I looked it up on Google, too, but decided not to go there, Mr. Pedantic.
>>Reminds me of this American guy I met in the pub who kept insisting that the Euro was the Euro-Dollar and just wouldn't be told:p
Naturally. Getting a term completely wrong is exactly identical to not using the Gaelic equivalent of words that everyone on here will understand. SlÃinte.
>>Making games has to be one of the most barbaric, ass-backwards forms of software development.
Don't believe the hype. Well, believe it, I guess, but it's not always that way.
I used to work in game development, and have (or had) friends or acquaintances at Obsidian, Midway, Bethesda, Valve, Sony, SOE, various Facebook game companies, and so forth.
There's just as wide a range of experiences in the game industry as in other industries, though it probably does trend a bit toward younger developers and longer work hours. You can have a bad boss working for Microsoft, and you can have a bad boss at Rockstar. The only difference is I think people are willing to put up with shit a bit more when they're working on something they love, and people love video games more than working on an incremental release for Outlook or whatever.
>>There are some parts of the industry that are not managed by psychopaths, or permanently in OMG PANIC mode.
Yeah, and even game development doesn't have to be crazy like that. LA Noire, IIRC, was handed the GTA engine on a platter, so they didn't/shouldn't have needed to worry about implementation details too much except their game-specific stuff (interviews and the like).
I'll have the occasional crunchtime... but I generally see crunchtime as a sign of bad time management skills, on my part or someone else's. Or, very infrequently, as the result of a crisis.
When I used to work doing game development, it was a 9 to 5 job, and I had a perfectly reasonable manager and very intelligent co-workers. YMMV, in other words, in the game industry and outside of it.
Translation: "Stupid users want to keep their stupid plugins! Ha! What do these idiots know?! We the developers, not some moron users, just know better what users really want! Didn't we tell them that all of their stuff is optional (to us)?! Well, we will just shove our choices down their throats and they will like it! Or else!... Wait, what happened?! They all left! What's going on?!"
From the Firefox feed: "At its core, Firefox is about people and is powered by a global community of individuals working together for the public good."
Yes, the FF dev team is obviously doing everything for the public good by making 10 minor changes a major revision increment.:p
#1 - the San Francisco law as written would outlaw animal shelters (what you call "rehoming centres") from collecting an adoption fee to rehome animals. That would put all the shelters into a drastic kill-down mode, or else cause a need to raise taxes by crazy amounts in order to handle all the animals needing to be kept in the shelters.
#2 - Outlawing the selling of aquarium fish? Lizards? Please.
#3 - PETA needs to get over themselves and learn to breed humans with humans rather than abusing the animals "their way."
The fact that PETA slaughters tons of animals donated to them every year says everything that needs to be said about those fucking evil hypocrites.
Sure, they claimed they don't do it any more, but then they come up with a bill like this, that will slaughter even more animals? Fuck them.
>>Seriously, I am in favor of random drug tests for all elected and appointed Federal officials.
Heh, like in Snow Crash, eh? Make the federal government only for the dedicated people willing to work for low pay in order to do something good for the country? Random drug testing and polygraph tests?
The start menu search is supposed to be the primary launcher for unpinned applications.
>>But a glance before pressing enter works just fine
Too slow, hombre! Too slow by far.
That's better than your solution because:
a) Win+R is as easy as Win
b) Being able to use Win/Win+R as I expect it to works on every computer I encounter... except yours. It must drive you nuts to use any computer but your own.
c) I don't have to install another program "classic shell"
Classic Shell is awesome. It lets you clean all the useless cruft out of your start menu, and re-enables being able to tap the win key and immediately use hotkeys to navigate through it. I have a whole submenu of commonly used directories, documents, and applications which I access by tapping Win,I, and then the first letter of the target. I can launch my todo.txt file, for example, by typing Win,I,T, and I can do this faster than the draw animation on the start menu.
I use this for things of middling importance - not important enough to pin to the start menu (which eats up start menu space, anyway, so I only have FF pinned), but used often enough to have a hotkey set up for it. My start menu is also the size of a playing card, without decoration, as opposed to the monstrosity that the normal Win7 start menu looks like.
I use Win+R all the time (or Win,R) for things like calc and notepad. But for launching directories and files, it's better (faster) to use hotkeys of one flavor or another.
On computers not my own, I just use the slower Win7 search bar. If I'm not doing development, the lack of speed doesn't bother me.
>>You should read what actual historians have to say about the idea that the Nazis were leftists.
I've sat through lectures with real historians on the subject, and have read various books. In a nutshell, liberals think that Nazis are right wing, because they share some ideas with the right wing (like a strong military, or being anti-gay). Conservatives think that Nazis are left wing, because they share some ideas with the left wing (hatred for capitalism, large government). Atheists think Nazis were Christians, because they shared some elements of Christianity (especially symbolism). Christians think Nazis were atheists, because Hitler hated Christianity.
And so forth. Everyone sees Nazis as being like their enemies. This is easy, since they were syncretists.
But at its heart, Nazi means National Socialism, which, again, was to differentiate itself from International (Soviet) Socialism. Just because Hitler hated the Soviets doesn't mean that he was a capitalist.
Your quote confuses modern liberalism with classical liberalism.
>>if your GM was handing out +5 Vorpal weapons, he was Monty Hauling you.
Obviously you didn't play 3rd edition =).
+5 vorpal weapons were easy to come by. (Gate in a Balor, take his weapon, and greater magic weapon it up to +5. Repeat each day as necessary.)
Back on topic: I'd love to hear a Miss USA contestant actually say something like that some time. I wouldn't propose marriage to her (I'm happy with my hot geek wife), but I'd send her some free Magic booster packs from Legends or Antiquities.
>>What's this search on start bar? You mean I don't have to use the "Run" menu in order to type "calc" anymore? Is it like the spotlike thingy on Mac?
On Windows7, it's better to use run and type calc than to use the search on the start bar. When you win-R (or win,R) and type calc, you know exactly what you're going to get.
On the retarded Win7 search bar, if you blindly type calc in the search window and hit return, you might end up with calc.exe, or you might end up opening a picture of Calculon from Futurama.
Microsoft truly doesn't understand why non-deterministic behavior is bad in UIs. You can go all the way back to Office's "smart" menus...
>>So why they hell did they change it? Because they made it better, and millions of users (this time actual millions) benefitted.
Ugh, please don't encourage them. The windows search fiasco was the worst feature of Vista/Win7.
It took a fully deterministic start menu and made it non-deterministic. (Close your eyes, tap the windows key and type "itunes" and hit return. See what launches.) This is *bad* user interface design.
Fortunately, the guys at Classic Shell (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/) have fixed the start menu back to its former, sane, design. If you really want to type-to-find on my start menu, I hit tab, and start typing, and it works just like any other Win7 search term. But I still have the ability to use the shortcuts to launch things with three keystrokes, in less than a quarter of a second. I'm not happy with any interface that makes me wait a second or two to get to the point where I can launch something.
I don't give a shit. If you have an XP box and upgrade it to Windows 7 with XP mode, a normal user would expect to be able to run all of his old applications with a 100% success rate.
But he can't. So it's not compatible, which is exactly what I said.
Awesome. Glad to see the spirit of inquiry so alive in our modern times.
You're also wrong about the Nazism thing. National Socialism was called that to differentiate itself and oppose International Socialism, which is what the USSR was running with COMINTERN - an attempt to unify the world under soviet communism. You can read pamphlets from the Communist Party of the USA called the Soviet America series (Race Relations in Soviet America, the Life of Workers in Soviet America, Towards a Soviet America, and so forth), such as: http://ia600202.us.archive.org/4/items/towardsovietamer00fostrich/towardsovietamer00fostrich.pdf
Hitler hated Slavic people as well as Jews, and hated Soviet communism. The Soviet leadership after the Russian Revolution was predominantly Jewish, so there was a fair bit of overlap there. He also hated capitalism with a fervor, so the notion that he was a far-right exemplar is only true as a tautology (in that people have defined far-right policies as being Nazism/fascism, even though there's little in common with normal right-wing agendas other than a strong military).
If you had to run down a list of Nazisms varied and often horrid philosophies, you'd see they agree more often with what we'd call left-wing beliefs than right-wing (support for gun control, for example), but, let's face it, the left-wing and right wing labels aren't very good and don't apply particularly well one way or the other to Nazism or fascism. By contrast, communism is a reasonable match for what we'd call "far left" policies these days.
You asked this question: "Want to rant about environmental laws?"
I didn't think that this was a real question. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question)
But if you demand an answer, then: yeah, sure.
>>Cutting the top off of mountains to get to coal is the logical consequence of regulations in the United States and modern technology. Our government (arguably that means our society) values people more than it values the environment.
No, currently, the pendulum has swung too far toward environmental protection. NIMBYism and the "I'm not opposed to the project in general, I'm just opposed to it HERE" lawsuits have been crippling our ability to do capital works projects. Companies will sink millions or billions into a project, and then the Sierra Club will sue and get it blocked, even if it is for a solar project or other green work. They've filed at least three lawsuits against solar plants here in California that I'm aware of. The Calico lawsuit was tossed out, but the SolarOne project got blocked, costing many millions to the company.
Is it? Or does it depend on the stability of the rock and other geological factors? What level of risk is acceptable? If a miner is willing to accept a 0.01% chance of dying in his lifetime for a $140,000 salary, is that his choice, or isn't it?
>>Mountaintop removal takes more machinery, more energy, but less people, and less risk.
And tends to run more afoul of environmental regulations, which was my point, if that was confusing you.
>>On the contrary. A local government is free to give out a cheap lease to a religious charitable group. They're not free to only do so for the charities they deem "proper," and charge double-rent to others to drive them out of town.
I agree. But that's not the ACLU's position, though. They don't believe in the freedom of a private or religious group to be able to determine their own members (http://www.aclu.org/content/us-supreme-court-ruling-boy-scouts-can-discriminate-damaging-limited-aclu-says) or that city governments can work with the Scouts (http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_0039.htm) or provide cheap rent to the Scouts (http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/86645/boy_scouts_want_to_discriminate_using_public_dollars/).
>>The current copyright system is broken, it's ethically bankrupt, so we no longer have an obligation to hold up our end of the social contract.
So if you were to take a year off from work, like a friend of mine did, to write a book, you'd be fine with people stealing copies of it? What if you never made a cent off of it, even though it was a best seller on the Kindle store (Amazon, let's say, decided to rip you off and not pay you any royalties)?
I know this doesn't make sense to you as a socialist, but most people would choose to NOT write the book if all their profits would be stolen. So we end up with a society where the only people writing books are people that are already wealthy or state-supported. In either case, the literary output of our society would decrease tremendously. The free market has positive benefits, believe it or not.
There ARE certainly issues with our copyright law (especially the perpetual copyright we have now) and software patents, but the fundamental concept of copyright is sound.
(Though I expect as a die-hard socialist, you probably don't believe in private property at all, eh?)
>>The ACLU, for instance, is a Libertarian organization by definition.
Unless, you know, it's about a Valedictorian trying to throw props out to their deity of choice during a graduation ceremony, or a city government giving a cheap lease to religious charitable groups or the Boy Scouts.
Their definitions of freedom and liberty doesn't seem to encompass those concepts.
>>California is broke because they're not allowed to raise taxes on anything ever without a two-thirds majority, but it only takes a 50%+1 vote for citizens to vote in new spending using the proposition system
Being able to raise taxes isn't the solution though. Being able to control spending is. (Our tax revenues are about where they were at 4-5 years ago, and yet we can't cut our spending to what it was in 2006? Why is that?)
We also pay our state employees far too much money - about 25% over what our cost of living difference should set wages to.
He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."
He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."
This is an argument that has gone back to before we even had a Constitution. The Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist debate is still raging today - now we just call it Strict Constructionism vs. Loose Constructionism. McCulloch vs. Maryland established broad powers for the government beyond a strict reading of the constitution, but now with the Tea Party elected congress wanting all bills passed to include the article of the constitution they derive powers from, we're maybe moving back the other way.
By calling him a right-wing nut, which implies there's no basis for strict constructionism, you're revealing your ignorance on the matter, or your bias at the very least.
The vast expansion of the federal government outside the bounds of the original constitution is very definitely a mixed blessing, and taking exception to it does not make one a "nut". However, he is mischaracterizing the liberal position as being authoritarian (large government liberalism does not necessarily mean authoritarianism), and using more than a reasonable amount of hyperbole.
This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.
His point is a valid one, that by adding environmental factors into the flood control policy, that we are probably dealing with all that horrible flooding now, and that it probably wouldn't have happened if our policies weren't to retain quite so much water.
As far as misguided environmentalism, that's a whole 'nother bag of chips. Google "green on green lawsuits" some time and spend a couple hours amusing you with the stupidity and hypocrisy of environmentalists.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The case was heard in Belfast. Northern Ireland - part of the UK, not the republic of Ireland.
Both of which are on what island?
>>I think you mean Ãras an UachtarÃin.
I looked it up on Google, too, but decided not to go there, Mr. Pedantic.
>>Reminds me of this American guy I met in the pub who kept insisting that the Euro was the Euro-Dollar and just wouldn't be told :p
Naturally. Getting a term completely wrong is exactly identical to not using the Gaelic equivalent of words that everyone on here will understand. SlÃinte.
>>Belfast is in Northern Ireland, which is part of UK, not part of Republic of Ireland.
I've been to both parts. Ireland is Ireland, no matter how they partition it.
(Belfast is scary as hell, though.)
>>Kudos to a judge that actually DID use his head!
Naturally, this is not in America.
Ireland rocks. The last time I was there, I watched a horse (pulling a carriage) placidly chewing on the lawn of the Irish White House.
>>If some of the mechanics resemble those in GTA, that's probably a direct result of the people paying the bills making some calls.
If they reimplemented the engine and all the details from GTA, then that was a horrendous waste of time and resources.
>>Making games has to be one of the most barbaric, ass-backwards forms of software development.
Don't believe the hype. Well, believe it, I guess, but it's not always that way.
I used to work in game development, and have (or had) friends or acquaintances at Obsidian, Midway, Bethesda, Valve, Sony, SOE, various Facebook game companies, and so forth.
There's just as wide a range of experiences in the game industry as in other industries, though it probably does trend a bit toward younger developers and longer work hours. You can have a bad boss working for Microsoft, and you can have a bad boss at Rockstar. The only difference is I think people are willing to put up with shit a bit more when they're working on something they love, and people love video games more than working on an incremental release for Outlook or whatever.
>>There are some parts of the industry that are not managed by psychopaths, or permanently in OMG PANIC mode.
Yeah, and even game development doesn't have to be crazy like that. LA Noire, IIRC, was handed the GTA engine on a platter, so they didn't/shouldn't have needed to worry about implementation details too much except their game-specific stuff (interviews and the like).
I'll have the occasional crunchtime... but I generally see crunchtime as a sign of bad time management skills, on my part or someone else's. Or, very infrequently, as the result of a crisis.
When I used to work doing game development, it was a 9 to 5 job, and I had a perfectly reasonable manager and very intelligent co-workers. YMMV, in other words, in the game industry and outside of it.
>>The tents are air conditioned with diesel-powered ECUs because people get heat related illnesses when they are not.
Man, maybe we should just copy how the Afghans do their air conditioning, eh?
From the Firefox feed: "At its core, Firefox is about people and is powered by a global community of individuals working together for the public good."
Yes, the FF dev team is obviously doing everything for the public good by making 10 minor changes a major revision increment. :p
The fact that PETA slaughters tons of animals donated to them every year says everything that needs to be said about those fucking evil hypocrites.
Sure, they claimed they don't do it any more, but then they come up with a bill like this, that will slaughter even more animals? Fuck them.
>>Seriously, I am in favor of random drug tests for all elected and appointed Federal officials.
Heh, like in Snow Crash, eh? Make the federal government only for the dedicated people willing to work for low pay in order to do something good for the country? Random drug testing and polygraph tests?
Actually? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Well, in any event, it's worth supporting the EFF in their efforts on this. As always, they're on the right side of the issues. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/supreme-court-agrees-hear-key-warrantless-gps
>>A search bar ... searches.
The start menu search is supposed to be the primary launcher for unpinned applications.
>>But a glance before pressing enter works just fine
Too slow, hombre! Too slow by far.
Classic Shell is awesome. It lets you clean all the useless cruft out of your start menu, and re-enables being able to tap the win key and immediately use hotkeys to navigate through it. I have a whole submenu of commonly used directories, documents, and applications which I access by tapping Win,I, and then the first letter of the target. I can launch my todo.txt file, for example, by typing Win,I,T, and I can do this faster than the draw animation on the start menu.
I use this for things of middling importance - not important enough to pin to the start menu (which eats up start menu space, anyway, so I only have FF pinned), but used often enough to have a hotkey set up for it. My start menu is also the size of a playing card, without decoration, as opposed to the monstrosity that the normal Win7 start menu looks like.
I use Win+R all the time (or Win,R) for things like calc and notepad. But for launching directories and files, it's better (faster) to use hotkeys of one flavor or another.
On computers not my own, I just use the slower Win7 search bar. If I'm not doing development, the lack of speed doesn't bother me.
>>You should read what actual historians have to say about the idea that the Nazis were leftists.
I've sat through lectures with real historians on the subject, and have read various books. In a nutshell, liberals think that Nazis are right wing, because they share some ideas with the right wing (like a strong military, or being anti-gay). Conservatives think that Nazis are left wing, because they share some ideas with the left wing (hatred for capitalism, large government). Atheists think Nazis were Christians, because they shared some elements of Christianity (especially symbolism). Christians think Nazis were atheists, because Hitler hated Christianity.
And so forth. Everyone sees Nazis as being like their enemies. This is easy, since they were syncretists.
But at its heart, Nazi means National Socialism, which, again, was to differentiate itself from International (Soviet) Socialism. Just because Hitler hated the Soviets doesn't mean that he was a capitalist.
Your quote confuses modern liberalism with classical liberalism.
>>if your GM was handing out +5 Vorpal weapons, he was Monty Hauling you.
Obviously you didn't play 3rd edition =).
+5 vorpal weapons were easy to come by. (Gate in a Balor, take his weapon, and greater magic weapon it up to +5. Repeat each day as necessary.)
Back on topic: I'd love to hear a Miss USA contestant actually say something like that some time. I wouldn't propose marriage to her (I'm happy with my hot geek wife), but I'd send her some free Magic booster packs from Legends or Antiquities.
>>What's this search on start bar? You mean I don't have to use the "Run" menu in order to type "calc" anymore? Is it like the spotlike thingy on Mac?
On Windows7, it's better to use run and type calc than to use the search on the start bar. When you win-R (or win,R) and type calc, you know exactly what you're going to get.
On the retarded Win7 search bar, if you blindly type calc in the search window and hit return, you might end up with calc.exe, or you might end up opening a picture of Calculon from Futurama.
Microsoft truly doesn't understand why non-deterministic behavior is bad in UIs. You can go all the way back to Office's "smart" menus...
>>So why they hell did they change it? Because they made it better, and millions of users (this time actual millions) benefitted.
Ugh, please don't encourage them. The windows search fiasco was the worst feature of Vista/Win7.
It took a fully deterministic start menu and made it non-deterministic. (Close your eyes, tap the windows key and type "itunes" and hit return. See what launches.) This is *bad* user interface design.
Fortunately, the guys at Classic Shell (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/) have fixed the start menu back to its former, sane, design. If you really want to type-to-find on my start menu, I hit tab, and start typing, and it works just like any other Win7 search term. But I still have the ability to use the shortcuts to launch things with three keystrokes, in less than a quarter of a second. I'm not happy with any interface that makes me wait a second or two to get to the point where I can launch something.
>>That's not the intended purpose of XP Mode
I don't give a shit. If you have an XP box and upgrade it to Windows 7 with XP mode, a normal user would expect to be able to run all of his old applications with a 100% success rate.
But he can't. So it's not compatible, which is exactly what I said.
>>Wrong. (I stopped reading there.)
Awesome. Glad to see the spirit of inquiry so alive in our modern times.
You're also wrong about the Nazism thing. National Socialism was called that to differentiate itself and oppose International Socialism, which is what the USSR was running with COMINTERN - an attempt to unify the world under soviet communism. You can read pamphlets from the Communist Party of the USA called the Soviet America series (Race Relations in Soviet America, the Life of Workers in Soviet America, Towards a Soviet America, and so forth), such as: http://ia600202.us.archive.org/4/items/towardsovietamer00fostrich/towardsovietamer00fostrich.pdf
Hitler hated Slavic people as well as Jews, and hated Soviet communism. The Soviet leadership after the Russian Revolution was predominantly Jewish, so there was a fair bit of overlap there. He also hated capitalism with a fervor, so the notion that he was a far-right exemplar is only true as a tautology (in that people have defined far-right policies as being Nazism/fascism, even though there's little in common with normal right-wing agendas other than a strong military).
If you had to run down a list of Nazisms varied and often horrid philosophies, you'd see they agree more often with what we'd call left-wing beliefs than right-wing (support for gun control, for example), but, let's face it, the left-wing and right wing labels aren't very good and don't apply particularly well one way or the other to Nazism or fascism. By contrast, communism is a reasonable match for what we'd call "far left" policies these days.
>>I asked you a question. Care to reply?
You asked this question: "Want to rant about environmental laws?"
I didn't think that this was a real question. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question)
But if you demand an answer, then: yeah, sure.
>>Cutting the top off of mountains to get to coal is the logical consequence of regulations in the United States and modern technology. Our government (arguably that means our society) values people more than it values the environment.
No, currently, the pendulum has swung too far toward environmental protection. NIMBYism and the "I'm not opposed to the project in general, I'm just opposed to it HERE" lawsuits have been crippling our ability to do capital works projects. Companies will sink millions or billions into a project, and then the Sierra Club will sue and get it blocked, even if it is for a solar project or other green work. They've filed at least three lawsuits against solar plants here in California that I'm aware of. The Calico lawsuit was tossed out, but the SolarOne project got blocked, costing many millions to the company.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/
>>Shaft mining is risky, and it always will be.
Is it? Or does it depend on the stability of the rock and other geological factors? What level of risk is acceptable? If a miner is willing to accept a 0.01% chance of dying in his lifetime for a $140,000 salary, is that his choice, or isn't it?
>>Mountaintop removal takes more machinery, more energy, but less people, and less risk.
And tends to run more afoul of environmental regulations, which was my point, if that was confusing you.
>>On the contrary. A local government is free to give out a cheap lease to a religious charitable group. They're not free to only do so for the charities they deem "proper," and charge double-rent to others to drive them out of town.
I agree. But that's not the ACLU's position, though. They don't believe in the freedom of a private or religious group to be able to determine their own members (http://www.aclu.org/content/us-supreme-court-ruling-boy-scouts-can-discriminate-damaging-limited-aclu-says) or that city governments can work with the Scouts (http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_0039.htm) or provide cheap rent to the Scouts (http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/86645/boy_scouts_want_to_discriminate_using_public_dollars/).
>>How is it not compatible?
Try running an app that uses 3D acceleration in it and get back to me.
>>The current copyright system is broken, it's ethically bankrupt, so we no longer have an obligation to hold up our end of the social contract.
So if you were to take a year off from work, like a friend of mine did, to write a book, you'd be fine with people stealing copies of it? What if you never made a cent off of it, even though it was a best seller on the Kindle store (Amazon, let's say, decided to rip you off and not pay you any royalties)?
I know this doesn't make sense to you as a socialist, but most people would choose to NOT write the book if all their profits would be stolen. So we end up with a society where the only people writing books are people that are already wealthy or state-supported. In either case, the literary output of our society would decrease tremendously. The free market has positive benefits, believe it or not.
There ARE certainly issues with our copyright law (especially the perpetual copyright we have now) and software patents, but the fundamental concept of copyright is sound.
(Though I expect as a die-hard socialist, you probably don't believe in private property at all, eh?)
>>The ACLU, for instance, is a Libertarian organization by definition.
Unless, you know, it's about a Valedictorian trying to throw props out to their deity of choice during a graduation ceremony, or a city government giving a cheap lease to religious charitable groups or the Boy Scouts.
Their definitions of freedom and liberty doesn't seem to encompass those concepts.
>>California is broke because they're not allowed to raise taxes on anything ever without a two-thirds majority, but it only takes a 50%+1 vote for citizens to vote in new spending using the proposition system
Being able to raise taxes isn't the solution though. Being able to control spending is. (Our tax revenues are about where they were at 4-5 years ago, and yet we can't cut our spending to what it was in 2006? Why is that?)
We also pay our state employees far too much money - about 25% over what our cost of living difference should set wages to.
This is an argument that has gone back to before we even had a Constitution. The Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist debate is still raging today - now we just call it Strict Constructionism vs. Loose Constructionism. McCulloch vs. Maryland established broad powers for the government beyond a strict reading of the constitution, but now with the Tea Party elected congress wanting all bills passed to include the article of the constitution they derive powers from, we're maybe moving back the other way.
By calling him a right-wing nut, which implies there's no basis for strict constructionism, you're revealing your ignorance on the matter, or your bias at the very least.
The vast expansion of the federal government outside the bounds of the original constitution is very definitely a mixed blessing, and taking exception to it does not make one a "nut". However, he is mischaracterizing the liberal position as being authoritarian (large government liberalism does not necessarily mean authoritarianism), and using more than a reasonable amount of hyperbole.
His point is a valid one, that by adding environmental factors into the flood control policy, that we are probably dealing with all that horrible flooding now, and that it probably wouldn't have happened if our policies weren't to retain quite so much water.
As far as misguided environmentalism, that's a whole 'nother bag of chips. Google "green on green lawsuits" some time and spend a couple hours amusing you with the stupidity and hypocrisy of environmentalists.