And the same is true with each different kind of installed component of every system.
The point of APT is that it's all collected, centralized and manageable. Including dependencies, the nightmare for upgrades (and downgrades).
Now, if there is an APT tool that can import a directory or files into the DB, registering any files, then that's great. For example, Perl has it's -MCPAN installer, but it's much better to use the APT wrapper. Maybe the way to do it is just to wrap the extensions into.deb packages for APT to use. Maybe the extensions are already distributed as.debs.
I wish these extensions would register when installed with my APT repository. That way it's easier to upgrade along with the rest of my system, especially after an OS upgrade (every 6 months with Ubuntu). And easier to clone to a new machine.
The APT dependency management would also make it easier to install, say, a GreaseMonkey script and automatically install GreaseMonkey, because it's the script I want and GreaseMonkey is incidental.
A reverse dependency tool in Firefox would let me install FireFox on a host, then get suggestions of all the extensions I have installed elsewhere. But that's more of a reach than just including the extensions installs in APT packages.
No, I dumbed it down when it became clear you couldn't understand the detail.
To repeat myself again, to give you one last chance to get it: I am accountable for the government we elected in the US. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent as much time helping turn it back. ANd I'm not nearly done. Which includes explaining the situation even to intransigent people like you.
Even if you're a foreigner. Which you decline to clarify, though I've asked you straight. So I expect you are. Pretty convenient for you to make demands of the US to give away subsidized tech leadership to other foreigners when you are one. You have no standing to contest my insistence that my government spend my money and my neighbors money on me and my neighbors, not you and yours.
"Enough said"? Yes, you've certainly said at least enough. Enough to make clear that you're just another grabby entitlement freak with your hand out and your ears closed.
Yes, they're part of the trolls, though Dan Rather is a bad example (at least in the case of the simulated memos that blew the story of Bush's actual derelictions of duty). The blogs out more trolls, and will continue until either the mass media catches up, or the blogs have as much entrenched interests to lose. Then there will likely be even more distributed exposures, more by people casually collaborating as tech makes that more convenient, fun and accessible to more people. Corroboration transforms gossip into fact, which destroys trolls.
The generation before our own volunteered for Vietnam in greater numbers and percentages than the generation before theirs did for WWII. Only because of the draft and the eventual overreaching of Nixon without a compliant partisan Congress did the Vietnam War end, after at least 4 years of both reasonable Americans and the Nixon administration knowing it was hopeless.
People have almost as much power in our government, especially over big, black/white issues like fighting the Iraq War, as we exercise. The sure way to have no power is to decide you have no power. American politics is a giant, expensive, complex system. But like any other, actions have reactions. We are now entering the beginning of a countercycle to the cycle that peaked in the last 6 years. If it doesn't completely cycle contrary to the old one, that's mainly because people don't interact enough. If, instead of just turning their backs on voting, 60% of eligible voters voted for candidates outside the duopoly, or for candidates entering the parties outside the channels of their governing powers, there would be a revolution, the kind Jefferson and his generation designed for every 2-4 years. If every House rep were fired every 2 years until things changed, instead of a 98% reelection rate simultaneous with a 35% approval rate, that would change things pretty fast. The rigged elections and synthetic choices are possible only with the majority turned off. You can claim that the apathy is part of the party duopoly programme, but it's not enforced by anyone but our fellow citizens. In the phase of the interactivity in which they must act, they don't. That of course has its damaging effect on the interactive system.
There is a fix, many fixes. There are patches to the main diseases, like campaign finance, prohibitions on party conspiracies, and routine investigations of any corruption/malfeasance/incompetence evidence by actually competing powers. Just a few would tip the balance of power into the self-cleansing the actual system, the Constitution, specifies, generating more change and actual representation. But again, it's all based on people's participation. Without the "demos" of "democracy", it's just "cracy", rule, by the people who do work at ruling. Do something to get more people into the "demos", and watch the possibilities for change and equitable power multiply. Give up, and get the government you deserve.
No, I'm doing what I can to stop the people who hijacked my country with Star Wars schemes (among many others), and the Dane is defending that particular fraud against me (and them, too, unless they're getting a check) as if that requires that I do what they do by subsidizing this Canadian company. Which I pointed out isn't nearly symmetrical as their example would require. I didn't say the Danes concocted the scheme, just that their government, and this particular Dane, is complicit in it. Which doesn't require my complicity in either that scheme, or another one to subsidize Canadians.
Meanwhile, I don't blame the Canadians or anyone else, though I don't have to like it and they're responsible. I criticized NASA, Griffin and the US government, which I expect to serve US interests better on my dime without spending it on foreigners. Not "dirty" foreigners, which I never said - your strawman.
So just because you can't follow the less than reflex logic of my completely legitimate dislike of subsidizing foreign corporations with my NASA budget, doesn't make that my limitation. It's yours. Just because you rehash the arguments I've already defeated in previous posts doesn't make mine less powerful, it just further attests your poor reading comprehension. Surely a convenient defect: in what country do you live and pay taxes? Like the rest of those insisting I pay to subsidize foreigners as if it's an absolute entitlement of the rest of the world, I expect you're not in the States. Just because you want to preserve your place in line for your own US subsidy doesn't mean I have to like it, even if it's "business as usual".
That kind of exchange is what makes anonymity valuable, especially to the anonymous person. But it's not sacrosanct, in and of itself. Anonymous government sources have negative value, and ought to be exposed every practically time. Which is just one example of how anonymity is not sacrosanct.
But it is valuable. In the case of whistleblowers, in a legitimate process it is usually essential, at least public anonymitiy. But even there, without eventually exercising the right of the accused to confront their accuser, the anonymous person gains too much power from unaccountability. Sometimes it might be worth it to society (and just to others than themselves), but overall it's too abusable. And there's no way to distinguish between those that are worth it and those that aren't, at least not until it's too late and damage is done.
Your example is flawed, because the utility company can't sue you if you're anonymous. A blog to which you repeatedly connect from a unique location controlled by only you is such shabby anonymity that it's like a password set to "password": no reasonable expectation of privacy should be attached. But what about the person who takes the steps necessary for anonymity, only to libel someone? Why should their anonymity be protected from the effort of the libel target to confront them?
If there is a problem with whistleblowers, it's not in the anonymity loop. It lies in the power of some people (eg. corporate execs) to damage others without accountability, often anonymously. If that problem is fixed, then anonymity isn't nearly as useful for security for whistleblowers or other accusers. So the anonymity isn't sacrosanct, even if the safety of an accuser with facts is always to be protected. We've popped out of anonymity into something else entirely. So there really is little, if any, reason to protect anonymity as a right, because it isn't.
Yeah yeah yeah. You tried that "kicking and screaming" line on me a couple of posts ago. While strawmanning me on "the US government is deluded into entitlement", which you want to say, but I never said. Meanwhile you're demanding I subsidize Canada because you like returning a tiny bit of the huge US subsidy of Denmark. All of which is correct, all of which makes you look like either a fool or a liar or both, none of which you've got an argument for. So you just deny it and say childish bad things about me that aren't even true.
When it destroys both your points and even devastates your sense of logic, then somehow my argument has no place in reality.
You're so deluded that you can't distinguish your projections from the realty I'm forcing down your throat.
What makes anonymity sacrosanct? Someone does something to be anonymous, their perogative. If someone else does something to expose their identity, that's their perogative, too. If what they do to expose them isn't itself wrong, then they haven't done anything wrong. If they use public info (eg. cameras recording public appearances) and deduction, there's not wrong. The exposed anonymous might not like it, but there's no intrinsic, universal right to anonymity just because they want it. And in fact exposing hidden players in public acts is the primary responsibility of newspapers and other periodical publishers.
I wish there were a lot more outrage about newspapers keeping some people anonymous. Anonymous sources used to spin news, lie to damage coverage and public knowledge. When the source isn't actually anonymous at all, to the reporter (or their editors), but is anonymized by the newspaper, creating more ignorance rather than more knowledge. Especially when that anonymity makes unaccountable some people who are reliably wrong, lying, or just predictably spinning.
Newspapers have a glorious future working to expose trolls in our new mediasphere full of cheap and easy cover. We need more exposure, and more support for it.
Denmark has had its military budget mostly paid by the US, ie. me since the 1940s. It's your choice if you want to minimally subsidize the huge subsidy. By "your" I mean you, because Denmark has a democratic government. Its accountability to citizens works both ways: the Danish people are accountable for the government you elect. If you voted against it, or otherwise opposed it or this policy, you might have an exculpating excuse. But you didn't, so you don't. To make matters worse, that missile defense system you're collaborating with is part of a giant system, Star Wars, to defraud Americans of $TRILLIONS more in insecurity extortion, and generations of counterproductive fearmongering to grease its wheels. I expect that the US system will add tremendous value to Denmark's infrastructure, even if it's only value lies in extracting more money for boondoggle, distracting military contracts. Your preference for that system is your problem, except to the extent to which your problems further entrench mine. But you're way out of line expecting me to have the same accommodating attitude that you have.
Meanwhile, Canada is another recipient of huge American military budget subsidy. This NASA work further subsidizes Canada, and no doubt its military (and intel) industries. Which compete with US businesses whose success is much more in my interest. But subsidized by my taxes. Which I oppose. As I've opposed the NASA administrator, Griffin, who oversees it. As I opposed the Bush Republican government urgently and often, every chance I've had.
And which I directly oppose in this simple case of paying for foreign corporations to compete with my domestic ones. Which is a simple self-interest that can be argued with only from the standpoint of someone with their hand out. Like so many foreigners who arrogantly ignore the huge subsidies I'm already paying for our mutual interests, have been for our lifetimes.
You've got some kind of European compulsion to call me, as an American, "arrogant". You're the one who's arrogant. You have such a sense of entitlement to US subsidy that you deny my right to complain about it. And so arrogant that you are insisting over and again that I have called my government deluded into entitlement, when I am calling you that. Because you are, as you have so consistently demonstrated in this thread.
I've been paying your bills your entire life. That doesn't mean every foreigner who bribes a (probably Republican) Congressmember is also so entitled. It does mean you should stop insulting me when I act like a democrat, and instead deserve a "thank you". Doubt I'll see it. You're welcome, anyway. But not to grab more, or insist that some other foreigners have that privilege without my opposition. Leveraging a half-century of mostly mutual interest into expectations of further subsidy well beyond mutual interest, or even mutuality, is the kind of arrogance that is so common among non-Americans that it even legitimizes some of the excessive American attitude to ignore foreigners entirely. Since I have lived in Canada for years, and traveled extensively in Europe (and well beyond), I can tell the difference. You evidently cannot.
What the hell are you talking about? The political problems that allow NASA to work against American interest is OK, because our tech foresight is more reliable than the integrity of our political process?
The people posting that this is OK, that my criticism is somehow merely xenophobia, are those undeniably deluded into entitlement.
So I dismiss your fatalism. Where do you live and pay your taxes?
Another part of the American way is to stand against those abuses. To publicly denounce them. To demand accountability. America's is the interactive citizen/government model. Your post is part of it, but would be more effective if pointing out how to fix it despite its propensity for breaking.
Because NASA already has the factory and the people with the expertise. It's not just that the US is rich, it's that we've had the foresight to spend it on the right things. Taking the risk with our money and our national effort that foreign countries don't even bother to take.
That's an American advantage, which I want us to use for Americans.
So fuck you, fucking Anonymous thief Coward. You're probably a foreigner, given your demands to cherry pick my country's success without taking the risks or paying the costs yourself. It's not being foreign that matters - it's being a foreign ripoff. Fuck you and your delusions of entitlement to my national tech investment. Get your own scientific socialism, and then you turn it into a global grab bag. Looter pussy.
If the answer was "you can pay the extremely high cost without the subsidies Americans paid to produce this unique fab", then that might be OK. But they didn't. They're not "devils", they're just foreigners who aren't paying the full cost of that fab, and are outside the mission that Americans are paying NASA for.
Do you have any other gibberish justifications for me to subsidize foreigners to compete with the industry in my own country? What country are you paying taxes in?
I'm pissed that my lifetime financing NASA, which is usually the government expense of which I'm most proud, is subsidizing some foreign corporation's R&D pulling it ahead of American business. America isn't necessarily any better or more deserving of first place, but it's my country, the one I'm paying for, the one I'm living in, the one NASA exists to serve. I'm perfectly happy with all the returns from NASA's American research investments into the world's benefit. But directing NASA's limited operations to benefit a single corporation, a foreign one, is unacceptable.
Funny how this happens after Bush puts a Star Wars scientist in charge of NASA. I guess when your entire career is spent ripping off NASA's space research for a bogus military contract, you don't even notice when you sell out the rest of NASA on your watch.
If the state could stop me from buying alcohol under age 21, it would have, but it didn't. Didn't stop it from trying, though.
Instead, my parents raised me right, and I learned to drink without driving or anything else stupid.
Making sure kids are exposed to only healthy environments is the parents' job, not the state's. Because the state will only get it awfully wrong, while parents can get it right for the specific kid.
The state might have to punish parents when their kids actually damage someone (or themselves) by taking more risks than they can handle. But starting from the point that no parents can allow their kids to do things they are ready for, even though they're not at the arbitary state age, just damages another generation of kids who should be learning from those actually responsible for them, not some official puritans and their nerveless, clumsy bureaucratic hands. Even if the scaredy-nannies want to vote for the latest buzzkill-in-chief.
I correct a series of deep errors, and that's "Redundant"? Maybe, in the sense that anyone worth thinking about would have got them right the first time. But the trollMod clearly wanted to try an anonymous supression, rather than step to the New Yorker and say something stupid directly. Because everyone knows how dangerous that kind of stupid behavior is.
If only I could just plug one of these into my PlayStation and boot Linux in 6 seconds, instead of the hours, reboots, and disc swaps to install Ubuntu on it.
In fact, what would be great would be a 2GB (maybe 4GB) Flash drive with minimal linux and gcc running on many different architectures, which loads the Linux source and recompiles for the host into which it's plugged. Maybe caching the last few, including the most popular PPC/x86/MIPS versions, which could of course be precompiled. There's probably a role for the Internet in updates, but running off the local drive will make the process much faster.
Ultimately I'd like to see all this run off the Flash in my mobile phone, booting the hosts off Bluetooth. That would take new BIOS'es for the hosts which could pair with Bluetooth and boot from it before booting the installed OS. Preferably all config'ed and run from an app in my phone.
Yes, I've been pointing out that Google can change, and should.
Most shopkeepers don't know they can get added to Google Maps. They wouldn't know about buying into the Yellow Pages, either, if the phone company didn't invest a lot of money and time having salespeople call them with solicitations for many years, including now that it's "common knowledge".
This entire thread you've acted like these two business directories are somehow magically just the way they are. My point has been that Google's maps aren't as good as the Yellow Pages for searching for choices in a business category, but could be if their database was as complete as the Yellow Pages'. Now you're pointing out that Google can get a better database, which I said in my first post.
I'm not going to argue both sides for us. Thanks for chatting.
Well, they're (minimally) bookmarkable, but they're just browsable, not searchable. Though I guess asking your assistant or calling 411 does count as a search. I'd bet they'd use Google, and then stick you with the limited selection of vendors.
AC, I'm glad you never liked NYC or Manhattan. Because the point is that NYC has vastly more options than Google shows. Which makes Google what's lacking, not NYC.
Another person cuts themselves out of the good stuff by getting it wrong and underestimating NYC.
Maybe the Web has less to offer than does the real world? Think about it. Then go outside and try it out.
And Google's comprehensive locksmith list makes me leery, considering they know where everyone's hidden our extra keys, when we'll be out, what we've bought that's easily fenceable...
You're missing the only point I'm making. When I search a 2 mile radius of my NYC home for "video games", I expect to see at least 20 or 30 results. I don't have to schlep to midtown to the Sony Store, but Google Maps would make me. All the convenience of their details means nothing when I have to walk past stores in the next block over just to get to the subway for Google's only outlet.
Meanwhile, when I see a place in the Yellow Pages, I call and ask if they have what I want. If not, I call the next one. Not as good as searchable/emailable maps, but more important to have more choices.
Again, I'm not saying I want the Yellow Pages. I'm saying that Google can fix this basic problem with some of the money they have in greater amounts than even the Yellow Pages has, which won't be deploying searchable maps any time soon. Though they should have done so with MapQuest starting in 1998 at latest, and own the business they created for a century.
With this decision, Verizon has just derailed the horde of VoIP startup/conversion trains rolling down the tracks into the future. I picture a caped, curly-mustached Verizon villain with a box and plunger detonating a high bridge made of glass fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty friendly. A great friend would then package them into .debs, so APT could manage everything. My best friend would then run APT for me.
And the same is true with each different kind of installed component of every system.
.deb packages for APT to use. Maybe the extensions are already distributed as .debs.
The point of APT is that it's all collected, centralized and manageable. Including dependencies, the nightmare for upgrades (and downgrades).
Now, if there is an APT tool that can import a directory or files into the DB, registering any files, then that's great. For example, Perl has it's -MCPAN installer, but it's much better to use the APT wrapper. Maybe the way to do it is just to wrap the extensions into
I wish these extensions would register when installed with my APT repository. That way it's easier to upgrade along with the rest of my system, especially after an OS upgrade (every 6 months with Ubuntu). And easier to clone to a new machine.
The APT dependency management would also make it easier to install, say, a GreaseMonkey script and automatically install GreaseMonkey, because it's the script I want and GreaseMonkey is incidental.
A reverse dependency tool in Firefox would let me install FireFox on a host, then get suggestions of all the extensions I have installed elsewhere. But that's more of a reach than just including the extensions installs in APT packages.
No, I dumbed it down when it became clear you couldn't understand the detail.
To repeat myself again, to give you one last chance to get it: I am accountable for the government we elected in the US. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent as much time helping turn it back. ANd I'm not nearly done. Which includes explaining the situation even to intransigent people like you.
Even if you're a foreigner. Which you decline to clarify, though I've asked you straight. So I expect you are. Pretty convenient for you to make demands of the US to give away subsidized tech leadership to other foreigners when you are one. You have no standing to contest my insistence that my government spend my money and my neighbors money on me and my neighbors, not you and yours.
"Enough said"? Yes, you've certainly said at least enough. Enough to make clear that you're just another grabby entitlement freak with your hand out and your ears closed.
Yes, they're part of the trolls, though Dan Rather is a bad example (at least in the case of the simulated memos that blew the story of Bush's actual derelictions of duty). The blogs out more trolls, and will continue until either the mass media catches up, or the blogs have as much entrenched interests to lose. Then there will likely be even more distributed exposures, more by people casually collaborating as tech makes that more convenient, fun and accessible to more people. Corroboration transforms gossip into fact, which destroys trolls.
The generation before our own volunteered for Vietnam in greater numbers and percentages than the generation before theirs did for WWII. Only because of the draft and the eventual overreaching of Nixon without a compliant partisan Congress did the Vietnam War end, after at least 4 years of both reasonable Americans and the Nixon administration knowing it was hopeless.
People have almost as much power in our government, especially over big, black/white issues like fighting the Iraq War, as we exercise. The sure way to have no power is to decide you have no power. American politics is a giant, expensive, complex system. But like any other, actions have reactions. We are now entering the beginning of a countercycle to the cycle that peaked in the last 6 years. If it doesn't completely cycle contrary to the old one, that's mainly because people don't interact enough. If, instead of just turning their backs on voting, 60% of eligible voters voted for candidates outside the duopoly, or for candidates entering the parties outside the channels of their governing powers, there would be a revolution, the kind Jefferson and his generation designed for every 2-4 years. If every House rep were fired every 2 years until things changed, instead of a 98% reelection rate simultaneous with a 35% approval rate, that would change things pretty fast. The rigged elections and synthetic choices are possible only with the majority turned off. You can claim that the apathy is part of the party duopoly programme, but it's not enforced by anyone but our fellow citizens. In the phase of the interactivity in which they must act, they don't. That of course has its damaging effect on the interactive system.
There is a fix, many fixes. There are patches to the main diseases, like campaign finance, prohibitions on party conspiracies, and routine investigations of any corruption/malfeasance/incompetence evidence by actually competing powers. Just a few would tip the balance of power into the self-cleansing the actual system, the Constitution, specifies, generating more change and actual representation. But again, it's all based on people's participation. Without the "demos" of "democracy", it's just "cracy", rule, by the people who do work at ruling. Do something to get more people into the "demos", and watch the possibilities for change and equitable power multiply. Give up, and get the government you deserve.
No, I'm doing what I can to stop the people who hijacked my country with Star Wars schemes (among many others), and the Dane is defending that particular fraud against me (and them, too, unless they're getting a check) as if that requires that I do what they do by subsidizing this Canadian company. Which I pointed out isn't nearly symmetrical as their example would require. I didn't say the Danes concocted the scheme, just that their government, and this particular Dane, is complicit in it. Which doesn't require my complicity in either that scheme, or another one to subsidize Canadians.
Meanwhile, I don't blame the Canadians or anyone else, though I don't have to like it and they're responsible. I criticized NASA, Griffin and the US government, which I expect to serve US interests better on my dime without spending it on foreigners. Not "dirty" foreigners, which I never said - your strawman.
So just because you can't follow the less than reflex logic of my completely legitimate dislike of subsidizing foreign corporations with my NASA budget, doesn't make that my limitation. It's yours. Just because you rehash the arguments I've already defeated in previous posts doesn't make mine less powerful, it just further attests your poor reading comprehension. Surely a convenient defect: in what country do you live and pay taxes? Like the rest of those insisting I pay to subsidize foreigners as if it's an absolute entitlement of the rest of the world, I expect you're not in the States. Just because you want to preserve your place in line for your own US subsidy doesn't mean I have to like it, even if it's "business as usual".
That kind of exchange is what makes anonymity valuable, especially to the anonymous person. But it's not sacrosanct, in and of itself. Anonymous government sources have negative value, and ought to be exposed every practically time. Which is just one example of how anonymity is not sacrosanct.
But it is valuable. In the case of whistleblowers, in a legitimate process it is usually essential, at least public anonymitiy. But even there, without eventually exercising the right of the accused to confront their accuser, the anonymous person gains too much power from unaccountability. Sometimes it might be worth it to society (and just to others than themselves), but overall it's too abusable. And there's no way to distinguish between those that are worth it and those that aren't, at least not until it's too late and damage is done.
Your example is flawed, because the utility company can't sue you if you're anonymous. A blog to which you repeatedly connect from a unique location controlled by only you is such shabby anonymity that it's like a password set to "password": no reasonable expectation of privacy should be attached. But what about the person who takes the steps necessary for anonymity, only to libel someone? Why should their anonymity be protected from the effort of the libel target to confront them?
If there is a problem with whistleblowers, it's not in the anonymity loop. It lies in the power of some people (eg. corporate execs) to damage others without accountability, often anonymously. If that problem is fixed, then anonymity isn't nearly as useful for security for whistleblowers or other accusers. So the anonymity isn't sacrosanct, even if the safety of an accuser with facts is always to be protected. We've popped out of anonymity into something else entirely. So there really is little, if any, reason to protect anonymity as a right, because it isn't.
Yeah yeah yeah. You tried that "kicking and screaming" line on me a couple of posts ago. While strawmanning me on "the US government is deluded into entitlement", which you want to say, but I never said. Meanwhile you're demanding I subsidize Canada because you like returning a tiny bit of the huge US subsidy of Denmark. All of which is correct, all of which makes you look like either a fool or a liar or both, none of which you've got an argument for. So you just deny it and say childish bad things about me that aren't even true.
When it destroys both your points and even devastates your sense of logic, then somehow my argument has no place in reality.
You're so deluded that you can't distinguish your projections from the realty I'm forcing down your throat.
Have a nice day.
What makes anonymity sacrosanct? Someone does something to be anonymous, their perogative. If someone else does something to expose their identity, that's their perogative, too. If what they do to expose them isn't itself wrong, then they haven't done anything wrong. If they use public info (eg. cameras recording public appearances) and deduction, there's not wrong. The exposed anonymous might not like it, but there's no intrinsic, universal right to anonymity just because they want it. And in fact exposing hidden players in public acts is the primary responsibility of newspapers and other periodical publishers.
I wish there were a lot more outrage about newspapers keeping some people anonymous. Anonymous sources used to spin news, lie to damage coverage and public knowledge. When the source isn't actually anonymous at all, to the reporter (or their editors), but is anonymized by the newspaper, creating more ignorance rather than more knowledge. Especially when that anonymity makes unaccountable some people who are reliably wrong, lying, or just predictably spinning.
Newspapers have a glorious future working to expose trolls in our new mediasphere full of cheap and easy cover. We need more exposure, and more support for it.
Denmark has had its military budget mostly paid by the US, ie. me since the 1940s. It's your choice if you want to minimally subsidize the huge subsidy. By "your" I mean you, because Denmark has a democratic government. Its accountability to citizens works both ways: the Danish people are accountable for the government you elect. If you voted against it, or otherwise opposed it or this policy, you might have an exculpating excuse. But you didn't, so you don't. To make matters worse, that missile defense system you're collaborating with is part of a giant system, Star Wars, to defraud Americans of $TRILLIONS more in insecurity extortion, and generations of counterproductive fearmongering to grease its wheels. I expect that the US system will add tremendous value to Denmark's infrastructure, even if it's only value lies in extracting more money for boondoggle, distracting military contracts. Your preference for that system is your problem, except to the extent to which your problems further entrench mine. But you're way out of line expecting me to have the same accommodating attitude that you have.
Meanwhile, Canada is another recipient of huge American military budget subsidy. This NASA work further subsidizes Canada, and no doubt its military (and intel) industries. Which compete with US businesses whose success is much more in my interest. But subsidized by my taxes. Which I oppose. As I've opposed the NASA administrator, Griffin, who oversees it. As I opposed the Bush Republican government urgently and often, every chance I've had.
And which I directly oppose in this simple case of paying for foreign corporations to compete with my domestic ones. Which is a simple self-interest that can be argued with only from the standpoint of someone with their hand out. Like so many foreigners who arrogantly ignore the huge subsidies I'm already paying for our mutual interests, have been for our lifetimes.
You've got some kind of European compulsion to call me, as an American, "arrogant". You're the one who's arrogant. You have such a sense of entitlement to US subsidy that you deny my right to complain about it. And so arrogant that you are insisting over and again that I have called my government deluded into entitlement, when I am calling you that. Because you are, as you have so consistently demonstrated in this thread.
I've been paying your bills your entire life. That doesn't mean every foreigner who bribes a (probably Republican) Congressmember is also so entitled. It does mean you should stop insulting me when I act like a democrat, and instead deserve a "thank you". Doubt I'll see it. You're welcome, anyway. But not to grab more, or insist that some other foreigners have that privilege without my opposition. Leveraging a half-century of mostly mutual interest into expectations of further subsidy well beyond mutual interest, or even mutuality, is the kind of arrogance that is so common among non-Americans that it even legitimizes some of the excessive American attitude to ignore foreigners entirely. Since I have lived in Canada for years, and traveled extensively in Europe (and well beyond), I can tell the difference. You evidently cannot.
What the hell are you talking about? The political problems that allow NASA to work against American interest is OK, because our tech foresight is more reliable than the integrity of our political process?
The people posting that this is OK, that my criticism is somehow merely xenophobia, are those undeniably deluded into entitlement.
So I dismiss your fatalism. Where do you live and pay your taxes?
Another part of the American way is to stand against those abuses. To publicly denounce them. To demand accountability. America's is the interactive citizen/government model. Your post is part of it, but would be more effective if pointing out how to fix it despite its propensity for breaking.
Because NASA already has the factory and the people with the expertise. It's not just that the US is rich, it's that we've had the foresight to spend it on the right things. Taking the risk with our money and our national effort that foreign countries don't even bother to take.
That's an American advantage, which I want us to use for Americans.
So fuck you, fucking Anonymous thief Coward. You're probably a foreigner, given your demands to cherry pick my country's success without taking the risks or paying the costs yourself. It's not being foreign that matters - it's being a foreign ripoff. Fuck you and your delusions of entitlement to my national tech investment. Get your own scientific socialism, and then you turn it into a global grab bag. Looter pussy.
If the answer was "you can pay the extremely high cost without the subsidies Americans paid to produce this unique fab", then that might be OK. But they didn't. They're not "devils", they're just foreigners who aren't paying the full cost of that fab, and are outside the mission that Americans are paying NASA for.
Do you have any other gibberish justifications for me to subsidize foreigners to compete with the industry in my own country? What country are you paying taxes in?
I'm pissed that my lifetime financing NASA, which is usually the government expense of which I'm most proud, is subsidizing some foreign corporation's R&D pulling it ahead of American business. America isn't necessarily any better or more deserving of first place, but it's my country, the one I'm paying for, the one I'm living in, the one NASA exists to serve. I'm perfectly happy with all the returns from NASA's American research investments into the world's benefit. But directing NASA's limited operations to benefit a single corporation, a foreign one, is unacceptable.
Funny how this happens after Bush puts a Star Wars scientist in charge of NASA. I guess when your entire career is spent ripping off NASA's space research for a bogus military contract, you don't even notice when you sell out the rest of NASA on your watch.
If the state could stop me from buying alcohol under age 21, it would have, but it didn't. Didn't stop it from trying, though.
Instead, my parents raised me right, and I learned to drink without driving or anything else stupid.
Making sure kids are exposed to only healthy environments is the parents' job, not the state's. Because the state will only get it awfully wrong, while parents can get it right for the specific kid.
The state might have to punish parents when their kids actually damage someone (or themselves) by taking more risks than they can handle. But starting from the point that no parents can allow their kids to do things they are ready for, even though they're not at the arbitary state age, just damages another generation of kids who should be learning from those actually responsible for them, not some official puritans and their nerveless, clumsy bureaucratic hands. Even if the scaredy-nannies want to vote for the latest buzzkill-in-chief.
Moderation -1
100% Redundant
I correct a series of deep errors, and that's "Redundant"? Maybe, in the sense that anyone worth thinking about would have got them right the first time. But the trollMod clearly wanted to try an anonymous supression, rather than step to the New Yorker and say something stupid directly. Because everyone knows how dangerous that kind of stupid behavior is.
If only I could just plug one of these into my PlayStation and boot Linux in 6 seconds, instead of the hours, reboots, and disc swaps to install Ubuntu on it.
In fact, what would be great would be a 2GB (maybe 4GB) Flash drive with minimal linux and gcc running on many different architectures, which loads the Linux source and recompiles for the host into which it's plugged. Maybe caching the last few, including the most popular PPC/x86/MIPS versions, which could of course be precompiled. There's probably a role for the Internet in updates, but running off the local drive will make the process much faster.
Ultimately I'd like to see all this run off the Flash in my mobile phone, booting the hosts off Bluetooth. That would take new BIOS'es for the hosts which could pair with Bluetooth and boot from it before booting the installed OS. Preferably all config'ed and run from an app in my phone.
Yes, I've been pointing out that Google can change, and should.
Most shopkeepers don't know they can get added to Google Maps. They wouldn't know about buying into the Yellow Pages, either, if the phone company didn't invest a lot of money and time having salespeople call them with solicitations for many years, including now that it's "common knowledge".
This entire thread you've acted like these two business directories are somehow magically just the way they are. My point has been that Google's maps aren't as good as the Yellow Pages for searching for choices in a business category, but could be if their database was as complete as the Yellow Pages'. Now you're pointing out that Google can get a better database, which I said in my first post.
I'm not going to argue both sides for us. Thanks for chatting.
Well, they're (minimally) bookmarkable, but they're just browsable, not searchable. Though I guess asking your assistant or calling 411 does count as a search. I'd bet they'd use Google, and then stick you with the limited selection of vendors.
AC, I'm glad you never liked NYC or Manhattan. Because the point is that NYC has vastly more options than Google shows. Which makes Google what's lacking, not NYC.
Another person cuts themselves out of the good stuff by getting it wrong and underestimating NYC.
Maybe the Web has less to offer than does the real world? Think about it. Then go outside and try it out.
They weren't stores? What were they?
And Google's comprehensive locksmith list makes me leery, considering they know where everyone's hidden our extra keys, when we'll be out, what we've bought that's easily fenceable...
You're missing the only point I'm making. When I search a 2 mile radius of my NYC home for "video games", I expect to see at least 20 or 30 results. I don't have to schlep to midtown to the Sony Store, but Google Maps would make me. All the convenience of their details means nothing when I have to walk past stores in the next block over just to get to the subway for Google's only outlet.
Meanwhile, when I see a place in the Yellow Pages, I call and ask if they have what I want. If not, I call the next one. Not as good as searchable/emailable maps, but more important to have more choices.
Again, I'm not saying I want the Yellow Pages. I'm saying that Google can fix this basic problem with some of the money they have in greater amounts than even the Yellow Pages has, which won't be deploying searchable maps any time soon. Though they should have done so with MapQuest starting in 1998 at latest, and own the business they created for a century.
With this decision, Verizon has just derailed the horde of VoIP startup/conversion trains rolling down the tracks into the future. I picture a caped, curly-mustached Verizon villain with a box and plunger detonating a high bridge made of glass fiber.