I hope you are right, but they sure haven't cared about their stock price these long years since the.bomb went off. It has just sat there. I'd have thought they would have been big and powerful enough to do things to make the stock go up, even if just a bit. But it has just sat there. They got desperate enough to pass out sagans of cash in special dividends and the stock? It just sat there.
> Microsoft is becoming a mature company and they are operating like one.
Mature stocks pay dividends, since the stock price isn't likely to be going up much anymore. Except for the aforementioned special dividends, Microsoft has preferred to sit on Scrooge McDuck size piles of cash. Now, with a pile of cash worthy of the greediest miser they are out borrowing yet more cash. They have a plan. Everybody is weakened by the recession and they are about to take advantage of their relative strength.... while they still can. Because I do think you are right and that they have no choice but to become a mature company.
Yup, They bet they can make a better return on it than the interest they will pay out. But still, it was only a couple of years ago they were passing out special dividends because they had so much cash on hand and apparently couldn't find better uses to put it to. So something is about to go down and it will be mega. With 25B now, add another 6B and they could pull off a 31B all cash transaction. And that never happens, there is always stock and such involved so they could be planning anything up to 50-75B So no, they won't be buying Google or IBM, but almost every other tech player should be looked at as a possible target.
You see it as a negative, I see it as a positive. We need con men like these guys to remind folks to not believe every smooth talking hustler who comes along selling something that sounds too good to be true... if you will only make a token investment today. Two guys asking for $35K a pop expecting sane people to believe they are going to pull off a 27B project that pushes every politically correct button one can imagine.
And if they DO collect any money, that is also great because as the wise man said, "It is immoral to let a sucker keep his money."
Has anyone sat down and run the numbers on just the 110 megawatts worth of photovoltaics? Then add in the infrastructure to store and transport that kind of power up and down the track. Now consider this would be among the fastest trains ever put into service and it is going to be solar powered electric? I guess it will have super size batteries to run at night? No, either the train is a good idea regardless of power source or it isn't. And the solar power station is a good idea on it's own or it isn't. The attempt to sell them as a package is just an appeal to emotion amongst the greens who these guys (rightly) figure will be the key decision makers on giving them the cash they are asking for.
> but when the store refuses to sell you something just because your valid CC does not have a U.S. billing address
That is a complex issue. I don't have any answers and if you thought about it a bit I seriously doubt you do either. Or are you just too shy to step forward, enlighten us all and claim a Nobel in economics?
The problem is copyright is a totally artificial construct and almost every country does it a little different. And the licenses the distributers have tend not to cross borders. And it just has to be that way for now. I don't like it either but until I can propose a better solution I won't bitch too loudly that nobody else has solved the problem. Just one example. Imagine the DVD. Now imagine one sold in India. It sells for a buck or two, because there that is all they can pay. If it were legal for copyrighted material to freely cross borders they would be selling for close to that here in the USA. At which point one of two things happens, profits on DVDs evaporate or prices in India rise enough (to prices they CAN'T PAY) to make exporting them into the US unprofitable. So somebody gets screwed. When somebody brings a few books or DVDs across a border in their luggage we all ignore it because we have to for practical reasons, but crates of the stuff would simply wreck the carefully managed artificial scarcity that copyright is based on.
Any legal construct that lets iTunes sell into every international territory at US prices on the date of US availability would pretty much have to include the same sort of thing for everyone else. Now consider that every film or song sold here in the US has some sort of legal setup in each foreign market where a local company has the legal rights to that material inside their territory. How are they going to like Apple (or Amazon, etc. This thread is about Apple but no need to just pick on them.) suddenly competing with their 'exclusive right' to sell that material? An exclusive right they paid a pretty penny to get by the way.
> Imagine a shop where every item has two price tags:
Oh stop dragging race into everything. Besides we all know that in this case it would be one price for gays and a higher price for heterosexuals. Of course the very act of buying an Apple product involves bending over and taking it up the pooper (over both the EULA and pricetag) I guess nobody would ever pay the higher price.
> I expect to see this meta tags on most sites in the near future.
Duh. How many ad networks would continue to do business with a site that lacked that tag if it ever got popular enough to have a measurable impact on ad impressions? Exactly. Thus this is pointless. People really should THINK before putting their mouth in gear. Guy wants to make everybody happy, which is a good intent, but it can't be done. The tension between ads and people not wanting to see the crap can't be solved by any means anyone is willing to undertake.
Personally I could care less about normal ads. Heck, I used to buy Computer Shopper to read the ads. Most of the ads I see here on slashdot aren't even a problem. It is sites who sign up for ad networks that accept the sleezy animated crap that are the problem. And nobody has a plan to deal with that.
> From what I hear, it's Apple's store and they are free to do whatever they want with it.
You know, it IS Apple's store. But why is it I only hear this when novel approach to property rights when it is Apple that must be defended from the latest otherwise indefensible idiocy they have gotten up to. Why not "It's Comcast's wires, they can do whatever they want with them." Or AIG signed contracts, Congress even put in a rider to allow it so why doesn't everyone shut the hell up about those bonuses.
No, even if Apple does have the 'right' is no reason for people not to take em to task and/or laugh at them when they are acting like idiots. Because we also have the right to speak, or at least I do since I haven't bought any Apple products... who knows, perhaps their absolute rights include a rider in their EULA saying no Apple owner may criticize The Company.
No, nobody ELSE seems to have such an absolute property right as Apple Inc. They even have an absolute right to dictate whether you can install their software on 3rd party hardware and whether/what 3rd party software is to be permitted to run on their operating systems. They have an absolute right to control products they manufacture from the day they build it until the day it is recycled, customer be damned.
> The higher profile this becomes, the greater likelihood Microsoft will step in and you will suddenly > find all those laptops running Windows, and therefore your donations going to promote Microsoft lock-in.
No, if it works out like every other laptop givaway the government has run, after a lot of infighting they will throw out a bunch of Apple stuff. The schools, these days being all Windows shops, will be totally unable to maintain them or even find good uses for them and they will mostly useless except for the web browser. Typical schools these days are chocka blocka full of closed source Windows applications for everything from K through 12, Reader Rabbit to SAT Prep stuff. And it all runs on Windows, not in a web browser.
Nah, that is just defeatist talk. If we had the will we wouldn't have any insurmountable problems. But if you are looking for reasons to abandon a technology anyway there are always plenty of justifications to offer.
Who needs huge cast containment vessels? That only applies if you aren't going to build safer pebble bed reactors. Engineers in short supply? Solvable. One we have a lot of expertise in the Navy. They aren't currently very involved in the GWOT so their expertise could be borrowed. Two we concentrate our limited design resources on getting a couple of bulletproof designs and simply replicate those on a mass production scale instead of the current practice where most plants are effectively one off designs.
The ageing installed units are a problem. But with clever engineers I'm certain they could be retrofitted to run another decade. And with a serious effort we could have a hundred new mid size reactors online in a decade. I'm talking executive orders removing the EPA from the whole loop sort of serious effort but it could be done if we really wanted off the foreign oil habit.
As for reprocessing, breeder reactors. Yes there are issues but if our current energy strategy really is a threat to both national security and the environment we will expend the resources to solve them.
> It's true that neo-puritans have glommed on to the environmental movement since the early '70's > to the extent that they have dominated it until recently, but there are some actual green voices > out there, clamouring to be heard amidst the neo-puritan lies.
You go right on believing that like a good little useful idiot. The so called environmental movement has been and still is dominated by Communists. Or do you think it coincidence that the first Earth Day happened to also be Lenin's 100th Birthday? They weren't afraid anybody would make that connection publicly because they owned the media then as fully as they do now.
I know it has to suck to be a true believer in a cause that has been hijacked by a movement with a totally different goal but wake up and smell the coffee, we don't get the world we want, we all get this crappy one that is lousy with communists. Yes some enviros simply hate all industry, some hate h. sapiens. But they don't matter any more than you do when the green movement is planning it's next big PR stunt. It is all just another front to push the same tired ideas. Their proposed solutions at that first Earth Day to avert the coming Ice Age are exactly the same ones they push now to stop Global Warming^W^WClimate Change.
> The thing that should be stunningly obvious to everyone is: sacrifice is unsustainable. It requires more > self-discipline than any large group of humans has ever managed, and in the absence of self-discipline it > requires unsustainable (to say nothing of unethical) enforcement measures.
How many will rise up and revolt against the carbon tax? We conservatives will howl and bitch but we won't have the stones to start a revolution. No, they know how to boil frogs. It will all be quite sustainable... right up until our civilization collapses, which is the goal. They assume that at that point they can impose 100% pure Socialism on a broken and scared populace. And they might be right. If they can maintain control of the mass media they will probably pull it off.
> The neo-puritans are in particular trouble right now because green tech has reached industrial > viability--wind farms, solar farms, biodiesel, etc. are all becoming viable industries, and in opposing > them neo-puritans necessarily reveal that they don't love the environment, they hate industry.
Bah, none of those green technologies are currently viable if the government subsidies went away. Nukes are viable IN SPITE of the best efforts of the government to regulate it into impracticality. And more importantly, none of the alternatives will provide enough energy without deployment on a scale that would offend even my limited green sensibilities. Do we cover several states in endless ranks of solar collectors and windmills? There isn't enough farmland to grow both food and enough biofuels to power our current economy and I want the economy to grow, now shrink.
Give us unlimited cheap electricity and somebody will solve the storage problem and then we say goodbye to fossil fuel. You want to stop using the stuff to save the environment, I want to stop using it because it is funding our enemies and must eventually become scarce. So why can't we agree that the only way to save the world (and civilization) is to defeat the so called environmentalists and seize the power of the atom!
Of course. But the goal is to make nuke plants impractical and any excuse will serve. Because if we were to build a crapload of the newer safe plants we would have plenty of energy, build enough and somebody would find a way to store it in vehicles. But none of that is green. The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
> Done. Now he can double-click on an EXE, and it will work.
Uh. Have you ever actually TRIED that? More often than not you get an epic fail. Sometimes you get an application that almost but not quite works. Very rarely you get 'just works.' Use the commercial Crossover Office and the odds get slightly better. Go look at winehq or codeweaver's compatibility lists sometime. Most apps don't work. Microsoft gave the Wine team several years where everyone was stuck on the WinXP APIs and it wasn't enough for them to catch up. My guess is they will finally achieve 99% success running WinXP apps about the same time DOSEMU finally worked.... about three years after anyone cared anymore.
Believe it or not, I do know a bit about Debian. And it sucks too from the quality standpoint these days. Allow me to demonstrate.
I have these old EPIA machines I'm repurposing. They will be off the net most of the time with occasional dialup access. I don't want to be seeing them back on my bench anytime soon. So that eliminated Fedora since F10 will go unsupported before years end. RHEL & clones are out since nothing new runs on an EPIA. (In their past life they ran WBEL3 just fine, but that's pretty old.) Ubuntu doesn't make it to the installer before going foom. Ok, Debian.
Nope. Debian 4.0 and 5.0.1 have something hosed in the name service. No network, no desktop. A minute and twenty seconds from entering name/password until the desktop appears because Nautilus is hanging for a whole minute. GDM does a similar but shorter hang everytime the login appears. Ain't deployable. I have been configuring TCP/IP, on linux no less, for going on fifteen years and I haven't found the problem in a few hours of config file twiddling, googling and even got desperate enough to pop into #debian. If I can't figure it out is safe to assume 90%+ of users won't figure it out and simply try something else. btw, Fedora 10 works just fine without anything in the network port.
But don't believe me try it yourself. Install a machine from a CD/DVD without anything plugged into the network port. Bring up the new machine and watch GDM sit and spin. Log in and watch Nautilus sit and spin. Dig out an old 4.0 install media and try again. Be appalled that something like that could make it into TWO stable releases. Debian 5 comes on 5 DVDs now instead of the 4 that 4.0 released, but while quantity has gone up quality apparently hasn't.
And I'm only picking on Debian because you brought it up like some sort of all purpose solution. I could rip on RH's stuff with more experience to make it more vicious. I could start by noting just how many totally different fracking print configuration systems they have shipped without finishing any of them.
> Drepper never suggested not to fix a bug for the ARM architecture....
Couldn't be bothered to read the linked bug discussion could you. Beyond rejecting a fix for an actual problem he even went so far as to say "No, Arm is not supported." Which was of course news to a lot of folks, since Debian has been shipping an official ARM port for years. If glibc isn't accepting patches for platforms Debian is officially supporting it is totally understandable they would adopt a fork that does.
> As the maintainer of GLIBC, he has to be the steward for the greater good of all users.
No, it needs to be correct code. If ARM happens to be the only platform that currenty exercises the bug it is still a bug. Goddamn people, I swear we are getting as blase about fixing bugs as a Microsoft shop. There is no such thing as a good bug, a less important bug, etc. If it is a bug and someone has a patch for it you APPLY THE DAMNED PATCH. If you have a problem with the patch you write a better patch. Not patching at all is never be the answer.
I really hate updating my systems these days, because for every bug fixed it seems you get a fresh new one. Make it shiny, we will fix the bugs later! Of course later never comes, eventually the crap piles up too high and somebody decides to just start over. Which explains the piles of discarded stuff and the new one that also doesn't quite work in most areas, especially in system administration.
Seriously, the Free Software world needs to call a timeout. Establish a core and devote every available resource into making that core bug free and secure. Then allow no change to be committed to that core without extensive peer review to prevent new bugs from getting in. The Linux kernel is hopeless, no chance of getting it to stop and clean up and x.org is currently in a period of upheaval, but the layer above each could be stabilized. Not just coreutils, but everything including the core widget sets, admin tools. Get things to a point where an ordinary userland package will (not might) work even it it wasn't built against the exact same release.
And finish hashing out the whole new/dev/, dbus, etc. and settle the API down enough to document the damned thing. I know UNIX, but this new stuff totally confuses me. WHere does one go to even find out how it is supposed to work? Which of course isn't how it currently DOES sorta work. How does one even know if a particular piece of documentation, sketchy and incomplete as it will certainly be, documents what was, what currently is or what is intended to be?
> And if you kill a few thousand people while waiting for all that to shake out, what matter?
Free will. The trick is ensuring a fully informed patient. Life is about risk. Especially in medicine where almost every drug and surgical procedure carries a non-zero risk of killing you. And if you had cancer you wouldn't think twice about rolling the dice either. The only question that would remain is for you and your doctor to evaluate the newest experimental drugs and pick one. Whats the worst that could happen, you die?
> I guess that's somehow better than killing them by making them wait?
Exactly. Do the numbers. Cold math. Every time some new wonder drug comes out that saves thousands per year just consider this: For every year that drug was moving through the FDA approval process that number of people DIED. Lawyers are quite skilled in pulling the heartstrings with tales of woe on the other side of the ledger but those other people who die waiting for the wheels of the government to slowly grind are just as DEAD, only they are forgotten, with no clever lawyer to speak for them.
Making a drug available in limited quantities to patients who REALLY need it and understand the risks is the morally right thing to do. I doubt you really want to try arguing the other side of that one. And making them more available would improve the approval process by getting real world testing.
>..if the FDA was doing the testing but the drug companies do their own testing.
And shouldn't it be? If they are going to stamp "safe and effective" on a drug wouldn't it make sense to know if it is actually safe? Adn for that declaration to actually mean something? That's the heart of the problem. The FDA imposes endless delays which kill thousands, they raise the cost of drugs and thereby contribute a lot to the high cost of medicine (which we are told can only be fixed with more of the same sort of government foolishness of course) and generally muck everything up. Yet because they are a mindless government agency the end result is useless because they allow bad drugs to get to market and it is a virtual certainty they block good ones as well, we just have no way of measuring that.
It is one thing to criticize, another to propose a solution. So here is one. We already have a limiting factor that prevents bad drugs from reaching the market and pulls them if they are discovered to have problems and it isn't the impotent FDA. It is the insurance industry. If a drug company can't find liability insurance only a foolish, desperate or really wealthy one would put out a drug self insured in this legal environment. So there is your limiting factor. So lets run with that and imagine a two track drug world.
A drug company could release a new drug at any time, so long as they understood they could get the crap sued out of them like things are now. So as soon as they (and their insurance company) had enough confidence in their new drug that the potential for lawsuits was enough smaller than the likely sales they could start selling. Of course medical insurance policies might not want to cover such 'new, experimental and less tested' drugs, doctors might not prescribe them, free market. But people who really need it and are willing to take a risk would no longer have to wait, often until they are long dead, for a new drug. They could also submit to the FDA testing track, with the advantage that with the drug actually selling in low quantity there would be a lot more feedback. At some point the FDA would complete it's testing and either declare the drug too risky to approve or 'safe and effective'. And they could even still sell it after FDA rejection assuming they could still find willing customers and insurance coverage... yea right. But the FDA blessing would end lawsuits. The drug is 'safe and effective' and legally that should be that. It is best practice and you should not be liable if you used the best accepted industry practice. Medicine is still both art and science and people just need to accept that their doctor can't deal in the sort of absolutes that an engineer can.
No, by 'novelty candidate' I mean just that. Jokes. In less serious times perhaps worthy of a protest (none of the above) vote but none I a) know enough about to even know if they are sane or b) people I KNOW to be as much a menace to the Republic as any of the major candidates.
Several assorted Socialists and Communists, I didn't vote for Obama largely because I think it likely he is a Communist, those guys are out of the closet. Then ya get the real cranks and kooks nobody has ever heard of, all of which make Obama's six months in the Senate before heading to Iowa look like vast experience.
And then there is the LP. Impractical and obsessed with legalizing dope in the best of times but went severely idiotarian after 9/11. Mostly nice folks who would like to do right, totally clueless politically and would certainly qualify as a menace (the idiotarian part) to the Republic if one somehow got elected. Because the country ISN'T Libertarian and they can't figure that out, they seem to assume that if they could just get equal time at the debates the reasonableness of their arguments would somehow trigger up this huge reawakening. Nope, most folks like suckling the government teat and getting them off is probably going to take close to the same century it took to reduce a once independent people to servitude.
> Either we're stupid, or we just enjoy being outraged by stupid stuff, I can't tell which...
Oh it gets worse. Ok, you are a drug company and you have a promising drug. After jumping through hoops for as long as a decade you finally get FDA approval. You have tested your new drug in various animals, several stages of human trials and the whole bit. The government has finally certified your drug to be safe and effective. So you go on the market. We will ignore the untold human misery that could have been averted with a faster process since everyone else seems to ignore that detail.
But now imagine something goes wrong. Perhaps a statistically significant number of patients have a bad side effect. You are still going to get yer ass sued off. Even after you spent a decade proving to the government's satisfaction that your new drug was safe and effective you are still legally liable. All those sagans of cash you spent provide zero protection from either civil or criminal liability. The FDA, being the State, is of course blameless. Even better, recent lawsuit verdicts say that even if a doctor misuses your drug (i.e. uses it in ways you clearly labeled it as contraindicated for) juries will still force you to pay up.
Oh, memo to the/. editors. It is the FDA, not the FTC.
>.. be sure that the next constitution isn't just a goddamned piece of paper and provides for some > real method of enforcing "the supreme law of the land"
I have pondered that problem. Ultimately it is a problem in US in that we elect these faithless people again and again. But of course the majority of US are products of government schools which have carefully neglected teaching the founding principles for a couple of generations now. But it is still our fault and the ultimate solution has to come from We The People.
However one nice partial solution I have pondered from time to time would be an Amendment. Yes I know what you are thinking, they ignore everything else why would one more bit of paper do what the others didn't? Ah, but I had an idea.
Proposed Amendment
It shall be legal to slay a faithless Congressman or Senator. When a Citizen is accused of the crime of killing a sitting member of Congress he or she has the option of invoking this Amendment. This implies that the accused is thereby confessing to the act of Murder and is seeking the protection of this Amendment to escape the traditional punishment. At the moment this Amendment is invoked the normal trial is thus finished and a special phase is entered.
The Jury shall be provided with a copy of the US Constituition, including all Amendments. The Accused must cite a specific Act of Congress which was introduced or co-sponsored by the slain Member, and which was enacted into Law after the Member last stood for election. The Jury shall be provided with a complete copy of said Bill. The Jury will then deliberate upon the sole question of whether in fact the Bill was a violation of the Member's Oath of Office. If the Jury, by simple majority vote, decides the Member's Bill was indeed a violation of this Constituition's limited powers the Accused shall be set Free and all reference to his crime of Murder shall be expunged from all official records leaving no impairment to the Accused's liberties. However, to discourage use of this Amendment in place of the normal use of the ballot, should the Jury find the Accused killed a Member who was keeping Faith with his Oath the Accused shall be put to Death by means most cruel within twenty four hours of the verdict being entered.
The Jury shall have the final decision in this matter. No appeal shall be permitted, no mistrial may be declared and no Judge may enter a directed verdict. The Jury shall deliberate until they reach a verdict. In way of guidance to such future juries facing such a weighty decision it should be noted that if the case be not so clear that you have little difficulty deciding you should probably vote to have the killer executed, this Amendment is intended to focus the minds of Congress on the limits to their powers, not to start a bloodbath.
> If you want to break the cycle and change the system, it's simple: have the courage to > vote for the candidate you like the most, regardless of his popularity.
Easier said than done. Take this past cycle. My preferred candidate dropped out the day before our Caucus. So I went anyway and spun again and went for the best pick of the remaining bunch. He dropped just a little later leaving a guy I had swore I would never support as the nominee apparent. So I kept to that oath as best I could. I didn't send any money to him or the national party but did send cash to down ticket candidates. But come the fall I voted for him because there was no way in hell I'd vote for the other party's guy and the 3rd party picks were nothing but novelty candidates. Staying home is a cop out.
So who was I supposed to vote FOR? There were no candidates I didn't loathe but voting is still a civic duty.
Really? So you launched the 2nd American Revolution when the 1st Amendment went away? It did you know, McCain Feingold's purpose was to carefully regulate political speech in the times when it matters most, near an election. It was passed mostly by Democrat politicians but was signed by President Bush even though he knew it to be unconstituitional. He was afraid of the MSM attacking him as a defender of big lobbists (which was no excuse to forsake his Oath) and then the Supremes suprised him and upheld it in one of their infamous 5-4 decisions.
So "Congress shall make no law.." is null and void because the Supremes said Congress CAN make a law so long as they approve of the law. So how many congresscritters did you bag? Uh huh.
When the 'assault weapons ban' was in effect that was most certainly an infringement. Hell, the machine gun ban is most certainly an infringement for the purposes of "..shall not be infringed." since at the time the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms included every weapon the military bore into war. Private militia companies even owned cannon. How many congresscritter and/pr faithless judges did you bag?
>... then why fear simple words no matter how fucking stupid they may or may not be?
I dunno, urging the killing of a US Congresswoman, even one as stupid as this one, is just a bad thing. We can debate whether it should be illegal or just very heavily sanctioned against socially, but it should not be encouraged. Personally I'd prefer if we could just shun the clowns enough they learn better, generally preferring to solve problems without running to the government all the time.
If you will review my posting history you will find it pretty obvious that I am no fan of the current administration. But you won't see me calling for whacking the fool. The system is broken right now, but if we start shooting we had better be launching a full 2nd American Revolution because as a general rule shooting people to solve political disagreements is a one way ride to 3rd world country status.
Besides, shooting Obama would get us Idiot Joe for POTUS. And if somebody managed a twofer it gets even worse with President Pelosi. So if you see some moron aiming at Obama, do the country a favor and STOP THEM if you are close enough, yell DUCK or just throw yourself in front of the bullet if that is the last option!
>..and the "Fairness Doctrine" (currently more of a boogyman being trotted out by that blow hard Rush, > than an actual rallying point for the Dems, but it does have it's supporters).
[SARCASM]
Ain't it the truth. Right now it only has a few back benchers like Congresswoman Pelosi behind it. But if Rush lets up on bashing it some of the more influential politicians might feel safe enough to start pushing it.
[/SARCASM]
It's all of a kind with this crap in today's article, previous attempt by the 'progressives' like McCain/Feingold, etc. But people refuse to connect the dots and see that one party just can't seem to stop attacking the Bill of Rights. If they aren't attacking the 1st Amendment they are attacking the 2nd. They won their fight against the 9th and 10th long ago, as those are are simply dead these days. Do you really believe they won't go after the others? They really have problems with the whole concept of a Constituition and the Rule of Law thing, they prefer the Rule of Men... so long as it is them doing the Ruling.
> In a nation that can afford to have multiple multi-billion, there is NO EXCUSE for anyone lacking basic food, shelter, and clothing.
I'd agree with that notion. In a country with this much opportunity there is NO EXCUSE for some idiot to waste their lives in squalor.
Ok, more seriously, you have a point. But lets examine our differing proposals to help lift up the poor. I will assume from your writing, that you are a standard issue Social Democrat/Liberal/Progressive who believes in the progressive income tax, income redistribution and the entitlement based welfare state as the means to solve poverty. And your side has been working hard at it since the New Deal, then the Great Society, the War on Poverty and so on. Just when are we skeptics entitled to ask for an accounting for your efforts? Because any fool can see that it ain't working yet and appears to be making most of our societal problems worse. But it does make liberals feel better about themselves, proving how they are so enlightened and care so much more than the poor selfish conservatives.
Then we have my team's proposed solution. We assert that the State, being built on force, can't do charity and that when it tries it causes more problems than it solves; it creates dependency and a sense of entitlement and that history has borne out these beliefs. That private charity has none of those defects and history has proven it to be effective and that furthermore if government could be scaled back private charity could and would step in and do a far more effective job.
Government charity always fails because it is flawed from the start. When the government takes the product of your labor and gives it to someone it deems more in need of it, the government pinhead gains zero Karma for gifting someone else's resources, seeing as it required no sacrifice on his part. You had no choice in the decision so you gain zero Karma. The recepient quickly gets the notion that it as his birthright to be a ward of the state and thus does not see a need to improve, and thus gains zero Karma. When you give to charity (or better directly help someone in your community in need) you DO gain Karma. And people accepting charity usually understand it isn't going to keep coming forever and thus has incentive to make the most of the offers of assistance beyond just immediate cash, thus becoming a self supporting member of the community and thereby gaining Karma.
And then we get the more fundamental problems in your philosophy. Liberalism is based on the notion that the average citizen is too much of a cold bastard to help his fellow man, so you more enlightened sorts must step in and force everyone to do it. Of course if everyone really WERE the bastards you thing we are Democrats would only be able to get elected by becoming lying bastards to fool the cold bastards into voting for em.... at least until you could get 50% of the population addicted to government handouts. So doesn't that mean that your philosophy is based on destroying rule By The People and replacing it with Rule by an Enlightened Elite? And that leads to the bigger question, if average humanity is really the scum you guys believe why are ya so hellbent on 'taking care' of us? Are we just pets or something? Oh sorry, isn't that pretty much the story of the Democrat party in the 20th Century?
So I guess the question I'd put to you is which is more important to you, clinging to failed theories or helping the poor. Dare to BELIEVE in your fellow man.
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes, I am a trader.
I hope you are right, but they sure haven't cared about their stock price these long years since the .bomb went off. It has just sat there. I'd have thought they would have been big and powerful enough to do things to make the stock go up, even if just a bit. But it has just sat there. They got desperate enough to pass out sagans of cash in special dividends and the stock? It just sat there.
> Microsoft is becoming a mature company and they are operating like one.
Mature stocks pay dividends, since the stock price isn't likely to be going up much anymore. Except for the aforementioned special dividends, Microsoft has preferred to sit on Scrooge McDuck size piles of cash. Now, with a pile of cash worthy of the greediest miser they are out borrowing yet more cash. They have a plan. Everybody is weakened by the recession and they are about to take advantage of their relative strength.... while they still can. Because I do think you are right and that they have no choice but to become a mature company.
> Because debt is really cheap right now.
Yup, They bet they can make a better return on it than the interest they will pay out. But still, it was only a couple of years ago they were passing out special dividends because they had so much cash on hand and apparently couldn't find better uses to put it to. So something is about to go down and it will be mega. With 25B now, add another 6B and they could pull off a 31B all cash transaction. And that never happens, there is always stock and such involved so they could be planning anything up to 50-75B So no, they won't be buying Google or IBM, but almost every other tech player should be looked at as a possible target.
> The problem with the snake oil salesmen,...
You see it as a negative, I see it as a positive. We need con men like these guys to remind folks to not believe every smooth talking hustler who comes along selling something that sounds too good to be true... if you will only make a token investment today. Two guys asking for $35K a pop expecting sane people to believe they are going to pull off a 27B project that pushes every politically correct button one can imagine.
And if they DO collect any money, that is also great because as the wise man said, "It is immoral to let a sucker keep his money."
Has anyone sat down and run the numbers on just the 110 megawatts worth of photovoltaics? Then add in the infrastructure to store and transport that kind of power up and down the track. Now consider this would be among the fastest trains ever put into service and it is going to be solar powered electric? I guess it will have super size batteries to run at night? No, either the train is a good idea regardless of power source or it isn't. And the solar power station is a good idea on it's own or it isn't. The attempt to sell them as a package is just an appeal to emotion amongst the greens who these guys (rightly) figure will be the key decision makers on giving them the cash they are asking for.
Con job.
> but when the store refuses to sell you something just because your valid CC does not have a U.S. billing address
That is a complex issue. I don't have any answers and if you thought about it a bit I seriously doubt you do either. Or are you just too shy to step forward, enlighten us all and claim a Nobel in economics?
The problem is copyright is a totally artificial construct and almost every country does it a little different. And the licenses the distributers have tend not to cross borders. And it just has to be that way for now. I don't like it either but until I can propose a better solution I won't bitch too loudly that nobody else has solved the problem. Just one example. Imagine the DVD. Now imagine one sold in India. It sells for a buck or two, because there that is all they can pay. If it were legal for copyrighted material to freely cross borders they would be selling for close to that here in the USA. At which point one of two things happens, profits on DVDs evaporate or prices in India rise enough (to prices they CAN'T PAY) to make exporting them into the US unprofitable. So somebody gets screwed. When somebody brings a few books or DVDs across a border in their luggage we all ignore it because we have to for practical reasons, but crates of the stuff would simply wreck the carefully managed artificial scarcity that copyright is based on.
Any legal construct that lets iTunes sell into every international territory at US prices on the date of US availability would pretty much have to include the same sort of thing for everyone else. Now consider that every film or song sold here in the US has some sort of legal setup in each foreign market where a local company has the legal rights to that material inside their territory. How are they going to like Apple (or Amazon, etc. This thread is about Apple but no need to just pick on them.) suddenly competing with their 'exclusive right' to sell that material? An exclusive right they paid a pretty penny to get by the way.
> Imagine a shop where every item has two price tags:
Oh stop dragging race into everything. Besides we all know that in this case it would be one price for gays and a higher price for heterosexuals. Of course the very act of buying an Apple product involves bending over and taking it up the pooper (over both the EULA and pricetag) I guess nobody would ever pay the higher price.
> I expect to see this meta tags on most sites in the near future.
Duh. How many ad networks would continue to do business with a site that lacked that tag if it ever got popular enough to have a measurable impact on ad impressions? Exactly. Thus this is pointless. People really should THINK before putting their mouth in gear. Guy wants to make everybody happy, which is a good intent, but it can't be done. The tension between ads and people not wanting to see the crap can't be solved by any means anyone is willing to undertake.
Personally I could care less about normal ads. Heck, I used to buy Computer Shopper to read the ads. Most of the ads I see here on slashdot aren't even a problem. It is sites who sign up for ad networks that accept the sleezy animated crap that are the problem. And nobody has a plan to deal with that.
> From what I hear, it's Apple's store and they are free to do whatever they want with it.
You know, it IS Apple's store. But why is it I only hear this when novel approach to property rights when it is Apple that must be defended from the latest otherwise indefensible idiocy they have gotten up to. Why not "It's Comcast's wires, they can do whatever they want with them." Or AIG signed contracts, Congress even put in a rider to allow it so why doesn't everyone shut the hell up about those bonuses.
No, even if Apple does have the 'right' is no reason for people not to take em to task and/or laugh at them when they are acting like idiots. Because we also have the right to speak, or at least I do since I haven't bought any Apple products... who knows, perhaps their absolute rights include a rider in their EULA saying no Apple owner may criticize The Company.
No, nobody ELSE seems to have such an absolute property right as Apple Inc. They even have an absolute right to dictate whether you can install their software on 3rd party hardware and whether/what 3rd party software is to be permitted to run on their operating systems. They have an absolute right to control products they manufacture from the day they build it until the day it is recycled, customer be damned.
> The higher profile this becomes, the greater likelihood Microsoft will step in and you will suddenly
> find all those laptops running Windows, and therefore your donations going to promote Microsoft lock-in.
No, if it works out like every other laptop givaway the government has run, after a lot of infighting they will throw out a bunch of Apple stuff. The schools, these days being all Windows shops, will be totally unable to maintain them or even find good uses for them and they will mostly useless except for the web browser. Typical schools these days are chocka blocka full of closed source Windows applications for everything from K through 12, Reader Rabbit to SAT Prep stuff. And it all runs on Windows, not in a web browser.
> It is worse than you think.
Nah, that is just defeatist talk. If we had the will we wouldn't have any insurmountable problems. But if you are looking for reasons to abandon a technology anyway there are always plenty of justifications to offer.
Who needs huge cast containment vessels? That only applies if you aren't going to build safer pebble bed reactors. Engineers in short supply? Solvable. One we have a lot of expertise in the Navy. They aren't currently very involved in the GWOT so their expertise could be borrowed. Two we concentrate our limited design resources on getting a couple of bulletproof designs and simply replicate those on a mass production scale instead of the current practice where most plants are effectively one off designs.
The ageing installed units are a problem. But with clever engineers I'm certain they could be retrofitted to run another decade. And with a serious effort we could have a hundred new mid size reactors online in a decade. I'm talking executive orders removing the EPA from the whole loop sort of serious effort but it could be done if we really wanted off the foreign oil habit.
As for reprocessing, breeder reactors. Yes there are issues but if our current energy strategy really is a threat to both national security and the environment we will expend the resources to solve them.
> It's true that neo-puritans have glommed on to the environmental movement since the early '70's
> to the extent that they have dominated it until recently, but there are some actual green voices
> out there, clamouring to be heard amidst the neo-puritan lies.
You go right on believing that like a good little useful idiot. The so called environmental movement has been and still is dominated by Communists. Or do you think it coincidence that the first Earth Day happened to also be Lenin's 100th Birthday? They weren't afraid anybody would make that connection publicly because they owned the media then as fully as they do now.
I know it has to suck to be a true believer in a cause that has been hijacked by a movement with a totally different goal but wake up and smell the coffee, we don't get the world we want, we all get this crappy one that is lousy with communists. Yes some enviros simply hate all industry, some hate h. sapiens. But they don't matter any more than you do when the green movement is planning it's next big PR stunt. It is all just another front to push the same tired ideas. Their proposed solutions at that first Earth Day to avert the coming Ice Age are exactly the same ones they push now to stop Global Warming^W^WClimate Change.
> The thing that should be stunningly obvious to everyone is: sacrifice is unsustainable. It requires more
> self-discipline than any large group of humans has ever managed, and in the absence of self-discipline it
> requires unsustainable (to say nothing of unethical) enforcement measures.
How many will rise up and revolt against the carbon tax? We conservatives will howl and bitch but we won't have the stones to start a revolution. No, they know how to boil frogs. It will all be quite sustainable... right up until our civilization collapses, which is the goal. They assume that at that point they can impose 100% pure Socialism on a broken and scared populace. And they might be right. If they can maintain control of the mass media they will probably pull it off.
> The neo-puritans are in particular trouble right now because green tech has reached industrial
> viability--wind farms, solar farms, biodiesel, etc. are all becoming viable industries, and in opposing
> them neo-puritans necessarily reveal that they don't love the environment, they hate industry.
Bah, none of those green technologies are currently viable if the government subsidies went away. Nukes are viable IN SPITE of the best efforts of the government to regulate it into impracticality. And more importantly, none of the alternatives will provide enough energy without deployment on a scale that would offend even my limited green sensibilities. Do we cover several states in endless ranks of solar collectors and windmills? There isn't enough farmland to grow both food and enough biofuels to power our current economy and I want the economy to grow, now shrink.
Give us unlimited cheap electricity and somebody will solve the storage problem and then we say goodbye to fossil fuel. You want to stop using the stuff to save the environment, I want to stop using it because it is funding our enemies and must eventually become scarce. So why can't we agree that the only way to save the world (and civilization) is to defeat the so called environmentalists and seize the power of the atom!
> he "Fault" in Yucca is a joke.
Of course. But the goal is to make nuke plants impractical and any excuse will serve. Because if we were to build a crapload of the newer safe plants we would have plenty of energy, build enough and somebody would find a way to store it in vehicles. But none of that is green. The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
> Done. Now he can double-click on an EXE, and it will work.
Uh. Have you ever actually TRIED that? More often than not you get an epic fail. Sometimes you get an application that almost but not quite works. Very rarely you get 'just works.' Use the commercial Crossover Office and the odds get slightly better. Go look at winehq or codeweaver's compatibility lists sometime. Most apps don't work. Microsoft gave the Wine team several years where everyone was stuck on the WinXP APIs and it wasn't enough for them to catch up. My guess is they will finally achieve 99% success running WinXP apps about the same time DOSEMU finally worked.... about three years after anyone cared anymore.
Yes I'm in a cynical mood today.
> Try Debian Linux. There are 3 main flavours.
Believe it or not, I do know a bit about Debian. And it sucks too from the quality standpoint these days. Allow me to demonstrate.
I have these old EPIA machines I'm repurposing. They will be off the net most of the time with occasional dialup access. I don't want to be seeing them back on my bench anytime soon. So that eliminated Fedora since F10 will go unsupported before years end. RHEL & clones are out since nothing new runs on an EPIA. (In their past life they ran WBEL3 just fine, but that's pretty old.) Ubuntu doesn't make it to the installer before going foom. Ok, Debian.
Nope. Debian 4.0 and 5.0.1 have something hosed in the name service. No network, no desktop. A minute and twenty seconds from entering name/password until the desktop appears because Nautilus is hanging for a whole minute. GDM does a similar but shorter hang everytime the login appears. Ain't deployable. I have been configuring TCP/IP, on linux no less, for going on fifteen years and I haven't found the problem in a few hours of config file twiddling, googling and even got desperate enough to pop into #debian. If I can't figure it out is safe to assume 90%+ of users won't figure it out and simply try something else. btw, Fedora 10 works just fine without anything in the network port.
But don't believe me try it yourself. Install a machine from a CD/DVD without anything plugged into the network port. Bring up the new machine and watch GDM sit and spin. Log in and watch Nautilus sit and spin. Dig out an old 4.0 install media and try again. Be appalled that something like that could make it into TWO stable releases. Debian 5 comes on 5 DVDs now instead of the 4 that 4.0 released, but while quantity has gone up quality apparently hasn't.
And I'm only picking on Debian because you brought it up like some sort of all purpose solution. I could rip on RH's stuff with more experience to make it more vicious. I could start by noting just how many totally different fracking print configuration systems they have shipped without finishing any of them.
> Drepper never suggested not to fix a bug for the ARM architecture....
Couldn't be bothered to read the linked bug discussion could you. Beyond rejecting a fix for an actual problem he even went so far as to say "No, Arm is not supported." Which was of course news to a lot of folks, since Debian has been shipping an official ARM port for years. If glibc isn't accepting patches for platforms Debian is officially supporting it is totally understandable they would adopt a fork that does.
> As the maintainer of GLIBC, he has to be the steward for the greater good of all users.
No, it needs to be correct code. If ARM happens to be the only platform that currenty exercises the bug it is still a bug. Goddamn people, I swear we are getting as blase about fixing bugs as a Microsoft shop. There is no such thing as a good bug, a less important bug, etc. If it is a bug and someone has a patch for it you APPLY THE DAMNED PATCH. If you have a problem with the patch you write a better patch. Not patching at all is never be the answer.
I really hate updating my systems these days, because for every bug fixed it seems you get a fresh new one. Make it shiny, we will fix the bugs later! Of course later never comes, eventually the crap piles up too high and somebody decides to just start over. Which explains the piles of discarded stuff and the new one that also doesn't quite work in most areas, especially in system administration.
Seriously, the Free Software world needs to call a timeout. Establish a core and devote every available resource into making that core bug free and secure. Then allow no change to be committed to that core without extensive peer review to prevent new bugs from getting in. The Linux kernel is hopeless, no chance of getting it to stop and clean up and x.org is currently in a period of upheaval, but the layer above each could be stabilized. Not just coreutils, but everything including the core widget sets, admin tools. Get things to a point where an ordinary userland package will (not might) work even it it wasn't built against the exact same release.
And finish hashing out the whole new /dev/, dbus, etc. and settle the API down enough to document the damned thing. I know UNIX, but this new stuff totally confuses me. WHere does one go to even find out how it is supposed to work? Which of course isn't how it currently DOES sorta work. How does one even know if a particular piece of documentation, sketchy and incomplete as it will certainly be, documents what was, what currently is or what is intended to be?
> And if you kill a few thousand people while waiting for all that to shake out, what matter?
Free will. The trick is ensuring a fully informed patient. Life is about risk. Especially in medicine where almost every drug and surgical procedure carries a non-zero risk of killing you. And if you had cancer you wouldn't think twice about rolling the dice either. The only question that would remain is for you and your doctor to evaluate the newest experimental drugs and pick one. Whats the worst that could happen, you die?
> I guess that's somehow better than killing them by making them wait?
Exactly. Do the numbers. Cold math. Every time some new wonder drug comes out that saves thousands per year just consider this: For every year that drug was moving through the FDA approval process that number of people DIED. Lawyers are quite skilled in pulling the heartstrings with tales of woe on the other side of the ledger but those other people who die waiting for the wheels of the government to slowly grind are just as DEAD, only they are forgotten, with no clever lawyer to speak for them.
Making a drug available in limited quantities to patients who REALLY need it and understand the risks is the morally right thing to do. I doubt you really want to try arguing the other side of that one. And making them more available would improve the approval process by getting real world testing.
> ..if the FDA was doing the testing but the drug companies do their own testing.
And shouldn't it be? If they are going to stamp "safe and effective" on a drug wouldn't it make sense to know if it is actually safe? Adn for that declaration to actually mean something? That's the heart of the problem. The FDA imposes endless delays which kill thousands, they raise the cost of drugs and thereby contribute a lot to the high cost of medicine (which we are told can only be fixed with more of the same sort of government foolishness of course) and generally muck everything up. Yet because they are a mindless government agency the end result is useless because they allow bad drugs to get to market and it is a virtual certainty they block good ones as well, we just have no way of measuring that.
It is one thing to criticize, another to propose a solution. So here is one. We already have a limiting factor that prevents bad drugs from reaching the market and pulls them if they are discovered to have problems and it isn't the impotent FDA. It is the insurance industry. If a drug company can't find liability insurance only a foolish, desperate or really wealthy one would put out a drug self insured in this legal environment. So there is your limiting factor. So lets run with that and imagine a two track drug world.
A drug company could release a new drug at any time, so long as they understood they could get the crap sued out of them like things are now. So as soon as they (and their insurance company) had enough confidence in their new drug that the potential for lawsuits was enough smaller than the likely sales they could start selling. Of course medical insurance policies might not want to cover such 'new, experimental and less tested' drugs, doctors might not prescribe them, free market. But people who really need it and are willing to take a risk would no longer have to wait, often until they are long dead, for a new drug. They could also submit to the FDA testing track, with the advantage that with the drug actually selling in low quantity there would be a lot more feedback. At some point the FDA would complete it's testing and either declare the drug too risky to approve or 'safe and effective'. And they could even still sell it after FDA rejection assuming they could still find willing customers and insurance coverage... yea right. But the FDA blessing would end lawsuits. The drug is 'safe and effective' and legally that should be that. It is best practice and you should not be liable if you used the best accepted industry practice. Medicine is still both art and science and people just need to accept that their doctor can't deal in the sort of absolutes that an engineer can.
> By which you mean they aren't going to win?
No, by 'novelty candidate' I mean just that. Jokes. In less serious times perhaps worthy of a protest (none of the above) vote but none I a) know enough about to even know if they are sane or b) people I KNOW to be as much a menace to the Republic as any of the major candidates.
Several assorted Socialists and Communists, I didn't vote for Obama largely because I think it likely he is a Communist, those guys are out of the closet. Then ya get the real cranks and kooks nobody has ever heard of, all of which make Obama's six months in the Senate before heading to Iowa look like vast experience.
And then there is the LP. Impractical and obsessed with legalizing dope in the best of times but went severely idiotarian after 9/11. Mostly nice folks who would like to do right, totally clueless politically and would certainly qualify as a menace (the idiotarian part) to the Republic if one somehow got elected. Because the country ISN'T Libertarian and they can't figure that out, they seem to assume that if they could just get equal time at the debates the reasonableness of their arguments would somehow trigger up this huge reawakening. Nope, most folks like suckling the government teat and getting them off is probably going to take close to the same century it took to reduce a once independent people to servitude.
> Either we're stupid, or we just enjoy being outraged by stupid stuff, I can't tell which...
Oh it gets worse. Ok, you are a drug company and you have a promising drug. After jumping through hoops for as long as a decade you finally get FDA approval. You have tested your new drug in various animals, several stages of human trials and the whole bit. The government has finally certified your drug to be safe and effective. So you go on the market. We will ignore the untold human misery that could have been averted with a faster process since everyone else seems to ignore that detail.
But now imagine something goes wrong. Perhaps a statistically significant number of patients have a bad side effect. You are still going to get yer ass sued off. Even after you spent a decade proving to the government's satisfaction that your new drug was safe and effective you are still legally liable. All those sagans of cash you spent provide zero protection from either civil or criminal liability. The FDA, being the State, is of course blameless. Even better, recent lawsuit verdicts say that even if a doctor misuses your drug (i.e. uses it in ways you clearly labeled it as contraindicated for) juries will still force you to pay up.
Oh, memo to the /. editors. It is the FDA, not the FTC.
> .. be sure that the next constitution isn't just a goddamned piece of paper and provides for some
> real method of enforcing "the supreme law of the land"
I have pondered that problem. Ultimately it is a problem in US in that we elect these faithless people again and again. But of course the majority of US are products of government schools which have carefully neglected teaching the founding principles for a couple of generations now. But it is still our fault and the ultimate solution has to come from We The People.
However one nice partial solution I have pondered from time to time would be an Amendment. Yes I know what you are thinking, they ignore everything else why would one more bit of paper do what the others didn't? Ah, but I had an idea.
Proposed Amendment
It shall be legal to slay a faithless Congressman or Senator. When a Citizen is accused of the crime of killing a sitting member of Congress he or she has the option of invoking this Amendment. This implies that the accused is thereby confessing to the act of Murder and is seeking the protection of this Amendment to escape the traditional punishment. At the moment this Amendment is invoked the normal trial is thus finished and a special phase is entered.
The Jury shall be provided with a copy of the US Constituition, including all Amendments. The Accused must cite a specific Act of Congress which was introduced or co-sponsored by the slain Member, and which was enacted into Law after the Member last stood for election. The Jury shall be provided with a complete copy of said Bill. The Jury will then deliberate upon the sole question of whether in fact the Bill was a violation of the Member's Oath of Office. If the Jury, by simple majority vote, decides the Member's Bill was indeed a violation of this Constituition's limited powers the Accused shall be set Free and all reference to his crime of Murder shall be expunged from all official records leaving no impairment to the Accused's liberties. However, to discourage use of this Amendment in place of the normal use of the ballot, should the Jury find the Accused killed a Member who was keeping Faith with his Oath the Accused shall be put to Death by means most cruel within twenty four hours of the verdict being entered.
The Jury shall have the final decision in this matter. No appeal shall be permitted, no mistrial may be declared and no Judge may enter a directed verdict. The Jury shall deliberate until they reach a verdict. In way of guidance to such future juries facing such a weighty decision it should be noted that if the case be not so clear that you have little difficulty deciding you should probably vote to have the killer executed, this Amendment is intended to focus the minds of Congress on the limits to their powers, not to start a bloodbath.
> If you want to break the cycle and change the system, it's simple: have the courage to
> vote for the candidate you like the most, regardless of his popularity.
Easier said than done. Take this past cycle. My preferred candidate dropped out the day before our Caucus. So I went anyway and spun again and went for the best pick of the remaining bunch. He dropped just a little later leaving a guy I had swore I would never support as the nominee apparent. So I kept to that oath as best I could. I didn't send any money to him or the national party but did send cash to down ticket candidates. But come the fall I voted for him because there was no way in hell I'd vote for the other party's guy and the 3rd party picks were nothing but novelty candidates. Staying home is a cop out.
So who was I supposed to vote FOR? There were no candidates I didn't loathe but voting is still a civic duty.
> These two things are mutually exclusive.
Really? So you launched the 2nd American Revolution when the 1st Amendment went away? It did you know, McCain Feingold's purpose was to carefully regulate political speech in the times when it matters most, near an election. It was passed mostly by Democrat politicians but was signed by President Bush even though he knew it to be unconstituitional. He was afraid of the MSM attacking him as a defender of big lobbists (which was no excuse to forsake his Oath) and then the Supremes suprised him and upheld it in one of their infamous 5-4 decisions.
So "Congress shall make no law.." is null and void because the Supremes said Congress CAN make a law so long as they approve of the law. So how many congresscritters did you bag? Uh huh.
When the 'assault weapons ban' was in effect that was most certainly an infringement. Hell, the machine gun ban is most certainly an infringement for the purposes of "..shall not be infringed." since at the time the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms included every weapon the military bore into war. Private militia companies even owned cannon. How many congresscritter and/pr faithless judges did you bag?
Nope, we be frogs slowly boiling to death.
> ... then why fear simple words no matter how fucking stupid they may or may not be?
I dunno, urging the killing of a US Congresswoman, even one as stupid as this one, is just a bad thing. We can debate whether it should be illegal or just very heavily sanctioned against socially, but it should not be encouraged. Personally I'd prefer if we could just shun the clowns enough they learn better, generally preferring to solve problems without running to the government all the time.
If you will review my posting history you will find it pretty obvious that I am no fan of the current administration. But you won't see me calling for whacking the fool. The system is broken right now, but if we start shooting we had better be launching a full 2nd American Revolution because as a general rule shooting people to solve political disagreements is a one way ride to 3rd world country status.
Besides, shooting Obama would get us Idiot Joe for POTUS. And if somebody managed a twofer it gets even worse with President Pelosi. So if you see some moron aiming at Obama, do the country a favor and STOP THEM if you are close enough, yell DUCK or just throw yourself in front of the bullet if that is the last option!
> ..and the "Fairness Doctrine" (currently more of a boogyman being trotted out by that blow hard Rush,
> than an actual rallying point for the Dems, but it does have it's supporters).
[SARCASM]
Ain't it the truth. Right now it only has a few back benchers like Congresswoman Pelosi behind it. But if Rush lets up on bashing it some of the more influential politicians might feel safe enough to start pushing it.
[/SARCASM]
It's all of a kind with this crap in today's article, previous attempt by the 'progressives' like McCain/Feingold, etc. But people refuse to connect the dots and see that one party just can't seem to stop attacking the Bill of Rights. If they aren't attacking the 1st Amendment they are attacking the 2nd. They won their fight against the 9th and 10th long ago, as those are are simply dead these days. Do you really believe they won't go after the others? They really have problems with the whole concept of a Constituition and the Rule of Law thing, they prefer the Rule of Men... so long as it is them doing the Ruling.
> In a nation that can afford to have multiple multi-billion, there is NO EXCUSE for anyone lacking basic food, shelter, and clothing.
I'd agree with that notion. In a country with this much opportunity there is NO EXCUSE for some idiot to waste their lives in squalor.
Ok, more seriously, you have a point. But lets examine our differing proposals to help lift up the poor. I will assume from your writing, that you are a standard issue Social Democrat/Liberal/Progressive who believes in the progressive income tax, income redistribution and the entitlement based welfare state as the means to solve poverty. And your side has been working hard at it since the New Deal, then the Great Society, the War on Poverty and so on. Just when are we skeptics entitled to ask for an accounting for your efforts? Because any fool can see that it ain't working yet and appears to be making most of our societal problems worse. But it does make liberals feel better about themselves, proving how they are so enlightened and care so much more than the poor selfish conservatives.
Then we have my team's proposed solution. We assert that the State, being built on force, can't do charity and that when it tries it causes more problems than it solves; it creates dependency and a sense of entitlement and that history has borne out these beliefs. That private charity has none of those defects and history has proven it to be effective and that furthermore if government could be scaled back private charity could and would step in and do a far more effective job.
Government charity always fails because it is flawed from the start. When the government takes the product of your labor and gives it to someone it deems more in need of it, the government pinhead gains zero Karma for gifting someone else's resources, seeing as it required no sacrifice on his part. You had no choice in the decision so you gain zero Karma. The recepient quickly gets the notion that it as his birthright to be a ward of the state and thus does not see a need to improve, and thus gains zero Karma. When you give to charity (or better directly help someone in your community in need) you DO gain Karma. And people accepting charity usually understand it isn't going to keep coming forever and thus has incentive to make the most of the offers of assistance beyond just immediate cash, thus becoming a self supporting member of the community and thereby gaining Karma.
And then we get the more fundamental problems in your philosophy. Liberalism is based on the notion that the average citizen is too much of a cold bastard to help his fellow man, so you more enlightened sorts must step in and force everyone to do it. Of course if everyone really WERE the bastards you thing we are Democrats would only be able to get elected by becoming lying bastards to fool the cold bastards into voting for em.... at least until you could get 50% of the population addicted to government handouts. So doesn't that mean that your philosophy is based on destroying rule By The People and replacing it with Rule by an Enlightened Elite? And that leads to the bigger question, if average humanity is really the scum you guys believe why are ya so hellbent on 'taking care' of us? Are we just pets or something? Oh sorry, isn't that pretty much the story of the Democrat party in the 20th Century?
So I guess the question I'd put to you is which is more important to you, clinging to failed theories or helping the poor. Dare to BELIEVE in your fellow man.