> But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences > are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe.
That is one opinion. Another, with a fair amount of evidence to back it, is that every time the issue is put to the test if women don't do equally well the definition of the task is changed until the desired result, equality, appears.
Exaxmple: Carly Fiorina destroyed Lucent and Hewlet Packard yet she is still considered a trailblazing leader who's opinion is sought out because to do otherwise might imply that she was a fool given a position she was unfit for to demonstrate political correctness. A male CEO who failed as utterly as she did would not likely be remembered.... although there are exceptions; the corporate world isn't quite sane now is it.
Bottom line, people should be free to try to be anything they want within a few sensible limits[1] and anybody who tries to stand in someone's way due to race, sex, etc. should attract the social sanction of all right thinking folk. And anyone discriminating while holding any power of the state should be removed from power.
Demanding equality of results is madness. We have tens of thousands of years of cultural differences and quite probably a few biological ones as well. And anyway, I though we were supposed to celebrate diversity and how can you HAVE diversity if there aren't differences to celebrate and draw strength from? The progresive newspeak diversity is so sterile and boring, where you have a rainbow of races, gender identies and cultures yet everyone thinks exactly alike and all results among identity groups are equal in every measurable way.
[1] Do I really have to spell out those obvious exceptions? It would just go offtopic at warp speed.
> Not letting women opt to choose the very subjects they're interested > in is, uh, the *opposite* of freedom for women.
Oh you silly silly person. These things are done in the interest of higher morality than what some woman thinks she wants. First and foremost is the self esteem of the progressives dictating the politically correct rules. If they feel better about themselves, for demonstrating their higher moral development and general superiority, then the project is a success. It is about our betters guiding us inferior creatures into a better world in spite of us being unworthy worms that counts. We will be told what do do, nay even what to WANT and we will be grateful to bask in the glow of our betters, knowing that they care for us even though we are unworthy, that they will be our shepherd and show us how to be obedient to their will.
> Both genders are equally smart but think differently to solve the same problems.
It boggles the mind how anyone could type politically correct tripe like that and expect no laughter. If you assume men and women think differently there must be fields of thought each will be better/worse at. To postulate that men and women have notably different mental machinery yet are statistically EXACTLY equal in attacking EVERY field of though would require a coincidence so improbable as to, like the poor Babelfish, be seen as the final proof for the non-existence of God.
>..talking about a world without prejudice is like the scientist saying "imagine a spherical cow...".
Not quite. The spherical cow is a simplification for ease of communicating a complex idea. The idea of blind justice is the goal we should be working toward, admitting that as imperfect humans we might never actually reach it. Having an unreachable goal is still useful in the same way as the cow though as an easy way to judge whether a new policy is wise or unwise by asking whether it moves toward or away from an easy to understand goal.
> You seem to have a chip on your shoulder when it comes to gay people (this post
I'll keep this short to avoid going too far offtopic. The objection is to the attempt to conflate behavior choices with inate difference in the attempt to make 'gay rights' a civil rights issue. That way leads to madness on too many levels to do justice to here. Probably the biggest is that if we open Pandora's Box and declare some behaviours are protected it won't stop with just one. And once we accept the notion that people aren't able to control themselves the very concept of self government is not just absurd it is dangerous. That and the judicial activism involved in 'gay marriage' that swerves back on topic. I have far less objection to lawful attempts, i.e. I'd still vote/agitate against it but wouldn't overly object to losing the argument in a legislature or at the ballot box. Judges making law is wrong.
> You can either balance the equation by ensuring diversity,
Bad idea. I have less objection (there are more and less offensive methods) to the notion of encouraging diversity but 'ensuring' diversity is just code for quotas and I fail to see how you fight discrimination with discrimination. It's destroying the village to save it. It's either muddled thinking at work or more wicked intentions cloaked in lies.
> I'm no real fan of affirmative action. Was it necessary at one point? Maybe...
A good argument could be mounted that it creates at least as many problems as it solves. The reason we have made progress on these problems is we managed to change minds. Affirmative action blunts the moral arguments that changes minds and wastes a lot of time arguing over it. Even with the downsides, was it required to get the ball rolling? Reasonable people can argue it. Even if it was we should be working to get rid of it as fast as possible.
> After reading the whole piece, I think I understand what she was trying to say, but it wasn't a great way of saying it.
If it were her only incident perhaps. If she hadn't been reading prepared remarks it could be written off as a simple brain fart. But she has more of this stuff. But there is so much more, even from that same speech beyond the pull quote every news outlet is running with. She says there are "basic differences" in the way people "of color" exercise "logic and reasoning." That sort of thing should be so far beyond the realm of polite conversation she should not only be disqualified from being elevated to the SCOTUS she should have been forced to retire from public life days from uttering the comments. Or at least have been forced to endure sensitivity training. (Equal treatement and all that.)
> I think I'm the sort of person you hate.
Only if you are a socialist/marxist/communist. And there it is more like implacable opposition. A burning hate causes one to make mistakes after all. Socialism is 180 degrees opposed to Truth Justice and the American Way and I take the view there is no point to compromising with em, finding common ground or any of that stuff. They are to be defeated and driven from the public debate.
> Having more than one sensibility in a discussion is inherently superior to a monoculture.
Which would have been a perfectly uncontroversial thing for her to have said. Alas, she didn't say that. Like most of her sort she sees everything through a prism of race, gender and class. And again like most of the ilk she appears to come from the elite. Private schools straight into Princeton and they are trying to sell us her 'personal story of struggle.' Bull crap. Pampered spoiled preppy brat who was easy prey for the campus lefties to form a young skull full of mush into a party aparatchik.
> You assume she's a member of "La Raza" (a supremacist group) just because she's latina?
No, I am taking the American Bar Association's word for it. Being published in the Berkley La Raza Law Journal isn't final proof, but if ya can't trust the ABA to know basic facts about a sitting Federal Judge could somebody explain why we take their opinion on appointments seriously?
> So you also assume that all white males are members of the KKK?
Again, no. Ones that open their chowhole in public to spout nonsense about white supremancy? Yup.
> By calling her a bigot, I assume that you are referring to her comment about Latinos...
That, several other choice quotes and several of her rulings. But that quote is almost enough to damn her by itself. She asserts that being a latina, in and of itself, makes her more likely to make good rulings than a white male. The belief that one race is superior to another has a word to describe it, racist. Her belief that a woman superior to a man also has a word, sexist. Put em together and you get bigot. That one quote she could call a mistake, do a mea culpa and skate by. Add in the whole litany and it adds up to a nasty bigot who doesn't even subscribe to the notion of blind justice. She doesn't say it is hard to achive, that we aren't achiving it, etc. By word and deed she makes it plain that she doesn't agree with the notion that blind justice is a worthy goal.
Sorry, my ideal Justice is not an emotion driven empath. Find me nine Vulcans and I'd say put em on the court and have done with it. It's called the Rule of Law and it is in direct opposition to her and Dear Leader's notion of the Rule of Men. I want laws that the people who must live under them can know the outcome of without needing a trail in 99% of cases. Our courts are clogged because nobody can predict the outcome, thus the incentive to roll the dice for the side with a weak case and the urge to settle anyway for the side with the stronger case. In a perfect world the lower courts, where they were judging instead of making policy, would be so in sync the Supreme Sourt would be bored.
> I know some white males (full disclosure: I am a white male) like to pretend that > we live in a race- and gender-blind society, but we don't.
Oh I'll admit we aren't there yet. Now comes the harder (at least for progressives) question, How do we get there?
There are two broad camps out there.
The American camp says "All Men are created equal." We understand that people do differ in reality, but any variation among the races, geners, etc are not as important as random differences between people in general and that at any rate we are all Equal before the Law. No we haven't achieved utopia in practice but it is the goal we have been working toward for a couple hundred years and we were making pretty good progress until we lost power in the 20th Century.
Then there is the Progressive camp. They believe (but deny) that people are defined by their race, gender, sexual disorders, etc. and justice is only a term to be applied to groups. In their world you have Black Justice, Jewish Justice, Lesbian Justice, etc and they are actually different. Of course in that worldview it is a quick leap to figure that if you are Jewish you don't want Black Justice. In other words it leads to balkanizarion, not a stable Republic. Of course divide and conquer is a time tested power tactic. But the important takeaway is to note that the Progressive worldview rejects (while paying lip service to) the entire notion of justice being blind so they don't even agree with us what the goal is.
Larry Summers was driven from polite society for a couple of years for the crime of asking whether it was desirable to broach the subject of whether there were basic differences between men and women. This bigot stands up and asserts there are fundamental differences between both the genders AND races[1] as if it were a settled fact and is on a fast track to the Supreme Court.
Just proves I really don't understand the progressive mind. I really wish you guys could settle what the rules are in such a way you could actually enumerate them in public. Which of course is exactly what will never happen because to speak them would give up the game as any sane person could only laugh.
[1] As a member of La Raza (The Race) and a good ivy league educated feminist she of course asserted that a latina is inherently superior to a white male.
> For example, the war in Afghanistan is a legal war. The 2003 Iraqi war was not.
You fail at history. The first Gulf War never officially ended. That means every time Saddam violated the cease fire agreement we had the option of resuming the war. That we went to the UN again and wanked away was purely for domestic consumption. Without making that effort, and proving to all the UN was ineffectual, the Democrat leaders in Congress would have never voted for the use of force resolution. Because Bush thought that if Congress blessed the 2003 phase of the war the Democrats would be forced to support the war effort against their will after they had voted for it. Well despite degrees from Harvard and Yale Pres. Bush still suffered under the delusion Democrats have any honor and will keep their word. They aren't and don't because they know their media corps have their back, ready and willing to push any inconvient facts down the memory hole. A lie isn't really a lie if nobody calls ya on it is their motto.
> But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by > the UN rather than any single country.
Perhaps in a perfect world you would be correct. But we don't live in a land of Unicorns and Rainbows. We live in a world where people were stupid enough to form the United Nations. One Nation, One Vote... in a world where the majority of countries were and still are unfree tyrannies. If I ever get a time machine that's probably my first stop, to meet the King of the Idiots who first proposed that idea. The UN isn't corrupt or 'broken', it is functioning exactly as it was designed, as a Parliament of Tyrants. Or an Axis of Evil if you will.
Seriously, it amazes me that the UN can, with a straight face and not as an April Fools gag, give the gavel of a human rights organization to Iran, Cuba, etc. Even more amazing is that the free nations of the world sit silently by and allow it to go on without laughing or leaving.
If we had a League of Free Nations the idea might have more merit, but most of the so called Free societies have been hellbent of defining Freedom Down lately, sadly the US among them. Most western social democracies these days have rigid hate speech laws, many have libel laws that are nightmares and all would regulate speech on the Internet in ways Americans would be horrified at and demand that 'something be done' within a year of turning control over to even the more enlightened western countries.
>..but they become bitchy once you start mentioning 64 bit processors.
I know you are trying to troll, but good grief you need to kick yer skills up a notch. You ain't going to get the coveted -1 Troll with such weak ass efforts. Slag Apple or Obama a bit if you want to see Karma burst into flames.
The first port of Linux from x86 was to the 64 bit Alpha. And x86_64 on an RPM based system 'just works.' Things are a little more backwards on Debian/Ubuntu but still on par with Win64.
> Seriously!! I mean, how can anyone sleep at night knowing that one of their neighbours might possibly have no > fingerprints and be nothing but a terrorist waiting to happen!?!?!?!
Of course! I had forgotten that in bizarro/Kostard world the only thing we watch for at borders is terrorists (who are a figment of Bushitler's mind). We all know that ordinary criminals and assorted riffraff never try to enter the country. You know, people with a warrant out for their arrest who might think removing their fingerprints might allow their fake/stolen ID to get em past the less than geniuses the government hires as guards.
> Terrible New Terrorism Drug Helps Terrorists Evade Identification And Cause More Terrible Terror.
I know that stuff like the above passes for fall down funny amongst the Daily Show/Colbert/Kos set but really, you guys need to stop hitting the bong so hard it fries yer brains out.
Just how common do you thing people with no fingerprints are? Don't you WANT something that odd to raise a red flag? If this sort of thing isn't supposed to raise a flag, just what in your bizarro world would?
While TFA says the Dr. recommends patients carry a letter explaining this odd side effect it doesn't make clear whether the patient in question was carrying such documentation or even if it was this incident that lead to the recommendation. As someone who has who has made a habit of reading news copy with a jaundiced eye, especially Reuters, one gets the impression this omission and the misleading way the article was written was deliberate.
> It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond.
Everyone is missing the point. If this one turns out to be a troll/trial balloon the next one won't. Reason? ASUS is departing the 'netbook' market as fast as they can do it and avoid anyone noticing.... sorta. Netbooks are small, inexpenensive, flash based, net centric devices. Now go look at ASUS's EeePC line and tell me how many of their recent offerings fit that description. $500 small laptops are going to ship with Windows, its just the way the monopoly works and ASUS has been in the game long enough they understand that. But since the term 'netbook' has a hotness associated with it they want to prevent most customers from realizing the bait-n-switch that is happening.
Why are they doing this, since they created the netbook in the first place? Several reasons. $500 SKUs have more profit in them than $300 ones, so follow the money right off. Second they have a very long term established relationship with Intel that will prevent them from being one of the first ARM vendors and they are smart enough to realize that once those ship the sub $350 space will go almost 100% ARM+Linux or ARM+CE and to compete there they would have to throw Intel under the bus. Finally, look at their contract manufacturing division (Pegatron) which is ramping up cheap ARM netbooks under a variety of badges that don't say ASUS as we speak.
> It may have always meant "planned economy," but that doesn't imply a single planner, nor would it take force to ensure compliance.
Sorry, but a planned economy only works with a central planner to replace the invisible hand. No village can know what they need to be producing to satisfy a need hundreds of miles away or one anticipated in the future. And since price no longer serves to communicate oversupply or shortage anymore only a central planner can organize things. Except for that pesky fact that no central planner CAN possess enough information to make such plans. The economics and math behind that are above a slashdot conversation and frankly bits are above my skills so go Google the details.
> The barrier to this kind of system is the "hoarding" mentality most people have.
No, the barrier is human nature as you suggest, but a different aspect. It is motive, as in what is the motive to open these mines you speak of, plant and reap the farms, manufacture things, etc. when there is no reward for doing it. Why study to be a doctor or engineer when there isn't a reward, even if the State will provide the education for free? You get exactly what some people's committee decides you 'need' and nothing more. And what you 'need' as a doctor isn't much different than some menial worker who 'pretends to work while they pretend to pay.' You might be provided a vehicle that the factory worker wouldn't get so that you can make house calls but you won't be provided any extra fuel for personal use.... unless you are a high Party official.
> No one's tied to a particular community, and can move to where ever to persue what jobs they want.
It has never worked that way in any implemented version of Communism, the State allocates labor with the same central planning as any other resource. All implemented versions of Fascism, Socialism and Communism[1] have shared totalatarianism in common, as in 'everything inside the State, nothing outside the State.' This means the State is what matters, and the only thing that matters. The individual humans trapped within are simply resources. Again, except for the maximum leader (every totalitarian system has needed a single person to personify the State) and the high Party officials who are more equal than everyone else. That aspect is almost Feudal.
[1] European Democratic Socialism has escaped the worst features of Socialism so far because there has been sufficient reactionary elements to prevent a total slide into Socialism.
>... is that the word no longer means communism. Now it means oppressive government,
No, it ALWAYS meant 'planned economy' and that implies a planner. To make that work requires force, and the only entity which can use force is the State.
And that is why the Internet is about as far from.communism as you can get and the article is either idiocy or pushing a political agenda. There is no central planning on the Internet, which is why it works so well. Voluntary cooperation is as American/Capitalist/etc as Mom, Apple Pie and (until recently) Chevy.
>..what is there to stop Apple from no longer selling boxed copies of their OS and thus killing them?
The hole in Apple's product line is currently so fscking huge that even that wouldn't totally stop clones. You could bundle a whole Mini with a clone tower Mac, move the licensed OS from Mini to the clone and ship the Mini kitted out as a 'free' Mythtv/whatever settop box. Yes there is that much room in the line between the mostly useless Mini and the overkill Mac Pro that there would be customers willing to go for it, especially if it were settled in court that Apple couldn't force the vendor out of business with legal fees and leave the customers unsupported.
> Maybe we wouldn't have had the church holding back science for so long.
I know it is just so trendy to hold views like that, but a little historical perspective might change your poorly informed opinion. You might start by comparing and contrasting the interaction of science and religion in the Enlightenment period with similar but less successful examples. The Islamic world almost but not quite had an intellectual awakening hundreds of years before Christian Europe awoke from the dark ages. However in the end their belief system proved incompatible with the mental processes needed to achieve the Scientific Method and they languish to this day in an intellectual void where few useful mental products are produced. Eastern cultures achieved stable civilizations hundreds (as in LOTS of hundreds) earlier yet settled into stagnation instead of launching the Enlightenment and the furious pace of scientific and cultural progress that followed. And even pre Christian western civilization had it's dark chapters. I seem to recall a rather famous Greek philosopher who was forced to commit suicide for 'corrupting the youth' among other crimes. Perhaps you might want to look that tale up.
Our understanding of thw world has been progressing, it is still a common mistake to forget that and to fall into the intellectual trap of judging past civilizations by the standards and knowledge of today. Forgetting we are the end product of the toil, breakthroughs and even mistakes of past generations. And to aid against Pride, just remember that future generations will almost certainly view us as semi civilized barbarians. Just imagine how they will likely learn about the horrors of the *isms of the 20th Century; with their hundred million corpses in mass graves arguments over in various ineffectual collectivist schemes that future generations will be hard pressed to understand, except to recoil in horror from the numbers and comdemn us as savages.
> In the meantime, you're being completely disingenuous yourself. If you really believed that piracy > was no worse with sneakernet than it is now, you'd be too stupid to have learned to type.
Yes the Internet has made things a little easier, but not as much as you seem to believe. I'm guessing you are too young to remember 'user groups'. All you needed was a couple of systems setup with two floppy drives and you were off to the races. A floppy could be copied in a minute flat on the better systems, a bit longer on the slow crappy serial based systems like the C64 and Atari. And copy they did, for hours while the users talked and talked. It was typical for everyone who attended semi-regular to have several shoe boxes of copied software.
Now it would be less practical because media capacity has outstripped transfer speed a little, but it is still pretty darned fast to dupe DVDs, especially if you cache the read and settle into stamping out multiple copies. CDs can even get pretty close to that one minute per copy speed of yore.
But what would totally reimagine sneakernet would be a new file sharing protocol that would allow two people to connect their disparate devices (laptop, mp3 player, smartphone, etc) on a local (wired or wireless) link and basically smartly sync everything between them. Smart in the sense that each user could set rules to decide what they want to receive so they don't fill up their device with a bunch of stuff they don't want. Have it remember you refused that pile of every episode of (insert name of series you don't particularly like) on your co-workers stash and never grab it even if it disappears and later shows back up on their laptop. Let the **AA clamp down on the Internet and watch how fast what I just described gets invented and popularized.
Give storage a few more doublings in capacity and music becomes a 'Pokemon' exercise. The top level packrats 'have em all' as in first every song that ever charted, then to every album commercially released and finally just every audio recording one could ever want. All available for sharing (via Internet or sneakernet) and spread around the world in so many locations no **AA effort could ever stamp it out. A few years later the same happens to movies and then TV shows. Children will be given a copy of 'everything' by their parents, supplemented by the cool new stuff by their friends.
How does the **AA continue to exist when that world appears? I believe the idea of copyright has merit even if the current eternal copyright is taking things way too far. But what I believe doesn't matter, the tech is coming and nothing I say or do, nothing you say or do, nothing the **AA says or does, nor even what government says, does or legislates is going to do more than hasten or delay that change a year or so.
Depends on what your definition of useless is. Go read _Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies_ by M. Stanton Evans. The fifty year seal on the Senate records has expired and combined with many other sources, all well footnoted, that book makes several things clear.
1. McCarthy had no idea just how far the rabbit hole went. Which is why he lost. But what he did know was for the most part accurate.
2. The US State Dept from the entry of the Soviet Union into WWII to the end of the period covered in the book was essentially in Soviet hands. China and Eastern Europe fell into Communist hands with the heroic assistance of the 5th Column within our foreign service.
3. A non-trivial but not quite majority of the US Congress were either Communists or useful idiots. The majority were Dems but the Pro/Anti Communist line hadn't hardened alone party lines to the same extent. Many Dems were still hard core anti-communist, including for example Robert Kennedy who served with Joe McCarthy for a time.
Again, I dare you kids to read it. It is brutal in the attention to detail and use of actual declassified documents.
You are asking the wrong question. Try "What is the point of running Windows this way?" Phoenix isn't trying to push "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" here.
> you can do this now: run Windows from a VM under an ordinary Linux distro.
In theory at least. What they hope is different is that is Phoenix doing it. They think they have the power to establish a standard here. If they succeed in pushing Windows on a large percentage of desktops into a secure sandbox it changes the game. You or me running Windows in VMWare doesn't.
For them to pull it off they are going to have to provide a seamless experience. That means no noticable performance hit, full DX10 support by somehow virtualizing the video such that whichever OS is visible gets almost full hardware access, yet can somehow be flipped to a virtual device when the other OS gets activated. WHen an average user flips to Windows they can't realize it is a VM. All of their games, video stuff, USB devices, etc. have to work normally. I'm guessing a buttload of custom Windows drivers are going to be needed. And I'd also guess you won't be able to put any ol video card in and have it work, especially the first year or two.
> So the question is, if Trusted Computing is such a boon for users, why > does it still have features that only serve to undermine those very users?
Or you might consider a slightly bigger world than your basement and uses for computers besides downloading porn and playing WoW. Remote attestation might not be something you care for, but if you were designing an ATM system you might feel differently about the ability to know, with a pretty high confidence, that the remote terminals are uncorrupted.
You are stuck on the idea that it is YOUR computer and that will always be so, that the person in front of the display owns the machine. But that just isn't true in a great many scenarios. I'd really like a system that allowed me to know if one of the workstations around here had been compromised. All of our machines are 'mine' in the sense I'm the one responsible for them, the employees sitting in front of em just use em.
Even remote attestation can be used for either good or evil. The key is to resist when big media tries to use it for evil. And it's evil because the machines aren't TimeWarner's yet they want to assert ownership over them just because they are displaying their precious IP.
> So is this fundamentally different from Asus putting SplashTop on some of their netbooks and motherboards?
Very different. What Phoenix is doing is pushing Windows into a VM, permanently. The machine boots Linux from the BIOS and loads Windows into a VM container in the background while you have a basic Linux desktop to browse the web, read email, etc. You can flip between Windows and Linux with a hotkey. But Windows stays in the VM. This offers a hope of eventually containing the menace from Redmond. The question is whether Phoenix will want to go there.
Imagine a real firewall dropped between the virtual NIC in Windows and the real one. Even better, just forget the network in Windows for most uses, use the Firefox on the 'other' more safe system that is a hotkey away. Push this tech a bit more and have seamless Windows(tm) windows running rootless on the X side. Now we don't even need to worry about two different displays. Basically, this tech offers the potential to blur the line between Windows and a real Internet ready system in ways impossible to predict. This could erase enough of Windows' defects to keep it viable or it could remove enough of the reasons to run Windows it hurts it. But Pandora's box is open and it will be interesting.
Ya know, there had better be more to this story that it appears, otherwise somebody needs to get their ass sued.
Now I'm normally a 'first we kill all the lawyers' type and would normally support the cops on the grounds they are too hamstrung by stupid lawsuits and even dumber (or should I say evil? Yes I should.) judges who take the side of criminals over upholding the law. But there IS a line, and this case just has 'abuse of power' stamped all over it and somebody needs to get punished for it. The arresting officer and his superior obviously, and whoever was the officer in charge back at the station who allowed the situation to continue there, all need a demotion.
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> But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences
> are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe.
That is one opinion. Another, with a fair amount of evidence to back it, is that every time the issue is put to the test if women don't do equally well the definition of the task is changed until the desired result, equality, appears.
Exaxmple: Carly Fiorina destroyed Lucent and Hewlet Packard yet she is still considered a trailblazing leader who's opinion is sought out because to do otherwise might imply that she was a fool given a position she was unfit for to demonstrate political correctness. A male CEO who failed as utterly as she did would not likely be remembered.... although there are exceptions; the corporate world isn't quite sane now is it.
Bottom line, people should be free to try to be anything they want within a few sensible limits[1] and anybody who tries to stand in someone's way due to race, sex, etc. should attract the social sanction of all right thinking folk. And anyone discriminating while holding any power of the state should be removed from power.
Demanding equality of results is madness. We have tens of thousands of years of cultural differences and quite probably a few biological ones as well. And anyway, I though we were supposed to celebrate diversity and how can you HAVE diversity if there aren't differences to celebrate and draw strength from? The progresive newspeak diversity is so sterile and boring, where you have a rainbow of races, gender identies and cultures yet everyone thinks exactly alike and all results among identity groups are equal in every measurable way.
[1] Do I really have to spell out those obvious exceptions? It would just go offtopic at warp speed.
> Not letting women opt to choose the very subjects they're interested
> in is, uh, the *opposite* of freedom for women.
Oh you silly silly person. These things are done in the interest of higher morality than what some woman thinks she wants. First and foremost is the self esteem of the progressives dictating the politically correct rules. If they feel better about themselves, for demonstrating their higher moral development and general superiority, then the project is a success. It is about our betters guiding us inferior creatures into a better world in spite of us being unworthy worms that counts. We will be told what do do, nay even what to WANT and we will be grateful to bask in the glow of our betters, knowing that they care for us even though we are unworthy, that they will be our shepherd and show us how to be obedient to their will.
> Both genders are equally smart but think differently to solve the same problems.
It boggles the mind how anyone could type politically correct tripe like that and expect no laughter. If you assume men and women think differently there must be fields of thought each will be better/worse at. To postulate that men and women have notably different mental machinery yet are statistically EXACTLY equal in attacking EVERY field of though would require a coincidence so improbable as to, like the poor Babelfish, be seen as the final proof for the non-existence of God.
> ..talking about a world without prejudice is like the scientist saying "imagine a spherical cow...".
Not quite. The spherical cow is a simplification for ease of communicating a complex idea. The idea of blind justice is the goal we should be working toward, admitting that as imperfect humans we might never actually reach it. Having an unreachable goal is still useful in the same way as the cow though as an easy way to judge whether a new policy is wise or unwise by asking whether it moves toward or away from an easy to understand goal.
> You seem to have a chip on your shoulder when it comes to gay people (this post
I'll keep this short to avoid going too far offtopic. The objection is to the attempt to conflate behavior choices with inate difference in the attempt to make 'gay rights' a civil rights issue. That way leads to madness on too many levels to do justice to here. Probably the biggest is that if we open Pandora's Box and declare some behaviours are protected it won't stop with just one. And once we accept the notion that people aren't able to control themselves the very concept of self government is not just absurd it is dangerous. That and the judicial activism involved in 'gay marriage' that swerves back on topic. I have far less objection to lawful attempts, i.e. I'd still vote/agitate against it but wouldn't overly object to losing the argument in a legislature or at the ballot box. Judges making law is wrong.
> You can either balance the equation by ensuring diversity,
Bad idea. I have less objection (there are more and less offensive methods) to the notion of encouraging diversity but 'ensuring' diversity is just code for quotas and I fail to see how you fight discrimination with discrimination. It's destroying the village to save it. It's either muddled thinking at work or more wicked intentions cloaked in lies.
> I'm no real fan of affirmative action. Was it necessary at one point? Maybe...
A good argument could be mounted that it creates at least as many problems as it solves. The reason we have made progress on these problems is we managed to change minds. Affirmative action blunts the moral arguments that changes minds and wastes a lot of time arguing over it. Even with the downsides, was it required to get the ball rolling? Reasonable people can argue it. Even if it was we should be working to get rid of it as fast as possible.
> After reading the whole piece, I think I understand what she was trying to say, but it wasn't a great way of saying it.
If it were her only incident perhaps. If she hadn't been reading prepared remarks it could be written off as a simple brain fart. But she has more of this stuff. But there is so much more, even from that same speech beyond the pull quote every news outlet is running with. She says there are "basic differences" in the way people "of color" exercise "logic and reasoning." That sort of thing should be so far beyond the realm of polite conversation she should not only be disqualified from being elevated to the SCOTUS she should have been forced to retire from public life days from uttering the comments. Or at least have been forced to endure sensitivity training. (Equal treatement and all that.)
> I think I'm the sort of person you hate.
Only if you are a socialist/marxist/communist. And there it is more like implacable opposition. A burning hate causes one to make mistakes after all. Socialism is 180 degrees opposed to Truth Justice and the American Way and I take the view there is no point to compromising with em, finding common ground or any of that stuff. They are to be defeated and driven from the public debate.
> Having more than one sensibility in a discussion is inherently superior to a monoculture.
Which would have been a perfectly uncontroversial thing for her to have said. Alas, she didn't say that. Like most of her sort she sees everything through a prism of race, gender and class. And again like most of the ilk she appears to come from the elite. Private schools straight into Princeton and they are trying to sell us her 'personal story of struggle.' Bull crap. Pampered spoiled preppy brat who was easy prey for the campus lefties to form a young skull full of mush into a party aparatchik.
> You assume she's a member of "La Raza" (a supremacist group) just because she's latina?
No, I am taking the American Bar Association's word for it. Being published in the Berkley La Raza Law Journal isn't final proof, but if ya can't trust the ABA to know basic facts about a sitting Federal Judge could somebody explain why we take their opinion on appointments seriously?
> So you also assume that all white males are members of the KKK?
Again, no. Ones that open their chowhole in public to spout nonsense about white supremancy? Yup.
> By calling her a bigot, I assume that you are referring to her comment about Latinos...
That, several other choice quotes and several of her rulings. But that quote is almost enough to damn her by itself. She asserts that being a latina, in and of itself, makes her more likely to make good rulings than a white male. The belief that one race is superior to another has a word to describe it, racist. Her belief that a woman superior to a man also has a word, sexist. Put em together and you get bigot. That one quote she could call a mistake, do a mea culpa and skate by. Add in the whole litany and it adds up to a nasty bigot who doesn't even subscribe to the notion of blind justice. She doesn't say it is hard to achive, that we aren't achiving it, etc. By word and deed she makes it plain that she doesn't agree with the notion that blind justice is a worthy goal.
Sorry, my ideal Justice is not an emotion driven empath. Find me nine Vulcans and I'd say put em on the court and have done with it. It's called the Rule of Law and it is in direct opposition to her and Dear Leader's notion of the Rule of Men. I want laws that the people who must live under them can know the outcome of without needing a trail in 99% of cases. Our courts are clogged because nobody can predict the outcome, thus the incentive to roll the dice for the side with a weak case and the urge to settle anyway for the side with the stronger case. In a perfect world the lower courts, where they were judging instead of making policy, would be so in sync the Supreme Sourt would be bored.
> I know some white males (full disclosure: I am a white male) like to pretend that
> we live in a race- and gender-blind society, but we don't.
Oh I'll admit we aren't there yet. Now comes the harder (at least for progressives) question, How do we get there?
There are two broad camps out there.
The American camp says "All Men are created equal." We understand that people do differ in reality, but any variation among the races, geners, etc are not as important as random differences between people in general and that at any rate we are all Equal before the Law. No we haven't achieved utopia in practice but it is the goal we have been working toward for a couple hundred years and we were making pretty good progress until we lost power in the 20th Century.
Then there is the Progressive camp. They believe (but deny) that people are defined by their race, gender, sexual disorders, etc. and justice is only a term to be applied to groups. In their world you have Black Justice, Jewish Justice, Lesbian Justice, etc and they are actually different. Of course in that worldview it is a quick leap to figure that if you are Jewish you don't want Black Justice. In other words it leads to balkanizarion, not a stable Republic. Of course divide and conquer is a time tested power tactic. But the important takeaway is to note that the Progressive worldview rejects (while paying lip service to) the entire notion of justice being blind so they don't even agree with us what the goal is.
Larry Summers was driven from polite society for a couple of years for the crime of asking whether it was desirable to broach the subject of whether there were basic differences between men and women. This bigot stands up and asserts there are fundamental differences between both the genders AND races[1] as if it were a settled fact and is on a fast track to the Supreme Court.
Just proves I really don't understand the progressive mind. I really wish you guys could settle what the rules are in such a way you could actually enumerate them in public. Which of course is exactly what will never happen because to speak them would give up the game as any sane person could only laugh.
[1] As a member of La Raza (The Race) and a good ivy league educated feminist she of course asserted that a latina is inherently superior to a white male.
> For example, the war in Afghanistan is a legal war. The 2003 Iraqi war was not.
You fail at history. The first Gulf War never officially ended. That means every time Saddam violated the cease fire agreement we had the option of resuming the war. That we went to the UN again and wanked away was purely for domestic consumption. Without making that effort, and proving to all the UN was ineffectual, the Democrat leaders in Congress would have never voted for the use of force resolution. Because Bush thought that if Congress blessed the 2003 phase of the war the Democrats would be forced to support the war effort against their will after they had voted for it. Well despite degrees from Harvard and Yale Pres. Bush still suffered under the delusion Democrats have any honor and will keep their word. They aren't and don't because they know their media corps have their back, ready and willing to push any inconvient facts down the memory hole. A lie isn't really a lie if nobody calls ya on it is their motto.
> But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by
> the UN rather than any single country.
Perhaps in a perfect world you would be correct. But we don't live in a land of Unicorns and Rainbows. We live in a world where people were stupid enough to form the United Nations. One Nation, One Vote... in a world where the majority of countries were and still are unfree tyrannies. If I ever get a time machine that's probably my first stop, to meet the King of the Idiots who first proposed that idea. The UN isn't corrupt or 'broken', it is functioning exactly as it was designed, as a Parliament of Tyrants. Or an Axis of Evil if you will.
Seriously, it amazes me that the UN can, with a straight face and not as an April Fools gag, give the gavel of a human rights organization to Iran, Cuba, etc. Even more amazing is that the free nations of the world sit silently by and allow it to go on without laughing or leaving.
If we had a League of Free Nations the idea might have more merit, but most of the so called Free societies have been hellbent of defining Freedom Down lately, sadly the US among them. Most western social democracies these days have rigid hate speech laws, many have libel laws that are nightmares and all would regulate speech on the Internet in ways Americans would be horrified at and demand that 'something be done' within a year of turning control over to even the more enlightened western countries.
> ..but they become bitchy once you start mentioning 64 bit processors.
I know you are trying to troll, but good grief you need to kick yer skills up a notch. You ain't going to get the coveted -1 Troll with such weak ass efforts. Slag Apple or Obama a bit if you want to see Karma burst into flames.
The first port of Linux from x86 was to the 64 bit Alpha. And x86_64 on an RPM based system 'just works.' Things are a little more backwards on Debian/Ubuntu but still on par with Win64.
> Seriously!! I mean, how can anyone sleep at night knowing that one of their neighbours might possibly have no
> fingerprints and be nothing but a terrorist waiting to happen!?!?!?!
Of course! I had forgotten that in bizarro/Kostard world the only thing we watch for at borders is terrorists (who are a figment of Bushitler's mind). We all know that ordinary criminals and assorted riffraff never try to enter the country. You know, people with a warrant out for their arrest who might think removing their fingerprints might allow their fake/stolen ID to get em past the less than geniuses the government hires as guards.
> Terrible New Terrorism Drug Helps Terrorists Evade Identification And Cause More Terrible Terror.
I know that stuff like the above passes for fall down funny amongst the Daily Show/Colbert/Kos set but really, you guys need to stop hitting the bong so hard it fries yer brains out.
Just how common do you thing people with no fingerprints are? Don't you WANT something that odd to raise a red flag? If this sort of thing isn't supposed to raise a flag, just what in your bizarro world would?
While TFA says the Dr. recommends patients carry a letter explaining this odd side effect it doesn't make clear whether the patient in question was carrying such documentation or even if it was this incident that lead to the recommendation. As someone who has who has made a habit of reading news copy with a jaundiced eye, especially Reuters, one gets the impression this omission and the misleading way the article was written was deliberate.
> It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond.
Everyone is missing the point. If this one turns out to be a troll/trial balloon the next one won't. Reason? ASUS is departing the 'netbook' market as fast as they can do it and avoid anyone noticing.... sorta. Netbooks are small, inexpenensive, flash based, net centric devices. Now go look at ASUS's EeePC line and tell me how many of their recent offerings fit that description. $500 small laptops are going to ship with Windows, its just the way the monopoly works and ASUS has been in the game long enough they understand that. But since the term 'netbook' has a hotness associated with it they want to prevent most customers from realizing the bait-n-switch that is happening.
Why are they doing this, since they created the netbook in the first place? Several reasons. $500 SKUs have more profit in them than $300 ones, so follow the money right off. Second they have a very long term established relationship with Intel that will prevent them from being one of the first ARM vendors and they are smart enough to realize that once those ship the sub $350 space will go almost 100% ARM+Linux or ARM+CE and to compete there they would have to throw Intel under the bus. Finally, look at their contract manufacturing division (Pegatron) which is ramping up cheap ARM netbooks under a variety of badges that don't say ASUS as we speak.
Nice try, but you fail.
> It may have always meant "planned economy," but that doesn't imply a single planner, nor would it take force to ensure compliance.
Sorry, but a planned economy only works with a central planner to replace the invisible hand. No village can know what they need to be producing to satisfy a need hundreds of miles away or one anticipated in the future. And since price no longer serves to communicate oversupply or shortage anymore only a central planner can organize things. Except for that pesky fact that no central planner CAN possess enough information to make such plans. The economics and math behind that are above a slashdot conversation and frankly bits are above my skills so go Google the details.
> The barrier to this kind of system is the "hoarding" mentality most people have.
No, the barrier is human nature as you suggest, but a different aspect. It is motive, as in what is the motive to open these mines you speak of, plant and reap the farms, manufacture things, etc. when there is no reward for doing it. Why study to be a doctor or engineer when there isn't a reward, even if the State will provide the education for free? You get exactly what some people's committee decides you 'need' and nothing more. And what you 'need' as a doctor isn't much different than some menial worker who 'pretends to work while they pretend to pay.' You might be provided a vehicle that the factory worker wouldn't get so that you can make house calls but you won't be provided any extra fuel for personal use.... unless you are a high Party official.
> No one's tied to a particular community, and can move to where ever to persue what jobs they want.
It has never worked that way in any implemented version of Communism, the State allocates labor with the same central planning as any other resource. All implemented versions of Fascism, Socialism and Communism[1] have shared totalatarianism in common, as in 'everything inside the State, nothing outside the State.' This means the State is what matters, and the only thing that matters. The individual humans trapped within are simply resources. Again, except for the maximum leader (every totalitarian system has needed a single person to personify the State) and the high Party officials who are more equal than everyone else. That aspect is almost Feudal.
[1] European Democratic Socialism has escaped the worst features of Socialism so far because there has been sufficient reactionary elements to prevent a total slide into Socialism.
> ... is that the word no longer means communism. Now it means oppressive government,
No, it ALWAYS meant 'planned economy' and that implies a planner. To make that work requires force, and the only entity which can use force is the State.
And that is why the Internet is about as far from .communism as you can get and the article is either idiocy or pushing a political agenda. There is no central planning on the Internet, which is why it works so well. Voluntary cooperation is as American/Capitalist/etc as Mom, Apple Pie and (until recently) Chevy.
> ..what is there to stop Apple from no longer selling boxed copies of their OS and thus killing them?
The hole in Apple's product line is currently so fscking huge that even that wouldn't totally stop clones. You could bundle a whole Mini with a clone tower Mac, move the licensed OS from Mini to the clone and ship the Mini kitted out as a 'free' Mythtv/whatever settop box. Yes there is that much room in the line between the mostly useless Mini and the overkill Mac Pro that there would be customers willing to go for it, especially if it were settled in court that Apple couldn't force the vendor out of business with legal fees and leave the customers unsupported.
> Maybe we wouldn't have had the church holding back science for so long.
I know it is just so trendy to hold views like that, but a little historical perspective might change your poorly informed opinion. You might start by comparing and contrasting the interaction of science and religion in the Enlightenment period with similar but less successful examples. The Islamic world almost but not quite had an intellectual awakening hundreds of years before Christian Europe awoke from the dark ages. However in the end their belief system proved incompatible with the mental processes needed to achieve the Scientific Method and they languish to this day in an intellectual void where few useful mental products are produced. Eastern cultures achieved stable civilizations hundreds (as in LOTS of hundreds) earlier yet settled into stagnation instead of launching the Enlightenment and the furious pace of scientific and cultural progress that followed. And even pre Christian western civilization had it's dark chapters. I seem to recall a rather famous Greek philosopher who was forced to commit suicide for 'corrupting the youth' among other crimes. Perhaps you might want to look that tale up.
Our understanding of thw world has been progressing, it is still a common mistake to forget that and to fall into the intellectual trap of judging past civilizations by the standards and knowledge of today. Forgetting we are the end product of the toil, breakthroughs and even mistakes of past generations. And to aid against Pride, just remember that future generations will almost certainly view us as semi civilized barbarians. Just imagine how they will likely learn about the horrors of the *isms of the 20th Century; with their hundred million corpses in mass graves arguments over in various ineffectual collectivist schemes that future generations will be hard pressed to understand, except to recoil in horror from the numbers and comdemn us as savages.
> In the meantime, you're being completely disingenuous yourself. If you really believed that piracy
> was no worse with sneakernet than it is now, you'd be too stupid to have learned to type.
Yes the Internet has made things a little easier, but not as much as you seem to believe. I'm guessing you are too young to remember 'user groups'. All you needed was a couple of systems setup with two floppy drives and you were off to the races. A floppy could be copied in a minute flat on the better systems, a bit longer on the slow crappy serial based systems like the C64 and Atari. And copy they did, for hours while the users talked and talked. It was typical for everyone who attended semi-regular to have several shoe boxes of copied software.
Now it would be less practical because media capacity has outstripped transfer speed a little, but it is still pretty darned fast to dupe DVDs, especially if you cache the read and settle into stamping out multiple copies. CDs can even get pretty close to that one minute per copy speed of yore.
But what would totally reimagine sneakernet would be a new file sharing protocol that would allow two people to connect their disparate devices (laptop, mp3 player, smartphone, etc) on a local (wired or wireless) link and basically smartly sync everything between them. Smart in the sense that each user could set rules to decide what they want to receive so they don't fill up their device with a bunch of stuff they don't want. Have it remember you refused that pile of every episode of (insert name of series you don't particularly like) on your co-workers stash and never grab it even if it disappears and later shows back up on their laptop. Let the **AA clamp down on the Internet and watch how fast what I just described gets invented and popularized.
Give storage a few more doublings in capacity and music becomes a 'Pokemon' exercise. The top level packrats 'have em all' as in first every song that ever charted, then to every album commercially released and finally just every audio recording one could ever want. All available for sharing (via Internet or sneakernet) and spread around the world in so many locations no **AA effort could ever stamp it out. A few years later the same happens to movies and then TV shows. Children will be given a copy of 'everything' by their parents, supplemented by the cool new stuff by their friends.
How does the **AA continue to exist when that world appears? I believe the idea of copyright has merit even if the current eternal copyright is taking things way too far. But what I believe doesn't matter, the tech is coming and nothing I say or do, nothing you say or do, nothing the **AA says or does, nor even what government says, does or legislates is going to do more than hasten or delay that change a year or so.
> True. But they were mostly useless.
Depends on what your definition of useless is. Go read _Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies_ by M. Stanton Evans. The fifty year seal on the Senate records has expired and combined with many other sources, all well footnoted, that book makes several things clear.
1. McCarthy had no idea just how far the rabbit hole went. Which is why he lost. But what he did know was for the most part accurate.
2. The US State Dept from the entry of the Soviet Union into WWII to the end of the period covered in the book was essentially in Soviet hands. China and Eastern Europe fell into Communist hands with the heroic assistance of the 5th Column within our foreign service.
3. A non-trivial but not quite majority of the US Congress were either Communists or useful idiots. The majority were Dems but the Pro/Anti Communist line hadn't hardened alone party lines to the same extent. Many Dems were still hard core anti-communist, including for example Robert Kennedy who served with Joe McCarthy for a time.
Again, I dare you kids to read it. It is brutal in the attention to detail and use of actual declassified documents.
> What's the point of running Linux this way?
You are asking the wrong question. Try "What is the point of running Windows this way?" Phoenix isn't trying to push "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" here.
> you can do this now: run Windows from a VM under an ordinary Linux distro.
In theory at least. What they hope is different is that is Phoenix doing it. They think they have the power to establish a standard here. If they succeed in pushing Windows on a large percentage of desktops into a secure sandbox it changes the game. You or me running Windows in VMWare doesn't.
For them to pull it off they are going to have to provide a seamless experience. That means no noticable performance hit, full DX10 support by somehow virtualizing the video such that whichever OS is visible gets almost full hardware access, yet can somehow be flipped to a virtual device when the other OS gets activated. WHen an average user flips to Windows they can't realize it is a VM. All of their games, video stuff, USB devices, etc. have to work normally. I'm guessing a buttload of custom Windows drivers are going to be needed. And I'd also guess you won't be able to put any ol video card in and have it work, especially the first year or two.
> So the question is, if Trusted Computing is such a boon for users, why
> does it still have features that only serve to undermine those very users?
Or you might consider a slightly bigger world than your basement and uses for computers besides downloading porn and playing WoW. Remote attestation might not be something you care for, but if you were designing an ATM system you might feel differently about the ability to know, with a pretty high confidence, that the remote terminals are uncorrupted.
You are stuck on the idea that it is YOUR computer and that will always be so, that the person in front of the display owns the machine. But that just isn't true in a great many scenarios. I'd really like a system that allowed me to know if one of the workstations around here had been compromised. All of our machines are 'mine' in the sense I'm the one responsible for them, the employees sitting in front of em just use em.
Even remote attestation can be used for either good or evil. The key is to resist when big media tries to use it for evil. And it's evil because the machines aren't TimeWarner's yet they want to assert ownership over them just because they are displaying their precious IP.
> So is this fundamentally different from Asus putting SplashTop on some of their netbooks and motherboards?
Very different. What Phoenix is doing is pushing Windows into a VM, permanently. The machine boots Linux from the BIOS and loads Windows into a VM container in the background while you have a basic Linux desktop to browse the web, read email, etc. You can flip between Windows and Linux with a hotkey. But Windows stays in the VM. This offers a hope of eventually containing the menace from Redmond. The question is whether Phoenix will want to go there.
Imagine a real firewall dropped between the virtual NIC in Windows and the real one. Even better, just forget the network in Windows for most uses, use the Firefox on the 'other' more safe system that is a hotkey away. Push this tech a bit more and have seamless Windows(tm) windows running rootless on the X side. Now we don't even need to worry about two different displays. Basically, this tech offers the potential to blur the line between Windows and a real Internet ready system in ways impossible to predict. This could erase enough of Windows' defects to keep it viable or it could remove enough of the reasons to run Windows it hurts it. But Pandora's box is open and it will be interesting.
Ya know, there had better be more to this story that it appears, otherwise somebody needs to get their ass sued.
Now I'm normally a 'first we kill all the lawyers' type and would normally support the cops on the grounds they are too hamstrung by stupid lawsuits and even dumber (or should I say evil? Yes I should.) judges who take the side of criminals over upholding the law. But there IS a line, and this case just has 'abuse of power' stamped all over it and somebody needs to get punished for it. The arresting officer and his superior obviously, and whoever was the officer in charge back at the station who allowed the situation to continue there, all need a demotion.