What about Harry Browne?. By conventional standards the Libertarians are a bit extreme, but they're the only party which is consistently for liberty and against government intrusion in personal and economic issues.
Yup, I have checked out that website, and I agree: He's the man. You're one of the few people to have changed my viewpoint. Thank you.
I would disagree with this. Look at his performance in the debates; he was consistently interrupting, violating the agreed-upon rules, at one point literally getting in Bush's face as he was talking. That does not strike me as professional, and I would not want anyone with an attitude like that representing my country.
I will agree with you about Gore's skill with the debates, too.
Certainly, running against as inept a Republican nominee as one can imagine (short, maybe, of Dan Quayle), one would have expected Gore to have done a lot better, especially in the debates.
Fundamentally, I think they'd underestimated Bush. Further, I think there's a lot of animosity and frustration in Gore that Bush is even on his radar screen.
If you were forced, by your aspirations, to have what is essentially a job interview against a fellow computer geek who feels that Outlook is the most secure e-mail client in existance, wouldn't you feel smug and superior, too?
To my way of thinking, this was Gore's undoing, but as a human being, I can understand it and even empathize completely. He must have been frustrated as hell.
So, despite the absolute debacle of the debates, I still feel that Gore is an elegant and qualified statesman, a gentleman of a high caliber who could represent the United States abroad with a measure of dignity unparalleled by Bush's brash hail-fellow-well-met demeanor.
Disclaimer: this article contains thoughts of a politically mature nature. You're welcome to agree or disagree with me. But if you're moderating, remember the Slashdot rules: moderate based on the intelligence of the posting, not based on whether you simply agree or disagree with it. Consider your motives between choosing a moderation point and then clicking that Moderate button.
Fiscal Republican but social Democrat. Huh? You want to provide services without getting taxes? Where's all this money going to come from? Or will you just hugely inflate the National Debt?
No, I suggest that you simply don't provide the services, but let people live their lives as they see fit.
I've since seen the answer, though they've not got a snowball's chance in hell of being elected for the near future: the Libertarian Party.
They're for low taxes (0 federal income tax!), the separation of church and state, and not meddling in capitalism.
They're for an abolition of entitlements, which make up a *huge* percentage of the federal budget. They're for a system which forces people to be accountable for their own fiscal survival.
Imagine how nice your retirement portfolio would look if you could invest everything that you now spend on income tax into it.
They're for an abolition of gun control. Fine, Columbine was tragic, but we all agree, based on an earlier Slashdot discussion, that there were underlying problems with student morale that caused it. The fact of the matter remains: criminals are called criminals because they ignore the law. Do you think criminals are going to register their guns? Nah. So, current gun control laws can only serve to hurt legitimate gun owners and sportsmen, antique firearm collectors and those who feel a need for personal defense.
The Libertarian Party wants to rescind all marriage taxes and fiscal benefits. And, since they're not affiliated with any religious organizations the way the Republicans are, they don't care if your sister wants to marry a yack. It doesn't matter to them, as long as both parties are consenting.
They feel abortion is wrong, as I do, but we also agree on the point that attempting to stop it through legislation will only mean that women start getting killed by coat hangers again.
By all measures, the war on drugs hasn't worked. Like Prohibition, most criminal activity can be attributed to the fact that drugs are illegal. Murders, thefts, etc. are all related to that. Back in the 1930s, anyone could walk into any pharmacy and buy heroin, yet no one was being killed in drive-by shootings over drug territories. Sure, some people will get hooked, and they might even die. Oh well. Darwinian Theory goes hand in hand with Libertarianism. Even so, few informed people could actually call marijuana dangerous. It's ironic that huge numbers of people are currently in jail - instead of productively working and spending - over what is widely considered in pharmacology to be a less addictive drug than either tobacco or alcohol.
And, they propose to get the federal government out of its involvement in all tasks not specifically described in the Constitution. In the USA, the Federal government has millions of square miles of land. The Libertarians propose to pay down the debt by auctioning that, and keep the government running on only its Constitutionally-appointed tasks with a variety of existing federal taxes not including income tax.
In Canada, they would do the same thing by selling constant fiscal liabilities like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, zillions of other silly government agencies that don't serve the Canadian constitution, and ending subsidies to private companies. Nortel, for instance, gets over $100 million CDN a year from the Canadian feds. Remember, Canada's population is 1/10th of the American population; that's a big strain.
I'd vote Libertarian in the upcoming Canadian election - at least out of disdain for the more practical choices - except there's no Libertarian candidate in my riding.
Maybe there's even a future for me running for public office...:)
This thing is doomed to failure. An untested, unproven processor with an operating system not known for its quickness.
Oh, puh-lease.
Even if everything you say were technically true, you forget the target market.
AOL's advertising catch line is, "So Easy to Use, No Wonder it's #1".
AOL users like their "IRC" client to be full of tacky sound effects like doors opening and closing.
The user interface looks like it was designed by simplifying a preschooler's story book.
And finally, there's the stupid "You've Got Mail" wav that they *love* to throw around everywhere.
I've *never* had an AOL account, and that sound is forever burned into my mind, along with the horrible login ?chimes?.
Bottom line? AOL users like that crap. They're simple enough that it's necessary for their computing experience. They won't notice if the machine happens to be sluggish.
So, on the contrary, this is probably a great place to whet the Transmeta's teeth, since it's really not a demanding appliation, and it certainly isn't as mission critical as a new desktop or notebook. (Imagine, if you will, that the Transmeta is a Pentium 60 with the FDIV fault. It would never be noticed in an internet appliance, though a good spreadsheet would expose it.)
If this thing were to take off, I think you'd find that within a few months there'd be a lot of complaints that it doesn't work as well as promised.
I'm slowly getting used to engine size in Litres, but don't know the conversion. I know the 318 that was in my old '74 plymouth was bigger than my 2.4L in my Olds, but not by how much.
318 CID = 5.2L
More than double the size of the Olds.
:)
The big pain in the ass is GM's 90 degree V6 engines. There's the Chevy 229 CID V6 (distributor in the back, a Chevy 305 with two cylinders lopped off), and the Buick 231 CID V6 (distributor up front). Both the 229 and the 231 are, in Metric, 3.8L engines. And they were used in a lot of the same cars quite interchangeably.
Having exclusively used the public transit system during my first years as a programmer (quite happily, mind you), I'll kindly ask you to go suck an egg for posting such narrow-minded stereotypical crap. I actually agree with just about everything else you said, but that kind of garbage only serves to undermine your message.
No, it only serves to undermine the overall usefulness of Nader.
Let's say that Nader had gotten the Presidency. Let's further suggest that he managed to have private cars banned from New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. This is within his party's platform.
Generally, those who can afford to avoid public transit do avoid public transit.
Why?
Well, public transit tends to be crowded. It tends to be slow. And it tends to be chock full of people that you'd rather not be forced to get intimate with.
I'd rather not have to sit beside an individual who cannot afford to drive a car because he cannot comprehend such basic concepts as daily bathing, let alone daily work.
I'd rather avoid sitting with a teenaged mother adjacent, her lack of parenting responsibility eclipsed only by her lack of basic birth control comprehension, as her child runs all through the bus, screaming and spilling grape juice on my new suit.
And, call me anti-social, but I'd rather not have to sit beside someone who feels a terrific need to engage me in a fascinating conversation about how lottery tickets are a viable means to ensure a financially comfortable retirement or how if you want to score some really good heroin you can just head down to the docks.
While I was perhaps a little extreme in my condemnation of public transit riders, you imply yourself that you no longer take it. Why is that?
If you're a Los Angeles resident who drives to work every day, assuming a 1-hour drive each way, and assuming that public transit has been greatly improved so that your commute time by bus/subway is still one hour each way, which are you going to take?
I can afford to drive, and therefore, I will. I do sincerely consider myself to have worked hard enough to have elevated myself to the point where I don't need to take public transit every day. I am therefore better than those people with whom I would be forced to fight for a seat on a bus.
Now, if a political party with an ill-conceived platform managed to ban outright or artificially increase the cost of driving to the point where it negated one of the benefits of my skills and hard work, what are my options?
I could continue to live and work in that community with a reduction of my ability to enjoy being a part of that community. Or, I could walk away from that community, taking with me the benefits of my skills and disposable income.
I assure you, I'm interested in improving my standard of living at all levels. I can therefore guarantee the option I would exercise would be the latter.
Of course, looking at Canada, I see a middle stage where a lot of things are still english, despite it being a 'metric country,' so we're not the only backwards place in the world.:)
Speaking as a Canadian citizen who grew up *after* Canada went Metric in 1976-1977, yeah, it's screwed up.
Metric is wonderful. It's easy to cope with, it's the measurement system embraced by science everywhere, it's clear and logical and not based on a dead king's body parts.
I never learned the English system in school. Never. It was briefly discussed, primarily in history classes, but that was it.
And yet, I'm 6'4" tall. I weigh 180 lbs. I have a 33" waist. I have *no idea* what those are in meters, kilograms and centimeters.
Nor can I look at someone and estimate their height in meters. In fact, whenever I estimate the length of something, it's in inches and feet. My 1976 Dodge Ram is about 21 feet long. My penis... Well, let's just say that it's proportional to my height.
Yards escape me, and meters I just can't eyeball.
My old Dodge is a Canadian model of the Ram. The only difference between it and an American Dodge Ram is that my '76 was one of the very first vehicles in Canada to have a Metric speedometer and odometer.
Now, even though my speedometer is in kilometers an hour (with little numbers for MPH, it's just the reverse of an American speedo), I think of speed in miles per hour. But to really mess things up, I think of distance in kilometers.
When I'm working on a car or truck (one of my favorite hobbies), I can always look at an SAE bolt and grab the right wrench to fit it. 7/16", 1/2", 9/16"... no problem. And yet, while with Metric bolts you don't have to do that "which is bigger" fractional conversion in your head, I still can't look at a valve cover bolt on a Chevrolet Cavalier (all recent cars are built with Metric fasteners) and say "that's 12mm" or "that's 13mm".
My truck has a 400 cubic inch engine. To convert that to liters so that I can really intimidate the jackass in the whiny little Honda with the tinted windows and the puny 1.5L engine, my 400 CID V8, converted to Metric, has a displacement of 6.6L.
Fluids? I think in liters. I know what 8 ounces looks like, but I pour gasoline into my truck by the liter. It takes 70L to fill my tank. Divide that by four (approximately), that's almost 18 gallons.
And finally, despite all that, I have no idea how many L/100km my truck takes. But I do know that my truck get about 8 miles per gallon.
So, I'm a mess. Do I feel handicapped by the fact that I mix the two measuring systems? No.
One of the few compelling Canadian politicians of all time, former Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, was perfectly bilingual. He spoke English and French with equal ease. And he was once asked by a reporter which language he thought in. Mr. St. Laurent's reponse was that he thought in whichever language he best knew the subject.
And this is a fairly good approximation of how I switch back and for between measuring systems.
How do I feel about the Metric system?
I love it. I wish I used it for everything. It *is* legitimately easier.
But if there's *anything* that has to be remembered about this is that while it seems like an easy switch on the surface, I'd still plan that it will take several generations to make the switch.
Well, unfortunately who would you have suggested we vote for? Bush was the republican nominee (don't blame me, I voted for McCain in the primaries).
Oh, absolutely. McCain would have made a far better President than Bush. I don't agree much with the Republican philosophy, but at least Gore would have had a worthy opponent, and the US would still have had a great statesman as President, whether Gore or McCain won.
McCain is a statesman. Bush is a bumbling fool that I wouldn't even hire as a tractor salesman.
That Bush got the nomination proves, of late, there is something very seriously wrong with the Republican party.
I'm sure as hell not going to vote for ol' baby-killing tax-and-spend Al Gore and his band of merry liberal pot-head cronies.
No. It's a much better idea to have an alcoholic admitted cocaine-user in the White House, especially since he's got 20 years of his life unaccounted for.
Try getting a job with even six months unaccounted on your resume.
Geez. I say deal with it America. We (Republicans) had to live through years of torture when democrats controlled the congress and the executive branch so I hope you guys get to have a taste of what that's like.
If it were just about the fact that the Republicans won, that'd be fine. The country has spoken, that's the direction that people want.
But the fact that the Republicans appear to have won with George W. Bush at the helm, to my way of thinking, very seriously calls into question whether the people are intelligent enough to be allowed to determine their own fate.
Bush doesn't need to screw up in office - he has enough skeletons in his closet to keep the US in scandals for the next four years at least.
Here's one for you. The Howard Stern Radio Show got a hold of a rumor that, back in the early 1970s before abortion was legal - and right in the middle of Bush's party-boy days when he was drinking and doing lines of coke off the toilet tanks in bars - Bush managed to get a woman knocked up, and the baby was aborted.
Again, this is Bush. The Republican ?candidate? ?President-elect?, and he's in the right rear pocket of the Right to Life campaign. Further, abortion was *illegal* back then.
Howard Stern called the Bush campaign headquarters several times throughout the week leading up to the election, seeking a confirmation or a denial.
Finally, yesterday, on election day, came the news from the Bush people: "We do not make statements to the tabloid news.", or something to that effect.
Not a confirmation, but certainly not the "you've-gotta-be-kidding" adament denial that one would have expected.
I would suggest that this bears further scrutiny.
As a sidenote, the Bush campaign should have considered using the tabloid media that they so eschew. It strikes me that Star, Globe and the National Enquirer are probably the best media outlets with which to address his strongest states.
Is this, then, a hallmark event signalling a challenge to the two-party system? Will the Democrats respond to this by working together with the Greens henceforth, or simply drowning them out by moving their agenda back to the left? Gee, let me guess...
No. Remember who Nader is.
Nader likes the spotlight, but doesn't really care how he gets it.
He's not the consumer-advocate man-of-the-people that everyone who got suckered in by him seems to think that he is. He's a *lawyer*. And a bad one at that, who used to be known for frivolous lawsuits, before he found fame with "Unsafe at any Speed" and the Chevrolet Corvair.
The Green Party was all about Nader, not about their platform. And a whole bunch of poor or unrealistic people who want to restrict your employer's freedom to pay you what you're worth. And to force you to ride public transit with the lice-infested hotel chambermaids and convenience store clerks of the world.
A Gore-Nader alliance is not going to happen. Probably Gore would welcome it for obvious reasons, but Nader has tried and been rejected several times from getting a Democratic nomination. This election was designed to be payback for Nader.
I do like the third and fourth party concepts, though, because like many people following this election, I was forced to think of Gore as being the lesser of the two (viable) evils. I still hope that Gore gets in.
The Reform Party, with Buchanan at the helm, is completely out to lunch. Want to see what his America would be like? Replace Iran's mosques with Baptist churches, and there ya go.
But Reform is pretty badly split. Note that Jesse Ventura, Reform governer of Minnesota, is a polar opposite to the Reform presence in this federal election. Ventura's version of the Reform Party appeals to me; Buchanan's terrifies me.
In the future, if the Reform Party eventually gets itself figured out and moves back towards its center-left position, and if the Libertarian party gets their act together, then the Democratic Party wouldn't be such a shoe-in for my vote.
Not that I'm an American citizen, so for the moment it's all an academic discussion. I'm watching this from the sidelines of Canada, with a huge number of American frieds calling and e-mailing me about the results. I love politics, and had 4 TV sets set up, watching the live coverage on ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN.
But this was not the election for a protest vote like Nader, no matter how disillusioned the two-party system makes you. If Bush wins Florida (which, let's face facts, he probably will), he's going to be the President.
Philosophical disagreements with the Republicans aside, Bush is an idiot. I have no respect for the man. Not because I disagree with him - that's okay, I still respect lots of people I disagree with. But Bush commands no respect. He's an imbecile. Immature, unqualified, unprepared, and unaccomplished, he's not half the Presidential figure that his father was.
Gore may be boring and smug, but he at least understands international policy. He understands how to get things done. (The Texas record proves that Bush doesn't.) And, most importantly between two otherwise uninteresting candidates, Gore is at least someone who will uphold the honor and dignity of the most important office in the world.
With an idiot like Bush at the helm, all nature of bad things are going to happen. I hope the Florida recounts save the world from Bush.
Well, certainly the Bush outcome demonstrates that the experiment called Democracy - longer-lived than Communism - is equally flawed.
Apparently, the masses are not intelligent enough to determine their own fate.
Republicans are one thing, fine. I can respect an ideological difference. But *Bush*? Bush?
It was bad enough that he won the Republican nomination from a distinguished gentleman lile McCain. But the public vote, too?
I'll bet large sums of money that the first Bush scandal happens or comes to light within the first 30 days that this illiterate and incompetant goofball is in office.
As a protest, "president" and "presidency" shall no longer be capitalized in the context of Bush.
Bush appears to have won Florida, giving him 271 votes in the Electoral College.
The difference between whether Gore or Bush won Florida, the last deciding state, was the wasted votes directed at Ralph Nader.
As punishment to Florida and to the Green Party, I'm yanking half the spark plugs leads off my truck tomorrow morning before I drive to work. I hope my small contribution to the cause of global warming gives Nader lung cancer, and melts the polar ice-caps to drown the wasteland that is Florida.
Troll this all you want, I've got more karma than you have.
No, no, try Kabul, Afghanistan for a great place to live. Never forget: The religious masses are full of stupid people.
I've never understood Islam. I mean, I know they're just out there, doing their own thing. But it strikes me that Afghanistan must be pretty warm in places? And they want you to keep a beard? [sigh] I'd already read the article, but I still don't get it.
I understand why Islamic customs make women wear all the headgear; apparently, the men get distracted when they're horny. Sure, fine, makes good sense to me. I can't condone it, but at least I understand it.
But, some of this is definately arid tropics where these people live. Don't the women get heatstroke? Even if Muslim men don't consider their women to be equals, doesn't a day of heatstroke at least reduce the quality of the sex when they get back to the tent that evening?
Understand that I'm not making fun, I'm just seeking an answer for what I consider to be a valid question.
And Microsoft's success is hard-earned -- and will not be cured by a Federal Department of Software Innovation.
Yeah. Right. A little bit of luck, a good marketing department, and a founder who has the same absolute assuredness that what he's doing is the right thing as Hitler had...
If Bush gets into office, he'll kill the DoJ's case against Microsoft. And then... ?
And we'll get to support Windows 2002, then Service Pack 1, 2, 3, Security Packs 697 to 3,422, Service Pack 5, Windows 2004, Service Packs 1-17, Security Pack 14,921 - Security Pack 21,476, and somewhere in there Windows Me2, Windows Mini-Me (for palmtops; no Austin Powers reference intended, of course), Windows Me4u, and all the other nasty names that Microsoft's marketing department could get past our friends, Bill and Paul.
Please. I don't like government meddling in business, but if for no other reason to help the DoJ see this thing through, vote for Gore.
Please do check it out, I'm sure you won't regret it, and it may even change your mind about the futility of voting this year...
Sadly, I'm a Canadian citizen. I'm still a job offer, Green Card and 5 years away from being an American voter. <sigh> The fact that I was born north of the 49th parallel is proof positive that God not only exists, but also that he's got a sarcastic and evil sense of humor.
But, even so, the problem is that if people vote Libertarian this year, even if it gets them up to the required 5% for federal funding, it also means that we've got the vote being taken away - probably substantially - from Gore.
Even if the Libertarian Party gets over the 5%, it will be at the cost of Gore's Presidency. This particular election is especially crucial, because the next President will be appointing a whole bunch of Supreme Court judges. Republican appointees might well overturn Roe vs. Wade, etc. Not to mention absolutely decimating DoJ vs. Microsoft. Remember, in Republican eyes, Microsoft hasn't done anything wrong.
In other words, while the Libertarian Party makes sense, you must vote for Gore this election, for God's sake. Or else abortion could be banned, Matthew Shepard died for nothing, and Microsoft will be allowed to take over the world.
Abortion: My problem with voting democrat is not that they'll keep abortion legal - it should be (sad but true).
Exactly.
However, it should _NOT_ be subsidized by the government, which the democrats have been doing. Now the government will take responsibilities for your (stupid) actions! Ludicrous!
For sure! If people aren't held responsible for their inattention to proper birth control techniques, they won't do it. Now, I'd draw the line with rape and incest; perhaps that could be paid. But general "I didn't think I was fertile at this time of the month" or "I thought if I pulled out before I...you know..." just aren't good enough.
Although Nader my unfairly try to make an economy where no salary is over $100K, the sad truth is that most people who make over $100K don't deserve it,
But when you make an arbitary decision like that, you give the successful no incentive to work any harder; to take that additional risk and open another business, which will employ x new people.
The fact of the matter is that you can't punish success. If you do, your best and brightest will flee.
Lemme tell you, I speak from experience. I'm a Canadian, no dependents, 26 years old. I make a good living. And over 50% of it is taken from me with one tax or another. That's one of the most tenuous issues that angers and frustrates me and just makes me crave an escape from Canada so that I can have a better standard of living in the United States.
Nader's solution is great in theory, but it's no solution.
and the people making them the money (eg working class) at $30-50K should be given a huge pay raise. Reward hard work but don't allow exploitation.
Oh yeah, but doesn't the free market do that already?
Is a parking attendant really worth $21/hr? Nope. But that's what Toronto's municipal parking attendants are paid. That's through unions, not through legislation. The net effect is that the municipal lots actually *cost* Toronto money; they're subsidized in order to make them compete with the private lots.
This raises your property tax burden, and gives companies and people reason to locate somewhere else. Allowed to escalate, your economy will quickly flouder. And those people who are parking attendants will never feel the hunger for cash that drives many people to go on to higher education or tinker with that old 486 in the corner. Again, the economy stagnates: eventually, you have an economy based on convenience store clerks, parking attendants and janitors. And let's face facts, they're not generally the most innovative of people.
However, if the job market was so tight that you couldn't get anyone to do the job for $20/hr, then that'd be fine with me.
Capitalism generally works pretty well when you don't meddle with it.
This isn't just about abortion. It's about preserving the separation between church and state.
Absolutely. You wanna live in a relious state? Move to Iran.
For example, religous convictions notwithstanding, there is no reason to disallow gay marriages.
For sure. It's time for people to get over it already. Remember, though, only a scant ?40? years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in many states. The same people who were so against interracial marriages are now the ones who think that gay people are a satanic cult.
I *really*, *really* hope Pat Buchanan is not celebrating victory on Wednesday. <snip> Also he's probably going to drop below 5% of the vote, so there'll be no federal money for Ventura to run in 2004.
Uhh... Yeah. The Reform party itself is pretty scary.
I think Ventura, from what I've heard about him, very much appeals to me. Fiscal conservative, but of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau attitude that "the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation". (Too bad PET wasn't a fiscal conservative...)
But, between Ventura as the guy who calls religion a crutch for weak-minded people, and Pat Robertson as Bible-thumper extraordinaire, there's no real solid definition of the Reform party. I think this scares away people who would support it from either side...
Until they get their act together, they're going to remain a fringe thing. (Remember their leadership convention in L.A.? Not gonna happen soon...)
Now with the DMCA saying we can't even reverse engineer software, there will be even more monopolies springing up. If it's not MS, it's some other company.
Yeah, I doubt that was specifically part of the plan with the DMCA. It was well-intentioned, but clearly written by people with no concept of computers.
The law will always be behind technology. There's no way anyone could ever predict another potential killer-app like Napster. But at least if the people who wrote the laws had had a clue...
(Slight digresion)Has anyone else gotten a bellyache from the latest 'Snikers' advertisement with the guy going into a polling booth only to have a talking cartoon elephant plop down on one of his shoulders saying things like "I'm the same as my father" "We both wear pants" and a cartoon talking donkey on the other shoulder saying things like "I invented the internet" and retorting with "I invented pants".
Absolutely. Great ad. It's not on TV here, but I caught it at Adcritic.com. You can Slashdot them by clicking here. You will need QuickTime to view it; sadly, Apple apparently hasn't seen fit to release it for Linux yet.
Further, Windows Media Player intercepts it though it can't play it, so you might have to take all *.mov filetypes away from Windows Media Player. (Hey, I run Linux on all my servers, but I need Winbloze for my main machine.)
what Gore had said was that he was responsible for championing Arpanet in Congress, which he was, and that he felt like its father (or something to that effect), which quickly got balooned out of control by the media.
Yeah, I know. I knew that there was a grain of truth to it, but I thought it was just a quote taken out of context. Which it basically is, if he helped to get funding for ARPANET. (Ahhh... memories. I got my first Internet account back in '88, when it was still called ARPANET, and all you got was a line to dial into a shell account with your terminal program. I started out with surplus equipment: a 300 baud acoustic modem on a real DEC VT-100 terminal, both of which I still have, for historical reasons.)
Gore may be uninspiring, but he's the clear choice.
Ummm, bombing an aspirin factory is a professional act?
Was he choosing the targets? It was an unfortunate wartime incident; sh*t happens.
Allowing nuclear secrets to be stolen, with exactly 0 reprisals is professional?
Wasn't Wen Ho Lee cleared? I'm sure it burned Janet Reno's ass, but didn't the facts show that the guy was just an imbecile with no criminal intent?
Making the sanctity of the Oval Office, and his position a laughingstock is professional?
Are you gonna tell me that no Republican has ever gotten his Slick Willie licked in office?
Gimme a break.
There are two unfortunate parts to this incident:
Part 1, he lied about it (but come on, any guy can understand that, and Hillary is a bit of a ball-crusher, I'm sure).
Part 2: Bill, Bill, Bill. You're the leader of the free world. You can do better than Monica!
But, the rest of that is between Bill and Hillary, where it should be.
C'mon. GW ain't perfect but don't tell me Clinton knows how to behave. That's like saying Ted Kennedy has sexual restraint.
Nah, Bill's just human.
Further, under the scrutiny of being President, if Bush gets to that point, I'd bet large sums of money here and now that facts will turn up against the man that are *far* more damning than anything raked up about Clinton. Remember, we're talking about the priviledged son, who has never had to work for anything in his life until this campaign. The party-boy whose only previous experience has been doing lines of coke off toilet tanks in the local saloon and then crashing his father's businesses. Then he gets to be governor of Texas, maybe even President. If he's elected, just you wait. He won't be in office a month before the first scandal, I promise.
I consider GW Bush's DUI arrest in 1976 to be far more damning than Clinton's bit of Presidential penile recreation. Even in the context that, in 1976, drinking and driving was a lot less illegal than it is today.
I don't think the electorate should expect *anyone* in office to be perfect; these are human beings, with individual strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us.
But, let's face facts. Bush is the new Quayle; even if you happen to agree with his politics, the guy is a *goofball*. There's nothing about him that makes you look at him and say, "Wow, this is a dignified and capable leader". Clinton wasn't perfect, but he sure did capture the hearts and minds of Americans and the rest of the world alike, on a level unseen since the Kennedy days.
Slashdot Mirror
*splutter*
Aww, come on, he does have a point:
Frequent blue screens can be used to limit your site's traffic to manageable levels!
What about Harry Browne?. By conventional standards the Libertarians are a bit extreme, but they're the only party which is consistently for liberty and against government intrusion in personal and economic issues.
Yup, I have checked out that website, and I agree: He's the man. You're one of the few people to have changed my viewpoint. Thank you.
I would disagree with this. Look at his performance in the debates; he was consistently interrupting, violating the agreed-upon rules, at one point literally getting in Bush's face as he was talking. That does not strike me as professional, and I would not want anyone with an attitude like that representing my country.I will agree with you about Gore's skill with the debates, too.
Certainly, running against as inept a Republican nominee as one can imagine (short, maybe, of Dan Quayle), one would have expected Gore to have done a lot better, especially in the debates.
Fundamentally, I think they'd underestimated Bush. Further, I think there's a lot of animosity and frustration in Gore that Bush is even on his radar screen.
If you were forced, by your aspirations, to have what is essentially a job interview against a fellow computer geek who feels that Outlook is the most secure e-mail client in existance, wouldn't you feel smug and superior, too?
To my way of thinking, this was Gore's undoing, but as a human being, I can understand it and even empathize completely. He must have been frustrated as hell.
So, despite the absolute debacle of the debates, I still feel that Gore is an elegant and qualified statesman, a gentleman of a high caliber who could represent the United States abroad with a measure of dignity unparalleled by Bush's brash hail-fellow-well-met demeanor.
Disclaimer: this article contains thoughts of a politically mature nature. You're welcome to agree or disagree with me. But if you're moderating, remember the Slashdot rules: moderate based on the intelligence of the posting, not based on whether you simply agree or disagree with it. Consider your motives between choosing a moderation point and then clicking that Moderate button.
Fiscal Republican but social Democrat. Huh? You want to provide services without getting taxes? Where's all this money going to come from? Or will you just hugely inflate the National Debt?No, I suggest that you simply don't provide the services, but let people live their lives as they see fit.
I've since seen the answer, though they've not got a snowball's chance in hell of being elected for the near future: the Libertarian Party.
They're for low taxes (0 federal income tax!), the separation of church and state, and not meddling in capitalism.
They're for an abolition of entitlements, which make up a *huge* percentage of the federal budget. They're for a system which forces people to be accountable for their own fiscal survival.
Imagine how nice your retirement portfolio would look if you could invest everything that you now spend on income tax into it.
They're for an abolition of gun control. Fine, Columbine was tragic, but we all agree, based on an earlier Slashdot discussion, that there were underlying problems with student morale that caused it. The fact of the matter remains: criminals are called criminals because they ignore the law. Do you think criminals are going to register their guns? Nah. So, current gun control laws can only serve to hurt legitimate gun owners and sportsmen, antique firearm collectors and those who feel a need for personal defense.
The Libertarian Party wants to rescind all marriage taxes and fiscal benefits. And, since they're not affiliated with any religious organizations the way the Republicans are, they don't care if your sister wants to marry a yack. It doesn't matter to them, as long as both parties are consenting.
They feel abortion is wrong, as I do, but we also agree on the point that attempting to stop it through legislation will only mean that women start getting killed by coat hangers again.
By all measures, the war on drugs hasn't worked. Like Prohibition, most criminal activity can be attributed to the fact that drugs are illegal. Murders, thefts, etc. are all related to that. Back in the 1930s, anyone could walk into any pharmacy and buy heroin, yet no one was being killed in drive-by shootings over drug territories. Sure, some people will get hooked, and they might even die. Oh well. Darwinian Theory goes hand in hand with Libertarianism. Even so, few informed people could actually call marijuana dangerous. It's ironic that huge numbers of people are currently in jail - instead of productively working and spending - over what is widely considered in pharmacology to be a less addictive drug than either tobacco or alcohol.
And, they propose to get the federal government out of its involvement in all tasks not specifically described in the Constitution. In the USA, the Federal government has millions of square miles of land. The Libertarians propose to pay down the debt by auctioning that, and keep the government running on only its Constitutionally-appointed tasks with a variety of existing federal taxes not including income tax.
In Canada, they would do the same thing by selling constant fiscal liabilities like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, zillions of other silly government agencies that don't serve the Canadian constitution, and ending subsidies to private companies. Nortel, for instance, gets over $100 million CDN a year from the Canadian feds. Remember, Canada's population is 1/10th of the American population; that's a big strain.
I'd vote Libertarian in the upcoming Canadian election - at least out of disdain for the more practical choices - except there's no Libertarian candidate in my riding.
Maybe there's even a future for me running for public office... :)
Quoted from subject line:
Go away, micro$hit troll!Moi? A troll? But of course!
But I take the Microsoft crack personally.
I'm in league with many entities, but I'll have you know that the devil is not one of them.
This thing is doomed to failure. An untested, unproven processor with an operating system not known for its quickness.
Oh, puh-lease.
Even if everything you say were technically true, you forget the target market.
AOL's advertising catch line is, "So Easy to Use, No Wonder it's #1".
AOL users like their "IRC" client to be full of tacky sound effects like doors opening and closing.
The user interface looks like it was designed by simplifying a preschooler's story book.
And finally, there's the stupid "You've Got Mail" wav that they *love* to throw around everywhere.
I've *never* had an AOL account, and that sound is forever burned into my mind, along with the horrible login ?chimes?.
Bottom line? AOL users like that crap. They're simple enough that it's necessary for their computing experience. They won't notice if the machine happens to be sluggish.
So, on the contrary, this is probably a great place to whet the Transmeta's teeth, since it's really not a demanding appliation, and it certainly isn't as mission critical as a new desktop or notebook. (Imagine, if you will, that the Transmeta is a Pentium 60 with the FDIV fault. It would never be noticed in an internet appliance, though a good spreadsheet would expose it.)
If this thing were to take off, I think you'd find that within a few months there'd be a lot of complaints that it doesn't work as well as promised.I think you overestimate AOL users.
# rm -f YouveGotMail.wav
I'm slowly getting used to engine size in Litres, but don't know the conversion. I know the 318 that was in my old '74 plymouth was bigger than my 2.4L in my Olds, but not by how much.
318 CID = 5.2L
More than double the size of the Olds.
:)
The big pain in the ass is GM's 90 degree V6 engines. There's the Chevy 229 CID V6 (distributor in the back, a Chevy 305 with two cylinders lopped off), and the Buick 231 CID V6 (distributor up front). Both the 229 and the 231 are, in Metric, 3.8L engines. And they were used in a lot of the same cars quite interchangeably.
Having exclusively used the public transit system during my first years as a programmer (quite happily, mind you), I'll kindly ask you to go suck an egg for posting such narrow-minded stereotypical crap. I actually agree with just about everything else you said, but that kind of garbage only serves to undermine your message.
No, it only serves to undermine the overall usefulness of Nader.
Let's say that Nader had gotten the Presidency. Let's further suggest that he managed to have private cars banned from New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. This is within his party's platform.
Generally, those who can afford to avoid public transit do avoid public transit.
Why?
Well, public transit tends to be crowded. It tends to be slow. And it tends to be chock full of people that you'd rather not be forced to get intimate with.
I'd rather not have to sit beside an individual who cannot afford to drive a car because he cannot comprehend such basic concepts as daily bathing, let alone daily work.
I'd rather avoid sitting with a teenaged mother adjacent, her lack of parenting responsibility eclipsed only by her lack of basic birth control comprehension, as her child runs all through the bus, screaming and spilling grape juice on my new suit.
And, call me anti-social, but I'd rather not have to sit beside someone who feels a terrific need to engage me in a fascinating conversation about how lottery tickets are a viable means to ensure a financially comfortable retirement or how if you want to score some really good heroin you can just head down to the docks.
While I was perhaps a little extreme in my condemnation of public transit riders, you imply yourself that you no longer take it. Why is that?
If you're a Los Angeles resident who drives to work every day, assuming a 1-hour drive each way, and assuming that public transit has been greatly improved so that your commute time by bus/subway is still one hour each way, which are you going to take?
I can afford to drive, and therefore, I will. I do sincerely consider myself to have worked hard enough to have elevated myself to the point where I don't need to take public transit every day. I am therefore better than those people with whom I would be forced to fight for a seat on a bus.
Now, if a political party with an ill-conceived platform managed to ban outright or artificially increase the cost of driving to the point where it negated one of the benefits of my skills and hard work, what are my options?
I could continue to live and work in that community with a reduction of my ability to enjoy being a part of that community. Or, I could walk away from that community, taking with me the benefits of my skills and disposable income.
I assure you, I'm interested in improving my standard of living at all levels. I can therefore guarantee the option I would exercise would be the latter.
Of course, looking at Canada, I see a middle stage where a lot of things are still english, despite it being a 'metric country,' so we're not the only backwards place in the world.
Speaking as a Canadian citizen who grew up *after* Canada went Metric in 1976-1977, yeah, it's screwed up.
Metric is wonderful. It's easy to cope with, it's the measurement system embraced by science everywhere, it's clear and logical and not based on a dead king's body parts.
I never learned the English system in school. Never. It was briefly discussed, primarily in history classes, but that was it.
And yet, I'm 6'4" tall. I weigh 180 lbs. I have a 33" waist. I have *no idea* what those are in meters, kilograms and centimeters.
Nor can I look at someone and estimate their height in meters. In fact, whenever I estimate the length of something, it's in inches and feet. My 1976 Dodge Ram is about 21 feet long. My penis... Well, let's just say that it's proportional to my height.
Yards escape me, and meters I just can't eyeball.
My old Dodge is a Canadian model of the Ram. The only difference between it and an American Dodge Ram is that my '76 was one of the very first vehicles in Canada to have a Metric speedometer and odometer.
Now, even though my speedometer is in kilometers an hour (with little numbers for MPH, it's just the reverse of an American speedo), I think of speed in miles per hour. But to really mess things up, I think of distance in kilometers.
When I'm working on a car or truck (one of my favorite hobbies), I can always look at an SAE bolt and grab the right wrench to fit it. 7/16", 1/2", 9/16"... no problem. And yet, while with Metric bolts you don't have to do that "which is bigger" fractional conversion in your head, I still can't look at a valve cover bolt on a Chevrolet Cavalier (all recent cars are built with Metric fasteners) and say "that's 12mm" or "that's 13mm".
My truck has a 400 cubic inch engine. To convert that to liters so that I can really intimidate the jackass in the whiny little Honda with the tinted windows and the puny 1.5L engine, my 400 CID V8, converted to Metric, has a displacement of 6.6L.
Fluids? I think in liters. I know what 8 ounces looks like, but I pour gasoline into my truck by the liter. It takes 70L to fill my tank. Divide that by four (approximately), that's almost 18 gallons.
And finally, despite all that, I have no idea how many L/100km my truck takes. But I do know that my truck get about 8 miles per gallon.
So, I'm a mess. Do I feel handicapped by the fact that I mix the two measuring systems? No.
One of the few compelling Canadian politicians of all time, former Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, was perfectly bilingual. He spoke English and French with equal ease. And he was once asked by a reporter which language he thought in. Mr. St. Laurent's reponse was that he thought in whichever language he best knew the subject.
And this is a fairly good approximation of how I switch back and for between measuring systems.
How do I feel about the Metric system?
I love it. I wish I used it for everything. It *is* legitimately easier.
But if there's *anything* that has to be remembered about this is that while it seems like an easy switch on the surface, I'd still plan that it will take several generations to make the switch.
Well, unfortunately who would you have suggested we vote for? Bush was the republican nominee (don't blame me, I voted for McCain in the primaries).
Oh, absolutely. McCain would have made a far better President than Bush. I don't agree much with the Republican philosophy, but at least Gore would have had a worthy opponent, and the US would still have had a great statesman as President, whether Gore or McCain won.
McCain is a statesman. Bush is a bumbling fool that I wouldn't even hire as a tractor salesman.
That Bush got the nomination proves, of late, there is something very seriously wrong with the Republican party.
I'm sure as hell not going to vote for ol' baby-killing tax-and-spend Al Gore and his band of merry liberal pot-head cronies.No. It's a much better idea to have an alcoholic admitted cocaine-user in the White House, especially since he's got 20 years of his life unaccounted for.
Try getting a job with even six months unaccounted on your resume.
Geez. I say deal with it America. We (Republicans) had to live through years of torture when democrats controlled the congress and the executive branch so I hope you guys get to have a taste of what that's like.If it were just about the fact that the Republicans won, that'd be fine. The country has spoken, that's the direction that people want.
But the fact that the Republicans appear to have won with George W. Bush at the helm, to my way of thinking, very seriously calls into question whether the people are intelligent enough to be allowed to determine their own fate.
Bush doesn't need to screw up in office - he has enough skeletons in his closet to keep the US in scandals for the next four years at least.
Here's one for you. The Howard Stern Radio Show got a hold of a rumor that, back in the early 1970s before abortion was legal - and right in the middle of Bush's party-boy days when he was drinking and doing lines of coke off the toilet tanks in bars - Bush managed to get a woman knocked up, and the baby was aborted.
Again, this is Bush. The Republican ?candidate? ?President-elect?, and he's in the right rear pocket of the Right to Life campaign. Further, abortion was *illegal* back then.
Howard Stern called the Bush campaign headquarters several times throughout the week leading up to the election, seeking a confirmation or a denial.
Finally, yesterday, on election day, came the news from the Bush people: "We do not make statements to the tabloid news.", or something to that effect.
Not a confirmation, but certainly not the "you've-gotta-be-kidding" adament denial that one would have expected.
I would suggest that this bears further scrutiny.
As a sidenote, the Bush campaign should have considered using the tabloid media that they so eschew. It strikes me that Star, Globe and the National Enquirer are probably the best media outlets with which to address his strongest states.
Is this, then, a hallmark event signalling a challenge to the two-party system? Will the Democrats respond to this by working together with the Greens henceforth, or simply drowning them out by moving their agenda back to the left? Gee, let me guess...
No. Remember who Nader is.
Nader likes the spotlight, but doesn't really care how he gets it.
He's not the consumer-advocate man-of-the-people that everyone who got suckered in by him seems to think that he is. He's a *lawyer*. And a bad one at that, who used to be known for frivolous lawsuits, before he found fame with "Unsafe at any Speed" and the Chevrolet Corvair.
The Green Party was all about Nader, not about their platform. And a whole bunch of poor or unrealistic people who want to restrict your employer's freedom to pay you what you're worth. And to force you to ride public transit with the lice-infested hotel chambermaids and convenience store clerks of the world.
A Gore-Nader alliance is not going to happen. Probably Gore would welcome it for obvious reasons, but Nader has tried and been rejected several times from getting a Democratic nomination. This election was designed to be payback for Nader.
I do like the third and fourth party concepts, though, because like many people following this election, I was forced to think of Gore as being the lesser of the two (viable) evils. I still hope that Gore gets in.
The Reform Party, with Buchanan at the helm, is completely out to lunch. Want to see what his America would be like? Replace Iran's mosques with Baptist churches, and there ya go.
But Reform is pretty badly split. Note that Jesse Ventura, Reform governer of Minnesota, is a polar opposite to the Reform presence in this federal election. Ventura's version of the Reform Party appeals to me; Buchanan's terrifies me.
In the future, if the Reform Party eventually gets itself figured out and moves back towards its center-left position, and if the Libertarian party gets their act together, then the Democratic Party wouldn't be such a shoe-in for my vote.
Not that I'm an American citizen, so for the moment it's all an academic discussion. I'm watching this from the sidelines of Canada, with a huge number of American frieds calling and e-mailing me about the results. I love politics, and had 4 TV sets set up, watching the live coverage on ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN.
But this was not the election for a protest vote like Nader, no matter how disillusioned the two-party system makes you. If Bush wins Florida (which, let's face facts, he probably will), he's going to be the President.
Philosophical disagreements with the Republicans aside, Bush is an idiot. I have no respect for the man. Not because I disagree with him - that's okay, I still respect lots of people I disagree with. But Bush commands no respect. He's an imbecile. Immature, unqualified, unprepared, and unaccomplished, he's not half the Presidential figure that his father was.
Gore may be boring and smug, but he at least understands international policy. He understands how to get things done. (The Texas record proves that Bush doesn't.) And, most importantly between two otherwise uninteresting candidates, Gore is at least someone who will uphold the honor and dignity of the most important office in the world.
With an idiot like Bush at the helm, all nature of bad things are going to happen. I hope the Florida recounts save the world from Bush.
Yes, it's official. Americans are retards.
Well, certainly the Bush outcome demonstrates that the experiment called Democracy - longer-lived than Communism - is equally flawed.
Apparently, the masses are not intelligent enough to determine their own fate.
Republicans are one thing, fine. I can respect an ideological difference. But *Bush*? Bush?
It was bad enough that he won the Republican nomination from a distinguished gentleman lile McCain. But the public vote, too?
I'll bet large sums of money that the first Bush scandal happens or comes to light within the first 30 days that this illiterate and incompetant goofball is in office.
As a protest, "president" and "presidency" shall no longer be capitalized in the context of Bush.
Bush appears to have won Florida, giving him 271 votes in the Electoral College.
The difference between whether Gore or Bush won Florida, the last deciding state, was the wasted votes directed at Ralph Nader.
As punishment to Florida and to the Green Party, I'm yanking half the spark plugs leads off my truck tomorrow morning before I drive to work. I hope my small contribution to the cause of global warming gives Nader lung cancer, and melts the polar ice-caps to drown the wasteland that is Florida.
Troll this all you want, I've got more karma than you have.
No, no, try Kabul, Afghanistan for a great place to live. Never forget: The religious masses are full of stupid people.
I've never understood Islam. I mean, I know they're just out there, doing their own thing. But it strikes me that Afghanistan must be pretty warm in places? And they want you to keep a beard? [sigh] I'd already read the article, but I still don't get it.
I understand why Islamic customs make women wear all the headgear; apparently, the men get distracted when they're horny. Sure, fine, makes good sense to me. I can't condone it, but at least I understand it.
But, some of this is definately arid tropics where these people live. Don't the women get heatstroke? Even if Muslim men don't consider their women to be equals, doesn't a day of heatstroke at least reduce the quality of the sex when they get back to the tent that evening?
Understand that I'm not making fun, I'm just seeking an answer for what I consider to be a valid question.
And Microsoft's success is hard-earned -- and will not be cured by a Federal Department of Software Innovation.
Yeah. Right. A little bit of luck, a good marketing department, and a founder who has the same absolute assuredness that what he's doing is the right thing as Hitler had...
If Bush gets into office, he'll kill the DoJ's case against Microsoft. And then... ?
And we'll get to support Windows 2002, then Service Pack 1, 2, 3, Security Packs 697 to 3,422, Service Pack 5, Windows 2004, Service Packs 1-17, Security Pack 14,921 - Security Pack 21,476, and somewhere in there Windows Me2, Windows Mini-Me (for palmtops; no Austin Powers reference intended, of course), Windows Me4u, and all the other nasty names that Microsoft's marketing department could get past our friends, Bill and Paul.
Please. I don't like government meddling in business, but if for no other reason to help the DoJ see this thing through, vote for Gore.
Please do check it out, I'm sure you won't regret it, and it may even change your mind about the futility of voting this year...
Sadly, I'm a Canadian citizen. I'm still a job offer, Green Card and 5 years away from being an American voter. <sigh> The fact that I was born north of the 49th parallel is proof positive that God not only exists, but also that he's got a sarcastic and evil sense of humor.
But, even so, the problem is that if people vote Libertarian this year, even if it gets them up to the required 5% for federal funding, it also means that we've got the vote being taken away - probably substantially - from Gore.
Even if the Libertarian Party gets over the 5%, it will be at the cost of Gore's Presidency. This particular election is especially crucial, because the next President will be appointing a whole bunch of Supreme Court judges. Republican appointees might well overturn Roe vs. Wade, etc. Not to mention absolutely decimating DoJ vs. Microsoft. Remember, in Republican eyes, Microsoft hasn't done anything wrong.
In other words, while the Libertarian Party makes sense, you must vote for Gore this election, for God's sake. Or else abortion could be banned, Matthew Shepard died for nothing, and Microsoft will be allowed to take over the world.
Abortion: My problem with voting democrat is not that they'll keep abortion legal - it should be (sad but true).
Exactly.
However, it should _NOT_ be subsidized by the government, which the democrats have been doing. Now the government will take responsibilities for your (stupid) actions! Ludicrous!For sure! If people aren't held responsible for their inattention to proper birth control techniques, they won't do it. Now, I'd draw the line with rape and incest; perhaps that could be paid. But general "I didn't think I was fertile at this time of the month" or "I thought if I pulled out before I ...you know..." just aren't good enough.
Although Nader my unfairly try to make an economy where no salary is over $100K, the sad truth is that most people who make over $100K don't deserve it,But when you make an arbitary decision like that, you give the successful no incentive to work any harder; to take that additional risk and open another business, which will employ x new people.
The fact of the matter is that you can't punish success. If you do, your best and brightest will flee.
Lemme tell you, I speak from experience. I'm a Canadian, no dependents, 26 years old. I make a good living. And over 50% of it is taken from me with one tax or another. That's one of the most tenuous issues that angers and frustrates me and just makes me crave an escape from Canada so that I can have a better standard of living in the United States.
Nader's solution is great in theory, but it's no solution.
and the people making them the money (eg working class) at $30-50K should be given a huge pay raise. Reward hard work but don't allow exploitation.Oh yeah, but doesn't the free market do that already?
Is a parking attendant really worth $21/hr? Nope. But that's what Toronto's municipal parking attendants are paid. That's through unions, not through legislation. The net effect is that the municipal lots actually *cost* Toronto money; they're subsidized in order to make them compete with the private lots.
This raises your property tax burden, and gives companies and people reason to locate somewhere else. Allowed to escalate, your economy will quickly flouder. And those people who are parking attendants will never feel the hunger for cash that drives many people to go on to higher education or tinker with that old 486 in the corner. Again, the economy stagnates: eventually, you have an economy based on convenience store clerks, parking attendants and janitors. And let's face facts, they're not generally the most innovative of people.
However, if the job market was so tight that you couldn't get anyone to do the job for $20/hr, then that'd be fine with me.
Capitalism generally works pretty well when you don't meddle with it.
This isn't just about abortion. It's about preserving the separation between church and state.
Absolutely. You wanna live in a relious state? Move to Iran.
For example, religous convictions notwithstanding, there is no reason to disallow gay marriages.For sure. It's time for people to get over it already. Remember, though, only a scant ?40? years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in many states. The same people who were so against interracial marriages are now the ones who think that gay people are a satanic cult.
I *really*, *really* hope Pat Buchanan is not celebrating victory on Wednesday. <snip> Also he's probably going to drop below 5% of the vote, so there'll be no federal money for Ventura to run in 2004.
Uhh... Yeah. The Reform party itself is pretty scary.
I think Ventura, from what I've heard about him, very much appeals to me. Fiscal conservative, but of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau attitude that "the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation". (Too bad PET wasn't a fiscal conservative...)
But, between Ventura as the guy who calls religion a crutch for weak-minded people, and Pat Robertson as Bible-thumper extraordinaire, there's no real solid definition of the Reform party. I think this scares away people who would support it from either side...
Until they get their act together, they're going to remain a fringe thing. (Remember their leadership convention in L.A.? Not gonna happen soon...)
He'll shut down the antitrust case faster than you can crash Windows 98.
Uhhh... Is it possible for a middle-aged alcoholic Texan to move that fast?
Now with the DMCA saying we can't even reverse engineer software, there will be even more monopolies springing up. If it's not MS, it's some other company.
Yeah, I doubt that was specifically part of the plan with the DMCA. It was well-intentioned, but clearly written by people with no concept of computers.
The law will always be behind technology. There's no way anyone could ever predict another potential killer-app like Napster. But at least if the people who wrote the laws had had a clue...
(Slight digresion)Has anyone else gotten a bellyache from the latest 'Snikers' advertisement with the guy going into a polling booth only to have a talking cartoon elephant plop down on one of his shoulders saying things like "I'm the same as my father" "We both wear pants" and a cartoon talking donkey on the other shoulder saying things like "I invented the internet" and retorting with "I invented pants".
Absolutely. Great ad. It's not on TV here, but I caught it at Adcritic.com. You can Slashdot them by clicking here. You will need QuickTime to view it; sadly, Apple apparently hasn't seen fit to release it for Linux yet.
Further, Windows Media Player intercepts it though it can't play it, so you might have to take all *.mov filetypes away from Windows Media Player. (Hey, I run Linux on all my servers, but I need Winbloze for my main machine.)
what Gore had said was that he was responsible for championing Arpanet in Congress, which he was, and that he felt like its father (or something to that effect), which quickly got balooned out of control by the media.Yeah, I know. I knew that there was a grain of truth to it, but I thought it was just a quote taken out of context. Which it basically is, if he helped to get funding for ARPANET. (Ahhh... memories. I got my first Internet account back in '88, when it was still called ARPANET, and all you got was a line to dial into a shell account with your terminal program. I started out with surplus equipment: a 300 baud acoustic modem on a real DEC VT-100 terminal, both of which I still have, for historical reasons.)
Gore may be uninspiring, but he's the clear choice.
Nice... I'm assuming this isn't a troll.
Nope, not at all. A measure of frustration, yes.
Ummm, bombing an aspirin factory is a professional act?Was he choosing the targets? It was an unfortunate wartime incident; sh*t happens.
Allowing nuclear secrets to be stolen, with exactly 0 reprisals is professional?Wasn't Wen Ho Lee cleared? I'm sure it burned Janet Reno's ass, but didn't the facts show that the guy was just an imbecile with no criminal intent?
Making the sanctity of the Oval Office, and his position a laughingstock is professional?Are you gonna tell me that no Republican has ever gotten his Slick Willie licked in office?
Gimme a break.
There are two unfortunate parts to this incident:
Part 1, he lied about it (but come on, any guy can understand that, and Hillary is a bit of a ball-crusher, I'm sure).
Part 2: Bill, Bill, Bill. You're the leader of the free world. You can do better than Monica!
But, the rest of that is between Bill and Hillary, where it should be.
C'mon. GW ain't perfect but don't tell me Clinton knows how to behave. That's like saying Ted Kennedy has sexual restraint.Nah, Bill's just human.
Further, under the scrutiny of being President, if Bush gets to that point, I'd bet large sums of money here and now that facts will turn up against the man that are *far* more damning than anything raked up about Clinton. Remember, we're talking about the priviledged son, who has never had to work for anything in his life until this campaign. The party-boy whose only previous experience has been doing lines of coke off toilet tanks in the local saloon and then crashing his father's businesses. Then he gets to be governor of Texas, maybe even President. If he's elected, just you wait. He won't be in office a month before the first scandal, I promise.
I consider GW Bush's DUI arrest in 1976 to be far more damning than Clinton's bit of Presidential penile recreation. Even in the context that, in 1976, drinking and driving was a lot less illegal than it is today.
I don't think the electorate should expect *anyone* in office to be perfect; these are human beings, with individual strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us.
But, let's face facts. Bush is the new Quayle; even if you happen to agree with his politics, the guy is a *goofball*. There's nothing about him that makes you look at him and say, "Wow, this is a dignified and capable leader". Clinton wasn't perfect, but he sure did capture the hearts and minds of Americans and the rest of the world alike, on a level unseen since the Kennedy days.
we see that M$ gives fairly equally to BOTH parties.
Hey, if I were Bill, I'd be hedging my bets pretty carefully, too.
Hey, do you suppose Bill Gates has a Slashdot account? It's not too impossible...