business would be driven out of the state very soon as investors only care about money.
I'd need to see some data before I'd conclude that was inevitable. There are already higher taxes here, cost of living is higher here and consequently worker salaries have got to be pushed up. It doesn't seem to me that you've done the calculations to where you can conclude that staying in California and paying these taxes would cost the companies more than it would to relocate somewhere else that would likely pass an internet tax sooner or later. Nor do I believe that you have a good reason why these companies wouldn't just pass off the costs to consumers, as they do with any other sales tax.
On the other hand, I'm MORE certain the idiots in Sacramento haven't done a proper analysis of it either...
Can anyone recommend a few states where these taxes are unlikely
Unlikely for how long exactly? There are states that don't have it at the moment, but whether it will stay that way long enough to make moving there worth it seems dependent on how much you buy online and how likely the legislators of that state are to realize that you can buy things on these newfangled tubes.
While I like not paying taxes on purchases, and recognize that in practice it might be impossible to enforce on -all- web transactions, I can't think of a good reason why online purchases SHOULD be exempt while things you buy in a store should have the tax.
2) You never refer to fetus as a blastocyst, parasite, or nickname him "blobby"
Totally. If you actually -do- have a blastocyst, you wouldn't know it. The blastocyst stage is over by two weeks after conception. You can't tell if a woman is pregnant even via pregnancy test until the blastocyst stage is over. Calling it that would just be plain INACCURATE. I guess you could have sex and then start saying that 5 to 6 days later, but you wouldn't actually know for certain at that time. No self-respecting scientist would do that.
Oh, also it might annoy your wife/baby mama, but that's beside the point.
Data show that having children decreases happiness. They also eat a lot of your time (which could be better spent doing science) and they're extremely expensive (scientists don't get paid that much). Knowing this, why would anyone who respects data have children?
Yeah, but that data showing children decreases happiness comes from "social scientists." There's data and then there's "data."
PS. I'm sorry to any social scientists who were offended at that joke, but 100% of poll respondents found it was totally true and furthermore that you should all get real jobs and quit crying about it.
PPS. I tease because I'm envious of your easy methodology that don't require working with dangerous chemicals or squinting at slides.
Scientists are responsible for bringing abortion into the world. These days a fetus is lucky to even have a crack at life.
We scientists also proved to the rest of you that sperm were not complete, though small humans, thus masturbation is not a waste of human life as the religious medicine men were saying it was. So you're able to self-pleasure without feeling guilty about it.
1. Drunkenly post something to blog, sober up, realize your wife will divorce you if she reads it
2. Submit it to slashdot
3. ???
4. SLASHDOTTED!!!
5. Wife can't read blog, no divorce, no child support payments, profit.
Since when does cheating on an exam result in criminal charges????
Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.
I don't think that justifies criminal charges for cheating on a test. Passing the MCAT does not certify you to DO surgery, it only is useful for getting into medical school. They would still have to pass medical school. And as I understand it, that also does not suddenly enable you to start sawing people open. In other words, I don't think cheating on the test constitutes a public problem.
This sorta seems like an example of companies using the law to punish transgressors for something that should not be a crime. Make sure every medical school on earth has these individuals' faces on the wall with a big "Don't let these cheaters in," strip search test takers, and put them in a faraday cage while taking the test, fine, whatever. The law is still not a club to be used to enforce the rules of your private entrance exam.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to write my senator and tell them to repeal those laws, I don't care that much, it just seems a little too much like laws the RIAA and MPAA are getting passed.
Telephone companies allow people to set up their own pay-by-the-minute number and willingly give their customers' money to that? Is there a legitimate use for setting up one's own number like that which I'm not thinking of? I'm assuming the phone company gets a cut of the money regardless of whether it's abusive and illegal, and so things like this aren't blocked on their side of things.
So you would doom millions to be raked over the coals by their own mistakes, all so you can have freedom. Awesome.
There, I generalized that for you.
Shouldn't the model be more of one where people who cannot manage systems have systems pre-secured for them, and the ones who can handle security can open them?
You would doom millions who insist they can handle security to be raked over the coals? Awesome.
Serious point here: mistakes and malware will happen no matter what. People who are competent enough to operate outside a walled garden will still make mistakes or not be informed enough, and will fall victim to malware, and walled gardens will be penetrated by malware too.
Activision won't be done until their entire customer base loathes them and thinks they are greedy control-freak imbeciles.
No, they just realized that they can abuse their customers more than any other game. It's the biggest game out there, gives it a certain amount of critical mass. If all your friends in high school are having a great time playing it, you'd have gladly given all the money in your pocket and might even promise to do two chores a day for a year if your parents would just let you buy that one shiny game. We were all that dumb back then, or at least I certainly was. Activision has merely recognized that demand is high for the game, and so the price goes up, and they have significantly more leverage.
And their customers may whine loudly, but keep taking the abuse anyway. With modern warfare 2, there was much consternation about the lack of dedicated servers, with many people pledging to boycott. Activision may have worried at first, but would take customer demands less seriously when they saw about half the boycotters playing the game at launch.
The prestige system has little to do with the gameplay though. The benefits are all aesthetic, you get new icons by your name, you get to paint your background and guns pretty colors. I guess you get some bragging rights. That's it. You don't get more powerful guns, or special abilities. It's not cheating, in other words.
I can see how it would be annoying to people who took the game far more seriously than I do, but it's just a game anyways.
Why is it news that they are honoring these pre-orders?
I think it is a bit absurd that gamestop never said "Okay, it looks like the game isn't actually going to happen, so here's your money back." Not surprising, since they offer reservations when there are mere unconfirmed rumors of games being in the works.
If the down payment is 5 dollars, how much would gamestop likely have made off of investments in that time?
But it also sometimes works out very well. Computational neuroscience itself seems to be an example of that. The wiki page for computational neuroscience mentions the term was coined by an Eric Schwartz who appears to have crossed from physics into neurobiology.
The "father of neuroscience", Ramon Y Cajal, had quite a colorful background. He had skill in art, which probably helped him record his observations and study neural cells, and in his professional career started out studying inflammation and cholera before moving into neurobiology.
It doesn't appear to be limited to biology either. I've heard there are well-respected economists who were physicists in previous professional lives. To take it even further, even in music, genre-crossing usually has interesting results, like Richard Cheese, who does lounge-singing covers of pop songs, or that bluegrass cover of Snoop Dog's Gin and Juice.
I'd submit that changing fields can often be productive, bringing a new way of looking at things to the field. Assuming the field is simple is the real problem, but that's a pitfall whether you're switching fields or staying in your own field.
The real question is why would anyone pre-order any big title.
In my experience working there, it takes a really, really huge game -franchise- to make gamestop make sure they order enough for release. Halo, madden, modern warfare, those games are sure to be there on launch day. Since this isn't an annual sequel, it might not fit their "must have stocked" criteria.
Nearly every other game, gamestop goes cheap, figuring if they sell out, they can try to punish the customer into reserving games. Even games that any idiot could tell were going to sell out, they give each store just a few more than they reserved, so that if you don't reserve, you have a good chance of being lectured "You should have pre-ordered, that's how you're supposed to do it." With plenty of the kids who shop there, that actually works and they'll start reserving.
Gamestop isn't too concerned with making sure people get the new games they came in for. Finding out if a store has a game on their website is difficult, and the information is often wrong, no doubt on purpose. The vast majority of their profits come from used sales, they resell used games at an outrageous markup. Kids sell their slightly used games in for X, gamestop sells it for nearly 2X. They can't get away with selling new games that way. They'd like for you to come in to buy a new game, the game not be in stock, and you figure since you're there you'll reserve something else or buy a used game.
And it works. The people who buy and sell (and work) at gamestop will take a lot of abuse and not bolt, since gamestop basically has a monopoly on the market. The main alternatives are amazon, which is not instant, or other retail stores that don't buy or sell used games, and generally have a worse selection outside of the most popular titles.
Also, my district manager was a real douchebag, the pay was lousy, and half the customers had never heard of deodorant, but that's not really relevant.
:( I already lost mine during the last universe collapse and new big bang...
I reserved mine infinity time before that though. And yes, I'm aware there's some nonsense in physics about that statement not being consistent with space-time, but that's how old it is and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
Technically, we're not to that point yet and this story is sorta going in the opposed direction. It was a few years ago when we found we could make skin cells revert back to a stem cell like state (induced pluripotent stem cells or IPSC). Pluripotent cells can make any type of cell. That's good for some things, but would not be good for therapy, like repairing a spinal cord injury. You don't want bone cells in your spinal cord. IPSC injected into your body would make teratomas, which are among the worst types of tumors.
Pluripotency means ability of one cell to make any cell type. Todipotency means the ability of one cell to make a whole organism. In humans, the fertilized egg is the only todipotent cell. The information needed to make any type of cell reside in all cells, the information needed to organize a -whole embryo- is not. It's not trivial to put that information in. For that reason, I think it's going to be a while before we can turn a skin cell directly into a todipotent cell that can make a whole clone.
I vaguely recall that scientists have taken mouse embryonic stem cells and made sperm and eggs. It shouldn't be too long before it's technically possible to take skin cells from someone, induce pluripotency, turn -those- cells into sperm and egg, fertilize themselves, and make an embryo that way. It wouldn't be a clone though, it would be a super-inbred embryo.
This conduct on the part of the science community is pretty non-scientific, IMHO. If you have doubts, attempt to reproduce the original results.
Problem: money. The people who control the purse strings are loath to fund basic research in the first place. Come up with a marketable treatment for impotence and they'll shower you with money, but if you want to look for exotic life forms in harsh environments, and you'll get a lot of rejections and little money
Funding purely to -repeat- basic research experiments that have already been done does not exist. Even if you come up with a valid NEW reason to repeat the experiments, the people reviewing your grant are likely to give it lower importance than experiments which are equally scientifically sound and HAVEN'T already been done.
If basic research were funded as well as we fund the military, then you'd probably see more results independently verified faster, but as such, it's not a high priority funding wise, so it does not happen very fast.
One of the basic principles of the scientific method is the ability for peers to independently reproduce results. If this is not the case, then this is not science.
if that's the case then global warming is not a science.
Global warming is a science and can, in fact, be tested and proven independently. The issue is that most of us would rather we not prove it a first time here on Earth, let alone create another Earth and test it twice.
if there is a topic that is only interesting to a small minority, and a large part of the population doesn't care, then by organizing, this group can get it's point into a coalition agreement if it's willing to compromise on a lot of other grounds.
That happens here too, the thing is you can't just show up on the general election. Primaries fill that role here. Look at the libertarian poster boy Ron Paul: he's a republican. Pro-business and the religious right both fit into the republican tent more or less and compromise okay. If they were two different parties, they'd form a coalition and it would basically be the same politics. The tea party is actually a wing of the republican party, they were smart enough to realize that going the path of true 3rd party was futile.
The main problem with the first-past-the-post system in my eyes is that for some reason, the left wing seems convinced that the only reason we usually have 2 parties is because the voters don't realize there are more than two boxes in the general election, leading to more 3rd party voting, and more vote splitting. If liberals realized that and if Nader had been more interested in what was good for the country than his own ego, Bush would have lost the electoral vote in 2000.
Those types of discussions happen here too, they happen in primaries, they happen in the media, they happen with individual members of a party. I mean, there were votes against the patriot act as you can see. There's plenty of opportunity to talk about it in a primary. It doesn't happen, because Americans are more convinced the world is out to get us than Germans are. If Germany had a 2 party system instead, there would still be the same discussions.
And if you try any sort of significant dissent, you will be labelled as a terrorist by the patriots.
Idiots like Ann Coulter already call all liberals terrorists, if that's what you're talking about. Besides, what's a little name calling? Hell, on 9/12, people were already throwing around the terrorist name. Either Pat Roberts or Jerry Fallwell basically said atheists and/or feminists caused 9/11 within a few months. Big freaking deal, so they'll call us terrorists. Been called that before.
If you're talking about being deported to gitmo for gaining traction on repealing the patriot act through legal means, no, that's absurd no matter how you look at it. If you take your tinfoil hat off, your suggestion taken literally is easy to spot as absurd. If you keep your tinfoil hat on, you think that repealing the patriot act would take away all the power of "the man?" The "patriots" wouldn't risk exposing themselves to persecute you for something as trivial as the patriot act. You'd have to go after all their pocketbooks before they'd assasinate you or deport you.
I guess that was an oversimplification, I didn't mean to suggest it was a magic 50% and we'd instantly get our way. After all, during the Bush administration, there were polls saying 75% of Americans wanted national medical healthcare, but that didn't materialize during the midterms or the 2004 election.
Still, it would at least be discussed. With whatever percentage are opposed to the healthcare reform, there was talk of repealing it during the midterms and still is talk about it.
And speaking of percent opposed to healthcare reform, I strongly disagree that there was an -obvious- majority. There was a lot of noise, but it was not obvious to me that most voters were opposed to it. Then again, I was for it and didn't really care how many people were against it, much as I don't care how many people are okay with the patriot act.
Slashdot Mirror
business would be driven out of the state very soon as investors only care about money.
I'd need to see some data before I'd conclude that was inevitable. There are already higher taxes here, cost of living is higher here and consequently worker salaries have got to be pushed up. It doesn't seem to me that you've done the calculations to where you can conclude that staying in California and paying these taxes would cost the companies more than it would to relocate somewhere else that would likely pass an internet tax sooner or later. Nor do I believe that you have a good reason why these companies wouldn't just pass off the costs to consumers, as they do with any other sales tax.
On the other hand, I'm MORE certain the idiots in Sacramento haven't done a proper analysis of it either...
Can anyone recommend a few states where these taxes are unlikely
Unlikely for how long exactly? There are states that don't have it at the moment, but whether it will stay that way long enough to make moving there worth it seems dependent on how much you buy online and how likely the legislators of that state are to realize that you can buy things on these newfangled tubes.
While I like not paying taxes on purchases, and recognize that in practice it might be impossible to enforce on -all- web transactions, I can't think of a good reason why online purchases SHOULD be exempt while things you buy in a store should have the tax.
And peer-reviewed reviews of peer reviews. Inception: the scientific version.
An early pioneer at microscopy, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was one of the first ones to look at sperm cells, around 1677. He describes that the samples were obtained fresh, and added the disclaimer "What I investigate is only what, without sinfully defiling myself, remains as a residue after conjugal coitus."
In other words, in this pioneering study of human sperm, Mrs. van Leeuwenhoek was an uncredited lab assistant in an unusual capacity.
2) You never refer to fetus as a blastocyst, parasite, or nickname him "blobby"
Totally. If you actually -do- have a blastocyst, you wouldn't know it. The blastocyst stage is over by two weeks after conception. You can't tell if a woman is pregnant even via pregnancy test until the blastocyst stage is over. Calling it that would just be plain INACCURATE. I guess you could have sex and then start saying that 5 to 6 days later, but you wouldn't actually know for certain at that time. No self-respecting scientist would do that.
Oh, also it might annoy your wife/baby mama, but that's beside the point.
Data show that having children decreases happiness. They also eat a lot of your time (which could be better spent doing science) and they're extremely expensive (scientists don't get paid that much). Knowing this, why would anyone who respects data have children?
Yeah, but that data showing children decreases happiness comes from "social scientists." There's data and then there's "data."
PS. I'm sorry to any social scientists who were offended at that joke, but 100% of poll respondents found it was totally true and furthermore that you should all get real jobs and quit crying about it.
PPS. I tease because I'm envious of your easy methodology that don't require working with dangerous chemicals or squinting at slides.
Scientists are responsible for bringing abortion into the world. These days a fetus is lucky to even have a crack at life.
We scientists also proved to the rest of you that sperm were not complete, though small humans, thus masturbation is not a waste of human life as the religious medicine men were saying it was. So you're able to self-pleasure without feeling guilty about it.
You're welcome.
1. Drunkenly post something to blog, sober up, realize your wife will divorce you if she reads it
2. Submit it to slashdot
3. ???
4. SLASHDOTTED!!!
5. Wife can't read blog, no divorce, no child support payments, profit.
Since when does cheating on an exam result in criminal charges????
Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.
I don't think that justifies criminal charges for cheating on a test. Passing the MCAT does not certify you to DO surgery, it only is useful for getting into medical school. They would still have to pass medical school. And as I understand it, that also does not suddenly enable you to start sawing people open. In other words, I don't think cheating on the test constitutes a public problem.
This sorta seems like an example of companies using the law to punish transgressors for something that should not be a crime. Make sure every medical school on earth has these individuals' faces on the wall with a big "Don't let these cheaters in," strip search test takers, and put them in a faraday cage while taking the test, fine, whatever. The law is still not a club to be used to enforce the rules of your private entrance exam.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to write my senator and tell them to repeal those laws, I don't care that much, it just seems a little too much like laws the RIAA and MPAA are getting passed.
Telephone companies allow people to set up their own pay-by-the-minute number and willingly give their customers' money to that? Is there a legitimate use for setting up one's own number like that which I'm not thinking of? I'm assuming the phone company gets a cut of the money regardless of whether it's abusive and illegal, and so things like this aren't blocked on their side of things.
So you would doom millions to be raked over the coals by their own mistakes, all so you can have freedom. Awesome.
There, I generalized that for you.
Shouldn't the model be more of one where people who cannot manage systems have systems pre-secured for them, and the ones who can handle security can open them?
You would doom millions who insist they can handle security to be raked over the coals? Awesome.
Serious point here: mistakes and malware will happen no matter what. People who are competent enough to operate outside a walled garden will still make mistakes or not be informed enough, and will fall victim to malware, and walled gardens will be penetrated by malware too.
They are obsessed with Hitler, cheats, their penis and forced sodomy
Hey now, don't slander the xbox live kiddies like that! They don't know who Hitler is!
Activision won't be done until their entire customer base loathes them and thinks they are greedy control-freak imbeciles.
No, they just realized that they can abuse their customers more than any other game. It's the biggest game out there, gives it a certain amount of critical mass. If all your friends in high school are having a great time playing it, you'd have gladly given all the money in your pocket and might even promise to do two chores a day for a year if your parents would just let you buy that one shiny game. We were all that dumb back then, or at least I certainly was. Activision has merely recognized that demand is high for the game, and so the price goes up, and they have significantly more leverage.
And their customers may whine loudly, but keep taking the abuse anyway. With modern warfare 2, there was much consternation about the lack of dedicated servers, with many people pledging to boycott. Activision may have worried at first, but would take customer demands less seriously when they saw about half the boycotters playing the game at launch.
The prestige system has little to do with the gameplay though. The benefits are all aesthetic, you get new icons by your name, you get to paint your background and guns pretty colors. I guess you get some bragging rights. That's it. You don't get more powerful guns, or special abilities. It's not cheating, in other words.
I can see how it would be annoying to people who took the game far more seriously than I do, but it's just a game anyways.
Why is it news that they are honoring these pre-orders?
I think it is a bit absurd that gamestop never said "Okay, it looks like the game isn't actually going to happen, so here's your money back." Not surprising, since they offer reservations when there are mere unconfirmed rumors of games being in the works.
If the down payment is 5 dollars, how much would gamestop likely have made off of investments in that time?
But it also sometimes works out very well. Computational neuroscience itself seems to be an example of that. The wiki page for computational neuroscience mentions the term was coined by an Eric Schwartz who appears to have crossed from physics into neurobiology.
The "father of neuroscience", Ramon Y Cajal, had quite a colorful background. He had skill in art, which probably helped him record his observations and study neural cells, and in his professional career started out studying inflammation and cholera before moving into neurobiology.
It doesn't appear to be limited to biology either. I've heard there are well-respected economists who were physicists in previous professional lives. To take it even further, even in music, genre-crossing usually has interesting results, like Richard Cheese, who does lounge-singing covers of pop songs, or that bluegrass cover of Snoop Dog's Gin and Juice.
I'd submit that changing fields can often be productive, bringing a new way of looking at things to the field. Assuming the field is simple is the real problem, but that's a pitfall whether you're switching fields or staying in your own field.
The real question is why would anyone pre-order any big title.
In my experience working there, it takes a really, really huge game -franchise- to make gamestop make sure they order enough for release. Halo, madden, modern warfare, those games are sure to be there on launch day. Since this isn't an annual sequel, it might not fit their "must have stocked" criteria.
Nearly every other game, gamestop goes cheap, figuring if they sell out, they can try to punish the customer into reserving games. Even games that any idiot could tell were going to sell out, they give each store just a few more than they reserved, so that if you don't reserve, you have a good chance of being lectured "You should have pre-ordered, that's how you're supposed to do it." With plenty of the kids who shop there, that actually works and they'll start reserving.
Gamestop isn't too concerned with making sure people get the new games they came in for. Finding out if a store has a game on their website is difficult, and the information is often wrong, no doubt on purpose. The vast majority of their profits come from used sales, they resell used games at an outrageous markup. Kids sell their slightly used games in for X, gamestop sells it for nearly 2X. They can't get away with selling new games that way. They'd like for you to come in to buy a new game, the game not be in stock, and you figure since you're there you'll reserve something else or buy a used game.
And it works. The people who buy and sell (and work) at gamestop will take a lot of abuse and not bolt, since gamestop basically has a monopoly on the market. The main alternatives are amazon, which is not instant, or other retail stores that don't buy or sell used games, and generally have a worse selection outside of the most popular titles.
Also, my district manager was a real douchebag, the pay was lousy, and half the customers had never heard of deodorant, but that's not really relevant.
:( I already lost mine during the last universe collapse and new big bang...
I reserved mine infinity time before that though. And yes, I'm aware there's some nonsense in physics about that statement not being consistent with space-time, but that's how old it is and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
/thread
Technically, we're not to that point yet and this story is sorta going in the opposed direction. It was a few years ago when we found we could make skin cells revert back to a stem cell like state (induced pluripotent stem cells or IPSC). Pluripotent cells can make any type of cell. That's good for some things, but would not be good for therapy, like repairing a spinal cord injury. You don't want bone cells in your spinal cord. IPSC injected into your body would make teratomas, which are among the worst types of tumors.
Pluripotency means ability of one cell to make any cell type. Todipotency means the ability of one cell to make a whole organism. In humans, the fertilized egg is the only todipotent cell. The information needed to make any type of cell reside in all cells, the information needed to organize a -whole embryo- is not. It's not trivial to put that information in. For that reason, I think it's going to be a while before we can turn a skin cell directly into a todipotent cell that can make a whole clone.
I vaguely recall that scientists have taken mouse embryonic stem cells and made sperm and eggs. It shouldn't be too long before it's technically possible to take skin cells from someone, induce pluripotency, turn -those- cells into sperm and egg, fertilize themselves, and make an embryo that way. It wouldn't be a clone though, it would be a super-inbred embryo.
This conduct on the part of the science community is pretty non-scientific, IMHO. If you have doubts, attempt to reproduce the original results.
Problem: money. The people who control the purse strings are loath to fund basic research in the first place. Come up with a marketable treatment for impotence and they'll shower you with money, but if you want to look for exotic life forms in harsh environments, and you'll get a lot of rejections and little money
Funding purely to -repeat- basic research experiments that have already been done does not exist. Even if you come up with a valid NEW reason to repeat the experiments, the people reviewing your grant are likely to give it lower importance than experiments which are equally scientifically sound and HAVEN'T already been done.
If basic research were funded as well as we fund the military, then you'd probably see more results independently verified faster, but as such, it's not a high priority funding wise, so it does not happen very fast.
One of the basic principles of the scientific method is the ability for peers to independently reproduce results. If this is not the case, then this is not science.
if that's the case then global warming is not a science.
Global warming is a science and can, in fact, be tested and proven independently. The issue is that most of us would rather we not prove it a first time here on Earth, let alone create another Earth and test it twice.
if there is a topic that is only interesting to a small minority, and a large part of the population doesn't care, then by organizing, this group can get it's point into a coalition agreement if it's willing to compromise on a lot of other grounds.
That happens here too, the thing is you can't just show up on the general election. Primaries fill that role here. Look at the libertarian poster boy Ron Paul: he's a republican. Pro-business and the religious right both fit into the republican tent more or less and compromise okay. If they were two different parties, they'd form a coalition and it would basically be the same politics. The tea party is actually a wing of the republican party, they were smart enough to realize that going the path of true 3rd party was futile.
The main problem with the first-past-the-post system in my eyes is that for some reason, the left wing seems convinced that the only reason we usually have 2 parties is because the voters don't realize there are more than two boxes in the general election, leading to more 3rd party voting, and more vote splitting. If liberals realized that and if Nader had been more interested in what was good for the country than his own ego, Bush would have lost the electoral vote in 2000.
Those types of discussions happen here too, they happen in primaries, they happen in the media, they happen with individual members of a party. I mean, there were votes against the patriot act as you can see. There's plenty of opportunity to talk about it in a primary. It doesn't happen, because Americans are more convinced the world is out to get us than Germans are. If Germany had a 2 party system instead, there would still be the same discussions.
And if you try any sort of significant dissent, you will be labelled as a terrorist by the patriots.
Idiots like Ann Coulter already call all liberals terrorists, if that's what you're talking about. Besides, what's a little name calling? Hell, on 9/12, people were already throwing around the terrorist name. Either Pat Roberts or Jerry Fallwell basically said atheists and/or feminists caused 9/11 within a few months. Big freaking deal, so they'll call us terrorists. Been called that before.
If you're talking about being deported to gitmo for gaining traction on repealing the patriot act through legal means, no, that's absurd no matter how you look at it. If you take your tinfoil hat off, your suggestion taken literally is easy to spot as absurd. If you keep your tinfoil hat on, you think that repealing the patriot act would take away all the power of "the man?" The "patriots" wouldn't risk exposing themselves to persecute you for something as trivial as the patriot act. You'd have to go after all their pocketbooks before they'd assasinate you or deport you.
I guess that was an oversimplification, I didn't mean to suggest it was a magic 50% and we'd instantly get our way. After all, during the Bush administration, there were polls saying 75% of Americans wanted national medical healthcare, but that didn't materialize during the midterms or the 2004 election.
Still, it would at least be discussed. With whatever percentage are opposed to the healthcare reform, there was talk of repealing it during the midterms and still is talk about it.
And speaking of percent opposed to healthcare reform, I strongly disagree that there was an -obvious- majority. There was a lot of noise, but it was not obvious to me that most voters were opposed to it. Then again, I was for it and didn't really care how many people were against it, much as I don't care how many people are okay with the patriot act.