Except for the fact that he's an American citizen, while the savages locked away at Gitmo are not.
Not quite true. At least one of the detainees was technically an American citizen, who needed a lot of external help to regain the right to a fair trial.
Several of the detainees are from friendly countries in the EU.
The US Constitution applies to US Citizens ONLY. Foreign nationals are granted NO constitutional protections, unless they become US Citizens.
You're right about that, but they are citizens of some country, and that country may have a treaty with the U.S. regarding the treatment and extradition of prisoners. Should we throw those treaties away and lose our rights overseas?
I'm not arguing that the constitution applies to these prisoners... and technically the Geneva convention doesn't either (though I think it should). For me the issue is due process. What is to stop person A from pointing the finger at person B and yelling "terrorist", and getting person B locked up indefinately? Clearly we must have some process and some safegards to prevent abuse. That's what the Geneva convention is for. We could just say "We're following the Geneva convention" and actually follow through, and everything would be fine.
Unfortunately GW and Rumsfeld would rather wipe their collective asses with international goodwill than to adhere to worldwide human rights standards.
For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
The designing and coding never gets old. I even enjoy fixing bugs (the ones that are reproducible). What gets old is the non-development work that you will need to do. You will need to deal with irate customers, you will need to review test cases, write, maintain, and review design documents, adhere to very strict processes, undergo audits regularly, deal with security, attempting to get other peoples code working, etc. I estimate that the time I spend actually designing and coding software is somewhere around 10% of my workload, and the percentage decreases as your coding skills improve.
So to answer your question... about 90% of the work is tedious and old, but about 10% is quite rewarding. I'm not sure if this is good or bad compared to other professions, but it's tolerable.
For one, you don't aid the dead, so comparing aid figures based on death count is rather dumb. We should base the aid on the living people that need aid.
Secondly, the $35 million is out of the federal government's budget. This does not count private charities, which will account for the bulk of the aid for the U.S.
Thirdly, yes, we did spend a lot of money on a war in Iraq. Many people thought the war was unnecessary and now think badly of the US for it, but that has nothing to do with this. The fact is WE ARE HELPING in the region affected by this Tsunami. There is an outpouring of support from the United States on this. Stop badmouthing your country when they're doing something good. Move to Canada if you hate the United States so much.
The point of coffee shops is leaving the office for ten or twenty minutes.
"Coffee" has very little to do with it. I am amazed that Starbucks was able to build an empire by selling coffee to people who don't like coffee. Very little of Starbuck's revenue comes from plain coffee. Most of their revenue is from the sweet, fattening lattes, mochas, and frappuchinos, and a significant portion is take out. Most of those who buy these drinks would not consider drinking a cup of black coffee. They want something sweet, creamy, hot, convenient, and caffinated, and they don't give a damn about the price.
Clearly this will not put Starbucks out of business... but have you ever been to a Starbucks at 7:30AM on a weekday? The customers that buy a $5 latte and hop in their cars are SBUX's bread and butter. Many of those would likely switch to the more convenient "self heating" variety if it tastes sweet and creamy enough.
I'd love an updated version of X-Wing with state-of-the-art graphics and game-play. What is the closest thing to X-Wing out there today?
They tried. "Totally games" produced an updated Windows version of Tie Fighter and X-Wing... unfortunately, they "updated" the gameplay a bit too much, and as a result, it totally sucked.
The DOS version of Tie Fighter may have lacked a bit in the graphics department, but the gameplay was just about perfect... Excellent MIDI music that changed according to what was happening on the screen, great controls, a smooth, space-like feeling.
Honestly, if you liked X-Wing, but haven't played TIE Fighter, I highly recommend you pick up the DOS "Collector's CD-ROM" edition of TIE Fighter. It's an excellent game, and you'll never notice that the graphics aren't that great. I've sucessfully run it under Windows 2000 (with a bit of help from Google). It may work under DosBox in Linux, but I haven't tried lately.
when the inevitable (3-times a day on average now) crashes come
Very strange indeed. I remember the 1999 version of Mozilla, and indeed it did crash all the time. However, sometime in 2001-2002, the crashes started happening so infrequently that they didn't bother me anymore.
Now, I'm running FireFox 1.0 (compiled from source) and it's quite stable and solid. It can go weeks without crashing. In fact, I don't think it has ever crashed on me.
On a 1.8ghz box, I'd estimate that VMWare performance is comparable to 300Mhz PC. It takes something like 10 minutes to boot Linspire on it. Fast enough to be usable for testing or evaluation, but nowhere near native performance or suggestive that VMWare is doing anything particularly clever.
Very interesting. How much RAM do you have? How much is dedicated to the VM? In my experience the only thing that holds back VMWare's performance is swapping. If you have enough ram (and enough dedicated to the guest) that neither the host nor the guest ever swap, and you install the right video drivers in the guest, you should be experiencing near-native performance.
Personally I run my entire development environment in a VM, and find it extremely usable. I find that the performance suffers when I dedicate less than 1 gig of ram to the guest. That's about the same amount of RAM I need to get decent performance on bare hardware.
I just rarely bother to play online games with people I don't already know, because, well, online gamers tend to either be a) 14 years old, or b) just act like it.
Agreed. In my opinion, this is also why online gaming will never reach the heights of popularity that many folks feel it's destined for. When I a few free moments (a rarity) to play a game, the last thing I want is some foul mouthed brat calling me names that he can't even spell.
The fact is that, like it or not, online gaming is dominiated by 14 year old brats that have nothing better to do than play games all day and act like assholes. When you form a community to play this game based on the sole criteria that the players are from the same timezone and like to game, that sub-community will be no different than the online gaming community as a whole (i.e. intolerable).
What I think an online game like this needs a way to bring in outside communities that are established for purposes other than gaming. I would probably enjoy playing World of Warcraft with the members of ACM or IEEE, for instance.
If Solaris had done this TEN YEARS AGO, then maybe. As things stand today, no. It comes down to a matter of trust.
Ten years ago (take a year or so), I installed solaris on my x86 PC. At the time, it was free (as in beer) for personal and educational use.
I was already a Linux user, and wanted to try a "real commercial UNIX" on my PC. I played with it for a while, then eventually deleted it. It was more difficult to install than Linux, but the reason I got rid of it was due to application compatibility. It's much harder to find applications that work with Solaris than Linux (applications that a poor college student could afford). I ended up downloading GCC and the entire GNU software development stack, and compiling my favorite apps from source.
In the end, I got rid of my Solaris partition because I simply had no compelling reason to use it. It was much easier to get the same applications running on Linux, and they ran faster there as well.
I guess my point is that unless the free software community embraces Solaris in a big way, Solaris is no Linux killer. Going open source may entice a few sales away from Linux in corporate environments, but there's no way the majority of Linux users will switch... at least not anytime soon.
Tabbed browsing, built in pop-up blocking, Google search, RSS headlines, a download manager, cross-platform compatability.
With my IE security settings set to High, and regular Windows Update patches, I have never caught a virus/trojan. Not one.
You're very lucky. Perhaps you have a ton of spyware installed on your system and don't even know it. Try running ad-aware and see what it comes up with.
Should I "punish" them by using something other than IE? That's just silly. Agreed. However, if you've come to the conclusion that MS has achieved dominance despite the quality of their products, it is reasonable to want to try something else. I don't mind i.e. particularly, but don't trust it either given my experience with their office suite and operating system.
Don't take it too much for granted that next mp3 player will remain backward compatible. MP3 is still a licensed technology, and the people who own that technology don't have to keep licensing "free" version.
Given that I have the source code to an MP3 player in a couple of different languages, I don't think I need to worry about not being able to play my MP3s again. Of course, that is, until those languages cease to be popular and I can no longer find compilers for them. That said, the algorithms for decoding MP3s certainly are available and cannot be put back into secrecy.
Even though it's not quite an open standard, a de facto standard with source code is certainly better than a closed secret format.
>I am hoping that, with Disney out of the picture Pixar may create more mature movies. I love what they have done so far but, I feel Pixar has so much more potential.
I doubt they will. There's still a stigma attached to animation in mainstream adult america... to them, anything animated is "for kids". There are exceptions, such as the south park movie, but I doubt it's possible to have a #1 movie that's both for adults and animated. Maybe if they broke their 100% CGI mold and incoporated live action they could do it, but that's not their strength.
I doubt pixar will settle for any fewer ticket sales than they're currently getting, so that pretty much confines them to making family-friendly movies.
We have an incumbent president that decides to invade a country for questionable reasons. He goes in with no real strategy for keeping the peace or exiting. Thousands and thousands die, and no "WMDs" are found, nullifying the reason for the quagmire in the first place.
But whether or not we invaded Iraq for a legitimate reason played no part in your decision. You voted for Bush just to spite those that question him.
That's the worst reason to vote for someone that I've ever heard. The second worst was "so he has to clean up the mess he made".
Does anyone have a worse reason that either of these two? I'm going to submit them to political science textbooks.
>Which reminds me - if Kerry wins Ohio, and therefore the Presidency, does his concession still stand?? Or does Bush have to suck it up and start packing up his stuff??
No. The electoral vote is the only one that technically matters. If Ohio finishes counting its votes and determines to send Kerry electors instead of Bush electors to Washington, then Kerry wins, and it doesn't matter who made what speech. Or Ohio's electors that are pledged to vote for Bush could vote for Kerry instead, and Kerry would be the president.
There's nothing in the constitution about the popular vote or who concedes the election to whom. It's all about how the electors vote.
The ones who brought up the first draft bill where Democrats, which was opposed by the Republicans and rest of the Democrats alike, so how does Bush winning make it more likely?
How, praytell, is Bush going to staff the army when he invades the next countries on his list, while we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Given that people that join the army voluntarily now actually have to fight, do you think people are going to sign up for it? How will we replace the retirees and casualties?
Bush will HAVE to either tone down his foriegn policy or re-instate the draft. My bet is on the draft.
>The republicans agree with a lot of what the libertarians agree with.
What planet are you on? The libertarians believe in the seperation of church and state, fiscal conservatism, and tend to be quite liberal on social issues. The libertarians also believe in war only when necessary.
The republicans, on the other hand, believe in insane levels of deficit spending, war whenever they feel like it, and that social issues should be written into law according to church dogma.
It's easy to say "I don't care" about some environmental issue, because natural processes also cause cataclysmic effects. The fact is that humans CAN alter the environment and humans DO breathe the air the environment produces, drink the water, and eat the fruit of the land.
The planet will survive no matter what we do, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, it need not support mamillian life. Though the course of history many classes of living organisms have become extinct though natural proccesses. It's quite possible that given a critical mass of people, all producing some minor atmospheric effect, we could alter the environment on the order of those natural processes, such that mamilian life were no longer sustainable. Natural selection would weed out the mammals and a new form of life would emerge.
If you're OK with that, go ahead and ignore the research about global warming. I for one would like to preserve the human race. I'm not saying all the science about global warmning is good. It isn't. However, to say that 6 billion people on the planet cold never affect the environment in a negative way is quite silly. We do need to take environmental research seriously, debunk the bad research, and heed the good research.
>you're just playing semantics at that point anyway, so I see no real value in it. Either the unions are equal or they are not, and if they are, there is no need to change the name.
It definately is a semantic play... but remember that semantics is the core of politics. The words you use to talk about something influence how you think about it. If a word has certain connotations that are inappropriate given the usage, it's appropriate to look for a new word. In this case, the word "marriage" has religious connotations that are inappropriate to the civil context. For instance, the Catholics view "marriage" as a holy sacrement. IMO it would be easier to change the word than to convince a critical mass of people that marriage in a religious sense is not necessarily the same as marriage in a civil sense.
>Marriage itself is neither inherently religious nor secular at this point. It has been one, the other or both for so long making such a statement is silly.
I'm sure that's true. It's also true that most people that are opposed to "gay marriage" are so opposed for religious reasons. Those that are in favor of the concept of gay marriage (call it a civil union or whatever) are not interested in barging into your local parish and demanding that God recognize their vows, nor are they interested in destroying "family values". The gay community just wants the same legal status as a heterosexual couple when it comes to patient's rights, wills, etc. The fact is that gay couples already have weddings and adopt children, and have done so long before any city or state started giving them marriage licenses. This "gay marriage" debate has nothing to do with that. This is all about the special secular legal status that a married couple gets if they're one male and one female, but no other combination thereof.
The only way to give them this legal status and still satisfy the religious folks (who are convinced that a homosexual couple getting married somehow affects them in a negative way, but won't share the mechanism) is to seperate the notion of religious marriage from that of secular marriage.
For once in his life, I agree with president Bush about something. Civil Unions are a good idea. I can't imagine why he was trying to ammend the constitution if that's really what he wants.
That said, I don't think the notions of two "seperate but equal" legal statuses for the same thing is a good thing either. Let's define "marriage" in the churches and define "civil unions" in the legislature. I'm aware that means scrapping the word "marriage" from the law books, and I think that's a good thing. Perhaps we can clean up the alimony laws while we're at it to get rid of this pre-nup bullshit.
BTW. I don't speak for the gay community... I'm a heterosexual that believes in equal rights for all.
>Google will bundle an OS with their search engine
Actually they do. If you "buy" the search engine, you're probably getting a Google Search Appliance, which comes with the OS, hardware, and search engine.
I can't speak for everyone, but I didn't like Clinton, and I like Bush even less. Clinton being an incompetent fool gives no license for Bush to be one as well.
Let's keep trying until we get a decent guy in there for a change.
Why? I'm not trying to be rude, I just think it's important given that this study has basically said that many Bush supporters have their facts wrong to know why someone that doesn't fit into that category would still want to vote Bush.
Is it because he supports your religious views?
Is it because you believe Iraq was a serious threat to the US?
Is it because you like Bush's fiscal policy (of borrowing against the future)?
Or is it because you think that Kerry changes his mind?
This is your chance to lay out the intelligent man's case for Bush. I'm sure many of us would like to hear it, as we haven't heard it yet.
The US delcares war on everything. The US has given up on having individual wars, and decided to combine the wars on drugs, terrorism, poverty, illiteracy, intellectual property theft, single mothers, and Iraq into one combined War on Everything.
The US president said in a statement today "It's become impossible, given so many wars against so many aspects of our society, to keep multiple fronts open all over the world. Therefore we have combined them into a single front, the war on Everything. As everything is now the enemy, it must be destroyed immediately. We will begin operation of the doomsday device in ten minutes. Our enemies will finally be vanquished. Kiss your mother and your own ass goodbye. God bless America."
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Except for the fact that he's an American citizen, while the savages locked away at Gitmo are not.
Not quite true. At least one of the detainees was technically an American citizen, who needed a lot of external help to regain the right to a fair trial.
Several of the detainees are from friendly countries in the EU.
The US Constitution applies to US Citizens ONLY. Foreign nationals are granted NO constitutional protections, unless they become US Citizens.
You're right about that, but they are citizens of some country, and that country may have a treaty with the U.S. regarding the treatment and extradition of prisoners. Should we throw those treaties away and lose our rights overseas?
I'm not arguing that the constitution applies to these prisoners... and technically the Geneva convention doesn't either (though I think it should). For me the issue is due process. What is to stop person A from pointing the finger at person B and yelling "terrorist", and getting person B locked up indefinately? Clearly we must have some process and some safegards to prevent abuse. That's what the Geneva convention is for. We could just say "We're following the Geneva convention" and actually follow through, and everything would be fine.
Unfortunately GW and Rumsfeld would rather wipe their collective asses with international goodwill than to adhere to worldwide human rights standards.
For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
The designing and coding never gets old. I even enjoy fixing bugs (the ones that are reproducible). What gets old is the non-development work that you will need to do. You will need to deal with irate customers, you will need to review test cases, write, maintain, and review design documents, adhere to very strict processes, undergo audits regularly, deal with security, attempting to get other peoples code working, etc. I estimate that the time I spend actually designing and coding software is somewhere around 10% of my workload, and the percentage decreases as your coding skills improve.
So to answer your question... about 90% of the work is tedious and old, but about 10% is quite rewarding. I'm not sure if this is good or bad compared to other professions, but it's tolerable.
This is quite stupid.
For one, you don't aid the dead, so comparing aid figures based on death count is rather dumb. We should base the aid on the living people that need aid.
Secondly, the $35 million is out of the federal government's budget. This does not count private charities, which will account for the bulk of the aid for the U.S.
Thirdly, yes, we did spend a lot of money on a war in Iraq. Many people thought the war was unnecessary and now think badly of the US for it, but that has nothing to do with this. The fact is WE ARE HELPING in the region affected by this Tsunami. There is an outpouring of support from the United States on this. Stop badmouthing your country when they're doing something good. Move to Canada if you hate the United States so much.
The point of coffee shops is leaving the office for ten or twenty minutes.
"Coffee" has very little to do with it. I am amazed that Starbucks was able to build an empire by selling coffee to people who don't like coffee. Very little of Starbuck's revenue comes from plain coffee. Most of their revenue is from the sweet, fattening lattes, mochas, and frappuchinos, and a significant portion is take out. Most of those who buy these drinks would not consider drinking a cup of black coffee. They want something sweet, creamy, hot, convenient, and caffinated, and they don't give a damn about the price.
Clearly this will not put Starbucks out of business... but have you ever been to a Starbucks at 7:30AM on a weekday? The customers that buy a $5 latte and hop in their cars are SBUX's bread and butter. Many of those would likely switch to the more convenient "self heating" variety if it tastes sweet and creamy enough.
I'd love an updated version of X-Wing with state-of-the-art graphics and game-play. What is the closest thing to X-Wing out there today?
.. Excellent MIDI music that changed according to what was happening on the screen, great controls, a smooth, space-like feeling.
They tried. "Totally games" produced an updated Windows version of Tie Fighter and X-Wing... unfortunately, they "updated" the gameplay a bit too much, and as a result, it totally sucked.
The DOS version of Tie Fighter may have lacked a bit in the graphics department, but the gameplay was just about perfect.
Honestly, if you liked X-Wing, but haven't played TIE Fighter, I highly recommend you pick up the DOS "Collector's CD-ROM" edition of TIE Fighter. It's an excellent game, and you'll never notice that the graphics aren't that great. I've sucessfully run it under Windows 2000 (with a bit of help from Google). It may work under DosBox in Linux, but I haven't tried lately.
when the inevitable (3-times a day on average now) crashes come
Very strange indeed. I remember the 1999 version of Mozilla, and indeed it did crash all the time. However, sometime in 2001-2002, the crashes started happening so infrequently that they didn't bother me anymore.
Now, I'm running FireFox 1.0 (compiled from source) and it's quite stable and solid. It can go weeks without crashing. In fact, I don't think it has ever crashed on me.
On a 1.8ghz box, I'd estimate that VMWare performance is comparable to 300Mhz PC. It takes something like 10 minutes to boot Linspire on it. Fast enough to be usable for testing or evaluation, but nowhere near native performance or suggestive that VMWare is doing anything particularly clever.
Very interesting. How much RAM do you have? How much is dedicated to the VM? In my experience the only thing that holds back VMWare's performance is swapping. If you have enough ram (and enough dedicated to the guest) that neither the host nor the guest ever swap, and you install the right video drivers in the guest, you should be experiencing near-native performance.
Personally I run my entire development environment in a VM, and find it extremely usable. I find that the performance suffers when I dedicate less than 1 gig of ram to the guest. That's about the same amount of RAM I need to get decent performance on bare hardware.
I just rarely bother to play online games with people I don't already know, because, well, online gamers tend to either be a) 14 years old, or b) just act like it.
Agreed. In my opinion, this is also why online gaming will never reach the heights of popularity that many folks feel it's destined for. When I a few free moments (a rarity) to play a game, the last thing I want is some foul mouthed brat calling me names that he can't even spell.
The fact is that, like it or not, online gaming is dominiated by 14 year old brats that have nothing better to do than play games all day and act like assholes. When you form a community to play this game based on the sole criteria that the players are from the same timezone and like to game, that sub-community will be no different than the online gaming community as a whole (i.e. intolerable).
What I think an online game like this needs a way to bring in outside communities that are established for purposes other than gaming. I would probably enjoy playing World of Warcraft with the members of ACM or IEEE, for instance.
If Solaris had done this TEN YEARS AGO, then maybe. As things stand today, no. It comes down to a matter of trust.
Ten years ago (take a year or so), I installed solaris on my x86 PC. At the time, it was free (as in beer) for personal and educational use.
I was already a Linux user, and wanted to try a "real commercial UNIX" on my PC. I played with it for a while, then eventually deleted it. It was more difficult to install than Linux, but the reason I got rid of it was due to application compatibility. It's much harder to find applications that work with Solaris than Linux (applications that a poor college student could afford). I ended up downloading GCC and the entire GNU software development stack, and compiling my favorite apps from source.
In the end, I got rid of my Solaris partition because I simply had no compelling reason to use it. It was much easier to get the same applications running on Linux, and they ran faster there as well.
I guess my point is that unless the free software community embraces Solaris in a big way, Solaris is no Linux killer. Going open source may entice a few sales away from Linux in corporate environments, but there's no way the majority of Linux users will switch... at least not anytime soon.
Remind me why I should be using Firefox?
Tabbed browsing, built in pop-up blocking, Google search, RSS headlines, a download manager, cross-platform compatability.
With my IE security settings set to High, and regular Windows Update patches, I have never caught a virus/trojan. Not one.
You're very lucky. Perhaps you have a ton of spyware installed on your system and don't even know it. Try running ad-aware and see what it comes up with.
Should I "punish" them by using something other than IE? That's just silly.
Agreed. However, if you've come to the conclusion that MS has achieved dominance despite the quality of their products, it is reasonable to want to try something else. I don't mind i.e. particularly, but don't trust it either given my experience with their office suite and operating system.
Don't take it too much for granted that next mp3 player will remain backward compatible. MP3 is still a licensed technology, and the people who own that technology don't have to keep licensing "free" version.
Given that I have the source code to an MP3 player in a couple of different languages, I don't think I need to worry about not being able to play my MP3s again. Of course, that is, until those languages cease to be popular and I can no longer find compilers for them. That said, the algorithms for decoding MP3s certainly are available and cannot be put back into secrecy.
Even though it's not quite an open standard, a de facto standard with source code is certainly better than a closed secret format.
>I am hoping that, with Disney out of the picture Pixar may create more mature movies. I love what they have done so far but, I feel Pixar has so much more potential.
I doubt they will. There's still a stigma attached to animation in mainstream adult america... to them, anything animated is "for kids". There are exceptions, such as the south park movie, but I doubt it's possible to have a #1 movie that's both for adults and animated. Maybe if they broke their 100% CGI mold and incoporated live action they could do it, but that's not their strength.
I doubt pixar will settle for any fewer ticket sales than they're currently getting, so that pretty much confines them to making family-friendly movies.
Interweb? Is that the same as the 'Information superhighway'?
All the internets are affected.
So let me get this straight...
We have an incumbent president that decides to invade a country for questionable reasons. He goes in with no real strategy for keeping the peace or exiting. Thousands and thousands die, and no "WMDs" are found, nullifying the reason for the quagmire in the first place.
But whether or not we invaded Iraq for a legitimate reason played no part in your decision. You voted for Bush just to spite those that question him.
That's the worst reason to vote for someone that I've ever heard. The second worst was "so he has to clean up the mess he made".
Does anyone have a worse reason that either of these two? I'm going to submit them to political science textbooks.
>Which reminds me - if Kerry wins Ohio, and therefore the Presidency, does his concession still stand?? Or does Bush have to suck it up and start packing up his stuff??
No. The electoral vote is the only one that technically matters. If Ohio finishes counting its votes and determines to send Kerry electors instead of Bush electors to Washington, then Kerry wins, and it doesn't matter who made what speech. Or Ohio's electors that are pledged to vote for Bush could vote for Kerry instead, and Kerry would be the president.
There's nothing in the constitution about the popular vote or who concedes the election to whom. It's all about how the electors vote.
The ones who brought up the first draft bill where Democrats, which was opposed by the Republicans and rest of the Democrats alike, so how does Bush winning make it more likely?
How, praytell, is Bush going to staff the army when he invades the next countries on his list, while we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Given that people that join the army voluntarily now actually have to fight, do you think people are going to sign up for it? How will we replace the retirees and casualties?
Bush will HAVE to either tone down his foriegn policy or re-instate the draft. My bet is on the draft.
>The republicans agree with a lot of what the libertarians agree with.
What planet are you on? The libertarians believe in the seperation of church and state, fiscal conservatism, and tend to be quite liberal on social issues. The libertarians also believe in war only when necessary.
The republicans, on the other hand, believe in insane levels of deficit spending, war whenever they feel like it, and that social issues should be written into law according to church dogma.
I don't see the resemblance at all.
I fail to see how this is so insightful.
It's easy to say "I don't care" about some environmental issue, because natural processes also cause cataclysmic effects. The fact is that humans CAN alter the environment and humans DO breathe the air the environment produces, drink the water, and eat the fruit of the land.
The planet will survive no matter what we do, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, it need not support mamillian life. Though the course of history many classes of living organisms have become extinct though natural proccesses. It's quite possible that given a critical mass of people, all producing some minor atmospheric effect, we could alter the environment on the order of those natural processes, such that mamilian life were no longer sustainable. Natural selection would weed out the mammals and a new form of life would emerge.
If you're OK with that, go ahead and ignore the research about global warming. I for one would like to preserve the human race. I'm not saying all the science about global warmning is good. It isn't. However, to say that 6 billion people on the planet cold never affect the environment in a negative way is quite silly. We do need to take environmental research seriously, debunk the bad research, and heed the good research.
>you're just playing semantics at that point anyway, so I see no real value in it. Either the unions are equal or they are not, and if they are, there is no need to change the name.
It definately is a semantic play... but remember that semantics is the core of politics. The words you use to talk about something influence how you think about it. If a word has certain connotations that are inappropriate given the usage, it's appropriate to look for a new word. In this case, the word "marriage" has religious connotations that are inappropriate to the civil context. For instance, the Catholics view "marriage" as a holy sacrement. IMO it would be easier to change the word than to convince a critical mass of people that marriage in a religious sense is not necessarily the same as marriage in a civil sense.
>Marriage itself is neither inherently religious nor secular at this point. It has been one, the other or both for so long making such a statement is silly.
I'm sure that's true. It's also true that most people that are opposed to "gay marriage" are so opposed for religious reasons. Those that are in favor of the concept of gay marriage (call it a civil union or whatever) are not interested in barging into your local parish and demanding that God recognize their vows, nor are they interested in destroying "family values". The gay community just wants the same legal status as a heterosexual couple when it comes to patient's rights, wills, etc. The fact is that gay couples already have weddings and adopt children, and have done so long before any city or state started giving them marriage licenses. This "gay marriage" debate has nothing to do with that. This is all about the special secular legal status that a married couple gets if they're one male and one female, but no other combination thereof.
The only way to give them this legal status and still satisfy the religious folks (who are convinced that a homosexual couple getting married somehow affects them in a negative way, but won't share the mechanism) is to seperate the notion of religious marriage from that of secular marriage.
For once in his life, I agree with president Bush about something. Civil Unions are a good idea. I can't imagine why he was trying to ammend the constitution if that's really what he wants.
That said, I don't think the notions of two "seperate but equal" legal statuses for the same thing is a good thing either. Let's define "marriage" in the churches and define "civil unions" in the legislature. I'm aware that means scrapping the word "marriage" from the law books, and I think that's a good thing. Perhaps we can clean up the alimony laws while we're at it to get rid of this pre-nup bullshit.
BTW. I don't speak for the gay community... I'm a heterosexual that believes in equal rights for all.
>The REAL George Dubya Bush was blocked from the rest of the world.. we'd be fine!
Qualification... those living outside the US would be fine, but those living inside the borders would still be screwed by the massive deficits, etc.
Perhaps if Bush was blocked from everything outside of his house in Crawford, we'd be getting somewhere.
>Google will bundle an OS with their search engine
Actually they do. If you "buy" the search engine, you're probably getting a Google Search Appliance, which comes with the OS, hardware, and search engine.
http://www.google.com/services/
I can't speak for everyone, but I didn't like Clinton, and I like Bush even less. Clinton being an incompetent fool gives no license for Bush to be one as well.
Let's keep trying until we get a decent guy in there for a change.
>I still plan to vote for Bush
Why? I'm not trying to be rude, I just think it's important given that this study has basically said that many Bush supporters have their facts wrong to know why someone that doesn't fit into that category would still want to vote Bush.
Is it because he supports your religious views?
Is it because you believe Iraq was a serious threat to the US?
Is it because you like Bush's fiscal policy (of borrowing against the future)?
Or is it because you think that Kerry changes his mind?
This is your chance to lay out the intelligent man's case for Bush. I'm sure many of us would like to hear it, as we haven't heard it yet.
The US delcares war on everything. The US has given up on having individual wars, and decided to combine the wars on drugs, terrorism, poverty, illiteracy, intellectual property theft, single mothers, and Iraq into one combined War on Everything.
The US president said in a statement today "It's become impossible, given so many wars against so many aspects of our society, to keep multiple fronts open all over the world. Therefore we have combined them into a single front, the war on Everything. As everything is now the enemy, it must be destroyed immediately. We will begin operation of the doomsday device in ten minutes. Our enemies will finally be vanquished. Kiss your mother and your own ass goodbye. God bless America."