The fact that Kerry only pays 13% of his income says nothing about his willingness to close loopholes and tax the rich. Would you seriously pay twice the amount in taxes that you legally needed to, even if you believed that was what you should be required to pay?
The big picture includes a lot more than what you said. It includes the fact that we're running up a monumental deficit mostly because of the Bush tax cuts. It includes the fact that the trickle-down "the rich invest their money and create jobs if we give them tax cuts they don't really need" hasn't been creating jobs to live up to the hype. (Yes, John Kerry's job loss figures are inflated. However, even the employment gains over the past year weren't actual gains because they haven't kept up with the growth of the working population.) A tax cut of that same size would have done better for the economy had it targeted the middle and lower classes rather than the upper. Rich folks invest and hire when they feel secure about the economy, which they don't; middle-class people spend money on goods and services just as long as they can afford to do so.
Plus, there are things the government needs to spend that money on, and is spending that money on without having it (hence the deficit.) Remember Homeland Security? Expenditures on that department are a small fraction of the magnitude of the tax cut, and additional funding could be used to better protect ports, borders, and potential targets. Remember No Child Left Behind? Ask some teachers if they're happy with how that's turned out wrt its lack of funding. Remember the states and how they're each running their own deficits?
If the American people want tax cuts for their wealthy employers they should think of a lot more federal expenditures they can do without.
Yea cause the current 35% in federal taxes is just not enough. I mean who are they to think they are eneitled to more than 60 cents on the dollar they earn.
And yet John Kerry can legally pay only 13 cents on the dollar. Those other rich people who are paying 35-40% must really hate him and wish that his loopholes were closed.
All those sources you cite talk about political leanings of media employess. What about how those leanings actually play out in the reporting they produce? Frankly something's very strange if these numbers are correct, because in addition to things like this Sinclair shite, the media in general just plain reports people from each side saying their side of the story and not saying things like "Bush is actually factually wrong about this" "Cheney actually did claim a substantive connection between Iraq and Al Quaeda back in 2001 as evidenced by this clip" etc. Whereas they play Kerry saying "I voted for it before I voted against it" on a loop without ever reporting the actual background on that story.
In other words, mainstream TV news is useless at untangling all everyone's spin, and frankly if they were really liberals at this point one would think they'd do something about all the crap the Bush admin is feeding the American public.
Eh, that doesn't prove anything. Unless you think he illegally evaded his taxes, I'd assume that he, like every other honest person in the world, is paying the smallest amount of taxes he legally can. The fact that he pays less than 13% of his income does indeed go to show that there are too many loopholes for rich people. He's at least saying that he's going to raise taxes on the rich - and that's what I agree we need to do - whereas Bush is dead set against it.
Anyway, who's running for president who isn't filthy rich? Any politician that climbs that high is already rich so it's automatically against their interests to tax the rich. We're really screwed if even the ones who say they want to tax the rich aren't going to.
I didn't get my results but I thought it was moderately biased towards Bush in the phrasing of some questions. However this could just be to the current atmosphere where "liberal" is a curse word and Kerry has to spin his opinions as more conservative than they really are. Most of the questions are just too simplistic; of course I'm in favor of preemptive military action if we're actually in danger but I didn't agree that we were in danger from Iraq. (I wonder how they count Kerry's stance on that question; he said in the debates that preemption has always been an acceptible alternative, but Bush says Kerry wants a "global test" etc etc.) Similarly, most people won't check the box for "support the concept of federally funded national healthcare coverage for all or most Americans" but really that'll only distinguish you from a Green or a Libertarian; yes or no on that doesn't represent either of the major parties' stances - though I'd bet leaving the box unchecked like most people will do will bring your Bush percentage up.
yeah, I'm not a big fan of this poll. Though I haven't seen its results yet, I'm getting the impression that people have to more or less admit to being socialist and pacifist in order to justify a higher score on Kerry than Bush.
who the fuck modded this troll? There's nothing trollish about it. It's a fact; you can buy a PC for well under $1000 that performs comparably to a Mac that costs twice that. Apple hardware is priced comparably to the most expensive versions of similar PC hardware; it costs much more than your everyday commodity stuff from Newegg. Look and feel, polish, all fine arguments for choosing Apple. But do a few random comparisons of hardware items between apple.com and newegg and tell me that their hardware is just as cheap.
The code he was describing would be easy to implement, but actually burning the CD is much harder to get right. Look how much work has gone into linux cd writing and how far there still is to go.
nah. Pretty colors on the tower don't matter that much; there'd be no reason to spend the thousand-dollar overhead on a Mac if the same software ran on cheap x86 hardware.
I'd have to say programs don't depend on several hundred tiny libraries because there are very few apps available for this OS yet. In fact, most of your points seem like they're functions of it being a small project.
It'd be easy to make a drag-drop gui for any of the package managers you mentioned, but it's no particular gain over using a graphical package manager since a) it's not like you're buying software on a CD from a store and b) except for the largest software projects and the most popular distros, one can't actually download the distro-specific package from the software project's website - you get it from your distro anyway. If you download all the available software from one central source, why not just use a package manager?
Fast booting is good, and if the OS was capable of doing all the things Linux does I'd consider that an advantage. But seeing apps "just pop up" isn't that much of an advantage if the app is Links2 rather than Firefox.
I'd keep an open mind about it as it seems like a worthwhile project but I'd say your expectations are a little on the high side.
eh, nobody has to install Gentoo. If you're looking for a quick install, use a different distro, that's not what it's there for. If it seems pointless to you then you're not the target audience. Compare Gentoo to Linux-From-Scratch and it won't seem that crazy; it basically is a Linux-From-Scratch that automates the brainless parts (like "download this package, uncompress it, apply this patch, run configure with these options,....)
Gentoo with an installer script would be cool too, and I imagine people are working on that. I don't think it's as easy as you think it is though; considering you're complaining about how hard it is to install it on just one computer, think about having to write an installer that considers all of each users' wacky configurations. It can be done, but I'm not terribly surprised it hasn't been done yet considering Gentoo's goal isn't to be an ease-of-use-focused distro.
I don't think there's anything particular about Linux that says it has to be difficult. The main differences in terms of ease of use between Linux and Windows are the presence of a GUI for most things that users can modify, and the automatic configuration of things they don't want to pay attention to. There's no barrier to that happening for linux (and it is, slowly, in certain distros at least) except that it's a lot of work. Guess what? It's most likely going to be the same amount of work for a brand-new OS as well. Maybe the developers have particular ideas about where Linux goes wrong that aren't fixable without starting from scratch, but just cause it's new doesn't mean it's going to be easier to use or better. good luck to them anyway.
X is not a major problem; some gui apps don't feel as fast as their Windows counterparts but that's not a big deal. Most people if you put them in front of a Gnome desktop they'll be just as happy with their web-browsing as on a Windows desktop. The major problem is that everything runs on Windows and not everything runs on Linux, so yes, it is mostly a problem of inertia. There is also the problem that many things that do run on Linux don't do so without some know-how. Things are progressing steadily on the ease-of-use front, but you're out of luck with most software you pick up at Media Play unless you're an absolute wizard with Wine. You'd have to be insane to be a gamer and not run Windows at least part-time, and even most gamers aren't geeky enough to want to run another OS just for fun if the one they have to use for certain things just happens to be able to do everything they want. So no, I don't see that another brand-new OS will be the magic bullet to kill Microsoft's market dominance - it has to go through all the baby steps Linux has already done, getting hardware support, getting the world to take it halfway seriously, etc, etc. But choice is good and we'll see what happens.
The left thinks he's too pro-war, and the Republicans think he's too antiwar (all that crap about the military spending he supposedly voted against.) Guess which charge is hurting him more.
Anyway, dumb votes or not, you must be able to see a contrast between him and Bush. For a start he wants the US to be highly regarded by its allies and not seen as just plain dangerous and stupid. Also he appears to be somewhat serious when he talks about war being a last resort.
nah, he's right. not this year. half a percent that puts Kerry over the top is way more important than the difference between a third party's half-percent and one percent, this time. In my book you're taking a needlessly literal interpretation of the world ending. Thanks to Bush after Sept. 11 the world went from a huge majority sympathetic to the U.S. to no country being willing to appear too much in support of us. That kind of thing matters.
Furthermore the lack of votes third parties will get in this election will not just be due to the desire to see Bush out of office, but also due to backlash for Nader being the percieved spoiler in 2000. Many 2000-election Nader supporters are now wishing he wouldn't run (look at Michael Moore and Bill Maher. and me for that matter.) Imagine what would happen if that occured again. It didn't force the Democratic party to listen more to the Greens' concerns, and if the Greens really just wanted to have influence over the Democrats they would be a PAC or some kind of subfaction rather than a separate political party. Don't get me wrong - I support the Greens as a third party, and I think they can eventually gain some political influence, but that can wait for a year when there's less on the line per vote.
1) JFK won by a comparatively small margin. There was also charges of voter fraud in that election (Illinois and Texas). Did JFK actually win those states or not?
2) The Gore campaign prepared extensively for the situation of losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral vote. They even wrote at least one legal brief to bolster their claim in such an eventuality. But coming up on the losing end of that scenario, THEN they claimed fraud.
OK, but which of those points implies that we should have an electoral system that arbitrarily groups people into population segments and abstracts their votes into one block determined by a simple majority, and also gives disproportionate weight to people living in places where there's more land per capita? The electoral college makes no sense anymore. Maybe back a hundred years ago when travel between states was less common people would have opinions more reliably dependent on their geographical location so it would make more sense to block out votes by state. Also maybe it used to be a commonly espoused ideology that people who own more land have more of a stake and thus should get more say in government. These days spread between the most liberal and most conservative states is a matter of 60/40 vs 40/60, and if people say that landowners' votes should count more than other people it's cause they're trolling. Splitting each state's electoral vote by house district (or, better, by actual population percentage) would be a good start. Unfortunately, it's up to the individual state to do that, and that's counter to their interests because splitting a state's electoral vote gives its majority that much less clout. It's just a broken system.
It used to be that the few people who actually needed to do that bought pickups. Not terribly stylish, but they served their purpose for people who needed them. But in the past few years all of a sudden everyone "needs" to own an SUV and drive it around for daily use, and maybe do something trucklike with it once and a while to try and justify the extra $2000+/year spent on gas (and a heavy chunk of change on the car itself, I might add.)
I don't get how the fire department thing would work. Okay, so they'd be employed on a contractual basis, kind of like insurance - I pay a yearly amount and if my house ever catches fire someone will come put it out. But what if I'm an asshole and don't bother to contract with any fire department, and my house catches fire and then catches my neighbors' houses on fire? Or the neighbors' fire departments make sure it doesn't spread to their houses, but the smoke still stinks them up or the heat peels their paint or whatever? Would I effectively get fire service for free since my neighbors paid to keep my house from burning their houses down? Should I be required by law to take some preventative measures so that my idiocy doesn't burn other people's stuff, or would that be too oppressive?
There's a point here, which is that there are nuances to life that ultrapure libertarians seem to miss. Sometimes when I exercise my rights in dumb ways (like not paying for fire service) it can negatively affect people around me in ways that are much more negative than the negativeness of forcing me to do the decent thing in the first place.
ok silly people, it's all a matter of preference, and I like quicklounge, k? I said I like a two layer taskbar implying not an xx-small one, and I also don't particularly like multiple desktops. Don't know why, just doesn't feel good. And what does multiple desktops have to do with quicklounge vs launchers? It's ok, my small (and solvable) annoyances with gnome don't have to be annoying to everyone, just letting them be known.
I like to have a two-layer taskbar, which makes any icons I put directly onto the panel reeeally big; I don't know how people manage that way if they run more than two or three programs. For anyone who uses a computer for a variety of tasks and doesn't have vision problems, small icons are a must.
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Ahhh.... the right answer. Finally I can stop reading this thread.
I believe he might be speaking of the standard set by our current leader, for whom, on election day, almost half the votes for president will be cast.
The fact that Kerry only pays 13% of his income says nothing about his willingness to close loopholes and tax the rich. Would you seriously pay twice the amount in taxes that you legally needed to, even if you believed that was what you should be required to pay?
The big picture includes a lot more than what you said. It includes the fact that we're running up a monumental deficit mostly because of the Bush tax cuts. It includes the fact that the trickle-down "the rich invest their money and create jobs if we give them tax cuts they don't really need" hasn't been creating jobs to live up to the hype. (Yes, John Kerry's job loss figures are inflated. However, even the employment gains over the past year weren't actual gains because they haven't kept up with the growth of the working population.) A tax cut of that same size would have done better for the economy had it targeted the middle and lower classes rather than the upper. Rich folks invest and hire when they feel secure about the economy, which they don't; middle-class people spend money on goods and services just as long as they can afford to do so.
Plus, there are things the government needs to spend that money on, and is spending that money on without having it (hence the deficit.) Remember Homeland Security? Expenditures on that department are a small fraction of the magnitude of the tax cut, and additional funding could be used to better protect ports, borders, and potential targets. Remember No Child Left Behind? Ask some teachers if they're happy with how that's turned out wrt its lack of funding. Remember the states and how they're each running their own deficits?
If the American people want tax cuts for their wealthy employers they should think of a lot more federal expenditures they can do without.
Yea cause the current 35% in federal taxes is just not enough. I mean who are they to think they are eneitled to more than 60 cents on the dollar they earn.
And yet John Kerry can legally pay only 13 cents on the dollar. Those other rich people who are paying 35-40% must really hate him and wish that his loopholes were closed.
All those sources you cite talk about political leanings of media employess. What about how those leanings actually play out in the reporting they produce? Frankly something's very strange if these numbers are correct, because in addition to things like this Sinclair shite, the media in general just plain reports people from each side saying their side of the story and not saying things like "Bush is actually factually wrong about this" "Cheney actually did claim a substantive connection between Iraq and Al Quaeda back in 2001 as evidenced by this clip" etc. Whereas they play Kerry saying "I voted for it before I voted against it" on a loop without ever reporting the actual background on that story.
In other words, mainstream TV news is useless at untangling all everyone's spin, and frankly if they were really liberals at this point one would think they'd do something about all the crap the Bush admin is feeding the American public.
Eh, that doesn't prove anything. Unless you think he illegally evaded his taxes, I'd assume that he, like every other honest person in the world, is paying the smallest amount of taxes he legally can. The fact that he pays less than 13% of his income does indeed go to show that there are too many loopholes for rich people. He's at least saying that he's going to raise taxes on the rich - and that's what I agree we need to do - whereas Bush is dead set against it.
Anyway, who's running for president who isn't filthy rich? Any politician that climbs that high is already rich so it's automatically against their interests to tax the rich. We're really screwed if even the ones who say they want to tax the rich aren't going to.
I didn't get my results but I thought it was moderately biased towards Bush in the phrasing of some questions. However this could just be to the current atmosphere where "liberal" is a curse word and Kerry has to spin his opinions as more conservative than they really are. Most of the questions are just too simplistic; of course I'm in favor of preemptive military action if we're actually in danger but I didn't agree that we were in danger from Iraq. (I wonder how they count Kerry's stance on that question; he said in the debates that preemption has always been an acceptible alternative, but Bush says Kerry wants a "global test" etc etc.) Similarly, most people won't check the box for "support the concept of federally funded national healthcare coverage for all or most Americans" but really that'll only distinguish you from a Green or a Libertarian; yes or no on that doesn't represent either of the major parties' stances - though I'd bet leaving the box unchecked like most people will do will bring your Bush percentage up.
yeah, I'm not a big fan of this poll. Though I haven't seen its results yet, I'm getting the impression that people have to more or less admit to being socialist and pacifist in order to justify a higher score on Kerry than Bush.
who the fuck modded this troll? There's nothing trollish about it. It's a fact; you can buy a PC for well under $1000 that performs comparably to a Mac that costs twice that. Apple hardware is priced comparably to the most expensive versions of similar PC hardware; it costs much more than your everyday commodity stuff from Newegg. Look and feel, polish, all fine arguments for choosing Apple. But do a few random comparisons of hardware items between apple.com and newegg and tell me that their hardware is just as cheap.
The code he was describing would be easy to implement, but actually burning the CD is much harder to get right. Look how much work has gone into linux cd writing and how far there still is to go.
nah. Pretty colors on the tower don't matter that much; there'd be no reason to spend the thousand-dollar overhead on a Mac if the same software ran on cheap x86 hardware.
all depends if they're civil-liberties-libertarians or I-don't-wanna-pay-taxes libertarians. Makes a big difference.
except it doesn't work in real time yet. that's kind of a barrier for releasing content that they want people to be able to actually watch.
I'd have to say programs don't depend on several hundred tiny libraries because there are very few apps available for this OS yet. In fact, most of your points seem like they're functions of it being a small project.
It'd be easy to make a drag-drop gui for any of the package managers you mentioned, but it's no particular gain over using a graphical package manager since a) it's not like you're buying software on a CD from a store and b) except for the largest software projects and the most popular distros, one can't actually download the distro-specific package from the software project's website - you get it from your distro anyway. If you download all the available software from one central source, why not just use a package manager?
Fast booting is good, and if the OS was capable of doing all the things Linux does I'd consider that an advantage. But seeing apps "just pop up" isn't that much of an advantage if the app is Links2 rather than Firefox.
I'd keep an open mind about it as it seems like a worthwhile project but I'd say your expectations are a little on the high side.
eh, nobody has to install Gentoo. If you're looking for a quick install, use a different distro, that's not what it's there for. If it seems pointless to you then you're not the target audience. Compare Gentoo to Linux-From-Scratch and it won't seem that crazy; it basically is a Linux-From-Scratch that automates the brainless parts (like "download this package, uncompress it, apply this patch, run configure with these options, ....)
Gentoo with an installer script would be cool too, and I imagine people are working on that. I don't think it's as easy as you think it is though; considering you're complaining about how hard it is to install it on just one computer, think about having to write an installer that considers all of each users' wacky configurations. It can be done, but I'm not terribly surprised it hasn't been done yet considering Gentoo's goal isn't to be an ease-of-use-focused distro.
I don't think there's anything particular about Linux that says it has to be difficult. The main differences in terms of ease of use between Linux and Windows are the presence of a GUI for most things that users can modify, and the automatic configuration of things they don't want to pay attention to. There's no barrier to that happening for linux (and it is, slowly, in certain distros at least) except that it's a lot of work. Guess what? It's most likely going to be the same amount of work for a brand-new OS as well. Maybe the developers have particular ideas about where Linux goes wrong that aren't fixable without starting from scratch, but just cause it's new doesn't mean it's going to be easier to use or better. good luck to them anyway.
X is not a major problem; some gui apps don't feel as fast as their Windows counterparts but that's not a big deal. Most people if you put them in front of a Gnome desktop they'll be just as happy with their web-browsing as on a Windows desktop. The major problem is that everything runs on Windows and not everything runs on Linux, so yes, it is mostly a problem of inertia. There is also the problem that many things that do run on Linux don't do so without some know-how. Things are progressing steadily on the ease-of-use front, but you're out of luck with most software you pick up at Media Play unless you're an absolute wizard with Wine. You'd have to be insane to be a gamer and not run Windows at least part-time, and even most gamers aren't geeky enough to want to run another OS just for fun if the one they have to use for certain things just happens to be able to do everything they want. So no, I don't see that another brand-new OS will be the magic bullet to kill Microsoft's market dominance - it has to go through all the baby steps Linux has already done, getting hardware support, getting the world to take it halfway seriously, etc, etc. But choice is good and we'll see what happens.
The left thinks he's too pro-war, and the Republicans think he's too antiwar (all that crap about the military spending he supposedly voted against.) Guess which charge is hurting him more.
Anyway, dumb votes or not, you must be able to see a contrast between him and Bush. For a start he wants the US to be highly regarded by its allies and not seen as just plain dangerous and stupid. Also he appears to be somewhat serious when he talks about war being a last resort.
nah, he's right. not this year. half a percent that puts Kerry over the top is way more important than the difference between a third party's half-percent and one percent, this time. In my book you're taking a needlessly literal interpretation of the world ending. Thanks to Bush after Sept. 11 the world went from a huge majority sympathetic to the U.S. to no country being willing to appear too much in support of us. That kind of thing matters.
Furthermore the lack of votes third parties will get in this election will not just be due to the desire to see Bush out of office, but also due to backlash for Nader being the percieved spoiler in 2000. Many 2000-election Nader supporters are now wishing he wouldn't run (look at Michael Moore and Bill Maher. and me for that matter.) Imagine what would happen if that occured again. It didn't force the Democratic party to listen more to the Greens' concerns, and if the Greens really just wanted to have influence over the Democrats they would be a PAC or some kind of subfaction rather than a separate political party. Don't get me wrong - I support the Greens as a third party, and I think they can eventually gain some political influence, but that can wait for a year when there's less on the line per vote.
OK, but which of those points implies that we should have an electoral system that arbitrarily groups people into population segments and abstracts their votes into one block determined by a simple majority, and also gives disproportionate weight to people living in places where there's more land per capita? The electoral college makes no sense anymore. Maybe back a hundred years ago when travel between states was less common people would have opinions more reliably dependent on their geographical location so it would make more sense to block out votes by state. Also maybe it used to be a commonly espoused ideology that people who own more land have more of a stake and thus should get more say in government. These days spread between the most liberal and most conservative states is a matter of 60/40 vs 40/60, and if people say that landowners' votes should count more than other people it's cause they're trolling. Splitting each state's electoral vote by house district (or, better, by actual population percentage) would be a good start. Unfortunately, it's up to the individual state to do that, and that's counter to their interests because splitting a state's electoral vote gives its majority that much less clout. It's just a broken system.
It used to be that the few people who actually needed to do that bought pickups. Not terribly stylish, but they served their purpose for people who needed them. But in the past few years all of a sudden everyone "needs" to own an SUV and drive it around for daily use, and maybe do something trucklike with it once and a while to try and justify the extra $2000+/year spent on gas (and a heavy chunk of change on the car itself, I might add.)
Speaking of numbers no one can pronounce....
I don't get how the fire department thing would work. Okay, so they'd be employed on a contractual basis, kind of like insurance - I pay a yearly amount and if my house ever catches fire someone will come put it out. But what if I'm an asshole and don't bother to contract with any fire department, and my house catches fire and then catches my neighbors' houses on fire? Or the neighbors' fire departments make sure it doesn't spread to their houses, but the smoke still stinks them up or the heat peels their paint or whatever? Would I effectively get fire service for free since my neighbors paid to keep my house from burning their houses down? Should I be required by law to take some preventative measures so that my idiocy doesn't burn other people's stuff, or would that be too oppressive?
There's a point here, which is that there are nuances to life that ultrapure libertarians seem to miss. Sometimes when I exercise my rights in dumb ways (like not paying for fire service) it can negatively affect people around me in ways that are much more negative than the negativeness of forcing me to do the decent thing in the first place.
It's probably a much bigger stumbling block to widespread adoption if it doesn't have a Windows port.
ok silly people, it's all a matter of preference, and I like quicklounge, k? I said I like a two layer taskbar implying not an xx-small one, and I also don't particularly like multiple desktops. Don't know why, just doesn't feel good. And what does multiple desktops have to do with quicklounge vs launchers? It's ok, my small (and solvable) annoyances with gnome don't have to be annoying to everyone, just letting them be known.
quicklounge is a much better solution for me.
I like to have a two-layer taskbar, which makes any icons I put directly onto the panel reeeally big; I don't know how people manage that way if they run more than two or three programs. For anyone who uses a computer for a variety of tasks and doesn't have vision problems, small icons are a must.