What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda.
Existing law allows the government to spy on suspected terrorists to their hearts content. With warrants through the FISA court. So when when Administration officials claim that NSA wiretapping is needed to spy on suspected terrorists, they are lying through their teeth. As warrantless wiretapping isn't need to spy on suspects, it must be for just one thing: spying people who are NOT suspects. And that is straight up fascism my friend.
I have a lot of friends and family who believe Bush can do no wrong (since we are at war and he is protecting us all) with all of these executive power grabs, but their eyes glass over and faces go black when I ask if they would be comfortable with Kerry or Hillery Clinton bringing those same surveillance and detention powers to bear against gun owners, anti-abortion activists, other conservative groups, etc. Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
I also like to ask those sorts of people an additional question: what if we didn't have the 25th Amendment and Bill Clinton was still in office? What if he took the exact same actions that Bush has over the last 6 years for the exact same reasons? Would they have supported Clinton as much as they did Bush through My Pet Goat, Katrina, Iraq, waterboarding, warrantless spying, indefinite detentions without trial, etc etc?
And is Franklin Roosevelt reviled today because of it? No, we put him on the dime.
And the difference between FDR and Bush is that putting Japanese Americans in camps was the one black mark on an otherwise stellar presidency. In 50 years we might look back and decide that naming a reef a national monument was the only thing Bush managed to do right in 8 years.
I mean, we just went through the Clinton years where Gore was spearheading the clipper initiative which would have effectively make privacy (and all non clipper crypto) illegal
I've told you a million times to stop exaggurating! The idea with the Clipper chip was to give the government a backdoor to spy on communications, yes, but unlike they NSA program, they would have still needed warrants to tap in.
Yes, everyone SHOULD have known that Bush was a douchebag in 2000. But I don't think anyone could have predicted what a fascist douchebag he would turn out to be.
Sony wouldn't have a manufacturing problem if they hadn't insisted on using Blu-Ray drives.
IBM has also had problems turning out Cell chips for the PS3. Makes me wonder if we wont hear in a few years that Sony was too small a customer for IBM to bother with...
It didn't. The PS2 was a big money loser for years. PS2 games, on the other hand, made lots of money. That's the problem with Sony's model - taking a loss on the hardware and making it up on game licences is okay if you're going to sell 100 million units, but that isn't going to happen for them this time around.
MP3 players existed before the iPod and they were *commodity hardware* no less. Apple said "Screw that, this is a style item, not a pocket radio", and made the MP3 player *cool*, then charged a couple hundred dollars more than the Asian consumer electronics giants were charging. And proceeded to beat the living who-hah out of them.
You're leaving out the rather pertinent fact that Apple was the first to use 1.8" hard drives in an MP3 player, and whooped the rest of the industry in the physical size/capacity area. And the fact that they used 400 Mbps Firewire when everyone else was using 11 Mbps USB 1.1.
I don't see anything being an "iPod killer" unless it can make similar technological jumps over the status quo. And the only things I see as being capable of that are cell phones.
No, not really. Why should the ACLU take gun cases when the powerful NRA has millions of members, millions of dollars to spend, and a great deal of political clout?
As Olberman makes clear, the Bill of Rights is pretty much worthless without habeas corpus. And as far as standing up to the Feds goes, why don't you ask Randy Weaver how well his guns worked for him.
Of all the things that the ACLU stands for, this is one I have NEVER seen them stand for.
I'm sorry, but this one is quite obvious. Why should the ACLU, an organization concerned with civil liberties, spend precious recourses on 2nd Amendment cases when the NRA, one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the country, is ONLY concerned with gun rights? Except when they aren't. It's been five years since cops broke into the man's home w/o a warrant, and I have yet to hear a peep out of the NRA on his behalf. Nor have I heard any "gun nuts" complain about the NRA not supporting this guy, but I still see complaints about the ACLU. Hmmm....
They tend to be the ones who have 200GB of MP3s off BitTorrent and no intention of paying for any of it whatsoever (as opposed to the "try before you buy" type people, who I have infinitely more time for, and may just have more of a point.)
And how many of those 200GB collectors pay for even 1% of the stuff they own? These guys are likely to have maxed out consumer debt already and couldn't pay for the stuff if they wanted to.
"It's not stealing"/"Everybody does it"/"Outdated business model"/"High prices"/"Shit music" is just a convenient justification
To which I would add "doesn't make any difference to the record labels because the person couldn't buy the music if they wanted to." Downloading stuff off P2P isn't about getting it for free, it's about convenience. And it's more convenient to download the stuff you want now when you're 20 than wait until you're 50 and have enough money.
Uh huh. Methinks there are some details your haven't mentioned. Just how did your grandmother pay for this fantastically expensive operation? How likely is Cheapass HMO, Inc to send patients to a top surgeon? How about one of the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance?
If my kid runs a lemonade stand and makes a profit, is he a "success" COMPARED (key word) to Minutemaid? No, though he's a success by the standards of children.
The problem with this reasoning is that every other software company is a failure then. The only one that comes close to Microsoft is Oracle.
Success is always measured against expectations. Apple, as a computer company, is not particularly successful.
Well, lets see, how many other computer companies that started in the 70's/early 80's are still around? Most have either been bought out by competititon or gone out of business. Apple has long been in the top 5 or 6 of the largest computer manufacturers in the world, and has long been a huge player in the education market. They have high margins across their entire product line and don't compete in the low profit-high risk market of $400 POS computers, nor are they at the mercy of Microsoft. Their stock price keeps going up, and since recovering from their slump in the mid 90's they have consistently turned a profit, even through the dot com bust.
What does wmv have over mp3? I understand not being swayed by the iPod, but I don't see why you would have gotten so much stuff in wmv instead of more open formats that would work just as well with WMP.
It works here in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, and many other countries. Are Americans really so lazy and selfish they can't drop their cans in one bin and plastic in another?
In a nutshell, yes. But even if you want to, many municipalities don't offer recycling services, you have to do it yourself. What happens in a typical mid sized city is that rather than having recyclables collected from your residence along with your trash, there are a few spots around town with dumpsters that you can drive to and place your metal cans/plastic bottles/newspapers in.
The obtuse indignation of your comments reveal you for what you really are: a self centered religious bigot.
Blah blah blah. Your comments reveal you to be a blabbering idiot who engages in rhetorical masturbation when he can't back up any one of his arguments.
Regarding your other post, I already provided the information. Go buy the book and read it yourself.
And you missed mine. Since you like debating minutiae, justify using the term "belief" in the same context with reguards to both science and religion, along with a comparison/contrast to those that want Intelligent Design to be presented as a valid scientific theory. 500 words or less.
I got AOE3 and the installer required XP. I thought that was a bunch of crap, so I did some Googling and it turns out you just need to install a library (don't remember what the name was offhand) and doing Start -> Run -> J:\setup.exe/a
With the/a option, it skips the OS checking part of the install and just asks you where you want to put the game. Haven't tried this with other games, it might only work with AOE3. YMMV.
Consumers have no problem passing up expensive pains in the ass, especially when there are better alternatives. See Divx for a good example. Even if they manage to get Vista on every $399 Dell POS, I bet schools, businesses and government agencies will stay with XP in droves.
How about you stop seeing things you want to see, and instead read what I actually wrote?
You mean this? the myth that American Indians were all peaceful tree-hugging poets and philosophers until the horrible white man slaughtered them.
I swear, the average slashdoter must have the comprehensive abilities of a 3-year-old.
As exemplified by your dumb ass. You had no problems "seeing what you wanted to see" and spouting your own straw men, Mr. Pot. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Slashdot Mirror
What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda.
Existing law allows the government to spy on suspected terrorists to their hearts content. With warrants through the FISA court. So when when Administration officials claim that NSA wiretapping is needed to spy on suspected terrorists, they are lying through their teeth. As warrantless wiretapping isn't need to spy on suspects, it must be for just one thing: spying people who are NOT suspects. And that is straight up fascism my friend.
I have a lot of friends and family who believe Bush can do no wrong (since we are at war and he is protecting us all) with all of these executive power grabs, but their eyes glass over and faces go black when I ask if they would be comfortable with Kerry or Hillery Clinton bringing those same surveillance and detention powers to bear against gun owners, anti-abortion activists, other conservative groups, etc. Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
I also like to ask those sorts of people an additional question: what if we didn't have the 25th Amendment and Bill Clinton was still in office? What if he took the exact same actions that Bush has over the last 6 years for the exact same reasons? Would they have supported Clinton as much as they did Bush through My Pet Goat, Katrina, Iraq, waterboarding, warrantless spying, indefinite detentions without trial, etc etc?
And is Franklin Roosevelt reviled today because of it? No, we put him on the dime.
And the difference between FDR and Bush is that putting Japanese Americans in camps was the one black mark on an otherwise stellar presidency. In 50 years we might look back and decide that naming a reef a national monument was the only thing Bush managed to do right in 8 years.
I mean, we just went through the Clinton years where Gore was spearheading the clipper initiative which would have effectively make privacy (and all non clipper crypto) illegal
I've told you a million times to stop exaggurating! The idea with the Clipper chip was to give the government a backdoor to spy on communications, yes, but unlike they NSA program, they would have still needed warrants to tap in.
Yes, everyone SHOULD have known that Bush was a douchebag in 2000. But I don't think anyone could have predicted what a fascist douchebag he would turn out to be.
Sony wouldn't have a manufacturing problem if they hadn't insisted on using Blu-Ray drives.
IBM has also had problems turning out Cell chips for the PS3. Makes me wonder if we wont hear in a few years that Sony was too small a customer for IBM to bother with...
Do you not think the PS2 made a profit,
It didn't. The PS2 was a big money loser for years. PS2 games, on the other hand, made lots of money. That's the problem with Sony's model - taking a loss on the hardware and making it up on game licences is okay if you're going to sell 100 million units, but that isn't going to happen for them this time around.
MP3 players existed before the iPod and they were *commodity hardware* no less. Apple said "Screw that, this is a style item, not a pocket radio", and made the MP3 player *cool*, then charged a couple hundred dollars more than the Asian consumer electronics giants were charging. And proceeded to beat the living who-hah out of them.
You're leaving out the rather pertinent fact that Apple was the first to use 1.8" hard drives in an MP3 player, and whooped the rest of the industry in the physical size/capacity area. And the fact that they used 400 Mbps Firewire when everyone else was using 11 Mbps USB 1.1.
I don't see anything being an "iPod killer" unless it can make similar technological jumps over the status quo. And the only things I see as being capable of that are cell phones.
Maybe that's because there will always be a group of people that simply won't buy an Xbox because it's made by Microsoft ?
Maybe those people wont care because Microsoft loses money on each Xbox sold?
Good observation about the ACLU.
No, not really. Why should the ACLU take gun cases when the powerful NRA has millions of members, millions of dollars to spend, and a great deal of political clout?
There is no #1 without #2.
As Olberman makes clear, the Bill of Rights is pretty much worthless without habeas corpus. And as far as standing up to the Feds goes, why don't you ask Randy Weaver how well his guns worked for him.
Of all the things that the ACLU stands for, this is one I have NEVER seen them stand for.
I'm sorry, but this one is quite obvious. Why should the ACLU, an organization concerned with civil liberties, spend precious recourses on 2nd Amendment cases when the NRA, one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the country, is ONLY concerned with gun rights? Except when they aren't. It's been five years since cops broke into the man's home w/o a warrant, and I have yet to hear a peep out of the NRA on his behalf. Nor have I heard any "gun nuts" complain about the NRA not supporting this guy, but I still see complaints about the ACLU. Hmmm....
They tend to be the ones who have 200GB of MP3s off BitTorrent and no intention of paying for any of it whatsoever (as opposed to the "try before you buy" type people, who I have infinitely more time for, and may just have more of a point.)
And how many of those 200GB collectors pay for even 1% of the stuff they own? These guys are likely to have maxed out consumer debt already and couldn't pay for the stuff if they wanted to.
"It's not stealing"/"Everybody does it"/"Outdated business model"/"High prices"/"Shit music" is just a convenient justification
To which I would add "doesn't make any difference to the record labels because the person couldn't buy the music if they wanted to." Downloading stuff off P2P isn't about getting it for free, it's about convenience. And it's more convenient to download the stuff you want now when you're 20 than wait until you're 50 and have enough money.
Uh huh. Methinks there are some details your haven't mentioned. Just how did your grandmother pay for this fantastically expensive operation? How likely is Cheapass HMO, Inc to send patients to a top surgeon? How about one of the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance?
If my kid runs a lemonade stand and makes a profit, is he a "success" COMPARED (key word) to Minutemaid? No, though he's a success by the standards of children.
The problem with this reasoning is that every other software company is a failure then. The only one that comes close to Microsoft is Oracle.
Success is always measured against expectations. Apple, as a computer company, is not particularly successful.
Well, lets see, how many other computer companies that started in the 70's/early 80's are still around? Most have either been bought out by competititon or gone out of business. Apple has long been in the top 5 or 6 of the largest computer manufacturers in the world, and has long been a huge player in the education market. They have high margins across their entire product line and don't compete in the low profit-high risk market of $400 POS computers, nor are they at the mercy of Microsoft. Their stock price keeps going up, and since recovering from their slump in the mid 90's they have consistently turned a profit, even through the dot com bust.
Sounds pretty successful to me.
What does wmv have over mp3? I understand not being swayed by the iPod, but I don't see why you would have gotten so much stuff in wmv instead of more open formats that would work just as well with WMP.
Wow, way to prove my point.
I didn't prove your point, I proved your hypocracy.
Next time, try not sucking back quite so many suds before posting.
Next time don't start off being an asshat and you wont get it thrown back in your face.
It works here in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, and many other countries. Are Americans really so lazy and selfish they can't drop their cans in one bin and plastic in another?
In a nutshell, yes. But even if you want to, many municipalities don't offer recycling services, you have to do it yourself. What happens in a typical mid sized city is that rather than having recyclables collected from your residence along with your trash, there are a few spots around town with dumpsters that you can drive to and place your metal cans/plastic bottles/newspapers in.
The obtuse indignation of your comments reveal you for what you really are: a self centered religious bigot.
Blah blah blah. Your comments reveal you to be a blabbering idiot who engages in rhetorical masturbation when he can't back up any one of his arguments.
Regarding your other post, I already provided the information. Go buy the book and read it yourself.
No, you haven't. Put up or shut up.
You completely missed my point.
And you missed mine. Since you like debating minutiae, justify using the term "belief" in the same context with reguards to both science and religion, along with a comparison/contrast to those that want Intelligent Design to be presented as a valid scientific theory. 500 words or less.
Hell, Microsoft ignores their own EULA's when it suits them, a la Windows Refund Day.
I got AOE3 and the installer required XP. I thought that was a bunch of crap, so I did some Googling and it turns out you just need to install a library (don't remember what the name was offhand) and doing Start -> Run -> J:\setup.exe /a
/a option, it skips the OS checking part of the install and just asks you where you want to put the game. Haven't tried this with other games, it might only work with AOE3. YMMV.
With the
Consumers have no problem passing up expensive pains in the ass, especially when there are better alternatives. See Divx for a good example. Even if they manage to get Vista on every $399 Dell POS, I bet schools, businesses and government agencies will stay with XP in droves.
I'm sure the company would say the conveyor system is better - how else could the charge the city for it?
Oh, no it precisely says just that.
Where. Put up or shut up.
you really ought to be more intellectually honest.
Is that so Mr. Pot? I hope your children are far less stupid than you are, and that asshattery isn't inherited.
How about you stop seeing things you want to see, and instead read what I actually wrote?
You mean this? the myth that American Indians were all peaceful tree-hugging poets and philosophers until the horrible white man slaughtered them.
I swear, the average slashdoter must have the comprehensive abilities of a 3-year-old.
As exemplified by your dumb ass. You had no problems "seeing what you wanted to see" and spouting your own straw men, Mr. Pot. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.