Nah, I just asked you to cite what you're using for an argument. It's not my responsibility to do your arguing for you. And since you've now ignored every fact I've shown you, including that essential part about the "3/5 slave votes" that should have seen some kind of interesting response from you, I'm not going to bother.
Get back to me when you want a fact based argument. Not "they're exactly the same", because you heard some "Libertarians" say that somewhere as they ran from a Republican Party that finally showed its hand too much.
You're the one who suggested that big government, not the ideologues of a specific group in a Party in power, is responsible for government malfunctions. It's a bad example of "correlation", because it ignores that one Party both preaches that government "is the problem, not the solution", and then proves the government is the solution. Republicans don't change when they get the power - it should be obvious that they lie about shrinking the government until they get the power and can no longer hide what they'll do. Which is mostly expand it, except (as I pointed out), to destroy the parts of the government that protect Americans from corporations and even the elements. They seem to like breaking the back of the military that Democrats build for them to abuse when power changes hands. Which they tell everyone they're going to do beforehand, like when they send "Project for a New American Century" letters vowing to invade Iraq on any pretext and create permanent bases there.
But hey, you're going to post pretending that Republicans don't vow to destroy the government. And you're going to pretend that there was no difference between, say, Bush's government with its Iraq War, Climate Change denial, wholesale spying on all Americans, trying to privateer Social Security, unlimited credit to people unfit to hold a job, versus, say, a Gore government which would clearly have brought none of those catastrophes.
No, the story is simple. You Republicans are incredibly divisive, as anyone honest will tell you. Your problem is that you're claiming that forcing Americans to stop killing each other is "divisive", and that somehow I claimed I would never divide dangerous people from the people we need to protect. By your "logic", putting any criminals in jail is "divisive".
You and your faithy ilk want to get subsized by government handouts, but never pay the taxes. You're driving those trucks with gunracks around land your grandpappy stole from the tribes who lived there, after the government paid the army to break their nations, and you don't ever want to pay any bills.
I mean, you'll even ignore how Republicans controlled the Federal government the last time a nationwide credit scam destroyed the economy, creating the Great Depression (and the land handouts that created the Dust Bowl), to somehow blame it on the Democrats who finally ended it.
There's no "moral" in your story. You're a liar and a cheat defending the stupidest policies that have most blatantly destroyed so much that Americans worked to create for generations. You're not even amusing while you do it: you're as predictable as a "Left Behind" sermon on abortion.
I agree. But Slashdot is a completely reactive "journalism" publisher, and its public commenters are notoriously shortsighted.
But I think that these higher profile moves will spur some confrontations. What really surprises me is that Stallman or some other FOSS activist hasn't forced a confrontation over these essential SW packages. Especially since Debian is so popular, and a modern OS should really bundle a SQL server in it for all apps to access if they need one. Maybe if Microsoft does that with Vista and SQL Server (Access wasn't really comparable), it will encourage perhaps Ubuntu to try the same, and finally push the conflicting interests into the public eye.
Yes, Farrakhan is a racist, a bigot, and generally evil. But he's not entirely evil. He often gets the right response, even if for the wrong reasons, in his activism to unify and mobilize Black people to stand up for themselves. I don't think all the people who went in the Million Man March were racists - they weren't even all Black, and certainly not all Black Muslims.
Before I discuss what those Wright soundbites you presented actually mean, you'll need to cite them, so we can see just which perspective Wright meant. And similarly honest context will mean that Farrakhan, for good or for ill, is indeed one of the giants of the African-American religious experience.
But even if Wright says Farrakan has "integrity" (though he doesn't have integrity), that doesn't make Wright a racist. What it makes Wright is a guy who sometimes puts the power of religious activism above honesty, at least when praising a powerful fellow (even if of a competing faith) preacher.
Where you go really wrong is where you deny that "racism is how this country was founded". The country was founded not only on the labor of millions of slaves (and even more millions killed in the process of kidnapping them). It was literally founded on racism that gave Southern states (like Jefferson's Virginia) extra Electoral College and Congressional weight for every 3/5 of a slave owned there, but denying those slaves the vote. Even after slavery was abolished (after almost a century of the country being run on it), racism kept Blacks from voting. Even today, as we've seen in, for example, Ohio in 2004, where Black districts were shortchanged with too few voting machines, so they had to stand in freezing rain for hours (or, understandably, quit and go home without voting). In Florida in 2000, where Black people were illegitimately purged from voting registrations. Across the South, where registration requirements exclude more Blacks than other people. And of course all the other ways not as well known or understood. All over the place, all the time, since the country was founded with racism factored in, down through today. Now, you're wrong about the founding of the country, but that doesn't make you a racist. Any more than are most Americans who inherit a racist whitewash of American history, because it's convenient, and because people who rail against it are demonized. Instead, we can talk about it, to learn the truth for ourselves.
So it's pretty clear that Wright, for whom "gains towards equality" by definition means he's still not equal, has quite a lot of truth when he says how racism founded and still runs this country. It's not 100% accurate, but he's a preacher, not a scientist. They emphasize points to make larger points when those injustices are ignored by people willing to say "it's OK because it's not obvious".
Wright might even have called the US "The US of KKKA". But what was he talking about? Again, cite the context so we can see what point he was making. The context is essential, especially in moral arguments about longterm injustices like American racism.
Meanwhile, though I said his "God damn America" went too far, that isn't racist, which is what we're talking about. It was irresponsible for him to say, because "damn" is a specific technical term from a preacher, which tells their believers to hate whoever god damns. But does it? Doesn't Wright, like so many more reasonable preachers, teach his followers to "hate the sin, love the sinner"? Didn't Wright specifically say that "God damns America" so long as America is killing innocent people? Which doesn't so much inspire hatred of America, as it inspires hatred of the killing, or rather anger to motivate people to try to stop the killing. Again, the context - even just the rest of the sentence - makes a dramatic difference.
As for a White person saying similar things, I already posted the clip of Falwell and Robertson agreeing that God sent the
And now polls of America's reaction to Obama's speech explaining his relationship to Wright and to racism show Obama ahead of Clinton, and the temporary drops from endless repetition of Wright's clips have been reversed by his explanation.
Maybe America really is reasonable enough to deserve a smart president for a change.
What a fool you (and the 25% of people who agree with you) are. OK, Bush's approval might be a few points above 25%, like 29% now and 27% in February, bouncing around that range for nearly a year. But what's the difference? What kind of contrived nonsense that I'm "dividing the country" by refusing to make a distinction without a difference?
The kind of nonsense that someone who ignores that people kill people with guns (and their environment with trucks) will happily ignore in your faithy paradise. You will change your life, whether the government, the economy or nature makes you. BUt since I care about my life more than yours that you're wasting dragging the rest of us down, I'm happy to see you divided from the weapons you're fatuously insisting on playing with.
Oh, my mortgage... I didn't go for one of those fake Bush mortgages that you people faked economic "expansion" with while the economy actually died, creating over $30 TRILLION in government and personal debt. Instead, I saved the money I made without your subsidies, and sold my family's house for a nice profit to someone with a reasonable mortgage they can easily afford, because they've actually got a job and assets. Now I'm just watching all the house prices collapse in time for my excellent credit, income and savings let me buy a home at record low mortgage rates. So while I'm happy to benefit from the catastrophe you Republicans have wrought on our country, I've got the ethical integrity to try to stop it, because I'm actually patriotic. Not one of these America haters like you, who have turned a decent country upside down according to your fascists wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Governing America isn't a word game like cherrypicking the bible to demand killing for your corporate masters is. You people have demonstrated conclusively that you'll drive America to hell whenever you get the chance. So what if you deluded faithy zombies still number somewhere in the 25-30% range. You're getting the power slapped out of your hands, hopefully in time for those qualified to run a country to shovel us out of your mess.
Well, I think he's wrong, but there is inconclusive evidence that US germ warfare cultivated HIV. And there is proven precedent, in the Tuskegee program to infect Black people with syphilis to study how to destroy their society. He didn't claim that "the White race" is keeping Blacks down, but rather that some White racists have, which is also proven over and over again, even if not sufficiently to support all of his most extreme conclusions.
Yes, it's a conspiracy theory, but one that's relatively popular (with, as I said, some - not enough - good reasons) in Wright's community, in which he's an activist. With so many dead and dying of AIDS, especially in Africa, but no really convincing explanation of its actual origin, dismissing such theories without actually disproving them (or really proving an alternative) is indulging in equally irresponsible coincidence theory.
But that's Wright, not Obama. It's perfectly obvious that Obama is not distancing himself from Wright, as was so clear in his speech, even though that would have been politically expedient. What should be clear, to anyone not on an irrational hairtrigger fear of Black racism, is that Obama's church membership didn't automatically endorse all his preacher's most extreme views. Which aren't that extreme, taken across the actual spectrum of beliefs in America. I mean, something like 30-40% of Americans believe that humans didn't evolve, but that god inserted fossils in the ground to trick us, and preachers around the country preach that every day. Most of those people can't accept that we evolved from earlier people in Africa, and many of them can't accept that Black (or other non-White) people are just exactly as human as White people are. I don't see Americans running in droves from those churches.
No, I "pointed my finger" at a specific breach of nuke security because oversight has been cut at that base. But why confuse you with the facts, when you're committed to believing that "equal opportunity big government" is to blame?
Of course stating Republicans have expanded the government faster than anyone while hollowing it out to make it unsafe is perfectly compatible with stating that Republicans have run the government according to "shrink it to drown it". That's the hollowing out part that I mentioned. But why believe the evidence of your own eyes, like an entire American city left to drown?
There is certainly cause and effect from Republicans insisting that government can't work, then proving it when they get the power. That's not mere "correlation", that's keeping a campaign promise of bad government. Some human beings have screwed things up much worse than others have. Those worse humans aren't merely "coincidentally" Republicans. Unless you're some kind of coincidence theorist.
Well, I don't know that we can assume that Wright hasn't indulged that kind of inflammatory (and rarely even irresponsible) through his entire long career, most of which has been out of the reach of YouTube. But even so, it's a tempest in a teapot.
But thanks for the compliment about my summary. I think most people have realized for themselves what I posted, because it's not too complicated. And because Obama's speach explained it, of course more clearly than I did - that's his job as a (legitimate) politician.
There are more ideas from Obama. In the couple days following his "Wright was wrong" speech mostly about race and one's relationship to one's church, Obama delivered two major speeches about his policy on the current economy, and about Iraq policy. Of course the corporate mass media preferred more endless replays of the Wright clips and some clips from Obama's response speech to covering those essential policies at all, but they're out there. Clinton, too, has more specific policies, though it seems to me they're more politically opportunist, tuned to media promotion strategies without showing real leadership out of our problems. But she's got the mass media working to turn her into a spokesmodel, too, so I'm probably missing more substance that's not "telegenic".
For example, I just found a letter Obama sent to Fed Chairman Bernanke a year ago, demanding specific actions to stop the growing handouts of unsupportable mortgages. I wish that there was more discussion of that letter than, say, whether Obama is "Black enough". But you have to look for yourself. Like I said, that's the kind of proactive research smart people can do to recognize that we'll get a smart president, if we deserve one.
Well, per-CPU pricing is a way to charge for how much work the DB is doing, which (when the DB is good) is roughly proportional to CPU capacity. So they're roughly charging the more profitable businesses per operation as much as they're charging those who make less off of each operation. That's why the less profitable customers will chafe, as the average pricing works against them, while subsidizing their more profitable "fellow" customers (some of whom can be competitors).
Oracle and IBM would do well to go the Red Hat model on their software, and charge for support and custom development, not the SW itself. Probably the best model would be to open the source code for reading, but keep their copyrights (not GPL), while giving it away free, but charging for developing apps and customized DB implementations (eg. stripping unneeded bloat). They could charge customers what each would bear from their operating profits, which would maximize their own profits, not just the minimum CPU capacity the customer can get away with.
Since IBM and Sun are supporting MySQL and Postgres, they're already doing that at the low end. Oracle is nearly doing that by supporting InnoDB. Once the "low" end (especially Postgres) eats more sales from the high end proprietary DBs than they generate in entry level customers upgrading, the tail will probably wag the dog. The trend is now towards more openness and integration, platform neutrality. They'll hold on as long as they can, but the writing is on the wall.
Thanks for pointing out all the national secrets that have been given away by Republicans operating and datamining our personal info database, and distributing secret nuke tech to all kinds of unstable governments, including enemies like N Korea.
And so we get some preaching from you. About how somehow "my side" is to blame for pharmaceutical pollution. It's really hilarious to see a faithy Republican like you claim "the Left" is responsible for environmental damage. But par for the course to hear some kind of contrived argument that it's "divisive" for judging people like you whose unregulated guns and trucks are actually killing people every day, and even threatening our entire civilization.
I don't claim "moral" superiority. I claim intellectual superiority, and whatever kind of superiority honesty gives me. You can claim only the lies and hypocrisy that Republicans earn with your projections of all your own worst fears about your own major malfunctions onto the people who care to tell the truth about you, who try to stop the damage you've unloaded that everyone can see is destroying everything you touch.
You "Conservatives" have squandered everything we had. You had unopposed power for as long as anyone ever gets any power in this country, and you screwed everything up. You've got no one to blame but yourselves, so of course you're twisting into knots looking for ways to blame anyone else.
And no one but the 25% who still think Bush is god believes you. Zero tolerance for you faithy, crooked Republicans. No more letting you drag the country into an extreme Right corner from which you hold out a hand in fake "compromise" to drag us even further rightward. Your day is done, even though it's too late to keep you from doing irreparable damage. Don't expect any more chances until you learn to live like adults in reality, not your faithy echo chamber.
I wonder how much of Carter's "disaster" presidency was a result of the US losing Vietnam, finding out about Watergate (and watching Ford pardon Nixon), the OPEC/oilcorp oil shocks, continuing CIA coups in Africa and South America, and Reagan/Bush's campaign manager running the SEC? While refusing to paper over his problems by just spending the US into debt, or misleading us into some "patriotic" war?
Carter had problems. But his intellect wasn't one of them. In fact the unprecedented problems he faced came from an evil genius in Nixon defaulting to a partisan dummy in Ford, while facing other evil geniuses setting up the country for the Reagan/Bush campaign. Carter failed to protect the country from that, so he's got his share of blame. But, if anything, his problem was that he wasn't smart enough to rip out the Republicans playing "chicken" with the country while he could.
He was, however, smart enough to pull off the only peace treaty between Israel and a neighbor in probably several thousand years, which has even survived the latest stresses. Which include not just the war, but also the new Israeli government's idiotic violence driving Palestinians into Egypt across the treaty border. We need a guy with that kind of smarts again.
Here's a specific one, right off the top of my head, within the last half-year: nuke cruise missiles "mistakenly" flown out of their base. And that report comes out of the most secretive government ever in American history. How many more are there "redacted" for "national security" purposes (of covering up this government's failures)?
Or are you just looking for any excuse to blame "big government", when you voted twice for Bush, and who knows how many times for the other Republicans, who for years have proven they'll expand government faster than anyone, even as they hollow it out to make it less safe?
Those preachers have the "guts and conviction" to recognize that a collection of cells in a womb that isn't conscious isn't a human being. They might still be mired in superstition, but at least they're not tricked into thinking that everything with a human shape is a human.
Hey, my imaginary all-powerful spirit tells me to believe that a new soul is created whenever two heterosexuals agree to go on a date. When you don't have sex on a date to provide a living vessel for the new soul, you've just damned that soul to never live, never get to heaven. You people have destroyed more souls than can be counted. But that's crazy, so you don't see me pretending that you should believe it too, no matter how many ignorant suckers I could talk into marching for it if I had a budget.
Meanwhile, "pro-life" Republicans like you are desperate to send American soldiers to kill and die for nothing but lies and greed. You set yourself up as judges who take the lives of accused criminals, even when many are proven to be executed without even being guilty. You demand politicians who strip government of its powers to protect people's lives and health, leaving the weak to die early and suffer while they live, so some rich corporate owners can squeeze pennies from them.
You will force Congress into a special session, fly back a vacationing president who's otherwise too busy to go to work while New Orleans drowns, so they can force a braindead woman's family (Terry Schiavo's) to suffer through yet another public extension of her living death.
You faithy Republicans have nothing to say worth believing about life or death, except that you've screwed up both for the country as long as you've been allowed to.
No, I think all preachers go too far telling people what they should do because an imaginary supernatural power says so, as I explained in my post.
Even though it's a preacher's job, if they're consistent and believe in damnation, to say "God damn America" (or some version of that) when America commits such terrible sins for so long, I think it's going too far. But none of that makes Wright a racist.
That's why the prospect of tools to easily port between them (and perhaps good middleware that allows selecting among any of them at deployment time without rewriting code, sacrificing performance or features, or jumping through hoops, is so exciting. Because lots of apps get written to one or another corp's DB precisely because of a perceived asset in the DB vendor corporation itself, but then learn too late to switch that the corp is actually a liability.
If IBM, Oracle and Sun are each applying their proprietary expertise to make Postgres and MySQL easily portable to each other, DB2 and Oracle's DB, to reduce the cost of switching so they can poach on each other's customers for "upgrades" across the different DBs, we might actually get that. Once they stop seeing lockin as a net benefit, they'll work to remove that mostly arbitrary barrier. And since the MySQL and Postgres code is GPL, those improvements are likely to be available to the public.
Even if these buyins produce only easy portability between Postgres and MySQL, especially to the point where it's easy to cluster a mixed group without real performance hits, we'll finally be able to disregard which DB an app was written for, by installing its native DB as an API to the other if we prefer it, and pool all our data in all our apps for direct access each by the other.
How many other critical nuke parts were shipped to people who didn't report the "mistake"? How many of them have customers in China, N Korea, jihadist gangs?
There used to be all kinds of failsafe procedures to keep critical weapons far, far from our enemies' hands. But that was before 7-13 years of Republicans running the system according to the principle "shrink government small enough to drown it in New Orleans^W^Wa bathtub".
These kinds of "mistakes" are top-notch marketing for a Star Wars "missile defense" boondoggle to pretend to protect us while ratcheting up all the risks.
Except the facts are that Republicans actually embrace rightwing bigot preachers, while all we have here on "the Left" is a preacher who occasionally gets angry at the facts of America's killing innocent people and institutionalized racism. Hell, Pat Robertson ran for president as a Republican, and got millions of Republican votes. That's a pretty definite association. And every Republican president or candidate for it has sought and received Robertson's and Falwell's enthusiastic endorsement - not just sat in their church once in a while.
There's no connection between Obama and Farrakhan, excpet they're both Black. I guess it's easy to make that mistake if you're a racist who says any one Black person's actions are shared by every Black person.
Not "all's fair in love and politics". I'd hate to see your lover if you really think that. And that kind of attitude is exactly why we have a faithy Republican regime that is stopped by nothing decent in pursuing power and the flood of money it can steal behind fake "Christian" posturing.
Just because Republicans have lowered American politics to divisive attacks irrelevant to facts, but playing on the worst impulses of Americans doesnt' mean we all have to accept it. Not when there's an alternative.
Obama's preacher isn't a racist. He went too far with "God damn America" (in one speech), but what he said was "God damn America so long as it's killing innocent people all the time", which is actually what any decent preacher who believes in damnation (they're all supposed to) would have to say. Because that's what the religion says.
There's absolutely no equation of Obama's preacher to a klansman. Klansmen are sick bastards joining a secret society with an unbroken tradition of universal hate (except for worshiping an imaginary idol of a White supremacy that almost ripped the country in half and destroyed it). Klansmen are murders, arsonists, rapists, and traitors, who demand the genocide and enslavement of the entire world, except a few people who look like them (but women are property).
Obama's preacher is a guy who sometimes shouts about racial and social injustice, and demands... that America stop killing innocent people, stop persecuting the Black community, face the fact that Hillary Clinton isn't in touch with the hardest problems many Americans face because of their race. Sure, he can get jerky and obnxious about it, and even be wrong about some of the injustices - and even more wrong failing to admit how much persecution of American Blacks is perpetuated inside the Black community, not by "Whitey". But he's got a right to be wrong. Hell, he's a preacher - he stands up every week to insist people do things because an imaginary supernatural force says so - his whole gig is unprovable, so he's going to be wrong sometimes. But what does he demand we do about it? He demands that we are compassionate, that we take care of one another, that we're honest about how we hurt each other, and that we do better.
Not what we reject from klansmen, even if we disagree with him, or offended by him.
Meanwhile, George Bush has sent us to war in Iraq and against "Terror" by invoking his own crackpot Christian ideas of Israel's sacrificial role in the "Rapture". He claims "God" told him to invade Iraq. He's actually lying, stealing and killing people in Jesus' name. McCain has relentlessly sought the endorsement of some of the most sick "Christian" preachers in America. Like Jerry Falwell before Falwell just died, even though McCain had earlier rejected Falwell as a crazyman when Falwell was endorsing Bush against McCain. But after Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed "gays, feminists, abortionists, the ACLU" for making "God" send us the 9/11/2001 attacks, McCain eagerly pursued their endorsements and kneeled at their feet. McCain went after endorsements from "reverends" John Hagee and Rod Parsley, who preach crazy "Left Behind" hatred of anyone not fitting their definition of "Christian" - like Catholics, whose church he says is a "whore", a direct agent of the devil. Hoping for those other people to burn alive in the streets, endorsing the widespread massacre of "sinners" by gangs of "Christians" trying to score their way into heaven when the Rapture leaves them behind for not having been sufficiently hateful in the "near-End Times". These people want global murder, actual apocalypse, and will pressure a president who listens to them to hand out nukes to maniacs in the Mideast to "bring it on".
Even the popular Billy Graham, who's had the ear of every president since Nixon, is a racist and antisemit who used to laugh it up with Nixon (and surely the rest, but off-tape) about what to do about the "problem" with those non-WASPs.
Clinton isn't much better, worshiping for years with "The Fellowship" (or "The Family"), a gender-segregated prayer group that's mostly secret, but includes some of
I'm looking forward to finally having a smart president again. That seems to be much better for the country, except when occasionally they're extremely evil. This time around "evil genius" doesn't seem like as much of a possibility.
But the licensing, and the support it brings, is worth a lot more than just whichever DB platform happens to be running. For running enterprises, not only does DB2 have major features that Postgres doesn't, but you can get DB2 experts from IBM available at the drop of a table (;). For major applications, that's worth the very expensive prices IBM charges.
And with Postgres as a path to DB2, IBM would be able to give lots more people that pitch. And a lot more people who now have to choose not to use DB2 because of the upfront expense, would instead be able to include DB2 in their plans as they deploy a Postgres app designed to be eventually upgraded to DB2.
And of course that's also true about Oracle.
Which, as I explained, is why each of them are buying into the free platforms. They didn't get rich for nothing. They're smart, and they know what they need to sell DBs to a largely saturated market.
IBM buying into Postgres through EnterpriseDB is clearly a response to Sun's buying into MySQL. But what's really exciting about the move is that Sun also bought into Postgres, shipping it with Solaris 10 and integrating it with its Java App Server, as an entry-level database. Since Sun is also supporting and bundling MySQL (and therefore using it to drive sales of Sun machines), tools for porting between Postgres and MySQL are likely in the works.
Now IBM will follow suit, probably offering Postgres as an intro to selling its DB2 database, which will mean IBM tools for upgrading from Postgres to DB2. Meanwhile, EnterpriseDB already offers tools to port Oracle apps to Postgres.
The next move will probably come from Oracle. To continue the head-to-head competition, Oracle will probably offer tools for porting Postgres (and maybe MySQL) apps to Oracle. It's surprising that Oracle didn't buy a Postgres or MySQL company before Sun or IBM got them, but maybe that's why Sun bought one of each: to keep them from Oracle. Though Oracle did buy the InnoDB corp that makes the MySQL engine with serious DB features, and SleepyCat, the BerkeleyDB corp.
So as the dust settles, there could finally be a grand unification at work. IBM, Sun and Oracle each have incentive and in-house teams for producing tools to port between Postgres, MySQL and their proprietary high-end RDBMS'es. And since the lower-end (though Postgres competes well with them all) DBs are all open source, there is a good chance the upgrades will be available for freely porting among all of them.
The age of database lockin might finally be falling behind us. We might finally be free to use whichever DB is best for the job today, not determined by which DB was best for some other job yesterday.
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Nah, I just asked you to cite what you're using for an argument. It's not my responsibility to do your arguing for you. And since you've now ignored every fact I've shown you, including that essential part about the "3/5 slave votes" that should have seen some kind of interesting response from you, I'm not going to bother.
Get back to me when you want a fact based argument. Not "they're exactly the same", because you heard some "Libertarians" say that somewhere as they ran from a Republican Party that finally showed its hand too much.
You're the one who suggested that big government, not the ideologues of a specific group in a Party in power, is responsible for government malfunctions. It's a bad example of "correlation", because it ignores that one Party both preaches that government "is the problem, not the solution", and then proves the government is the solution. Republicans don't change when they get the power - it should be obvious that they lie about shrinking the government until they get the power and can no longer hide what they'll do. Which is mostly expand it, except (as I pointed out), to destroy the parts of the government that protect Americans from corporations and even the elements. They seem to like breaking the back of the military that Democrats build for them to abuse when power changes hands. Which they tell everyone they're going to do beforehand, like when they send "Project for a New American Century" letters vowing to invade Iraq on any pretext and create permanent bases there.
But hey, you're going to post pretending that Republicans don't vow to destroy the government. And you're going to pretend that there was no difference between, say, Bush's government with its Iraq War, Climate Change denial, wholesale spying on all Americans, trying to privateer Social Security, unlimited credit to people unfit to hold a job, versus, say, a Gore government which would clearly have brought none of those catastrophes.
No, the story is simple. You Republicans are incredibly divisive, as anyone honest will tell you. Your problem is that you're claiming that forcing Americans to stop killing each other is "divisive", and that somehow I claimed I would never divide dangerous people from the people we need to protect. By your "logic", putting any criminals in jail is "divisive".
You and your faithy ilk want to get subsized by government handouts, but never pay the taxes. You're driving those trucks with gunracks around land your grandpappy stole from the tribes who lived there, after the government paid the army to break their nations, and you don't ever want to pay any bills.
I mean, you'll even ignore how Republicans controlled the Federal government the last time a nationwide credit scam destroyed the economy, creating the Great Depression (and the land handouts that created the Dust Bowl), to somehow blame it on the Democrats who finally ended it.
There's no "moral" in your story. You're a liar and a cheat defending the stupidest policies that have most blatantly destroyed so much that Americans worked to create for generations. You're not even amusing while you do it: you're as predictable as a "Left Behind" sermon on abortion.
So my work here is done. Goodbye.
I agree. But Slashdot is a completely reactive "journalism" publisher, and its public commenters are notoriously shortsighted.
But I think that these higher profile moves will spur some confrontations. What really surprises me is that Stallman or some other FOSS activist hasn't forced a confrontation over these essential SW packages. Especially since Debian is so popular, and a modern OS should really bundle a SQL server in it for all apps to access if they need one. Maybe if Microsoft does that with Vista and SQL Server (Access wasn't really comparable), it will encourage perhaps Ubuntu to try the same, and finally push the conflicting interests into the public eye.
Yes, Farrakhan is a racist, a bigot, and generally evil. But he's not entirely evil. He often gets the right response, even if for the wrong reasons, in his activism to unify and mobilize Black people to stand up for themselves. I don't think all the people who went in the Million Man March were racists - they weren't even all Black, and certainly not all Black Muslims.
Before I discuss what those Wright soundbites you presented actually mean, you'll need to cite them, so we can see just which perspective Wright meant. And similarly honest context will mean that Farrakhan, for good or for ill, is indeed one of the giants of the African-American religious experience.
But even if Wright says Farrakan has "integrity" (though he doesn't have integrity), that doesn't make Wright a racist. What it makes Wright is a guy who sometimes puts the power of religious activism above honesty, at least when praising a powerful fellow (even if of a competing faith) preacher.
Where you go really wrong is where you deny that "racism is how this country was founded". The country was founded not only on the labor of millions of slaves (and even more millions killed in the process of kidnapping them). It was literally founded on racism that gave Southern states (like Jefferson's Virginia) extra Electoral College and Congressional weight for every 3/5 of a slave owned there, but denying those slaves the vote. Even after slavery was abolished (after almost a century of the country being run on it), racism kept Blacks from voting. Even today, as we've seen in, for example, Ohio in 2004, where Black districts were shortchanged with too few voting machines, so they had to stand in freezing rain for hours (or, understandably, quit and go home without voting). In Florida in 2000, where Black people were illegitimately purged from voting registrations. Across the South, where registration requirements exclude more Blacks than other people. And of course all the other ways not as well known or understood. All over the place, all the time, since the country was founded with racism factored in, down through today. Now, you're wrong about the founding of the country, but that doesn't make you a racist. Any more than are most Americans who inherit a racist whitewash of American history, because it's convenient, and because people who rail against it are demonized. Instead, we can talk about it, to learn the truth for ourselves.
So it's pretty clear that Wright, for whom "gains towards equality" by definition means he's still not equal, has quite a lot of truth when he says how racism founded and still runs this country. It's not 100% accurate, but he's a preacher, not a scientist. They emphasize points to make larger points when those injustices are ignored by people willing to say "it's OK because it's not obvious".
Wright might even have called the US "The US of KKKA". But what was he talking about? Again, cite the context so we can see what point he was making. The context is essential, especially in moral arguments about longterm injustices like American racism.
Meanwhile, though I said his "God damn America" went too far, that isn't racist, which is what we're talking about. It was irresponsible for him to say, because "damn" is a specific technical term from a preacher, which tells their believers to hate whoever god damns. But does it? Doesn't Wright, like so many more reasonable preachers, teach his followers to "hate the sin, love the sinner"? Didn't Wright specifically say that "God damns America" so long as America is killing innocent people? Which doesn't so much inspire hatred of America, as it inspires hatred of the killing, or rather anger to motivate people to try to stop the killing. Again, the context - even just the rest of the sentence - makes a dramatic difference.
As for a White person saying similar things, I already posted the clip of Falwell and Robertson agreeing that God sent the
And now polls of America's reaction to Obama's speech explaining his relationship to Wright and to racism show Obama ahead of Clinton, and the temporary drops from endless repetition of Wright's clips have been reversed by his explanation.
Maybe America really is reasonable enough to deserve a smart president for a change.
What a fool you (and the 25% of people who agree with you) are. OK, Bush's approval might be a few points above 25%, like 29% now and 27% in February, bouncing around that range for nearly a year. But what's the difference? What kind of contrived nonsense that I'm "dividing the country" by refusing to make a distinction without a difference?
The kind of nonsense that someone who ignores that people kill people with guns (and their environment with trucks) will happily ignore in your faithy paradise. You will change your life, whether the government, the economy or nature makes you. BUt since I care about my life more than yours that you're wasting dragging the rest of us down, I'm happy to see you divided from the weapons you're fatuously insisting on playing with.
Oh, my mortgage... I didn't go for one of those fake Bush mortgages that you people faked economic "expansion" with while the economy actually died, creating over $30 TRILLION in government and personal debt. Instead, I saved the money I made without your subsidies, and sold my family's house for a nice profit to someone with a reasonable mortgage they can easily afford, because they've actually got a job and assets. Now I'm just watching all the house prices collapse in time for my excellent credit, income and savings let me buy a home at record low mortgage rates. So while I'm happy to benefit from the catastrophe you Republicans have wrought on our country, I've got the ethical integrity to try to stop it, because I'm actually patriotic. Not one of these America haters like you, who have turned a decent country upside down according to your fascists wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Governing America isn't a word game like cherrypicking the bible to demand killing for your corporate masters is. You people have demonstrated conclusively that you'll drive America to hell whenever you get the chance. So what if you deluded faithy zombies still number somewhere in the 25-30% range. You're getting the power slapped out of your hands, hopefully in time for those qualified to run a country to shovel us out of your mess.
Well, I think he's wrong, but there is inconclusive evidence that US germ warfare cultivated HIV. And there is proven precedent, in the Tuskegee program to infect Black people with syphilis to study how to destroy their society. He didn't claim that "the White race" is keeping Blacks down, but rather that some White racists have, which is also proven over and over again, even if not sufficiently to support all of his most extreme conclusions.
Yes, it's a conspiracy theory, but one that's relatively popular (with, as I said, some - not enough - good reasons) in Wright's community, in which he's an activist. With so many dead and dying of AIDS, especially in Africa, but no really convincing explanation of its actual origin, dismissing such theories without actually disproving them (or really proving an alternative) is indulging in equally irresponsible coincidence theory.
But that's Wright, not Obama. It's perfectly obvious that Obama is not distancing himself from Wright, as was so clear in his speech, even though that would have been politically expedient. What should be clear, to anyone not on an irrational hairtrigger fear of Black racism, is that Obama's church membership didn't automatically endorse all his preacher's most extreme views. Which aren't that extreme, taken across the actual spectrum of beliefs in America. I mean, something like 30-40% of Americans believe that humans didn't evolve, but that god inserted fossils in the ground to trick us, and preachers around the country preach that every day. Most of those people can't accept that we evolved from earlier people in Africa, and many of them can't accept that Black (or other non-White) people are just exactly as human as White people are. I don't see Americans running in droves from those churches.
No, I "pointed my finger" at a specific breach of nuke security because oversight has been cut at that base. But why confuse you with the facts, when you're committed to believing that "equal opportunity big government" is to blame?
Of course stating Republicans have expanded the government faster than anyone while hollowing it out to make it unsafe is perfectly compatible with stating that Republicans have run the government according to "shrink it to drown it". That's the hollowing out part that I mentioned. But why believe the evidence of your own eyes, like an entire American city left to drown?
There is certainly cause and effect from Republicans insisting that government can't work, then proving it when they get the power. That's not mere "correlation", that's keeping a campaign promise of bad government. Some human beings have screwed things up much worse than others have. Those worse humans aren't merely "coincidentally" Republicans. Unless you're some kind of coincidence theorist.
Well, at least you're nuts.
Well, I don't know that we can assume that Wright hasn't indulged that kind of inflammatory (and rarely even irresponsible) through his entire long career, most of which has been out of the reach of YouTube. But even so, it's a tempest in a teapot.
But thanks for the compliment about my summary. I think most people have realized for themselves what I posted, because it's not too complicated. And because Obama's speach explained it, of course more clearly than I did - that's his job as a (legitimate) politician.
There are more ideas from Obama. In the couple days following his "Wright was wrong" speech mostly about race and one's relationship to one's church, Obama delivered two major speeches about his policy on the current economy, and about Iraq policy. Of course the corporate mass media preferred more endless replays of the Wright clips and some clips from Obama's response speech to covering those essential policies at all, but they're out there. Clinton, too, has more specific policies, though it seems to me they're more politically opportunist, tuned to media promotion strategies without showing real leadership out of our problems. But she's got the mass media working to turn her into a spokesmodel, too, so I'm probably missing more substance that's not "telegenic".
For example, I just found a letter Obama sent to Fed Chairman Bernanke a year ago, demanding specific actions to stop the growing handouts of unsupportable mortgages. I wish that there was more discussion of that letter than, say, whether Obama is "Black enough". But you have to look for yourself. Like I said, that's the kind of proactive research smart people can do to recognize that we'll get a smart president, if we deserve one.
Well, per-CPU pricing is a way to charge for how much work the DB is doing, which (when the DB is good) is roughly proportional to CPU capacity. So they're roughly charging the more profitable businesses per operation as much as they're charging those who make less off of each operation. That's why the less profitable customers will chafe, as the average pricing works against them, while subsidizing their more profitable "fellow" customers (some of whom can be competitors).
Oracle and IBM would do well to go the Red Hat model on their software, and charge for support and custom development, not the SW itself. Probably the best model would be to open the source code for reading, but keep their copyrights (not GPL), while giving it away free, but charging for developing apps and customized DB implementations (eg. stripping unneeded bloat). They could charge customers what each would bear from their operating profits, which would maximize their own profits, not just the minimum CPU capacity the customer can get away with.
Since IBM and Sun are supporting MySQL and Postgres, they're already doing that at the low end. Oracle is nearly doing that by supporting InnoDB. Once the "low" end (especially Postgres) eats more sales from the high end proprietary DBs than they generate in entry level customers upgrading, the tail will probably wag the dog. The trend is now towards more openness and integration, platform neutrality. They'll hold on as long as they can, but the writing is on the wall.
Thanks for pointing out all the national secrets that have been given away by Republicans operating and datamining our personal info database, and distributing secret nuke tech to all kinds of unstable governments, including enemies like N Korea.
Feel safer now?
And so we get some preaching from you. About how somehow "my side" is to blame for pharmaceutical pollution. It's really hilarious to see a faithy Republican like you claim "the Left" is responsible for environmental damage. But par for the course to hear some kind of contrived argument that it's "divisive" for judging people like you whose unregulated guns and trucks are actually killing people every day, and even threatening our entire civilization.
I don't claim "moral" superiority. I claim intellectual superiority, and whatever kind of superiority honesty gives me. You can claim only the lies and hypocrisy that Republicans earn with your projections of all your own worst fears about your own major malfunctions onto the people who care to tell the truth about you, who try to stop the damage you've unloaded that everyone can see is destroying everything you touch.
You "Conservatives" have squandered everything we had. You had unopposed power for as long as anyone ever gets any power in this country, and you screwed everything up. You've got no one to blame but yourselves, so of course you're twisting into knots looking for ways to blame anyone else.
And no one but the 25% who still think Bush is god believes you. Zero tolerance for you faithy, crooked Republicans. No more letting you drag the country into an extreme Right corner from which you hold out a hand in fake "compromise" to drag us even further rightward. Your day is done, even though it's too late to keep you from doing irreparable damage. Don't expect any more chances until you learn to live like adults in reality, not your faithy echo chamber.
I wonder how much of Carter's "disaster" presidency was a result of the US losing Vietnam, finding out about Watergate (and watching Ford pardon Nixon), the OPEC/oilcorp oil shocks, continuing CIA coups in Africa and South America, and Reagan/Bush's campaign manager running the SEC? While refusing to paper over his problems by just spending the US into debt, or misleading us into some "patriotic" war?
Carter had problems. But his intellect wasn't one of them. In fact the unprecedented problems he faced came from an evil genius in Nixon defaulting to a partisan dummy in Ford, while facing other evil geniuses setting up the country for the Reagan/Bush campaign. Carter failed to protect the country from that, so he's got his share of blame. But, if anything, his problem was that he wasn't smart enough to rip out the Republicans playing "chicken" with the country while he could.
He was, however, smart enough to pull off the only peace treaty between Israel and a neighbor in probably several thousand years, which has even survived the latest stresses. Which include not just the war, but also the new Israeli government's idiotic violence driving Palestinians into Egypt across the treaty border. We need a guy with that kind of smarts again.
Here's a specific one, right off the top of my head, within the last half-year: nuke cruise missiles "mistakenly" flown out of their base. And that report comes out of the most secretive government ever in American history. How many more are there "redacted" for "national security" purposes (of covering up this government's failures)?
Or are you just looking for any excuse to blame "big government", when you voted twice for Bush, and who knows how many times for the other Republicans, who for years have proven they'll expand government faster than anyone, even as they hollow it out to make it less safe?
Those preachers have the "guts and conviction" to recognize that a collection of cells in a womb that isn't conscious isn't a human being. They might still be mired in superstition, but at least they're not tricked into thinking that everything with a human shape is a human.
Hey, my imaginary all-powerful spirit tells me to believe that a new soul is created whenever two heterosexuals agree to go on a date. When you don't have sex on a date to provide a living vessel for the new soul, you've just damned that soul to never live, never get to heaven. You people have destroyed more souls than can be counted. But that's crazy, so you don't see me pretending that you should believe it too, no matter how many ignorant suckers I could talk into marching for it if I had a budget.
Meanwhile, "pro-life" Republicans like you are desperate to send American soldiers to kill and die for nothing but lies and greed. You set yourself up as judges who take the lives of accused criminals, even when many are proven to be executed without even being guilty. You demand politicians who strip government of its powers to protect people's lives and health, leaving the weak to die early and suffer while they live, so some rich corporate owners can squeeze pennies from them.
You will force Congress into a special session, fly back a vacationing president who's otherwise too busy to go to work while New Orleans drowns, so they can force a braindead woman's family (Terry Schiavo's) to suffer through yet another public extension of her living death.
You faithy Republicans have nothing to say worth believing about life or death, except that you've screwed up both for the country as long as you've been allowed to.
No, I think all preachers go too far telling people what they should do because an imaginary supernatural power says so, as I explained in my post.
Even though it's a preacher's job, if they're consistent and believe in damnation, to say "God damn America" (or some version of that) when America commits such terrible sins for so long, I think it's going too far. But none of that makes Wright a racist.
That's why the prospect of tools to easily port between them (and perhaps good middleware that allows selecting among any of them at deployment time without rewriting code, sacrificing performance or features, or jumping through hoops, is so exciting. Because lots of apps get written to one or another corp's DB precisely because of a perceived asset in the DB vendor corporation itself, but then learn too late to switch that the corp is actually a liability.
If IBM, Oracle and Sun are each applying their proprietary expertise to make Postgres and MySQL easily portable to each other, DB2 and Oracle's DB, to reduce the cost of switching so they can poach on each other's customers for "upgrades" across the different DBs, we might actually get that. Once they stop seeing lockin as a net benefit, they'll work to remove that mostly arbitrary barrier. And since the MySQL and Postgres code is GPL, those improvements are likely to be available to the public.
Even if these buyins produce only easy portability between Postgres and MySQL, especially to the point where it's easy to cluster a mixed group without real performance hits, we'll finally be able to disregard which DB an app was written for, by installing its native DB as an API to the other if we prefer it, and pool all our data in all our apps for direct access each by the other.
How many other critical nuke parts were shipped to people who didn't report the "mistake"? How many of them have customers in China, N Korea, jihadist gangs?
There used to be all kinds of failsafe procedures to keep critical weapons far, far from our enemies' hands. But that was before 7-13 years of Republicans running the system according to the principle "shrink government small enough to drown it in New Orleans^W^Wa bathtub".
These kinds of "mistakes" are top-notch marketing for a Star Wars "missile defense" boondoggle to pretend to protect us while ratcheting up all the risks.
Feel safer now?
Except the facts are that Republicans actually embrace rightwing bigot preachers, while all we have here on "the Left" is a preacher who occasionally gets angry at the facts of America's killing innocent people and institutionalized racism. Hell, Pat Robertson ran for president as a Republican, and got millions of Republican votes. That's a pretty definite association. And every Republican president or candidate for it has sought and received Robertson's and Falwell's enthusiastic endorsement - not just sat in their church once in a while.
There's no connection between Obama and Farrakhan, excpet they're both Black. I guess it's easy to make that mistake if you're a racist who says any one Black person's actions are shared by every Black person.
Not "all's fair in love and politics". I'd hate to see your lover if you really think that. And that kind of attitude is exactly why we have a faithy Republican regime that is stopped by nothing decent in pursuing power and the flood of money it can steal behind fake "Christian" posturing.
Just because Republicans have lowered American politics to divisive attacks irrelevant to facts, but playing on the worst impulses of Americans doesnt' mean we all have to accept it. Not when there's an alternative.
Obama's preacher isn't a racist. He went too far with "God damn America" (in one speech), but what he said was "God damn America so long as it's killing innocent people all the time", which is actually what any decent preacher who believes in damnation (they're all supposed to) would have to say. Because that's what the religion says.
There's absolutely no equation of Obama's preacher to a klansman. Klansmen are sick bastards joining a secret society with an unbroken tradition of universal hate (except for worshiping an imaginary idol of a White supremacy that almost ripped the country in half and destroyed it). Klansmen are murders, arsonists, rapists, and traitors, who demand the genocide and enslavement of the entire world, except a few people who look like them (but women are property).
Obama's preacher is a guy who sometimes shouts about racial and social injustice, and demands... that America stop killing innocent people, stop persecuting the Black community, face the fact that Hillary Clinton isn't in touch with the hardest problems many Americans face because of their race. Sure, he can get jerky and obnxious about it, and even be wrong about some of the injustices - and even more wrong failing to admit how much persecution of American Blacks is perpetuated inside the Black community, not by "Whitey". But he's got a right to be wrong. Hell, he's a preacher - he stands up every week to insist people do things because an imaginary supernatural force says so - his whole gig is unprovable, so he's going to be wrong sometimes. But what does he demand we do about it? He demands that we are compassionate, that we take care of one another, that we're honest about how we hurt each other, and that we do better.
Not what we reject from klansmen, even if we disagree with him, or offended by him.
Meanwhile, George Bush has sent us to war in Iraq and against "Terror" by invoking his own crackpot Christian ideas of Israel's sacrificial role in the "Rapture". He claims "God" told him to invade Iraq. He's actually lying, stealing and killing people in Jesus' name. McCain has relentlessly sought the endorsement of some of the most sick "Christian" preachers in America. Like Jerry Falwell before Falwell just died, even though McCain had earlier rejected Falwell as a crazyman when Falwell was endorsing Bush against McCain. But after Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed "gays, feminists, abortionists, the ACLU" for making "God" send us the 9/11/2001 attacks, McCain eagerly pursued their endorsements and kneeled at their feet. McCain went after endorsements from "reverends" John Hagee and Rod Parsley, who preach crazy "Left Behind" hatred of anyone not fitting their definition of "Christian" - like Catholics, whose church he says is a "whore", a direct agent of the devil. Hoping for those other people to burn alive in the streets, endorsing the widespread massacre of "sinners" by gangs of "Christians" trying to score their way into heaven when the Rapture leaves them behind for not having been sufficiently hateful in the "near-End Times". These people want global murder, actual apocalypse, and will pressure a president who listens to them to hand out nukes to maniacs in the Mideast to "bring it on".
Even the popular Billy Graham, who's had the ear of every president since Nixon, is a racist and antisemit who used to laugh it up with Nixon (and surely the rest, but off-tape) about what to do about the "problem" with those non-WASPs.
Clinton isn't much better, worshiping for years with "The Fellowship" (or "The Family"), a gender-segregated prayer group that's mostly secret, but includes some of
I'm looking forward to finally having a smart president again. That seems to be much better for the country, except when occasionally they're extremely evil. This time around "evil genius" doesn't seem like as much of a possibility.
As I said, Postgres is fairly high-end itself.
But the licensing, and the support it brings, is worth a lot more than just whichever DB platform happens to be running. For running enterprises, not only does DB2 have major features that Postgres doesn't, but you can get DB2 experts from IBM available at the drop of a table (;). For major applications, that's worth the very expensive prices IBM charges.
And with Postgres as a path to DB2, IBM would be able to give lots more people that pitch. And a lot more people who now have to choose not to use DB2 because of the upfront expense, would instead be able to include DB2 in their plans as they deploy a Postgres app designed to be eventually upgraded to DB2.
And of course that's also true about Oracle.
Which, as I explained, is why each of them are buying into the free platforms. They didn't get rich for nothing. They're smart, and they know what they need to sell DBs to a largely saturated market.
IBM buying into Postgres through EnterpriseDB is clearly a response to Sun's buying into MySQL. But what's really exciting about the move is that Sun also bought into Postgres, shipping it with Solaris 10 and integrating it with its Java App Server, as an entry-level database. Since Sun is also supporting and bundling MySQL (and therefore using it to drive sales of Sun machines), tools for porting between Postgres and MySQL are likely in the works.
Now IBM will follow suit, probably offering Postgres as an intro to selling its DB2 database, which will mean IBM tools for upgrading from Postgres to DB2. Meanwhile, EnterpriseDB already offers tools to port Oracle apps to Postgres.
The next move will probably come from Oracle. To continue the head-to-head competition, Oracle will probably offer tools for porting Postgres (and maybe MySQL) apps to Oracle. It's surprising that Oracle didn't buy a Postgres or MySQL company before Sun or IBM got them, but maybe that's why Sun bought one of each: to keep them from Oracle. Though Oracle did buy the InnoDB corp that makes the MySQL engine with serious DB features, and SleepyCat, the BerkeleyDB corp.
So as the dust settles, there could finally be a grand unification at work. IBM, Sun and Oracle each have incentive and in-house teams for producing tools to port between Postgres, MySQL and their proprietary high-end RDBMS'es. And since the lower-end (though Postgres competes well with them all) DBs are all open source, there is a good chance the upgrades will be available for freely porting among all of them.
The age of database lockin might finally be falling behind us. We might finally be free to use whichever DB is best for the job today, not determined by which DB was best for some other job yesterday.