the unlawful detentions without trial, the wire-taps, the cronyism, the pointless foreign warmongering & gunboat diplomacy, the war on drugs, the denial of gay rights, the staged Q&A sessions, etc. etc. etc.... all chug along with as much momentum as ever.
That's the funny thing about "momentum"...it takes quite a while to overcome. Or did you really expect that he would change each and every thing you're complaining about overnight.
No, but most of those who voted for him clearly did. Massive, abrupt, radical (unspecified) change was the overwhelming central message of his entire campaign.
He could get rid of "don't ask don't tell" overnight by executive fiat, just like how the troops were once racially integrated. He could likewise shut down the wiretaps, schedule the detainee tribunals, etc. with a mere wave of his pen. He's done NONE of it. Instead, he's running around buying shitty car companies. Pathetic.
I can agree with you that TARP was amazingly toxic and still insist that the GM bailout was also amazingly toxic.
And in fact, I do. The Bush/Obama Era (a phrase which I'm sadly getting very used to using) has been marked by irresponsible, continuous and ever-escalating raids of the treasury.
And where the fuck did all the war protesters go? When we were losing soldiers daily in Iraq & Afghanistan under Bush, it was the worst thing ever. Now that we're losing soldiers daily in Iraq & Afghanistan under Obama (with the Iraq draw-down going EXACTLY according to Bush's old time-table), everything is peachy-keen. WTF?
I voted third-party, but those of you who voted for Obama should be far more pissed at him than I am. On civil liberties, war policy, domestic spending, everything that matters, he's just GWB with a bad health-care plan who likes playing with car companies. It's sick.
But he doesn't have that dopey smirk or stupid-sounding Texas drawl, so I guess it's all good, right?
Other countries don't have our First Amendment rights.
I have the right to stand on a street corner and say, "hey, you should vote for Al Franken. What a swell guy!" *
I also have the right to pitch in with several friends and buy a billboard which says: "Al is swell! Vote for him!"
I furthermore have the right to pitch in with A LOT of people and buy 30 seconds on TV to say "Everybody in their right mind should vote for Al Franken."
I can even put together a "Tell People To Vote For Al" club, and ask other people who want to help me spread the word to send me money.
The problem with Campaign Finance Reform is, if it's "during the election cycle", I'm not allowed to do any of that stuff without falling under the strictly-regulated umbrella of Al Franken's campaign budget.
But Rupert Murdoch can spend 30 minutes a night, every night, on FOX News telling everybody how wonderful Norm Coleman is ** and how great it would be if we all voted for him. Likewise, he can buy the Minneapolis Star Tribune away from Gannet and run daily front-page articles crowing about Norm Coleman's legislative accomplishments and/or Al Franken scandals.
Campaign Finance laws which restrict, in any way, spending money on expressing an opinion about a sitting Senator or his opponent, are violations of our right to political speech, and furthermore hands the news media a monopoly on free expression
* This is a hypothetical example. Al Franken is not a swell guy. He's a complete choad. ** Norm Coleman - Also a complete choad.
"There's no difference between Democrats and Republicans" - The Governator
He's certainly doing his damndest to prove his point, too. As a Republican, he spent money like crazy, and is now raising taxes (including the notorious "car tax" which helped him shove Gov. Davis out of office!)
Actually, he probably with me and is shocked because no one is bitching about the administration, no bid contracts, millions of dollars being spent and payoffs to those responsible for the contract.
I guess maybe if haliburton or cheney was a name in the story, everyone would be pissed.
Yep. I maintain that it is THE LEFT, after working so hard to elect Obama, who should be most pissed off at him right now. On economics, foreign policy, and even civil liberties, he's doing nearly everything which we were all supposed to be so enraged at Bush over, and in many cases, taking things farther.
As a libertarian, I kind of expected him to keep ballooning the federal spending and ruin what's left of the tattered economy which Bush left him. Right on schedule there, and I don't feel let down about it because I never had my hopes up.
What I find disappointing is that the unlawful detentions without trial, the wire-taps, the cronyism, the pointless foreign warmongering & gunboat diplomacy, the war on drugs, the denial of gay rights, the staged Q&A sessions, etc. etc. etc.... all chug along with as much momentum as ever.
But hey, we (the taxpayers) now own a shitty car company, so I guess there's that.
sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Those ones?
Every credible third-party study on professional sports teams has completely debunked that myth.
Having a sports team in your town brings in NO additional net revenue, and in most cases, costs you.
If you're going to subsidize private businesses to the tune of $400 Million, you are better off giving $1 Million each to 400 random small business in the local Yellow Pages than building a ballpark.
I'm sure he was banking on a bit of taxpayer funds and cutting deals with the electric company to get that done. My guess is they voted him down.
Exactly.
He's a rich oil man (we've all seen "There Will Be Blood", right?) who saw an opportunity where companies like ADM were scoring big wins at the government trough due the the demands for "greener" energy, so he gambled on a chance to get in on it.
He spent a couple million on some big-ass windmills, and a little more on lobbying/advertising efforts to see if he could sucker the public to pitch in on it. If it worked, he would have become one of the biggest energy barons in the world. Since it didn't, he can still just cut his losses by either selling off some of this stuff for the smallest loss possible, or finding new, smaller farms to participate in. He might not break even on what he spent, but he's not exactly going to be out on the street over this.
I've yet to have the battery run out on my iPhone. Whenever I'm driving, it's getting charged. On the rare occasions that this is not enough and it starts running down, I leave it plugged in overnight and I'm good to go for a couple days.
Granted, this rapid charge cycle will render my battery into an inert lump of nickel by the time it's two years old, but by then I'll probably be upgrading to a 4th-gen iPhone anyway, and will sell this one to somebody on Craigslist with the ambition to pull it apart, install an after-market battery, and jailbreak it for their Sprint plan (or whatever.)
This is all well and good, but all I want to know is when somebody will release a Katamari game for the iPhone!
Back when I had a PSP, that was, by far, the most addictive game in their lineup. A version that worked off the iPhone's tilt sensor would be even cooler.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I'm aware that it will probably never happen. It's nice to dream, though.)
Roughly half of the people I know who are big comic book fans fall into the stereotype. But the half that don't are pretty normal successful people, they don't need anyone's pity for a stereotype they don't fit. I, myself, just think comic books suck.
Saying "comic books suck" makes about as much sense to me as saying "music is stupid".
Comic books are not a genre, they are a vehicle for artistic expression, just like film, poetry, dance, sculpture, etc.
I don't care for most of the poetry I've encountered, and there's a lot of poetry out there that does absolutely nothing for me. (This fact saved me a lot of time when reading Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy.) That said, I wouldn't say "poetry sucks". If I couldn't find at least some poems I liked, it would be an indicator that I wasn't a very broad-minded person. Give any art form a chance, and odds are a few brilliant artists out there will connect with you.
Despite getting the joke, I believe it's proper grammar to refer to a group of "things" in the masculine if they is at least one masculine thing in said group.
More so in languages that have masculine and feminine articles such as French. If there's a group of 10 people and 1 is a man, you refer to them in the masculine.
Which is probably why it's common to say "hey 'guys'" when referring to any group of people or "Congressmen". Of course, politically correct dictates that we people should say "congress men and women" or "actors and actresses" or "waiters and waitresses". Historically, you'd just use the masculine plural to describe a mixed group.
At least that's what I recall from studying French and perhaps German and Italian as well.
Convenient though it would be, that convention is all but dead within the context of American English. The preferred plural to modern readers would be *sigh* "congresspeople."
There was a time when I might have thought such a trend was worth fighting, but you'd have more luck pushing back advancing glaciers than resisting the evolution of language, especially in the age of the Internet.
I would put it to you that human nature has not changed, only the choice of "thems" for the "us" to rally against.
Or did you not watch those Prop 8 ads, which convinced people (including a lot of Obama voters) that gay couples were going to ruin marriage for everybody if we let them into the club?
Yes, an it's an excuse for war. And it works. It gets the pious killing the other side. They don't need to know the actual reason if you can use their religion to make them kill.
This is not an indictment of religion how?
Because non-religious justifications, such as nationalism, or even FEAR OF religion ("radical Islamists hate us because of our freedoms and because we don't cover our women in burkas!") works every bit as well, if not better, to gin up support for killing people while masking the real motivations.
If you care first about games, you are on the wrong platform entirely.
Consider getting an X-Box 360, a PS3, a Wii, or, if you must, a Windows box.
My Mac mini runs City of Heroes acceptably well for the 10 hours a month or so that I actually play it, and spends the rest of its life functioning as a media center. I haven't been a "gamer" since burning out on Quake, so game performance is almost meaningless to me.
If I was still a gamer, I'd own gaming hardware. Since I'm not, the Mac is a great machine for me.
Of course, it's government policy (specifically, government tax policy), along with regulations regarding the minimum allowable coverage, which allows these insurance giants to exist as they are in the first place.
The best way government could possibly fix the health care industry would be by getting out of it.
The trouble is, this empty suit is continuing and compounding Bush's mistakes.
-jcr
Exactly. Based on the first 100 days, Obama is on track to be, at best, the second-worst president of my lifetime.
Is everybody excited about replacing an 8-year hopeless war in Iraq with a 10-year hopeless war in Afghanistan?
Bush recklessly grew the deficit. In a single year, Obama appears to be set to QUADRUPLE it. Oh, but don't worry, he promises to cut that in half by the end of his first term, which means we'll "only" be growing the debt at double the rate we were during Bush's final year, which was already way too high.
Lest you think I'm some kind of Republican shill: I'm fairly certain McCain would have been as bad or worse.
But hey, at least we're closing Git'mo (while retaining the option of holding enemy combatants without trial indefinitely... as long as it's not in that base.)
The only real "change" I'm seeing from Obama is what will be left of the tax rebate he's promising us after you subtract the cost of all his new hidden taxes that we will have to pay (i.e., carbon exchange taxes.) That will amount to change. Mostly copper.
The JR was built with public money and then sold (so cheaply you could call it a gift) to private enterprise.
Japan does a lot of things right, but their government is incredibly corrupt and poorly-run. They've also been in an economic slump much worse than our current one for over a decade. I would hesitate to look to Japan for any answers, beyond an example of "what not to do about the current crisis."
This system won't take people from NYC to LA. It's for going from Minneapolis or Madison to Chicago. These are routes where air travel is wasteful (2 hours in the airport waiting for a one hour flight) and rail competes very well.
So you think 2 hours in a train station waiting for a 4 hour train ride would be a step up?
Because I can guaran-damn-tee you that the TSA will make getting on and off these trains every bit as much of a hassle as they do with airplanes. If not right away, immediately after the first incident of some nut-job shooting up a train car.
Slashdot Mirror
the unlawful detentions without trial, the wire-taps, the cronyism, the pointless foreign warmongering & gunboat diplomacy, the war on drugs, the denial of gay rights, the staged Q&A sessions, etc. etc. etc. ... all chug along with as much momentum as ever.
That's the funny thing about "momentum"...it takes quite a while to overcome. Or did you really expect that he would change each and every thing you're complaining about overnight.
No, but most of those who voted for him clearly did. Massive, abrupt, radical (unspecified) change was the overwhelming central message of his entire campaign.
He could get rid of "don't ask don't tell" overnight by executive fiat, just like how the troops were once racially integrated. He could likewise shut down the wiretaps, schedule the detainee tribunals, etc. with a mere wave of his pen. He's done NONE of it. Instead, he's running around buying shitty car companies. Pathetic.
I can agree with you that TARP was amazingly toxic and still insist that the GM bailout was also amazingly toxic.
And in fact, I do. The Bush/Obama Era (a phrase which I'm sadly getting very used to using) has been marked by irresponsible, continuous and ever-escalating raids of the treasury.
And where the fuck did all the war protesters go? When we were losing soldiers daily in Iraq & Afghanistan under Bush, it was the worst thing ever. Now that we're losing soldiers daily in Iraq & Afghanistan under Obama (with the Iraq draw-down going EXACTLY according to Bush's old time-table), everything is peachy-keen. WTF?
I voted third-party, but those of you who voted for Obama should be far more pissed at him than I am. On civil liberties, war policy, domestic spending, everything that matters, he's just GWB with a bad health-care plan who likes playing with car companies. It's sick.
But he doesn't have that dopey smirk or stupid-sounding Texas drawl, so I guess it's all good, right?
Other countries don't have our First Amendment rights.
I have the right to stand on a street corner and say, "hey, you should vote for Al Franken. What a swell guy!" *
I also have the right to pitch in with several friends and buy a billboard which says: "Al is swell! Vote for him!"
I furthermore have the right to pitch in with A LOT of people and buy 30 seconds on TV to say "Everybody in their right mind should vote for Al Franken."
I can even put together a "Tell People To Vote For Al" club, and ask other people who want to help me spread the word to send me money.
The problem with Campaign Finance Reform is, if it's "during the election cycle", I'm not allowed to do any of that stuff without falling under the strictly-regulated umbrella of Al Franken's campaign budget.
But Rupert Murdoch can spend 30 minutes a night, every night, on FOX News telling everybody how wonderful Norm Coleman is ** and how great it would be if we all voted for him. Likewise, he can buy the Minneapolis Star Tribune away from Gannet and run daily front-page articles crowing about Norm Coleman's legislative accomplishments and/or Al Franken scandals.
Campaign Finance laws which restrict, in any way, spending money on expressing an opinion about a sitting Senator or his opponent, are violations of our right to political speech, and furthermore hands the news media a monopoly on free expression
* This is a hypothetical example. Al Franken is not a swell guy. He's a complete choad.
** Norm Coleman - Also a complete choad.
"There's no difference between Democrats and Republicans" - The Governator
He's certainly doing his damndest to prove his point, too. As a Republican, he spent money like crazy, and is now raising taxes (including the notorious "car tax" which helped him shove Gov. Davis out of office!)
Actually, he probably with me and is shocked because no one is bitching about the administration, no bid contracts, millions of dollars being spent and payoffs to those responsible for the contract.
I guess maybe if haliburton or cheney was a name in the story, everyone would be pissed.
Yep. I maintain that it is THE LEFT, after working so hard to elect Obama, who should be most pissed off at him right now. On economics, foreign policy, and even civil liberties, he's doing nearly everything which we were all supposed to be so enraged at Bush over, and in many cases, taking things farther.
As a libertarian, I kind of expected him to keep ballooning the federal spending and ruin what's left of the tattered economy which Bush left him. Right on schedule there, and I don't feel let down about it because I never had my hopes up.
What I find disappointing is that the unlawful detentions without trial, the wire-taps, the cronyism, the pointless foreign warmongering & gunboat diplomacy, the war on drugs, the denial of gay rights, the staged Q&A sessions, etc. etc. etc. ... all chug along with as much momentum as ever.
But hey, we (the taxpayers) now own a shitty car company, so I guess there's that.
sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Those ones?
Every credible third-party study on professional sports teams has completely debunked that myth.
Having a sports team in your town brings in NO additional net revenue, and in most cases, costs you.
If you're going to subsidize private businesses to the tune of $400 Million, you are better off giving $1 Million each to 400 random small business in the local Yellow Pages than building a ballpark.
I'm sure he was banking on a bit of taxpayer funds and cutting deals with the electric company to get that done. My guess is they voted him down.
Exactly.
He's a rich oil man (we've all seen "There Will Be Blood", right?) who saw an opportunity where companies like ADM were scoring big wins at the government trough due the the demands for "greener" energy, so he gambled on a chance to get in on it.
He spent a couple million on some big-ass windmills, and a little more on lobbying/advertising efforts to see if he could sucker the public to pitch in on it. If it worked, he would have become one of the biggest energy barons in the world. Since it didn't, he can still just cut his losses by either selling off some of this stuff for the smallest loss possible, or finding new, smaller farms to participate in. He might not break even on what he spent, but he's not exactly going to be out on the street over this.
As Scott Adams (a manager himself at times) once adroitly pointed out, when employees fail, it's ALWAYS the fault of management.
Either you failed to give your employees what they needed to succeed, or you failed to hire the right employees. Either way, it's on you.
So... There are 7000 LAN gamers still out there?
Or just 7000 people with a romantic attachement to the idea of being able to still play on LANs?
Because for most of us, the widespread availability of fast Internet connectivity has made LAN parties kind of obsolete.
Hmm... It's better than nothing, which is what I was expecting. Something else to download along with the 3.0 update tonight, I guess.
Please, for fuck's sake STOP Just let this thread END
I've yet to have the battery run out on my iPhone. Whenever I'm driving, it's getting charged. On the rare occasions that this is not enough and it starts running down, I leave it plugged in overnight and I'm good to go for a couple days.
Granted, this rapid charge cycle will render my battery into an inert lump of nickel by the time it's two years old, but by then I'll probably be upgrading to a 4th-gen iPhone anyway, and will sell this one to somebody on Craigslist with the ambition to pull it apart, install an after-market battery, and jailbreak it for their Sprint plan (or whatever.)
None of the features of the iPhone are revolutionary, except one:
They made their features convenient and user-friendly enough to be actually useful.
This is all well and good, but all I want to know is when somebody will release a Katamari game for the iPhone!
Back when I had a PSP, that was, by far, the most addictive game in their lineup. A version that worked off the iPhone's tilt sensor would be even cooler.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I'm aware that it will probably never happen. It's nice to dream, though.)
Roughly half of the people I know who are big comic book fans fall into the stereotype. But the half that don't are pretty normal successful people, they don't need anyone's pity for a stereotype they don't fit. I, myself, just think comic books suck.
Saying "comic books suck" makes about as much sense to me as saying "music is stupid".
Comic books are not a genre, they are a vehicle for artistic expression, just like film, poetry, dance, sculpture, etc.
I don't care for most of the poetry I've encountered, and there's a lot of poetry out there that does absolutely nothing for me. (This fact saved me a lot of time when reading Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy.) That said, I wouldn't say "poetry sucks". If I couldn't find at least some poems I liked, it would be an indicator that I wasn't a very broad-minded person. Give any art form a chance, and odds are a few brilliant artists out there will connect with you.
I've only seen a few episodes, and found it uneven at best, but Sheldon and that Asian dude are clearly "geek's geeks."
For the "rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock" scene alone, the show has more than justified its existence on the airwaves as far as I'm concerned.
Despite getting the joke, I believe it's proper grammar to refer to a group of "things" in the masculine if they is at least one masculine thing in said group.
More so in languages that have masculine and feminine articles such as French. If there's a group of 10 people and 1 is a man, you refer to them in the masculine.
Which is probably why it's common to say "hey 'guys'" when referring to any group of people or "Congressmen". Of course, politically correct dictates that we people should say "congress men and women" or "actors and actresses" or "waiters and waitresses". Historically, you'd just use the masculine plural to describe a mixed group.
At least that's what I recall from studying French and perhaps German and Italian as well.
Convenient though it would be, that convention is all but dead within the context of American English. The preferred plural to modern readers would be *sigh* "congresspeople."
There was a time when I might have thought such a trend was worth fighting, but you'd have more luck pushing back advancing glaciers than resisting the evolution of language, especially in the age of the Internet.
I would put it to you that human nature has not changed, only the choice of "thems" for the "us" to rally against.
Or did you not watch those Prop 8 ads, which convinced people (including a lot of Obama voters) that gay couples were going to ruin marriage for everybody if we let them into the club?
Yes, an it's an excuse for war. And it works. It gets the pious killing the other side. They don't need to know the actual reason if you can use their religion to make them kill.
This is not an indictment of religion how?
Because non-religious justifications, such as nationalism, or even FEAR OF religion ("radical Islamists hate us because of our freedoms and because we don't cover our women in burkas!") works every bit as well, if not better, to gin up support for killing people while masking the real motivations.
If you care first about games, you are on the wrong platform entirely.
Consider getting an X-Box 360, a PS3, a Wii, or, if you must, a Windows box.
My Mac mini runs City of Heroes acceptably well for the 10 hours a month or so that I actually play it, and spends the rest of its life functioning as a media center. I haven't been a "gamer" since burning out on Quake, so game performance is almost meaningless to me.
If I was still a gamer, I'd own gaming hardware. Since I'm not, the Mac is a great machine for me.
Of course, it's government policy (specifically, government tax policy), along with regulations regarding the minimum allowable coverage, which allows these insurance giants to exist as they are in the first place.
The best way government could possibly fix the health care industry would be by getting out of it.
You would be hard-pressed to find anything in America which functions less like a free market than our current health-care system.
The trouble is, this empty suit is continuing and compounding Bush's mistakes.
-jcr
Exactly. Based on the first 100 days, Obama is on track to be, at best, the second-worst president of my lifetime.
Is everybody excited about replacing an 8-year hopeless war in Iraq with a 10-year hopeless war in Afghanistan?
Bush recklessly grew the deficit. In a single year, Obama appears to be set to QUADRUPLE it. Oh, but don't worry, he promises to cut that in half by the end of his first term, which means we'll "only" be growing the debt at double the rate we were during Bush's final year, which was already way too high.
Lest you think I'm some kind of Republican shill: I'm fairly certain McCain would have been as bad or worse.
But hey, at least we're closing Git'mo (while retaining the option of holding enemy combatants without trial indefinitely... as long as it's not in that base.)
The only real "change" I'm seeing from Obama is what will be left of the tax rebate he's promising us after you subtract the cost of all his new hidden taxes that we will have to pay (i.e., carbon exchange taxes.) That will amount to change. Mostly copper.
The JR was built with public money and then sold (so cheaply you could call it a gift) to private enterprise.
Japan does a lot of things right, but their government is incredibly corrupt and poorly-run. They've also been in an economic slump much worse than our current one for over a decade. I would hesitate to look to Japan for any answers, beyond an example of "what not to do about the current crisis."
This system won't take people from NYC to LA. It's for going from Minneapolis or Madison to Chicago. These are routes where air travel is wasteful (2 hours in the airport waiting for a one hour flight) and rail competes very well.
So you think 2 hours in a train station waiting for a 4 hour train ride would be a step up?
Because I can guaran-damn-tee you that the TSA will make getting on and off these trains every bit as much of a hassle as they do with airplanes. If not right away, immediately after the first incident of some nut-job shooting up a train car.