew the leak wasn't a crime. Also, his mandate was understood to be 'get Rove or Cheney' and he was more than happy to be a political weapon if it would advance his career. And while he quickly realized no underlying crime had happened he wasn't going to let something as trivial as that stop his investigation^W chance at glory, after all the typical Washington ass covering could, and kinda did, still trip someone up. Of course even had it been a crime, going after Armitage would have shifted the attention to Powell's State Dept. which was not his mission.
> Try making that same argument about Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton and see where it leads.
A sordid tale of lust and perjury based on a stained blue dress might be as close as Ken Starr got to Bill Clinton himself but do remember those various probes netted a Governor of Arkansas and several other felony convictions. And he did manage to at least get Mr. Clinton disbarred.
Now compare to Patrick Fitzgerald. He knew from the first or second day who leaked Plame's name, that it wasn't anyone in the White House or VP's office and that it wouldn't have been a violation of the law at any rate since Ms. Plame/Wilson was no longer a covert agent. Yet he drug out an investigation for how long, paralyzing much of the government during wartime? And in the end he managed to, after trying how many grand juries, to get a perjury conviction on Scooter Libby under teh most dubious of circumstances. No others were even charged let along convicted. No Fitzmas present of Rove perp walked out of the White House.
> It's refreshing to see this kind of forward thinking coming out of an organization > not normally known for its progressiveness.
If by 'progressive' you mean they are slightly to the right of Marx, ok. Guess I better take a note that the word has been redefined again.
Or are we discussing a different AP than the Associated (with terrorists) Press that runs Al Qaeda and Hezbollah propaganda as news... because their 'stringers' are active members. The same AP that could learn lessons in objectivity from Pravda?
Now to this 'novel' notion. It is just a formalization of long standing practice. As the old media have been dying they have long since lacked the resources to do actual journalism and have been printing press releases as news for years. Of course only SOME organizations get that sort of treatment and they always match the political views of the typical newsroom. Don't expect to see Heritage or Cato getting their work carried as is as news.
But even when a press release isn't run over the wire as a news article it is common to see them lightly reworded by a 'journalist' and run as a news article. Not just politics, it is big in tech and business news too.
This sort of thing is why I giggle every time some MSM dead man walking goes droning on about the advantages of traditional news, the research, the editors and fact checkers, etc. vs bloggers in their underwear. It used to be true but not for years. Read a NYT or CNN article or two. Note the spelling and grammar errors. If an article were still going past several humans before hitting print/web wouldn't ONE of them used the spell checker or caught the grammar glitches? Now read a couple where YOU know as much or more about the subject as the reporter. Bet you found factual errors didn't ya. If they still had editors and fact checkers shouldn't they have caught those? If they still had humans in the loop would the NYT have let Jason Blair get away with passing off his mashups of stolen copy and outright fiction until people OUTSIDE the paper caught him?
It's all a fiction, you are getting the same opinion passed off as fact in a modern newspaper or TV news piece as you get on a blog, difference is bloggers really do get fact checked by other bloggers and the best and most reliable over time float to the top of the page view rankings.
Doesn't work. Violence is morally neutral[1], being in and of itself neither good nor evil. Rape is always evil as there is no such thing as defensive rape. You can fight a war of liberation, never heard of raping for liberty. And note my objection isn't to a game with rape as a plot element, even a central plot device. My objection is more to rape being a victory condition.
A better analogy would be GTA. And yes I'd also consider it a morally dubious work with little redeeming virtues. I have only seen it played once and that was enough. Saw a teen playing it, saw him carjack a little old lady. WTF? We have descended a long way in our entertainment.
I have played games where the player can choose which side to play. You can't really understand some games without playing a few rounds as the bad guys. This game can't even claim that defense, there is just the one side and the player is the bad guy. Should it be outlawed? Honourable people can differ and as a libertarian I'd have to take the not position. I have said here before that the right to be wrong is Freedom 0. Should it be condemned by all right thinking people to discourage it and similar releases in the future by social sanction instead of legal ones? I'm still waiting to hear anyone make a cogent case for the con position on that one.
Really, my position can be summed up thus: You have the right to release it, you have the right to buy it. I have the right to say "You guys are some sick fucks and I hope you don't mind if I keep an eye on ya" and the police should be able to say, "when a young lady goes missing in your neighborhood you guys buying sacks of that stuff are on the suspect list right after her boyfriend and the area's registered sex offenders."
[1] Unless you are a pacifist. But who cares what they think, they live only at the sufferance of those who are willing to defend them against the barbarians. And at any rate RAH had their number years ago. "Most self-described "pacifists" are not pacific; they simply assume false colors. When the wind changes, they hoist the Jolly Roger."
> Your theory is that the US isn't putting *enough* people in jail...
I know this requires a little thinking.... So I'll type slow. (rim shot)
I assert that we aren't putting them in jail soon enough. Most hardened criminals are going to end up spending most of their lives in prison. I am saying we should skip that decade where they go in and out of the criminal justice system before they have assaulted/raped/killed enough people to earn that 25-life sentence and give em ten (and make em serve most of it) on the first violent assault, armed robbery, etc.
1. Doing a decade at 20 means they might get out young enough to actually do something productive and having spent hard time might be motivated to reform. If a few of them end up avoiding graduating to life sentences it just might reduce the prison population. And if doing ten doesn't reform em just put their ass away on the next conviction.
2. If it became common for first time armed robbers to go away for the better part of a decade the incentive to do armed robberies would drop. If nothing else, when nobody in the 'hood knows anybody who has stuck up a convience store and didn't go up they might get the hint... and at least they will all be first timers who won't know what the heck they are doing. Even gang bangers have a rudimentary understanding of risk/reward. Example: for all the urban yodeling about killing cops it isn't too common.
> I have one major problem with your idealistic assessment. > > What is a fact?
We used to have a simple way to deal with that question. We called them juries. They tried the facts in the case. Now the lawyers and judges do it in endless pretrial motions so that after months and months of lawyering the jury gets a predigested load of crap that bears little resemblance to the facts of the case everyone ELSE in the courtroom knows about. So I propose we skip the crap. Give it all to the jury, let both sides make their arguments why various pieces of evidence are suspect and let em decide. All too often these days juries walk out of courtrooms, read the newspapers and learn of the evidence that was tossed and regret their verdict. The jury is supposed to be the bedrock of our legal system, not the judges and lawyers. If we really can't trust twelve fellow Citizens to do Justice we need to replace our whole system because our Republic isn't a very good idea with such for Citizens. What we have now is a worst of all worlds mishmash.
> Also, how do you deal with illegally acquired evidence?
That one is easy. It is evidence, it goes in. The point is to determine the Truth or as close as mortals get to it and that can't happen if you intentionally leave facts out. The facts about the alleged crimes committed in its collection also go in. And if one side really thinks it matters I'd even go so far as to let the trial of the police go first so the verdict can be known to the jury. Although that notion might be complicated by the fact the cop will also want the verdict in the main case to bolster his chances with HIS jury. Perhaps they could agree to have their cases tried together and let the same jury hand out both verdicts at the same time?
> How do you deal with obvious conflicts of interest?
If the conflict is with the judge get a different one. If the whole town is too inflamed to get an unbiased jury change the venue. Any other conflicts get brought up at trial and are just more data points for the jury to ponder when weighing testimony and evidence.
> If you managed to come to the conclusion that rape is bad without thinking about > it at all then you really need to start thinking for yourself.
I'm libertarian. So no I don't have to think a lot about whether rape is right or wrong. No initiation of force or fraud is simple and pretty much covers that whole situation without having to dwell on any nuances that apparently keep you awake at night.
> I would challenge you to apply the reasonings to everyday life and see how many holywood > blockbusters or historic classics fall foul of the same logic.
Example please? I haven't played the game in question but the discussion here on/. asserts the avatar character in RapeLay is out for revenge[1] on some woman and as his chosen revenge rapes, and make his sex slaves, the woman's family including an underage girl. That is the 'victory conditions' in this game. Find an example in the corpus of Western Literature, including the debauched crap that passes for current Hollywood entertainment that is even on the same f**king planet with that. Many stories have rape as a plot element, fiction explores the human condition and it is a fact of life. The key difference is that the rapist normally comes to a bad end; he doesn't 'win.'
[1] Tales of revenge are a popular plot in any medium. The discussion hasn't mentioned what inspired the vengence in the game. And maybe there is a wrong so mighty as to justify such a terrible vengence in some minds. But I'm having a hard time imagining such a wrong. The American notion that no crime justifies 'corruption of blood.' is perhaps too deeply ingrained in me. If someone did something terribly wrong enough to me I could see meting out a terrible vengence and being feminist enough to not allow the wrongdoers gender stay my hand. But I just don't think I could ever see raping or killing her children as justified. But maybe that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.
Only as part of whole solution. The problem with the justice system is bigger that that. The bigger problem is that it has become a game. The idea of justice is simple. The purpose if to determine the Truth (or as close as we mortals can come) of who did what to who, using the Law as guide and then to dispense Justice. Not dueling rulebook lawyers playing games with the judges to see how much evidence can be thrown out, how many witnesses tossed out and delays introduced until the whole thing collapses in a weak assed plea agreement. No, in my justice system you get swift, fair and impartial Justice. All facts are admissable, bullshit gets gavelled down and weeks after the crime report you get the case to a jury who hands down a verdict that won't spend the next decade going through endless appeals. As important as Justice being done is, it is equally important that it be seen to be done. A final verdict in the third appeal as a minor note in the newspaper years after everyone (except the family of the victim of course) has forgotton the blaring headlines that accompanied the crime isn't effective.
If you limit the trial to an attempt to determine the Truth it doesn't take months. Did Tyrone kill the clerk at the 7-11? That question doesn't usually need months of court time. Endless pretrial motions to exclude each and every piece of evidence does. Endless bullshit examining his broken childhood and various other minutia of his mental state eat up time, bringing in endless expert witnesses on each side to debate it does. The seperate trial to determine whether the statement he gave the cops when he was first brought in is admissable eats up lots of time. Then there is the new trend where the victim's family gets to eat up yet more court time that has nothing to do with determining guilt or innocence. No. Did the accused murder? Yes or no, show the jury the evidence, let the defense do their best to shoot holes in it and let em bring back a verdict and get on with their lives. If getting picked for a jury in a major crime didn't mean losing a few months people would be a hell of a lot more willing to serve.
Put em on trial and put em away after their first felony and pretty soon the courts won't be so backed up ya have to plea criminals down the first dozen crimes. Amazing how that works. Even from the first you aren't increasing the prison population much. Most of those guys are going up anyway in a few years, so go ahead and save a few of their victims. And once everyone realized this was the new way of things and wasn't just a temporary thing that would be reversed after the next election crime would indeed drop.
And when the cops really do something improper, instead of the current game of excluding the evidence and letting a monster walk free, they can show up next week for their own swift, fair and impartial Justice. Allowing those sworn to uphold the law to break that law inspires a lack of respect for the Law all around.
But just fixing the justice system won't bring crime under control longterm. We also have to smash the Welfare State and the government schools.
> I.e., we don't know whether the effect of limiting access to such material is to > reduce or increase the number of offences that are committed.
Oh what twaddle. Seems pretty self evident that people who obsess over games that feature rape are probably more likely to be thinking about rape. Playing one a time or two probably isn't going to cause you to run out to the nearest mall and abduct the first hot teen you see. But if you find some dolt with a shelf of that sort of stuff, ya know it just might be a good idea to see what's in his basement.
I know that sounds like profiling... because it is. It is exactly the same thing as spending less time frisking an elderly woman in line with her grandkids to spend a little more time looking at Abdulah's paperwork.
Of course what we do in games affects us. I certainly hope that if the alien scum ever invade I'm going to be so READY to put those otherwise wasted hours to use. I'm so desensitized to killing aliens, mutants, undead, Nazi's, etc. I should be able to kill em by the thousand and not bat an eye.
The current American legal system only proves one thing. That it is screwed up along with just about everything else. Our crime problem is only a mystery to progressives and the mentally infirm... but I repeat myself. Lets examine the life history of the typical hard core criminal sitting on death row.
He grew up in a disfunctional family. The stats on this are too clear to debate. If he even know who his father was he didn't really get a chance to know they guy. And even though the baby daddy is as much of a dysfucntional waste of a life as the kid turned out to be, the kid's odds would have been better if the father had manned up and been a real dad. But mom's subsidized housing doesn't allow a man to stay anyway so it's all a moot point.
He went to a 'school' that more resembled a juvenile detention center than anything else. He didn't learn to read all that well but he learned fast that he could commit pretty much any crime short of murder and it wouldn't matter so he did. Eventually he got old enough to prosecute as an adult for one of his antics and did some time. Now with a criminal record, no education and no other real prospects he will wander aimlessly in the bottom of society for a few years. He will commit various crimes, many violent, get arrested dozens of times and occasionally do short stretches of time in jail/prison. Along the way he will father a couple of kids, just to keep the cycle going. Eventually he will committed a murder that he couldn't plea bargain down on and got sent to death row.
The problem is justice which isn't sure and certain has little deterrent effect. By the time an offender gets sent up for a long stretch or sent to death row they have usually committed a hundred or more felonies, been caught a dozen or more time and convicted multiple times. But they didn't go up the river. They experienced it, all their friends saw that crime pays and we now have whole sections of cities the police fear to enter after dark.
> Would you then claim its acceptable as most people seem to to enjoy killing thousands of people in a war simulator?
I know the anti-hero is popular these days in video games, witness the popularity of GTA... hell anything from Rockstar. And I haven't been a 'gamer' since Quake3 was cool, blah blah. But I think the big difference is in most games the player is the white hat and the guys getting smoked are not just on the 'other side' they are evil. Usually obviously so. Why do you think Id Software picked Nazis for the first first person shooter? More people objected to killing the guard dogs because there ain't no bag limit on Nazis. Nobody was going to go on TV and say killing Nazis was wrong, Nazis NEED to be killed. Teaching your children to kill Nazis is a good thing. Never again.
So lets review, you find moral equivalence between killing Nazis, zombies and horrid mishapen mutants and raping innocent children. Nice moral compass ya got there dude. You should run for Congress.
Ok, that probably wasn't what you MEANT to say but it is what you did say. So would you care to revise and extend your remarks?
> I will be very glad when the whole PC mentality gets scrapped.
Oh you silly silly person. It won't be scrapped, it will simply absorb this program. Just watch and learn... and despair. IT will work something like this:
1. It will work wonders. Duh, incentives work.
2. Democratic Socialists, Teachers Unions, Politically Correct types of all sorts will set out to undermine it. The idea is dangerous.
3. People will find cases where the 'correct' division of the rewards aren't occurring. The usual suspects will be OUTRAGED! Protests will be staged. The 'problem' will be 'solved' by race and gender norming the rewards to ensure exactly equal representation.
4. The 'everybody is a winner' crowd will (probably already are) be whining about the unfairness of it all. The 'special' classes will of course be declared to be ' all winners' within a year and get the maximum reward.
5. It of course will be totally unfair that some get no reward so a base pay will be mandated. Initially they will allow us to 'compromise with them' and only grant the money to kids who actually show up at school on a semi regular basis. But that requirement will be silently discarded through various slight of hand tricks and outright ignoring of the agreement.
6. And of course, as the past head of the AFT is on record saying, the teachers are the purpose of the schools and any money going into those buildings is going to wind up in their pockets. So now that the students have a known source of income the schools can nickel and dime the hell out of em until the base pay is properly flowing into the school's budget. And by lowering the merit part and raising the base eventually we will eventually have 'fairness' where five years from now the best and brightest students end up with an extra fifty inflation wrecked dollars in their pocket every year.
7. And the kids will learn the correct lesson from watching the whole mess go from great idea to crap. The system is hosed, achievement will be punished and resistence is futile. The individual is nothing, the Group everything.
> I want you to think for a little while about what the long term implications of fusion energy on technologically advanced human civilization will be.
Exactly the same as fission, diddly squat. Greens hate the N word for one reason, it means energy independence. So they will hate fusion for exactly the same reason. If we had the will to ignore the greens we could be reaping the benefits of fission now and eventually have fusion as an incremental improvement and hedge against running out of fissionable material. Barring that improbable event neither will do us any good.
Greens seem to be divided into three groups. The group making most of the decisions are the 'watermelons'. Red Communists hiding behind a Green cover. The two groups had enough goals in common to make cooperation inevitable. And even if knowing cooperation hadn't happened subversion was a given, the Soviets subverted any organization they thought might be useful and the Greens are very useful to their purposes. Both Greens and Communists want to slow/stop western industrial civilization. Note that until the fall of the Soviet Union no major 'Green' organiation made much of a fuss about Soviet environmental disasters and outright crimes against nature and for that matter still tend to cover up for them. While the Watermelons make up most of the Green leadership, the bulk of the shock troops are even more dangerous; the Gaians. These self hating pieces of mental disfunction worship the Earth. And every time they pray to Her they seem to hear the same message, "Humans are a disease. Industry and the Civilization it makes possible are an abomination against Me. Smash it all, and I shall unleash the Four Horsemen to complete the task of erasing the scourge of Humanity from My face. For thy service to Me, you shall be granted the honor of dying last." Third and making up a percentage too small to make a difference are the responsible enviromentalists and conservationists.
> I don't understand who are going to sell these when Microsoft call them up and say...
Notice who is doing this. Mobile phone carriers, mobile chipset makers, etc. are the driving force behind this effort. They came together and did Symbian because they understood letting Windows in would end up with them in the PC situation where Microsoft is the one making the bulk of the profit. So if Microsoft had the ability to hurt them I'd think they would have crushed them like bugs already.
Remember also that Chinese contract manufacturers live in a totally different world where Microsoft has no influence. Get consumer electronics instead of PC makers to do the end marketing and again, Microsoft can't hurt them. That just leaves the retailers. Yes Microsoft owns a while isle in Best Buy so they might keep these guys out of there for an Xmas or two. And frankly Best Buy will fear them on their own for their ability to turn a $500 laptop purchase into a $200 netbook sale. Until the wireless carriers put them in the part of Best Buy THEY own bubdles with a 3G contract. And what of Walmart, Walgreens, etc. These puppies are cheap and heading down. Sooner or later they show up as impulse purchase items at Big Lots in blister packs. How much leverage does Microsoft have with any of those markets?
>..the essential principles of the constitution have been expounded upon and shifted SLOWLY and > SLIGHTLY in interpretation over time. as THEY SHOULD BE, since society changes. right?
No. That is the 'living constitution theory and it's rubbish. It means exactly what it meant when the words were written or it is meaningless, meaning whatever the Democrats in Congress and the Media say it means. For the Rule of Law to work requires a dead Constitution. Of course that doesn't mean it must be unchanging, as it provides a means to update it, Amendments. If a part of it is considered obsolete or in need of updating or rewriting to adapt to changes in society or technology one need only pass an Amendment. Heck, if the required supermajority think the whole thing needs replacing another Constitutional Convention can always be called into existence. But what isn't supposed to be allowed is for some judge to suddenly discover some new Right in it, or Congress to suddenly discover a new power.
For example, back when we were still a Republic some rather unwise folks thought banning booze was a nifty idea. But since they were unwise, but not illiterate they could actually read the Constitution and see it gave the Federal Government no such authority. Also not being evil they decided they had to do it the right way and work to pass an Amendment. We all know how that worked out, so another Amendment was passed to cancel out the first. Fast forward just a little. If regulating booze was outside the powers of the Federal Government, can anyone explain how in the Wide Wide World of Sports the FDA, DEA, etc. can exist? Easy, the Living Constitution and the newly redefined Commerce Clause! See the problem yet?
Congress started sneaking over the line pretty fast actually. But they sneaked because they knew it was wrong and if enough people caught em there would be trouble. By the turn of the 20th Century they weren't sneaking much anymore. By the New Deal we were plainly in the age of the Rule of Men, and FDR was The Man.
Let me set a challenge to you. Go to Congress's Thomas search engine and find a Bill at random. Open another tab and Google up a copy of the US Constituition. Since you are asking the question it is a good probability you have never actually read our founding document so do that before continuing. Now read that random Bill and attempt to locate the authority for whatever it is trying to do in the Constituition you have open in the other tab. Odds are you won't find any such authority but you will find a 10th Amendment that forbids it. Repeat this random process another nine times, recording your results. I'll bet you that at least eight will fail muster and give you even odds that all ten will fail.
> You are wrong. A bunch of dead white men from several hundred years ago don't know what's best for 2009.
Ah but they did. Because you see they even thought of that. They designed a system that was difficult to change yet could adapt to changing conditions. Pretty smart for a bunch of pre Internet dudes, huh? The problem was progressives wanted to scrap it and start over with fascism/socialism yet lacked the votes to do so. They got the bright idea to just start ignoring the limits and use their control over the mass media to blur ths issue. And they got away with it so they continued experimenting. Soon they discovered the notion of having judges with lifetime appointments write laws that lawmakers would bet voted out of office for passing. And that was a success too, again with a good smokescreen by the media wing of the Party.
Now we live in an age where Congress rarely passes a law that would meet strict Constituitional scrutiny and people think it is normal. I say if you want a Dept. of Education you need an Amendment to permit the transfer of that function from the States to the Feds. If 'everyone' thinks the Dept. of Education is such a great idea it shouldn't be hard to muster the supermajority needed to pass the Amendment.... yet nobody tried to pass one, they just ignored the problem. Probably because it in fact wouldn't pass but more likely because if they did propose one a few people might start asking how the REST of the fetid swamp in DC exists without amending to permit them.
> And it embodies, IMHO, a wider question about the freedom of the people to act as they wish...
And who the Hell thinks we are Free? Who the Hell even WANTS to be Free anymore? To listen to the talking heads on TV everyone is currently just stoked about the coming universal healthcare fiasco. Sorry, you can't have the government take care of you from Womb to the Tomb and be allowed to be Free. You give away responsibility and the freedom goes with it. People are dumb enough to think the government will legalize legal dope while the government is deciding how much TRANSFAT you can consume and will soon be regulating normal fat? Hello!
Two options here, continue to give up liberty for security or demand FREEDOM and the RESPONSIBILITY that goes with it. But expecting to mix a welfare state and drug legalization is insane. And don't believe for a second it would stop with weed. The second it was legalized the same teenage morons would exchange one leaf on their t-shirts for another, the coca leaf. Then it would be the heroin poppy, etc. Without the welfare state I'd say legalize it all, as is I'm having enough trouble paying taxes as it is, I don't want to pay even more to clean up the mess drug legalization would stick the taxpayers with.
The problem being illustrated is with the concept of 'democracy', an idea our Founding Fathers was aware of and not only discarded it was a notion they took great measures to prevent. Instead we were given a Republic, if we could keep it. Epic Fail.
Democracy means if you have a group of a hundred people, fifty one can vote to piss in the Corn Flakes of the other forty nine and if everyone believes in Democracy there can't be any objections if the votes were counted properly. Because that is what Democracy IS, the People can have anything they vote for. We had a Republic with a written Constituition that laid down hard limits that while changable, were intentionally difficult. This created the Rule of Laws instead of the Rule of Men. We had divided and limited government. But we threw that away and now have the Rule of Men and our civilization is declining.
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> But wasn't the GNOME project founded because KDE depends on Qt, which is not adequately "free?"
Sorta. Qt was totally not free when KDE began, it was only a 'free download, but only for the Linux version' sort of free. The same sort of ferret coders who couldn't get past "Qt shiny, me want!" are the sort who now want to handwave away all criticism of the non-code legal/political issues surrounding Mono. Back then enough people saw the danger of basing the entire Free Software desktop effort on a small commercial software house's unfree code that GNOME was founded in response. It is almost certainly a direct response to that pressure that eventually caused Qt to now be 100% Free.
No such response is required to Mono, only keeping it at arm's length. If we never allow it to become a standard part of our software base and build no major hard to replace flagship applications upon it the odds are Microsoft will never launch an attack.
Of course if we do this the critics will always insist we were fools to not avail ourselves of the incredible Microsoft technology and that we held back progress. But expenditures on defenses are always like that, it is hard to count the cost of the wars not fought while the ships, planes and tanks have measurable costs. Thus it is here, if Microsoft never attacks we will never know what costs we saved, but the odds of having the patent armegeddon are greatly increased if we lower our guard and make ourselves a target they can't refuse striking.
> Actually, all of those are very useful,....
No, they might be useful someday. Today they are all semi-stable and almost totally undocumented black boxes that upend forty years of UNIX/POSIX tradition yet were pushed into production in this insane quest to be a better Windows than Windows and thus somehow bring about the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
So while all of the old understood ways of configuring a system have been tossed into the trash, the new replacements aren't ready for prime time. By ready I mean 'just works' at least 99% of the time and has clear documentation to permit a skilled UNIX admin to fix that last 1%.
Example: The hpt_37x driver has been broken[1] (massive data corruption) in Fedora's kernels since at least F8 and probably earlier. With a few tweaks the open source driver at Highpoint's website can be built and works. Your mission, get F11 to use it. I finally this did it this morning by editing /etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd and having it force the driver to load in the initrd phase before the *Kit bullcrap gets a chance to start.
[1] It isn't Fedora's fault. Kernel mailing list traffic shows a problem that has been fixed, regressed and fixed yet again, rinse and repeat a time or two. From what I can tell 2.6.30 may finally have it fixed but F11 shipped with 2.6.29.
> ..it only comes out to around 5-6 megs.
You do know that attitude is what is killing us. It is an APPLET. Only 5-6megs.... Of course it could be much worse. Have a look at libgweather. It lets the clock applet show the local weather. On Fedora 10 it weighs in at 80MB, mostly a bunch of XML horror that nobody thought to gzip.
But with Tomboy/Mono it is the resident set that should be the dealbreaker. Applets should not consume more RAM at idle than an entire POSIX environment would need to happily run in a generation ago.
> Unless they are very lightly traveled....
I think that is kinda the point. Michigan has been depopulating for decades. They are also talking about solving the vast wastelands of depoplulated cities by simply removing most of them and leaving small clusters of communities and returning most of the former cities to wilderness with a few parks sprinkled around.
It's what happens when Democrats rule an area for too long, everyone leaves. California will be dealing with these problems in just a couple more years at the current rate the productive population is fleeing.
> ...disclosed for the first time today in a court filing...
If you are going to cut/paste from an MSNBC article from May '07 you might want to note that fact. You might also have noticed this in the middle:
"No one was ever charged with the leak of Plame's name itself, which would have been a crime only if someone knowingly gave our information about someone covered by a specific law protecting the identities of covert agents."
And since the whole Wilson thing smells like a CIA black op against their own country I'm really not sure I do trust their bull against the available evidence she had long since become a desk jockey. If she were REALLY covert er idiot husband wouldn't have been going around Washington blabbing about her being in the agency.
But forget all that debatable detail, the big question still remains. Fitzgerald knew Armitage was the primary source for Novak's report by day two. So what the hell was the investigation supposed to be investigating? I have asked this question a lot of times but nobody answers it.
> Your facts are flat out wrong.
I'm afraid it is you who are wrong... about a great many things.
> Plame WAS a covert agent,
Was being the key word, she had been riding a desk for years. She had been an analyst for years, which is why Richard Armitage was not charged for clueing Bob Novak in on a fairly open 'secret' in the DC party circuit. Idiot Joe got off on talking about his 'secret agent' spouse.
Remember, the special prosecuter knew it was Armitage from at most the second day he was on the job and never considered filing charges against him. Because he knew the leak wasn't a crime. Also, his mandate was understood to be 'get Rove or Cheney' and he was more than happy to be a political weapon if it would advance his career. And while he quickly realized no underlying crime had happened he wasn't going to let something as trivial as that stop his investigation^W chance at glory, after all the typical Washington ass covering could, and kinda did, still trip someone up. Of course even had it been a crime, going after Armitage would have shifted the attention to Powell's State Dept. which was not his mission.
> Try making that same argument about Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton and see where it leads.
A sordid tale of lust and perjury based on a stained blue dress might be as close as Ken Starr got to Bill Clinton himself but do remember those various probes netted a Governor of Arkansas and several other felony convictions. And he did manage to at least get Mr. Clinton disbarred.
Now compare to Patrick Fitzgerald. He knew from the first or second day who leaked Plame's name, that it wasn't anyone in the White House or VP's office and that it wouldn't have been a violation of the law at any rate since Ms. Plame/Wilson was no longer a covert agent. Yet he drug out an investigation for how long, paralyzing much of the government during wartime? And in the end he managed to, after trying how many grand juries, to get a perjury conviction on Scooter Libby under teh most dubious of circumstances. No others were even charged let along convicted. No Fitzmas present of Rove perp walked out of the White House.
> It's refreshing to see this kind of forward thinking coming out of an organization
> not normally known for its progressiveness.
If by 'progressive' you mean they are slightly to the right of Marx, ok. Guess I better take a note that the word has been redefined again.
Or are we discussing a different AP than the Associated (with terrorists) Press that runs Al Qaeda and Hezbollah propaganda as news... because their 'stringers' are active members. The same AP that could learn lessons in objectivity from Pravda?
Now to this 'novel' notion. It is just a formalization of long standing practice. As the old media have been dying they have long since lacked the resources to do actual journalism and have been printing press releases as news for years. Of course only SOME organizations get that sort of treatment and they always match the political views of the typical newsroom. Don't expect to see Heritage or Cato getting their work carried as is as news.
But even when a press release isn't run over the wire as a news article it is common to see them lightly reworded by a 'journalist' and run as a news article. Not just politics, it is big in tech and business news too.
This sort of thing is why I giggle every time some MSM dead man walking goes droning on about the advantages of traditional news, the research, the editors and fact checkers, etc. vs bloggers in their underwear. It used to be true but not for years. Read a NYT or CNN article or two. Note the spelling and grammar errors. If an article were still going past several humans before hitting print/web wouldn't ONE of them used the spell checker or caught the grammar glitches? Now read a couple where YOU know as much or more about the subject as the reporter. Bet you found factual errors didn't ya. If they still had editors and fact checkers shouldn't they have caught those? If they still had humans in the loop would the NYT have let Jason Blair get away with passing off his mashups of stolen copy and outright fiction until people OUTSIDE the paper caught him?
It's all a fiction, you are getting the same opinion passed off as fact in a modern newspaper or TV news piece as you get on a blog, difference is bloggers really do get fact checked by other bloggers and the best and most reliable over time float to the top of the page view rankings.
Nah, even the Gorebots wouldn't go there.... but we can be certain it is Bush's fault.
> ..lets exchange the word rape for violence.
Doesn't work. Violence is morally neutral[1], being in and of itself neither good nor evil. Rape is always evil as there is no such thing as defensive rape. You can fight a war of liberation, never heard of raping for liberty. And note my objection isn't to a game with rape as a plot element, even a central plot device. My objection is more to rape being a victory condition.
A better analogy would be GTA. And yes I'd also consider it a morally dubious work with little redeeming virtues. I have only seen it played once and that was enough. Saw a teen playing it, saw him carjack a little old lady. WTF? We have descended a long way in our entertainment.
I have played games where the player can choose which side to play. You can't really understand some games without playing a few rounds as the bad guys. This game can't even claim that defense, there is just the one side and the player is the bad guy. Should it be outlawed? Honourable people can differ and as a libertarian I'd have to take the not position. I have said here before that the right to be wrong is Freedom 0. Should it be condemned by all right thinking people to discourage it and similar releases in the future by social sanction instead of legal ones? I'm still waiting to hear anyone make a cogent case for the con position on that one.
Really, my position can be summed up thus: You have the right to release it, you have the right to buy it. I have the right to say "You guys are some sick fucks and I hope you don't mind if I keep an eye on ya" and the police should be able to say, "when a young lady goes missing in your neighborhood you guys buying sacks of that stuff are on the suspect list right after her boyfriend and the area's registered sex offenders."
[1] Unless you are a pacifist. But who cares what they think, they live only at the sufferance of those who are willing to defend them against the barbarians. And at any rate RAH had their number years ago. "Most self-described "pacifists" are not pacific; they simply assume false colors. When the wind changes, they hoist the Jolly Roger."
> Your theory is that the US isn't putting *enough* people in jail...
I know this requires a little thinking.... So I'll type slow. (rim shot)
I assert that we aren't putting them in jail soon enough. Most hardened criminals are going to end up spending most of their lives in prison. I am saying we should skip that decade where they go in and out of the criminal justice system before they have assaulted/raped/killed enough people to earn that 25-life sentence and give em ten (and make em serve most of it) on the first violent assault, armed robbery, etc.
1. Doing a decade at 20 means they might get out young enough to actually do something productive and having spent hard time might be motivated to reform. If a few of them end up avoiding graduating to life sentences it just might reduce the prison population. And if doing ten doesn't reform em just put their ass away on the next conviction.
2. If it became common for first time armed robbers to go away for the better part of a decade the incentive to do armed robberies would drop. If nothing else, when nobody in the 'hood knows anybody who has stuck up a convience store and didn't go up they might get the hint... and at least they will all be first timers who won't know what the heck they are doing. Even gang bangers have a rudimentary understanding of risk/reward. Example: for all the urban yodeling about killing cops it isn't too common.
> I have one major problem with your idealistic assessment.
>
> What is a fact?
We used to have a simple way to deal with that question. We called them juries. They tried the facts in the case. Now the lawyers and judges do it in endless pretrial motions so that after months and months of lawyering the jury gets a predigested load of crap that bears little resemblance to the facts of the case everyone ELSE in the courtroom knows about. So I propose we skip the crap. Give it all to the jury, let both sides make their arguments why various pieces of evidence are suspect and let em decide. All too often these days juries walk out of courtrooms, read the newspapers and learn of the evidence that was tossed and regret their verdict. The jury is supposed to be the bedrock of our legal system, not the judges and lawyers. If we really can't trust twelve fellow Citizens to do Justice we need to replace our whole system because our Republic isn't a very good idea with such for Citizens. What we have now is a worst of all worlds mishmash.
> Also, how do you deal with illegally acquired evidence?
That one is easy. It is evidence, it goes in. The point is to determine the Truth or as close as mortals get to it and that can't happen if you intentionally leave facts out. The facts about the alleged crimes committed in its collection also go in. And if one side really thinks it matters I'd even go so far as to let the trial of the police go first so the verdict can be known to the jury. Although that notion might be complicated by the fact the cop will also want the verdict in the main case to bolster his chances with HIS jury. Perhaps they could agree to have their cases tried together and let the same jury hand out both verdicts at the same time?
> How do you deal with obvious conflicts of interest?
If the conflict is with the judge get a different one. If the whole town is too inflamed to get an unbiased jury change the venue. Any other conflicts get brought up at trial and are just more data points for the jury to ponder when weighing testimony and evidence.
> If you managed to come to the conclusion that rape is bad without thinking about
> it at all then you really need to start thinking for yourself.
I'm libertarian. So no I don't have to think a lot about whether rape is right or wrong. No initiation of force or fraud is simple and pretty much covers that whole situation without having to dwell on any nuances that apparently keep you awake at night.
> I would challenge you to apply the reasonings to everyday life and see how many holywood
> blockbusters or historic classics fall foul of the same logic.
Example please? I haven't played the game in question but the discussion here on /. asserts the avatar character in RapeLay is out for revenge[1] on some woman and as his chosen revenge rapes, and make his sex slaves, the woman's family including an underage girl. That is the 'victory conditions' in this game. Find an example in the corpus of Western Literature, including the debauched crap that passes for current Hollywood entertainment that is even on the same f**king planet with that. Many stories have rape as a plot element, fiction explores the human condition and it is a fact of life. The key difference is that the rapist normally comes to a bad end; he doesn't 'win.'
[1] Tales of revenge are a popular plot in any medium. The discussion hasn't mentioned what inspired the vengence in the game. And maybe there is a wrong so mighty as to justify such a terrible vengence in some minds. But I'm having a hard time imagining such a wrong. The American notion that no crime justifies 'corruption of blood.' is perhaps too deeply ingrained in me. If someone did something terribly wrong enough to me I could see meting out a terrible vengence and being feminist enough to not allow the wrongdoers gender stay my hand. But I just don't think I could ever see raping or killing her children as justified. But maybe that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.
> What to you suggest? Harsher penalties?
Only as part of whole solution. The problem with the justice system is bigger that that. The bigger problem is that it has become a game. The idea of justice is simple. The purpose if to determine the Truth (or as close as we mortals can come) of who did what to who, using the Law as guide and then to dispense Justice. Not dueling rulebook lawyers playing games with the judges to see how much evidence can be thrown out, how many witnesses tossed out and delays introduced until the whole thing collapses in a weak assed plea agreement. No, in my justice system you get swift, fair and impartial Justice. All facts are admissable, bullshit gets gavelled down and weeks after the crime report you get the case to a jury who hands down a verdict that won't spend the next decade going through endless appeals. As important as Justice being done is, it is equally important that it be seen to be done. A final verdict in the third appeal as a minor note in the newspaper years after everyone (except the family of the victim of course) has forgotton the blaring headlines that accompanied the crime isn't effective.
If you limit the trial to an attempt to determine the Truth it doesn't take months. Did Tyrone kill the clerk at the 7-11? That question doesn't usually need months of court time. Endless pretrial motions to exclude each and every piece of evidence does. Endless bullshit examining his broken childhood and various other minutia of his mental state eat up time, bringing in endless expert witnesses on each side to debate it does. The seperate trial to determine whether the statement he gave the cops when he was first brought in is admissable eats up lots of time. Then there is the new trend where the victim's family gets to eat up yet more court time that has nothing to do with determining guilt or innocence. No. Did the accused murder? Yes or no, show the jury the evidence, let the defense do their best to shoot holes in it and let em bring back a verdict and get on with their lives. If getting picked for a jury in a major crime didn't mean losing a few months people would be a hell of a lot more willing to serve.
Put em on trial and put em away after their first felony and pretty soon the courts won't be so backed up ya have to plea criminals down the first dozen crimes. Amazing how that works. Even from the first you aren't increasing the prison population much. Most of those guys are going up anyway in a few years, so go ahead and save a few of their victims. And once everyone realized this was the new way of things and wasn't just a temporary thing that would be reversed after the next election crime would indeed drop.
And when the cops really do something improper, instead of the current game of excluding the evidence and letting a monster walk free, they can show up next week for their own swift, fair and impartial Justice. Allowing those sworn to uphold the law to break that law inspires a lack of respect for the Law all around.
But just fixing the justice system won't bring crime under control longterm. We also have to smash the Welfare State and the government schools.
> I.e., we don't know whether the effect of limiting access to such material is to
> reduce or increase the number of offences that are committed.
Oh what twaddle. Seems pretty self evident that people who obsess over games that feature rape are probably more likely to be thinking about rape. Playing one a time or two probably isn't going to cause you to run out to the nearest mall and abduct the first hot teen you see. But if you find some dolt with a shelf of that sort of stuff, ya know it just might be a good idea to see what's in his basement.
I know that sounds like profiling... because it is. It is exactly the same thing as spending less time frisking an elderly woman in line with her grandkids to spend a little more time looking at Abdulah's paperwork.
Of course what we do in games affects us. I certainly hope that if the alien scum ever invade I'm going to be so READY to put those otherwise wasted hours to use. I'm so desensitized to killing aliens, mutants, undead, Nazi's, etc. I should be able to kill em by the thousand and not bat an eye.
> The American legal system proves they are not.
The current American legal system only proves one thing. That it is screwed up along with just about everything else. Our crime problem is only a mystery to progressives and the mentally infirm... but I repeat myself. Lets examine the life history of the typical hard core criminal sitting on death row.
He grew up in a disfunctional family. The stats on this are too clear to debate. If he even know who his father was he didn't really get a chance to know they guy. And even though the baby daddy is as much of a dysfucntional waste of a life as the kid turned out to be, the kid's odds would have been better if the father had manned up and been a real dad. But mom's subsidized housing doesn't allow a man to stay anyway so it's all a moot point.
He went to a 'school' that more resembled a juvenile detention center than anything else. He didn't learn to read all that well but he learned fast that he could commit pretty much any crime short of murder and it wouldn't matter so he did. Eventually he got old enough to prosecute as an adult for one of his antics and did some time. Now with a criminal record, no education and no other real prospects he will wander aimlessly in the bottom of society for a few years. He will commit various crimes, many violent, get arrested dozens of times and occasionally do short stretches of time in jail/prison. Along the way he will father a couple of kids, just to keep the cycle going. Eventually he will committed a murder that he couldn't plea bargain down on and got sent to death row.
The problem is justice which isn't sure and certain has little deterrent effect. By the time an offender gets sent up for a long stretch or sent to death row they have usually committed a hundred or more felonies, been caught a dozen or more time and convicted multiple times. But they didn't go up the river. They experienced it, all their friends saw that crime pays and we now have whole sections of cities the police fear to enter after dark.
> Would you then claim its acceptable as most people seem to to enjoy killing thousands of people in a war simulator?
I know the anti-hero is popular these days in video games, witness the popularity of GTA... hell anything from Rockstar. And I haven't been a 'gamer' since Quake3 was cool, blah blah. But I think the big difference is in most games the player is the white hat and the guys getting smoked are not just on the 'other side' they are evil. Usually obviously so. Why do you think Id Software picked Nazis for the first first person shooter? More people objected to killing the guard dogs because there ain't no bag limit on Nazis. Nobody was going to go on TV and say killing Nazis was wrong, Nazis NEED to be killed. Teaching your children to kill Nazis is a good thing. Never again.
So lets review, you find moral equivalence between killing Nazis, zombies and horrid mishapen mutants and raping innocent children. Nice moral compass ya got there dude. You should run for Congress.
Ok, that probably wasn't what you MEANT to say but it is what you did say. So would you care to revise and extend your remarks?
> I will be very glad when the whole PC mentality gets scrapped.
Oh you silly silly person. It won't be scrapped, it will simply absorb this program. Just watch and learn... and despair. IT will work something like this:
1. It will work wonders. Duh, incentives work.
2. Democratic Socialists, Teachers Unions, Politically Correct types of all sorts will set out to undermine it. The idea is dangerous.
3. People will find cases where the 'correct' division of the rewards aren't occurring. The usual suspects will be OUTRAGED! Protests will be staged. The 'problem' will be 'solved' by race and gender norming the rewards to ensure exactly equal representation.
4. The 'everybody is a winner' crowd will (probably already are) be whining about the unfairness of it all. The 'special' classes will of course be declared to be ' all winners' within a year and get the maximum reward.
5. It of course will be totally unfair that some get no reward so a base pay will be mandated. Initially they will allow us to 'compromise with them' and only grant the money to kids who actually show up at school on a semi regular basis. But that requirement will be silently discarded through various slight of hand tricks and outright ignoring of the agreement.
6. And of course, as the past head of the AFT is on record saying, the teachers are the purpose of the schools and any money going into those buildings is going to wind up in their pockets. So now that the students have a known source of income the schools can nickel and dime the hell out of em until the base pay is properly flowing into the school's budget. And by lowering the merit part and raising the base eventually we will eventually have 'fairness' where five years from now the best and brightest students end up with an extra fifty inflation wrecked dollars in their pocket every year.
7. And the kids will learn the correct lesson from watching the whole mess go from great idea to crap. The system is hosed, achievement will be punished and resistence is futile. The individual is nothing, the Group everything.
> I want you to think for a little while about what the long term implications of fusion energy on technologically advanced human civilization will be.
Exactly the same as fission, diddly squat. Greens hate the N word for one reason, it means energy independence. So they will hate fusion for exactly the same reason. If we had the will to ignore the greens we could be reaping the benefits of fission now and eventually have fusion as an incremental improvement and hedge against running out of fissionable material. Barring that improbable event neither will do us any good.
Greens seem to be divided into three groups. The group making most of the decisions are the 'watermelons'. Red Communists hiding behind a Green cover. The two groups had enough goals in common to make cooperation inevitable. And even if knowing cooperation hadn't happened subversion was a given, the Soviets subverted any organization they thought might be useful and the Greens are very useful to their purposes. Both Greens and Communists want to slow/stop western industrial civilization. Note that until the fall of the Soviet Union no major 'Green' organiation made much of a fuss about Soviet environmental disasters and outright crimes against nature and for that matter still tend to cover up for them. While the Watermelons make up most of the Green leadership, the bulk of the shock troops are even more dangerous; the Gaians. These self hating pieces of mental disfunction worship the Earth. And every time they pray to Her they seem to hear the same message, "Humans are a disease. Industry and the Civilization it makes possible are an abomination against Me. Smash it all, and I shall unleash the Four Horsemen to complete the task of erasing the scourge of Humanity from My face. For thy service to Me, you shall be granted the honor of dying last." Third and making up a percentage too small to make a difference are the responsible enviromentalists and conservationists.
> I don't understand who are going to sell these when Microsoft call them up and say...
Notice who is doing this. Mobile phone carriers, mobile chipset makers, etc. are the driving force behind this effort. They came together and did Symbian because they understood letting Windows in would end up with them in the PC situation where Microsoft is the one making the bulk of the profit. So if Microsoft had the ability to hurt them I'd think they would have crushed them like bugs already.
Remember also that Chinese contract manufacturers live in a totally different world where Microsoft has no influence. Get consumer electronics instead of PC makers to do the end marketing and again, Microsoft can't hurt them. That just leaves the retailers. Yes Microsoft owns a while isle in Best Buy so they might keep these guys out of there for an Xmas or two. And frankly Best Buy will fear them on their own for their ability to turn a $500 laptop purchase into a $200 netbook sale. Until the wireless carriers put them in the part of Best Buy THEY own bubdles with a 3G contract. And what of Walmart, Walgreens, etc. These puppies are cheap and heading down. Sooner or later they show up as impulse purchase items at Big Lots in blister packs. How much leverage does Microsoft have with any of those markets?
> ..the essential principles of the constitution have been expounded upon and shifted SLOWLY and
> SLIGHTLY in interpretation over time. as THEY SHOULD BE, since society changes. right?
No. That is the 'living constitution theory and it's rubbish. It means exactly what it meant when the words were written or it is meaningless, meaning whatever the Democrats in Congress and the Media say it means. For the Rule of Law to work requires a dead Constitution. Of course that doesn't mean it must be unchanging, as it provides a means to update it, Amendments. If a part of it is considered obsolete or in need of updating or rewriting to adapt to changes in society or technology one need only pass an Amendment. Heck, if the required supermajority think the whole thing needs replacing another Constitutional Convention can always be called into existence. But what isn't supposed to be allowed is for some judge to suddenly discover some new Right in it, or Congress to suddenly discover a new power.
For example, back when we were still a Republic some rather unwise folks thought banning booze was a nifty idea. But since they were unwise, but not illiterate they could actually read the Constitution and see it gave the Federal Government no such authority. Also not being evil they decided they had to do it the right way and work to pass an Amendment. We all know how that worked out, so another Amendment was passed to cancel out the first. Fast forward just a little. If regulating booze was outside the powers of the Federal Government, can anyone explain how in the Wide Wide World of Sports the FDA, DEA, etc. can exist? Easy, the Living Constitution and the newly redefined Commerce Clause! See the problem yet?
> we did? when the hell did that happen?
Congress started sneaking over the line pretty fast actually. But they sneaked because they knew it was wrong and if enough people caught em there would be trouble. By the turn of the 20th Century they weren't sneaking much anymore. By the New Deal we were plainly in the age of the Rule of Men, and FDR was The Man.
Let me set a challenge to you. Go to Congress's Thomas search engine and find a Bill at random. Open another tab and Google up a copy of the US Constituition. Since you are asking the question it is a good probability you have never actually read our founding document so do that before continuing. Now read that random Bill and attempt to locate the authority for whatever it is trying to do in the Constituition you have open in the other tab. Odds are you won't find any such authority but you will find a 10th Amendment that forbids it. Repeat this random process another nine times, recording your results. I'll bet you that at least eight will fail muster and give you even odds that all ten will fail.
That is what the Rule of Men looks like.
> You are wrong. A bunch of dead white men from several hundred years ago don't know what's best for 2009.
Ah but they did. Because you see they even thought of that. They designed a system that was difficult to change yet could adapt to changing conditions. Pretty smart for a bunch of pre Internet dudes, huh? The problem was progressives wanted to scrap it and start over with fascism/socialism yet lacked the votes to do so. They got the bright idea to just start ignoring the limits and use their control over the mass media to blur ths issue. And they got away with it so they continued experimenting. Soon they discovered the notion of having judges with lifetime appointments write laws that lawmakers would bet voted out of office for passing. And that was a success too, again with a good smokescreen by the media wing of the Party.
Now we live in an age where Congress rarely passes a law that would meet strict Constituitional scrutiny and people think it is normal. I say if you want a Dept. of Education you need an Amendment to permit the transfer of that function from the States to the Feds. If 'everyone' thinks the Dept. of Education is such a great idea it shouldn't be hard to muster the supermajority needed to pass the Amendment.... yet nobody tried to pass one, they just ignored the problem. Probably because it in fact wouldn't pass but more likely because if they did propose one a few people might start asking how the REST of the fetid swamp in DC exists without amending to permit them.
> And it embodies, IMHO, a wider question about the freedom of the people to act as they wish...
And who the Hell thinks we are Free? Who the Hell even WANTS to be Free anymore? To listen to the talking heads on TV everyone is currently just stoked about the coming universal healthcare fiasco. Sorry, you can't have the government take care of you from Womb to the Tomb and be allowed to be Free. You give away responsibility and the freedom goes with it. People are dumb enough to think the government will legalize legal dope while the government is deciding how much TRANSFAT you can consume and will soon be regulating normal fat? Hello!
Two options here, continue to give up liberty for security or demand FREEDOM and the RESPONSIBILITY that goes with it. But expecting to mix a welfare state and drug legalization is insane. And don't believe for a second it would stop with weed. The second it was legalized the same teenage morons would exchange one leaf on their t-shirts for another, the coca leaf. Then it would be the heroin poppy, etc. Without the welfare state I'd say legalize it all, as is I'm having enough trouble paying taxes as it is, I don't want to pay even more to clean up the mess drug legalization would stick the taxpayers with.
The problem being illustrated is with the concept of 'democracy', an idea our Founding Fathers was aware of and not only discarded it was a notion they took great measures to prevent. Instead we were given a Republic, if we could keep it. Epic Fail.
Democracy means if you have a group of a hundred people, fifty one can vote to piss in the Corn Flakes of the other forty nine and if everyone believes in Democracy there can't be any objections if the votes were counted properly. Because that is what Democracy IS, the People can have anything they vote for. We had a Republic with a written Constituition that laid down hard limits that while changable, were intentionally difficult. This created the Rule of Laws instead of the Rule of Men. We had divided and limited government. But we threw that away and now have the Rule of Men and our civilization is declining.