I'm directing my comments directly at you, not some mysterious bugbears like your favorite cartoon hobbyhorse. Not Clinton or anyone else you're insisting on dragging into this thread no matter how irrelevant - especially that straw man Clipper Chip jive that I never mentioned. I'm calling you out - where have you been with your treasured "freedom insurance"? Typing away. What are you waiting for?
I'm going to do something about Bush in the election in 7 months: I'm going to vote for candidates that will produce laws under different policies than Bush's failed ones for at least the next two years left in his term. And for candidates that will do other things about Bush himself while he's still around: censure, impeachment, whatever will stop his criminal acts. "Bush is a moron" will be a welcome plank in their platform, on which they certainly can run - as long as they're not morons. Their job as the opposition minority is to stop Bush and Republicans whenever they must, whenever they can. Especially when they're shut out of legislating by Republican rule gaming and majority tyranny, they can barely do that. Since their party can't pass legislation over the rubber stamp of the Republican drones, they're not in a position to produce policies. Even standing in the way of the Republican bulldozers is enough work. Not that Democrats have had their shoulder to that wheel all the time the past 6-12 years, but that's their maximum.
The FreeRepublic comment was directed to the poster to whom I replied. That you take exception to it is an unexpected, though telling, byproduct.
I like your instant voter registration/voting plan, probably with some tweaks. But none of those things involve guns. Where have your guns been for the past 5 years he's been destroying our country?
For one, we vote in the upcoming November elections. That certainly has effect, even beyond the typical party influences, especially with another factor, impeachment, on the menu. But of course there's all kinds of other political processes short of even reelection, that show up in the polls that pols live on, that controls the fundraising that they live and die for, that happens in the media that is their lifeblood, that lands in their mailboxes every day.
So you're illiterate, you don't know what illiterate means, and you don't know anything about politics. All you know how to do is bark "but but Clinton..." whenever your politics nerve gets a spike. Tell you what - ignore everything I said. There's nothing you can do about politics until the 2008 elections. Don't bother doing anything until then. You won't be missed.
Wnat are you, illiterate? I'm saying what I'm saying: "the current administration, the one we've got, the one we can do something about".
So I will slap your obfuscation, talking around, and other insistence we talk about the dead past. right out of your hands.
The question is "will Bush stop IBM from supplying Americans with strong, easy encryption"?
It's not "can I think of something irrelevant to say about an administration from the past decade because it diverts attention from my favorite president".
We're talking about the current administration, the one we've got, the one we can do something about. Not just partisan politics. But actual politics that go way beyond elections, to actually governing the country.
I know partisans want to do nothing but win elections, get the bribes and power. But we need politicians who can also run the country. And people who can communicate with them to ensure they represent us.
When Democrats have some power, even when balanced by a Republican other branch, the only bad politicians are Democrats. When Republicans have all the power, the only bad politicians are the old, half-forgotten Democrats. When Republican infallibility is debunked, then "neither party is good" - until Democrats no longer threaten Republicans. When did/. become FreeRepublic?
Haha - with Verizon's two-tier internet, your VoIP call won't get the latency and uptime it needs to keep the quality it had before your lost your crappy Verizon wireless signal. Welcome to second-class citizenship, where you pay more for less service. Verizon will probably sell Verizon Wireless a "special DSL package" for extra money, but mixing wireless service from one telco wwith broadband from another will get you cut out and ripped off.
Sprint, AT&T and the other telcos won't be any different. And the only way the cablecos will even get into the wireless phone biz is once they've got a "rate structure" they can bundle like that.
You're a minion, too. And you're not even significant enough to ever get anywhere close to Abramoff, or get clued to any conspiracy except your wildest fantasies. You're worse than nothing: you're an asshole for its own sake. Just like practically everyone else who should be ashamed of their Bush worship and excuses for creating Abramoff's actual conspiracy by covering for it. Scumbag.
Sometime between the Iraq invasion and Bush's reelection, just like everywhere else in the USA where people of differing political opinions can actually talk about current events. I think the injection of national politics actually into people's lives, or its immediate threat, has pushed political discussion into lots of people's lives. Which sounds sensible to me.
Who called you a conspirator? Who called you a ratfucker? Who called you anything? No one.
But you are insisting on some kind of defense from those charges no one made. Which makes you a straw man arguer. And by posting it, you are a "substance -free objection for-its-sake poster". If you're working with other intellectually dishonest posters like that, you're all ratfuckers.
And when you erupt in intellectually dishonest denial of the implications of Abramoff's Republican bribery conspiracy's roots in Gates' corporation, you're in denial.
What's cool about porting Oracle to Linux is that Oracle can modify Linux. They can drop parts of the kernel that don't help Oracle run, and add parts Oracle needs but that isn't part of Oracle. I'd love to see an Oracle Linux distro that is stripped to do nothing but run an Oracle server (not even run Oracle clients) and maybe one of Oracle's Java app servers, in clusters.
How big is Google's index of the Web, complete with URLs of results? I could search that, only a day out of date, without a Net connection, if it fit on a HD. Maybe using Usenet to distribute it...
I want to see them harness the same kind of power regeneration hybrid cars use to recapture power when braking. When the voltage square wave goes down, maybe charge a nanoflywheel to discharge when sending the voltage back up again.
I was going with the idea that this subthread was really about Nixonian ratfucking, which it's become, until I reread my earlier post from which it branched.
In which I summarized that the astroturf ratfucking we're discussing follows the justified accusation that Republican Abramoff worked for Bill Gates II to help Microsoft get political favors. We're not talking about software patents in this subthread so much as the Abramoff Republican bribery/favors network serving Microsoft. So we're talking about a Republican astroturf campaign after all.
You're not much of a leftwing slashtroll if you don't notice that we're talking about Republican bribers and Microsoft. That's not just pro-corporatist, it's fascism.
Abramoff's TrollMod minions don't want us talking about the White House bed he shares with Gates, because that's us working together to connect the dots by finding more evidence and logical connections.
All I said was that the tactics are Nixonian, and used the technical political term "ratfucking", which also derives from Nixon - still standard in the Republican Party. I said that when Republicans do it, that's what it's called. So I didn't actually imply that Republicans are doing it, just that they do it. Any inference that Republicans are doing the ratfucking we're discussing in this subthread is on your part. Though I'll take credit for helping you do it. Because they're ratfuckers.
I'm especially inspired by the current events of this week, in which Bush's #2's #2 told a detailed story of Bush as head ratfucker.
It was nice before alt.tasteless invaded rec.pets.cats too. And it was nice when it was DARPANet, and when it was BitNET. But there were fewer people to learn really different things from.
We think we learned about metamods, but Slashdot's SW doesn't protect from the anonymous TrollMod. The metamods would be a lot more powerful if some social circuits were closed with a "web of trust" more than the current haphazard system.
Meanwhile, I personally favor extreme politeness until betrayed even a little bit anonymously - then I go nuclear. I learned it growing up here in NYC, which is a lot like the Internet, but smellier, with better pizza.
But at least it's just Internet chat. We're also learning more not to believe what we read, and to cross reference. Some of us, anyway.
When the Republican Party astroturfs, they call it >ratfucking: Nixonian "dirty tricks". Especially when it's astrolling, like calling people who are interested in the links from Gates to Bush through Abramoff "gullible leftists". What's next is reverse astrolling: an organized campaign posting impossible rightwing conspiracy trolls, to paint any deduction of Republican fascism with a dismissable troll brush.
The Watergate crowd seems to have only recently gotten the hang of exploiting Christianity. We're watching them learn the ropes of the Internet. Maybe we can throw them a Kibology anvil and slow them down for a while.
The biggest Republican lobbyist of the current generation, Abramoff, worked into his power position at the law firm of the father of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Gates was a certified monopolist, but the incoming Republican administration let him keep operating his monopoly. That takes a lot of lobbying and money. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to bribing Republican politicians for his corporate clients.
Those aren't random facts. That's not a coincidence. Those are leads. When we talk about them more, we work together to connect the dots by finding more evidence and logical connections.
What is sinister is an Anonymous Coward insisting we ignore such closely related facts as random, that they're a "coincidence", that they're important only to a "gullible leftist". An Anonymous Coward coincidence theorist. Just another soldier in the vast rightwing zombie army. Take a bow - and exit.
The problem is obviously the report cards. They got a D+ on a report card, which resulted in getting a D- on the next one. If they didn't give report cards, we wouldn't have to read news stories like this, which make us feel so bad. Instead we'd just read news about getting robbed after their ID was stolen from the IRS, making them unable to pay their taxes, and going to jail in place of the IDnappers.
Or maybe the problem is the media, for reporting these stories which tell IDnappers where to look to steal IDs. Instead we should just learn about it privately, when the bank closes our empty account, or the IRS sends goons to arrest us when we're too broke to pay our taxes.
OK, maybe the problem is the IRS. Without the IRS, we wouldn't have our IDs exposed to theft. And who wants to pay taxes? Instead, we could just let the country grow over with weeds and druglord gangs.
All right - the problem is my posts. Too long, too sarcastic, too scary. No, it's your fault for reading them.
We have our priorities. $2B investigating astronomy is nothing compared to the $300BILLION we've already spent invading Iraq, or the $2TRILLION it will cost. If we caught bin Laden we might not get to spend all that Iraqmire budget on "the right priorities".
Why would you assume something like that? Wishful thinking?
The reason you have "no real info" on that comic book theory is that you're making it up from nothing, despite the ample evidence that Bush doesn't care about catching bin Laden. Bush does care about spending $TRILLIONS invading Iraq, though.
Slashdot Mirror
"The facts are clearly biased against George W Bush." - the Daily Show (paraphrase)
It's typo-nazi bait. Congratulations!
I'm directing my comments directly at you, not some mysterious bugbears like your favorite cartoon hobbyhorse. Not Clinton or anyone else you're insisting on dragging into this thread no matter how irrelevant - especially that straw man Clipper Chip jive that I never mentioned. I'm calling you out - where have you been with your treasured "freedom insurance"? Typing away. What are you waiting for?
I'm going to do something about Bush in the election in 7 months: I'm going to vote for candidates that will produce laws under different policies than Bush's failed ones for at least the next two years left in his term. And for candidates that will do other things about Bush himself while he's still around: censure, impeachment, whatever will stop his criminal acts. "Bush is a moron" will be a welcome plank in their platform, on which they certainly can run - as long as they're not morons. Their job as the opposition minority is to stop Bush and Republicans whenever they must, whenever they can. Especially when they're shut out of legislating by Republican rule gaming and majority tyranny, they can barely do that. Since their party can't pass legislation over the rubber stamp of the Republican drones, they're not in a position to produce policies. Even standing in the way of the Republican bulldozers is enough work. Not that Democrats have had their shoulder to that wheel all the time the past 6-12 years, but that's their maximum.
The FreeRepublic comment was directed to the poster to whom I replied. That you take exception to it is an unexpected, though telling, byproduct.
I like your instant voter registration/voting plan, probably with some tweaks. But none of those things involve guns. Where have your guns been for the past 5 years he's been destroying our country?
For one, we vote in the upcoming November elections. That certainly has effect, even beyond the typical party influences, especially with another factor, impeachment, on the menu. But of course there's all kinds of other political processes short of even reelection, that show up in the polls that pols live on, that controls the fundraising that they live and die for, that happens in the media that is their lifeblood, that lands in their mailboxes every day.
So you're illiterate, you don't know what illiterate means, and you don't know anything about politics. All you know how to do is bark "but but Clinton..." whenever your politics nerve gets a spike. Tell you what - ignore everything I said. There's nothing you can do about politics until the 2008 elections. Don't bother doing anything until then. You won't be missed.
Wnat are you, illiterate? I'm saying what I'm saying: "the current administration, the one we've got, the one we can do something about".
So I will slap your obfuscation, talking around, and other insistence we talk about the dead past. right out of your hands.
The question is "will Bush stop IBM from supplying Americans with strong, easy encryption"?
It's not "can I think of something irrelevant to say about an administration from the past decade because it diverts attention from my favorite president".
Why would I want to use JBoss instead of Oracle's own Java app server? Or Apache's?
We're talking about the current administration, the one we've got, the one we can do something about. Not just partisan politics. But actual politics that go way beyond elections, to actually governing the country.
/. become FreeRepublic?
I know partisans want to do nothing but win elections, get the bribes and power. But we need politicians who can also run the country. And people who can communicate with them to ensure they represent us.
When Democrats have some power, even when balanced by a Republican other branch, the only bad politicians are Democrats. When Republicans have all the power, the only bad politicians are the old, half-forgotten Democrats. When Republican infallibility is debunked, then "neither party is good" - until Democrats no longer threaten Republicans. When did
Haha - with Verizon's two-tier internet, your VoIP call won't get the latency and uptime it needs to keep the quality it had before your lost your crappy Verizon wireless signal. Welcome to second-class citizenship, where you pay more for less service. Verizon will probably sell Verizon Wireless a "special DSL package" for extra money, but mixing wireless service from one telco wwith broadband from another will get you cut out and ripped off.
Sprint, AT&T and the other telcos won't be any different. And the only way the cablecos will even get into the wireless phone biz is once they've got a "rate structure" they can bundle like that.
You're a minion, too. And you're not even significant enough to ever get anywhere close to Abramoff, or get clued to any conspiracy except your wildest fantasies. You're worse than nothing: you're an asshole for its own sake. Just like practically everyone else who should be ashamed of their Bush worship and excuses for creating Abramoff's actual conspiracy by covering for it. Scumbag.
Sometime between the Iraq invasion and Bush's reelection, just like everywhere else in the USA where people of differing political opinions can actually talk about current events. I think the injection of national politics actually into people's lives, or its immediate threat, has pushed political discussion into lots of people's lives. Which sounds sensible to me.
Who called you a conspirator? Who called you a ratfucker? Who called you anything? No one.
But you are insisting on some kind of defense from those charges no one made. Which makes you a straw man arguer. And by posting it, you are a "substance -free objection for-its-sake poster". If you're working with other intellectually dishonest posters like that, you're all ratfuckers.
And when you erupt in intellectually dishonest denial of the implications of Abramoff's Republican bribery conspiracy's roots in Gates' corporation, you're in denial.
What's cool about porting Oracle to Linux is that Oracle can modify Linux. They can drop parts of the kernel that don't help Oracle run, and add parts Oracle needs but that isn't part of Oracle. I'd love to see an Oracle Linux distro that is stripped to do nothing but run an Oracle server (not even run Oracle clients) and maybe one of Oracle's Java app servers, in clusters.
How big is Google's index of the Web, complete with URLs of results? I could search that, only a day out of date, without a Net connection, if it fit on a HD. Maybe using Usenet to distribute it...
I want to see them harness the same kind of power regeneration hybrid cars use to recapture power when braking. When the voltage square wave goes down, maybe charge a nanoflywheel to discharge when sending the voltage back up again.
I was going with the idea that this subthread was really about Nixonian ratfucking, which it's become, until I reread my earlier post from which it branched.
In which I summarized that the astroturf ratfucking we're discussing follows the justified accusation that Republican Abramoff worked for Bill Gates II to help Microsoft get political favors. We're not talking about software patents in this subthread so much as the Abramoff Republican bribery/favors network serving Microsoft. So we're talking about a Republican astroturf campaign after all.
You're not much of a leftwing slashtroll if you don't notice that we're talking about Republican bribers and Microsoft. That's not just pro-corporatist, it's fascism.
Moderation +1
70% Insightful
30% Overrated
Abramoff's TrollMod minions don't want us talking about the White House bed he shares with Gates, because that's us working together to connect the dots by finding more evidence and logical connections.
All I said was that the tactics are Nixonian, and used the technical political term "ratfucking", which also derives from Nixon - still standard in the Republican Party. I said that when Republicans do it, that's what it's called. So I didn't actually imply that Republicans are doing it, just that they do it. Any inference that Republicans are doing the ratfucking we're discussing in this subthread is on your part. Though I'll take credit for helping you do it. Because they're ratfuckers.
I'm especially inspired by the current events of this week, in which Bush's #2's #2 told a detailed story of Bush as head ratfucker.
It was nice before alt.tasteless invaded rec.pets.cats too. And it was nice when it was DARPANet, and when it was BitNET. But there were fewer people to learn really different things from.
We think we learned about metamods, but Slashdot's SW doesn't protect from the anonymous TrollMod. The metamods would be a lot more powerful if some social circuits were closed with a "web of trust" more than the current haphazard system.
Meanwhile, I personally favor extreme politeness until betrayed even a little bit anonymously - then I go nuclear. I learned it growing up here in NYC, which is a lot like the Internet, but smellier, with better pizza.
But at least it's just Internet chat. We're also learning more not to believe what we read, and to cross reference. Some of us, anyway.
When the Republican Party astroturfs, they call it >ratfucking: Nixonian "dirty tricks". Especially when it's astrolling, like calling people who are interested in the links from Gates to Bush through Abramoff "gullible leftists". What's next is reverse astrolling: an organized campaign posting impossible rightwing conspiracy trolls, to paint any deduction of Republican fascism with a dismissable troll brush.
The Watergate crowd seems to have only recently gotten the hang of exploiting Christianity. We're watching them learn the ropes of the Internet. Maybe we can throw them a Kibology anvil and slow them down for a while.
The biggest Republican lobbyist of the current generation, Abramoff, worked into his power position at the law firm of the father of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Gates was a certified monopolist, but the incoming Republican administration let him keep operating his monopoly. That takes a lot of lobbying and money. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to bribing Republican politicians for his corporate clients.
Those aren't random facts. That's not a coincidence. Those are leads. When we talk about them more, we work together to connect the dots by finding more evidence and logical connections.
What is sinister is an Anonymous Coward insisting we ignore such closely related facts as random, that they're a "coincidence", that they're important only to a "gullible leftist". An Anonymous Coward coincidence theorist. Just another soldier in the vast rightwing zombie army. Take a bow - and exit.
You could RTFA, which describes how scientists can tell that patients lived longer than the treatments' duration.
The problem is obviously the report cards. They got a D+ on a report card, which resulted in getting a D- on the next one. If they didn't give report cards, we wouldn't have to read news stories like this, which make us feel so bad. Instead we'd just read news about getting robbed after their ID was stolen from the IRS, making them unable to pay their taxes, and going to jail in place of the IDnappers.
Or maybe the problem is the media, for reporting these stories which tell IDnappers where to look to steal IDs. Instead we should just learn about it privately, when the bank closes our empty account, or the IRS sends goons to arrest us when we're too broke to pay our taxes.
OK, maybe the problem is the IRS. Without the IRS, we wouldn't have our IDs exposed to theft. And who wants to pay taxes? Instead, we could just let the country grow over with weeds and druglord gangs.
All right - the problem is my posts. Too long, too sarcastic, too scary. No, it's your fault for reading them.
We have our priorities. $2B investigating astronomy is nothing compared to the $300BILLION we've already spent invading Iraq, or the $2TRILLION it will cost. If we caught bin Laden we might not get to spend all that Iraqmire budget on "the right priorities".
Why would you assume something like that? Wishful thinking?
The reason you have "no real info" on that comic book theory is that you're making it up from nothing, despite the ample evidence that Bush doesn't care about catching bin Laden. Bush does care about spending $TRILLIONS invading Iraq, though.