The condemnation of Moveon has nothing to do with questioning someone in the military, but anyone who dares to question the bullshit of the right wing. If the Democrats who voted to condemn Moveon had two brains between them, they would have added language to the bill that condemned the attacks on Max Cleland, John Kerry, John Murtha, the generals who have questioned the war, and Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers". Then the Republicans in the Senate would have been forced to condemn the right wing's attacks on those who have served or are serving in the military, or be shown to be political hacks. But the Democrats who voted for this bill didn't do that. Because they are stupid.
Actually, Petreaus's report is backed up by the Brookings Institute, hardly arch conservative
You mean those two supposed critics of the war, that Dick Cheney called no friends of the administration, that have been big war backers from the start?
The fact of the matter is, conditions are improving in Iraq
Liar.
when your leftist ban on DDT has resulted in the deaths of 100 million people from Malaria since its inception
Debunked. Site is down at the moment for some reason.
the banning of the personal ownership of weapons
Which Democrats are calling for a ban on personal weapons, exactly? And of the current candidates for president, which one has backed gun control any time recently? I'll give you a hint: the candidate is from New York, and isn't Hillary Clinton.
the nationalization of health care
So what part of our current system do you like best? That we spend twice as much per patient as other industrialized nations for worse care? That insurance companies take your expensive premiums and use the money to try and find ways to deny you care? Or the fact that Cuba is catching up to us in health care despite spending 1/30th as much per patient?
yes, you'll be expanding, again, the IRS
Reagan and the Bushes have ensured the necessity of the largest tax increases in the history of this country. It's just a matter of when they go into effect.
If Move-On is pro-American, name me one web page where Move-On advocates -any- policy that will: a) improve the world share of American GDP
Irrelevant.
b) improve American access to or control of world's natural resources.
Irrelevant.
c) support American corporations, over foreign corporations
Irrelevant. Do you also demand that the American Cancer Society come up with better plans for fighting forest fires?
The USA is going to win the war in Iraq
Then we're going to need another 400,000 troops. And that's just to pacify Baghdad. I'm sure the 101st fighting keyboarders in the wingnutosphere are going to go down to their local recruitment office and sign up any day now. Any day now.
because, MoveOn wants the United States to be destroyed.
That's alright son, just go back to drinking the Kool-Aid. Soon, the pain of being that damn stupid will all go away...
For one it was a partisan political attack on somebody who is not an elected official.
Like what the right wing does on a constant basis?
It was also published before he even gave his report to Congress, so how could they know he was lying.
Because we already knew what he was going to say. What he had been saying for years: "we are making progress in Iraq" even though the splurge had failed by Bush's own benchmarks.
Having listened to his report and read it as well, it was pretty clear that he was being honest about what was and was not working.
Bull fucking shit. Car bombs and getting shot in the face (as opposed to the back of the head) aren't sectarian violence? Go up to an American family that has lost a soldier in Iraq and try telling them their son's death didn't count because he was shot in the face or killed by a car bomb.
The media named "surge"
Um, no. "Surge" is the Republican marketing term for the escalation. They don't call it an escalation because then the lazy press might compare it to all the other escalations in troop levels, and notice that these half-measures only end up with more American casualties and zero progress in Iraq.
The MoveOn.Org ad was highly offensive.
Max Cleland, John Kerry, Valerie Wilson, John Murtha, "phony soldiers", and just about any general that has criticized the Bush administration. Where was the right wings outrage then, eh?
Its always "OMG! Vista is so much worse than XP! Its slower and more expensive!!!". And no, it isn't.
How do you figure? Slower: check. More expensive: check. And then there's the bloat: Vista needs 8x as much memory as XP and needs fifteen frikkin gigabytes of hard drive space. That is pathetic.
Vista isn't "breaking" hardware, it's just that some third-party software was so poorly designed, taking advantage of the flaws present in the average XP install (everything from assuming the user was always a full admin to just going ahead and loading kernel modules for any damn thing like DRM or virus scanning) that when MS fixed these issues, a handful of crap software didn't work (or, in the case of programs expecting admin privileges, didn't work without a UAC prompt) anymore.
Some "third party software?" You mean like some of Microsoft's own applications?
Sure, DX10, >4gb of ram, etc are things that COULD be backported to work in XP. They haven't been.
DX10 will be. It was the same story with DX9: it was released only for XP as another way to try and force people to "upgrade".
>4gb of ram
XP 64? Beuler? Beuler?
Within 18 months you'll see computers shipping with 4gb.
So? My 10 year old Celeron can address 4 gb of ram.
The point is, they're included as standard, within 18 months you'll need several of the features, moving forwards, there's no ongoing support for XP. You can stick your head in the sand and ignore those facts and downgrade to XP, then figure out in 18 months to 2 years that blah blah blah
Oh, I am perfectly aware that Congress is quite fond of stretching the Commerce Clause to absurd lengths, and the Supreme Court is quite fond of rubber-stamping those interpretations. This, however, is not one of those times. And the government isn't regulating "communications as in speech" but "communications as in infrastructure". And since much of said infrastructure was paid for using public dollars, the public has a reasonable expectation to have a say in how their tax dollars are used. So once again, if the telecos don't like it, they can buy the lines back from the public and then start paying rent on properties that those lines run across.
I was going to type up a list of things I like about Vista compared to XP, but, you know what? Your post was so inflammatory and insulting that I'm just going to give one reason to prefer Vista over any other OS out there: Specifically to spite assholes like you.
Then don't make dipshit comparisons, Sparky. If you get tired of your POS OS you can always consider upgrading to Windows 2000.
Well, lets see. There's the venerable Commerce Clause, and these lines run across state lines. Then there's the fact that the lines are run across public land and private land through the use of eminent domain. If the telecos don't want regulation, first they can give back all the subsidies they were granted to build the infrastructure in the first place. Then they can start paying rent on the land they use. But somehow I doubt AT&T will start cutting me checks anytime soon.
I'm sorry I worded it poorly, but I didn't meant to infer that teens aren't allowed to have their own concept of value. I'm merely stating that children's concept of value does not match up with big corporation executive's concept of value, and it is ridiculous for Mr. Ballmer to spin it as such.
Oh, sorry about that. Next time we'll try and read your mind more clearly.
Please. People said the same thing about Windows 2000, and people said the same thing about Windows XP
Please, what a ridiculous comparison. 2k had vast usability improvements over NT 4. And XP at least had instant user switching. And check out the system requirements. Basically, requirements doubled between NT 4.0 and 2000, and again to XP. Vista, however, requires a processor three times faster than one that will run XP, needs eight times as much memory, and fifteen frikkin gigabytes of free space!
Personally, I think Vista's pretty damned good.
Why? Because it's "prettier" than XP? Because you have way to much free space? Because that new Dual Core 2 processor is just way to fast and you need something to slow it down? Or is that much of the operating system is not designed with the end user in mind, but selling out to the content industry?
Only materialistic liberals believe money is the great motivator of society.
Like all those liberal Republicans in Congress who investigated and re-investigated Whitewater with no probable cause?
Too bad all the free money, housing, and education still hasn't righted all the wrongs in the world.
Red herring.
It's unfortunate you began your rebuttal with what is essentially an ad hominem attack.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means.
You find me the "conservative movement" that holds that view.
Do you also demand evidence that the Pope is Catholic? If you willfully ignore decades of Republican rhetoric, that's your problem, not mine.
I live in one of the most liberal places in the United States. I have neighbors who go on vacations to communes, but still are wild eyes liberals who fervently support the democrat party.
Yeah? Go and ask one of those "wild eyes liberals" how happy they are over the Democratic leadership caving on the Iraq war, NSA wiretapping, "free trade", etc etc. They'd vote Labor or Socialist but we don't have those parties in the U.S. We have the conservative Democrats and the ultra-conservative Republicans.
Three Mile Island was a greatly overblown event
Why don't you ask someone in the nuclear field how "overblown" they think a partial core meltdown happens to be.
Even today, many if not most environmental groups consider the risk of nuclear energy to be far less severe than the immediate effect of burning fossil fuels. Respected scientists have ALWAY held this view.
How many respected scientists blow off nuclear safety.
Your statement only makes sense in support of the conclusion drawn by the book - journalists completely ignored the many positive statements by respected scientists purely because of their own irrational fear of one severe tragedy in a communist country and a sensationalized event.
Must have been a conservative reaction then, like their modern hand-wringing over the terrahrists.
Either you are a Kool-Aid drinker, or you are a troll.
The academic study cited most frequently by critics of a "liberal media bias" in American journalism is The Media Elite,* a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter.
Too bad their work is exceptionally poor. Their research and book were funded by right wing groups like the Scaife Foundation and the Coors Foundation. Reporters that agreed with statements like "the government should not attempt to regulate people's sexual practices" were counted as "liberal" even though keeping government out of people's lives is supposedly one of the foundations of the conservative movement.
And there's the flawed methodology:
The Lichters' study of PBS is notable for what it leaves out: It excluded talkshows such as William F. Buckley's Firing Line and Morton Kondracke's American Interests, news reports like the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and business programs like Louis Rukeyser's Wall $treet Week. The Center claims this is to ensure "a group of programs that were similar in style and content, to maximize the comparability of judgments."
The study's focus, however, removes those PBS shows most often criticized for having a conservative slant--programming that takes up more of the PBS schedule than the documentaries that the Center's study is limited to. Firing Line and American Interests--programs underwritten by the Center's biggest funders--provided approximately 50 hours of programming a year between them.
The survey which found that most of these journalists were Democratic voters
Operating under the old "Democrat==Liberal" fallacy when the Democratic Party is actually very conservative.
The book's most thorough case study involved nuclear energy. The survey of journalists showed that most were highly skeptical about nuclear safety. However, the authors conducted a separate survey of scientists in energy related fields, who were much more sanguine about nuclear safety issues. They then conducted a content analysis of nuclear energy coverage in the media outlets they had surveyed. They found that the opinions of sources who were cited as scientific experts reflected the antinuclear sentiments of journalists, rather than the more pro-nuclear perspectives held by most energy scientists.
Completely ignoring three facts: the Cold War was still going strong, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Is it any surprise there was a heightened concern about nuclear explosions/accidents?
The authors concluded that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes
Yes, in the chapter called "Pot calls Kettle Black."
The tech is cheaper and more accessible - at entry level. But $25 will buy you a paint set. That doesn't make you a Renoir, a Monet, a Picasso, or a Wyeth.
So not the point. Of course you have to have talent to make good music. But talented musicians used to have to rent very expensive recording studios, whereas now they can do it themselves for a fraction of the cost.
The scripting, the acting, the pitch-perfect narration of Jim Dale.
Here's hoping they give him his damn cameo in the next Harry Potter movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The condemnation of Moveon has nothing to do with questioning someone in the military, but anyone who dares to question the bullshit of the right wing. If the Democrats who voted to condemn Moveon had two brains between them, they would have added language to the bill that condemned the attacks on Max Cleland, John Kerry, John Murtha, the generals who have questioned the war, and Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers". Then the Republicans in the Senate would have been forced to condemn the right wing's attacks on those who have served or are serving in the military, or be shown to be political hacks. But the Democrats who voted for this bill didn't do that. Because they are stupid.
Actually, Petreaus's report is backed up by the Brookings Institute, hardly arch conservative
You mean those two supposed critics of the war, that Dick Cheney called no friends of the administration, that have been big war backers from the start?
The fact of the matter is, conditions are improving in Iraq
Liar.
when your leftist ban on DDT has resulted in the deaths of 100 million people from Malaria since its inception
Debunked. Site is down at the moment for some reason.
the banning of the personal ownership of weapons
Which Democrats are calling for a ban on personal weapons, exactly? And of the current candidates for president, which one has backed gun control any time recently? I'll give you a hint: the candidate is from New York, and isn't Hillary Clinton.
the nationalization of health care
So what part of our current system do you like best? That we spend twice as much per patient as other industrialized nations for worse care? That insurance companies take your expensive premiums and use the money to try and find ways to deny you care? Or the fact that Cuba is catching up to us in health care despite spending 1/30th as much per patient?
yes, you'll be expanding, again, the IRS
Reagan and the Bushes have ensured the necessity of the largest tax increases in the history of this country. It's just a matter of when they go into effect.
If Move-On is pro-American, name me one web page where Move-On advocates -any- policy that will: a) improve the world share of American GDP
Irrelevant.
b) improve American access to or control of world's natural resources.
Irrelevant.
c) support American corporations, over foreign corporations
Irrelevant. Do you also demand that the American Cancer Society come up with better plans for fighting forest fires?
The USA is going to win the war in Iraq
Then we're going to need another 400,000 troops. And that's just to pacify Baghdad. I'm sure the 101st fighting keyboarders in the wingnutosphere are going to go down to their local recruitment office and sign up any day now. Any day now.
because, MoveOn wants the United States to be destroyed.
That's alright son, just go back to drinking the Kool-Aid. Soon, the pain of being that damn stupid will all go away...
Moveon.org can dish it out but they sure cant take it.
So did Moveon buy Google this morning, or are you just being stupid?
For one it was a partisan political attack on somebody who is not an elected official.
Like what the right wing does on a constant basis?
It was also published before he even gave his report to Congress, so how could they know he was lying.
Because we already knew what he was going to say. What he had been saying for years: "we are making progress in Iraq" even though the splurge had failed by Bush's own benchmarks.
Having listened to his report and read it as well, it was pretty clear that he was being honest about what was and was not working.
Bull fucking shit. Car bombs and getting shot in the face (as opposed to the back of the head) aren't sectarian violence? Go up to an American family that has lost a soldier in Iraq and try telling them their son's death didn't count because he was shot in the face or killed by a car bomb.
The media named "surge"
Um, no. "Surge" is the Republican marketing term for the escalation. They don't call it an escalation because then the lazy press might compare it to all the other escalations in troop levels, and notice that these half-measures only end up with more American casualties and zero progress in Iraq.
The MoveOn.Org ad was highly offensive.
Max Cleland, John Kerry, Valerie Wilson, John Murtha, "phony soldiers", and just about any general that has criticized the Bush administration. Where was the right wings outrage then, eh?
Its always "OMG! Vista is so much worse than XP! Its slower and more expensive!!!". And no, it isn't.
How do you figure? Slower: check. More expensive: check. And then there's the bloat: Vista needs 8x as much memory as XP and needs fifteen frikkin gigabytes of hard drive space. That is pathetic.
Vista isn't "breaking" hardware, it's just that some third-party software was so poorly designed, taking advantage of the flaws present in the average XP install (everything from assuming the user was always a full admin to just going ahead and loading kernel modules for any damn thing like DRM or virus scanning) that when MS fixed these issues, a handful of crap software didn't work (or, in the case of programs expecting admin privileges, didn't work without a UAC prompt) anymore.
Some "third party software?" You mean like some of Microsoft's own applications?
Except Microsoft picked neither.
Sure, DX10, >4gb of ram, etc are things that COULD be backported to work in XP. They haven't been.
DX10 will be. It was the same story with DX9: it was released only for XP as another way to try and force people to "upgrade".
>4gb of ram
XP 64? Beuler? Beuler?
Within 18 months you'll see computers shipping with 4gb.
So? My 10 year old Celeron can address 4 gb of ram.
The point is, they're included as standard, within 18 months you'll need several of the features, moving forwards, there's no ongoing support for XP. You can stick your head in the sand and ignore those facts and downgrade to XP, then figure out in 18 months to 2 years that blah blah blah
XP is an upgrade to Vista. Seriously.
Oh, I am perfectly aware that Congress is quite fond of stretching the Commerce Clause to absurd lengths, and the Supreme Court is quite fond of rubber-stamping those interpretations. This, however, is not one of those times. And the government isn't regulating "communications as in speech" but "communications as in infrastructure". And since much of said infrastructure was paid for using public dollars, the public has a reasonable expectation to have a say in how their tax dollars are used. So once again, if the telecos don't like it, they can buy the lines back from the public and then start paying rent on properties that those lines run across.
I was going to type up a list of things I like about Vista compared to XP, but, you know what? Your post was so inflammatory and insulting that I'm just going to give one reason to prefer Vista over any other OS out there: Specifically to spite assholes like you.
Then don't make dipshit comparisons, Sparky. If you get tired of your POS OS you can always consider upgrading to Windows 2000.
Well, lets see. There's the venerable Commerce Clause, and these lines run across state lines. Then there's the fact that the lines are run across public land and private land through the use of eminent domain. If the telecos don't want regulation, first they can give back all the subsidies they were granted to build the infrastructure in the first place. Then they can start paying rent on the land they use. But somehow I doubt AT&T will start cutting me checks anytime soon.
I'm sorry I worded it poorly, but I didn't meant to infer that teens aren't allowed to have their own concept of value. I'm merely stating that children's concept of value does not match up with big corporation executive's concept of value, and it is ridiculous for Mr. Ballmer to spin it as such.
Oh, sorry about that. Next time we'll try and read your mind more clearly.
Right, because Apple would never consider foisting regularly scheduled forced upgrades on their their users.
Well, they haven't, so what's your point exactly?
Is that really a valid baseline? Every new release takes a year to two of use before it catches up with usability of the system it replaced?
Nope.
Please. People said the same thing about Windows 2000, and people said the same thing about Windows XP
Please, what a ridiculous comparison. 2k had vast usability improvements over NT 4. And XP at least had instant user switching. And check out the system requirements. Basically, requirements doubled between NT 4.0 and 2000, and again to XP. Vista, however, requires a processor three times faster than one that will run XP, needs eight times as much memory, and fifteen frikkin gigabytes of free space!
Personally, I think Vista's pretty damned good.
Why? Because it's "prettier" than XP? Because you have way to much free space? Because that new Dual Core 2 processor is just way to fast and you need something to slow it down? Or is that much of the operating system is not designed with the end user in mind, but selling out to the content industry?
KotOR2 was one of the most disappointing games I've ever played.
Because it was rushed for a holiday release; whole planets and plotlines and (presumably) a non-lame ending were cut from the game.
Only materialistic liberals believe money is the great motivator of society.
Like all those liberal Republicans in Congress who investigated and re-investigated Whitewater with no probable cause?
Too bad all the free money, housing, and education still hasn't righted all the wrongs in the world.
Red herring.
It's unfortunate you began your rebuttal with what is essentially an ad hominem attack.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means.
You find me the "conservative movement" that holds that view.
Do you also demand evidence that the Pope is Catholic? If you willfully ignore decades of Republican rhetoric, that's your problem, not mine.
I live in one of the most liberal places in the United States. I have neighbors who go on vacations to communes, but still are wild eyes liberals who fervently support the democrat party.
Yeah? Go and ask one of those "wild eyes liberals" how happy they are over the Democratic leadership caving on the Iraq war, NSA wiretapping, "free trade", etc etc. They'd vote Labor or Socialist but we don't have those parties in the U.S. We have the conservative Democrats and the ultra-conservative Republicans.
Three Mile Island was a greatly overblown event
Why don't you ask someone in the nuclear field how "overblown" they think a partial core meltdown happens to be.
Even today, many if not most environmental groups consider the risk of nuclear energy to be far less severe than the immediate effect of burning fossil fuels. Respected scientists have ALWAY held this view.
How many respected scientists blow off nuclear safety.
Your statement only makes sense in support of the conclusion drawn by the book - journalists completely ignored the many positive statements by respected scientists purely because of their own irrational fear of one severe tragedy in a communist country and a sensationalized event.
Must have been a conservative reaction then, like their modern hand-wringing over the terrahrists.
Either you are a Kool-Aid drinker, or you are a troll.
the democrat party
Suck it biznap. Suck it long, suck it hard.
The PC gaming platform is not exactly what you call highly stable.
It's the publisher that determines stability, not the platform.
Too bad their work is exceptionally poor. Their research and book were funded by right wing groups like the Scaife Foundation and the Coors Foundation. Reporters that agreed with statements like "the government should not attempt to regulate people's sexual practices" were counted as "liberal" even though keeping government out of people's lives is supposedly one of the foundations of the conservative movement.
And there's the flawed methodology: The survey which found that most of these journalists were Democratic voters
Operating under the old "Democrat==Liberal" fallacy when the Democratic Party is actually very conservative.
The book's most thorough case study involved nuclear energy. The survey of journalists showed that most were highly skeptical about nuclear safety. However, the authors conducted a separate survey of scientists in energy related fields, who were much more sanguine about nuclear safety issues. They then conducted a content analysis of nuclear energy coverage in the media outlets they had surveyed. They found that the opinions of sources who were cited as scientific experts reflected the antinuclear sentiments of journalists, rather than the more pro-nuclear perspectives held by most energy scientists.
Completely ignoring three facts: the Cold War was still going strong, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Is it any surprise there was a heightened concern about nuclear explosions/accidents?
The authors concluded that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes
Yes, in the chapter called "Pot calls Kettle Black."
Just like you were once. Thus, you == blob of cells. Nothing separates you from an embryo, save time and nutrition.
That and a few billion cells, conscious thought, and a sense of proportion. Maybe you missed out on that last one.
And abortion is a death sentence.
For a blob of cells with brainpower comparable to your average earthworm.
What makes you, or anybody, think that Microsoft was stifling Bungie's creativity?
Forcing a game out half-finished, for starters?
Easy. Do a remake a la Doom 3. And this time leave @#$!@#$!@#$ multiplayer in, assholes.
Especially when you realise that Hollywood and the music industry are for the most part very liberal
No, they aren't. They're for their own kind of big business.
The tech is cheaper and more accessible - at entry level. But $25 will buy you a paint set. That doesn't make you a Renoir, a Monet, a Picasso, or a Wyeth.
So not the point. Of course you have to have talent to make good music. But talented musicians used to have to rent very expensive recording studios, whereas now they can do it themselves for a fraction of the cost.
The scripting, the acting, the pitch-perfect narration of Jim Dale.
Here's hoping they give him his damn cameo in the next Harry Potter movie.
He is someone who -- for a refreshing change -- actually believes in what he is actually doing.
Which is great if you are doing the right thing. But as Bush has proved, doing what you believe in is no virtue when what you believe in is crap.
more personal freedom.
Abortion.
Ron Paul would be great in reigning in the fascism of the Bush/Cheney years, but horrible at anything else.