At this level, I would like to think that ideas matter much more than production quality. Given a $100M budget for a movie, it seems like things like plot and character development can be done away with entirely. But anyone who has seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail knows that great things can be done on a shoestring budget. Give me a camcorder and two halves of a coconut to bang together, and I can move the world.
Sort of the same way the Web was brought down by the sheer volume of crappy home pages made available by free hosting sites?
It wasn't. The reason is, you can broadcast anything you want, but nobody has to listen. Heck, if this took off, I could put up a network consisting entirely of looping footage of my own home videos. Nobody but my own family would tune in, and then but rarely. And because Bittorrent scales supply to meet demand, I'm not wasting much in the way of network resources in doing so.
It will still cost just as much as it ever has to create polished shows. Production cost doesn't go down at all, though the low cost of distributing means that more crappiness will be available. This isn't a problem, because if the stuff being put out is lame, nobody is going to tell you to tune in. It's analogous to everyone knowing about homestarrunner.com, but nobody knowing about http://www.angelfire.com/~eix32bwzr/harrypotterfan fic/index.html.
I think this sort of network would remain on the fringes, even if it were made very easy to use. Mostly it would be a test bed for new ideas, and whenever something really cool reared its head, some cable channel will swoop in with a million dollar contract and the promise of a better production budget.
I did finally find a copy of "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". The photocopied form is indeed a voter registration form from 1994. It does indeed have two relevant boxes, one stating "Republican" and one stating "I do not wish to affiliate with any party." The Republican one is very decisively checked.
Looking for an instance where Bill O'Reilly lied? You just provided it. To wit, "When I registered in Nassau to vote in 1994, there was not a box for an independent. I left all the boxes empty. Somehow, I was assigned Republican status."
I can't wrap my brain around the analogy either. I think this is a case of OSIA arguing with idiots, being dragged down to their level, and being handily trounced by more experienced idiots.
You can't ask a girl her religion on the first date? I don't think that's true at all. I knew my girlfriend's religion, views on sex, marriage, and children, her favorite authors, her hobbies and interests, her scientific mindset, and most all the other big questions before we even met face to face. We discussed everything from every angle, and I think we were brutally honest with each other. It worked.
OKCupid is great for finding a bunch of people who are a lot like you. eHarmony sounds to me like a good choice for those who are willing to pay a premium in order to avoid the risk of a bad date. I think both approaches are valid.
I met my girlfriend there, and I resent the implication that this automatically means our relationship is "screwed up".
Hmmm... You seem touchy on this topic. Maybe you're the one in 1,000 that works well. On the other hand, if you know you have a good relationship, why is this enough of a tender spot for you that you have to justify it, much less, even pay any attention to what I say?
The reason I got touchy is because you're trying to convince people that meeting people online isn't viable, a claim with which I strongly disagree. But if you'd rather turn it into a sign that I'm insecure about my relationship, you go right ahead.
My impression is, you want the comfort of meeting someone who shares all your most important values, without the discomfort of actually asking the questions needed to find out those values.
Check the documentation in Franken's book. If I recall correctly (and I'm pretty sure I do), Franken has a photocopy of O'Reilly's voter registration for Nassau back in 1994.
The box for "Republican" was checked.
The box for "Independent" was available but blank.
In an interview with Terry Gross, Gross points out this documentation, and O'Reilly goes nuts.
Now, you could theorize (in a straw-grasping way) that it was checked by some disgruntled civil servant rather than by Bill himself, or maybe he had a Florida moment and checked the wrong box. But if he voted in the 1994, 1996, and 1998 elections, he had ample opportunity to be made aware of his accidental affiliation. And if he were anywhere near as "independent" as he claims, he would probably have gone in and remedied it. Instead, he remained a registered Republican until well after the 2000 election, when the Washington Post was preparing a story about O'Reilly which mentioned his affiliation.
Your parody doesn't work. The conclusion of the GP post wasn't that there was no need for private space initiatives, but that the government programs are doing useful research.
Besides, if we liken NASA to Queen Isabella's exploration program, then Columbus' request was more like going to NASA and asking them to do a new and risky mission. Instead of setting up a private program to compete with the government, Columbus went and requested government funding for his program.
1) I agree, it's best to meet face to face as soon as practical. However, you can know someone for years and still fill in a lot of their personality with wishful thinking. The best advice is to be extremely honest extremely early, and hit the topics that could cause problems as quickly as possible.
2) <sarcasm$gt;Good thing this only happens over the Internet.</sarcasm$gt; Admittedly, in face to face conversation it's impossible for a 300-lb. guy from Detroit to pretend to be a fifteen year old girl, but the point stands. It's the same as any other forum: watch out for falseness and pretension, and don't take anyone at their word.
3) Was this an online dating service? Or a real life one? I've never tried the latter.
4) Evidence? I don't see a huge advantage to having an online service run by someone with a masters in psychology or family counseling, because it's so difficult to apply anything they've learned in their studies to Internet dating. Those who think too highly of their own knowledge will end up running something like eHarmony.com, which (according to another poster) writes off 20% of their potential customers as hopeless.
5) Screw eHarmony. Try OKCupid. The system is pretty straightforward. You create an account, then answer as many of the hundreds of questions in their database as you like. You can also say how your ideal match would answer, and how important it is that they answer properly. Then it looks for people who match you well. It works pretty well so long as you're honest with yourself and actually know what you want.
It's absolutely free. No "Premium Memberships" crap.
To summarize my post: I met my girlfriend there, and I resent the implication that this automatically means our relationship is "screwed up".
He lied when he told Good Morning America viewers that "if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again."
He said this before the war, and after combat operations ended and the WMD caches kept not pouring in, he started spinning to give himself breathing room. At first he said "in the next few weeks," then continually extended the deadline. Finally, in another interview in February 2004, he gave a half-hearted apology, but still shows no signs of distrust of the Bush administration. [source]
O'Reilly lied when he said he was a political independent. This is another one documented in Franken's book. His own voter registration shows himself registered as a Republican, and he's donated thousands to Republican causes, none to Democratic ones.
O'Reilly lies when he calls his show "The No-Spin Zone." This lie is so manifest, it's hardly worth taking time to document it.
There's a difference between the authors of a free utility covering themselves against lawsuits, and Microsoft's consistent pattern of giving crappy/misleading information about vulnerabilities in the software its customers paid for.
If you reported an important bug in GDIscan, the author would most likely fix it quickly and thank you. That is what it means to take responsibility for your software. Whether the author refuses to plaster a "SUE ME" sign on his own back is not the issue.
Re:Another tax-and-spend liberal flip-flopper...
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Huh?
On what grounds do you claim Kerry is "teh most liberal senator in the history of Earth!"? How is John Kerry more liberal than, say, Barbara Boxer? What about Dennis Kucinich? Technically a representative, not a senator, but still so far to the left of Kerry that it's a wonder they can cohabit the same political party.
Next, on the question of flip-floppery. Why isn't Bush a flip-flopper for vacillating on his reasons for invading Iraq? Before the war, it was, "We have to take Saddam out to make America more secure! He has weapons of mass destruction and he's putting them on boats to the U.S. even as we speak! He'll detonate a nuke in New York by year's end!" Then when all the reasons he told us we had to go to war evaporated, he just starts talking about how wonderful it was that he removed Saddam Hussein from power, and how Iraqis are free from his brutal regime. Anyone who doesn't see the value of the war must have been glad that Hussein was in power.
But it's not like that. Sure, Hussein was a brutal dictator, a cancer on his country that needed to be ripped out. But he's been precisely that since he took power in the '80's. On the basis of human rights being violated by crazed dictators, there are dozens of countries equally worthy of consideration. We're not invading those countries, there's no indication that we're looking to invade anyone else for such reasons, and it's clear that America had little desire to go to war solely to remove Hussein from power. But the alternative is for Bush to admit that he shouldn't have gone to war, so he flip-flops.
Kerry, far from flip-flopping on the war as his critics claim, has been as consistent as we have a right to expect. He didn't vote to go to war, but to give the President the authority he needed to be credible in the U.N. Kerry voted for a process, whose end result might have been a declaration of war, but also included several intermediate steps which Bush ignored in his obsessive drive to remove Hussein from power.
After the war began, Kerry "voted for the $87B before he voted against it." But that lovely, oft-replayed soundbite doesn't fully convey the complexity of the situation. The bill Kerry voted for and the bill Kerry voted against were not the same bill. President Bush threatened to veto the version of the bill that Kerry supported, so if Kerry is a flip-flopper, then so is President Bush.
Stop that. Everyone has their own preferences, and that's fine. But if you're going to be a sexist pig, the least you can do is have the decency to be apologetic about it. Women come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and then our mass media goes in, selects whatever shape/size is de rigueur, and tells every other woman on the planet to work their asses off to look like that.
Apparently, if you ran the media, all that would change is that our SO's would start feeling bad about not looking like Shape B rather than Shape A.
Do half the population a favor, and stop bitching about how women just aren't living up to your expectations. It's tough enough for women to be happy with themselves, without you throwing in your two cents.
I'm not even clear which side of the argument you're weighing in on. But "broadband" doesn't necessarily mean "over the Internet." Technically, "broadband" means that a given medium has multiple frequencies that can be used as separate data paths, and they're all being used (or a large subset of them, anyways). This is opposed to "narrowband" which means that only one frequency is being used.
This would be technically appropriate if the processer were utilizing optical connections between individual grid cells.
However, I think that they're using "broadband" in its incorrect but common usage, to mean "we can move a honkin' lotta data over these here pipes." So my interpretation is that the CELL has numerous identical nodes, each a processor in its own right, with high-capacity pipes between cells.
Sounds fast, but also sounds tricky to program. I've heard from people more experienced than myself that the PS2 was also a game programmer's nightmare. But I'm not in a position to judge.
I kind of liked it. I did a search on myself, and it created several groups, one of which was all about me, and one of which was about my evil, hockey-playing Google-nemesis.
I've been plotting and scheming for years about how to take back the crown from that bastard.
Just because the hostage takers weren't from Chechnya (this is the first I've heard of it, but it sounds plausible) doesn't mean they weren't working to get the Russians to let go of Chechnya.
Nothing I've said so far should indicate any sympathy with these sick bastards or their sick political agenda. I don't want to see Chechnya under the iron rule of a few hyperreligious fruitcakes. But like everyone else I've been arguing with, you're missing my point. Whatever tactics they employ, they do so with the aim of achieving certain political goals. Recognizing that isn't the same as sympathizing with them, much less saying that the aims justify the means.
A flat fee wouldn't work. In fact, it illustrates why I can't stand your extreme version of libertarianism.
Let's put aside the fact that it would be impossible to figure out who actually benefits from it, as well as the fact that you've created a world where everyone who thinks they have done me some "service" are now sending me bills. The real problem is, the faintest whim of a rich person is valued as much as the fondest dream of a poor person.
Say I'm a very wealthy individual. I want the statue's boobies draped. How much do I have to want it in order to make it happen? Not much. I'm rich enough that I can simply speak the word, and some hireling will take care of all the details.
Now say I'm a very poor person. Scraping together $1000 would be a huge deal. It might even be impossible. Yet I'm as horrified by the sight of Justice as anyone. Because I'm living in a libertarian system, my opinion matters zero, because I don't have the capital to enforce it.
Under a system where dollars are essentially votes--which is what I feel you are proposing--the opinions of the rich matter, and the opinions of the poor don't.
If our goal is to maximize the happiness of the most people,
Who said that it was? It sure isn't my goal!
It isn't? I thought that the reason you were pushing libertarianism was because you thought it the most just, equitable system, and that everyone would be better off living under its precepts.
Now, are you saying that the only reason you're promoting libertarianism is because you believe that you could cash in big time? If so, I'm ignoring any further displays of moral outrage.
To me, your attempt to equate taxation to slavery is simply further indication that you're a libertarian just because you think taxes suck. In reality, there is no comparison. With slavery, the basic rights of a human being are being violated. You would be hard pressed to get more than a few people to agree that taxation is inherently immoral.
If you're a slave, there is nothing you can legally do to end your enslavement. If you're a rich person who thinks he is being charged an unfair share of taxes, all you have to do is quit whatever employment provides you your income, and live like the rest of us shmucks.
You know, I've met some very intelligent, eloquent Libertarians who can almost convince me that the whole thing might have something going for it.
You aren't one of those people.
The factory workers worked in the factory because working a person to death takes years and starving them to death takes weeks. You don't dispute my claim that the labor workers performed was slowly killing them. And yet you seem to believe that the employer and employee freely entered into an agreement where the employer retained most of the value of the labor and the employee got to sacrifice his health for the right to keep eating.
There is no free exchange of value there. It's exploitation of the worst sort. Of course, kneejerk libertarians like yourself are so committed to the mantra that the market is always right, you have to accept the idea that subsistence wages are acceptable if that's what "the market will bear." If the market won't support a living wage in exchange for labor, then some people don't deserve to live.
What do you feel for people who make more money than you? Probably a mixture of jealousy and hero worship. You obviously don't flinch at the idea of a single person having enough wealth to significantly improve the lives of a million people.
"...name me an example of a company that's ever stayed in business long selling something nobody wanted, regardless of how much brow-beating they did."
You missed my point entirely. The point isn't that if a product is selling then somebody must want it. In my telemarketing example, my customers (those who pay me to peddle their wares) are happy that I'm creating a larger market for their wares. But the value I'm creating is more than negated by the value I'm destroying for the people whom I harass. You know, the value that comes from not having dinner interrupted by stupid sales calls, the right not to be strongarmed into buying stuff they don't really need, etc.
There are plenty of ways to get money for myself by being inhumanly obnoxious, and by destroying value elsewhere. Spamming, frivolous lawsuits, exploiting others, all these things can be very profitable. But that doesn't make them right, and that doesn't mean that they should be rewarded.
The most fundimental principle of libertarianism is the "Non-Aggression Principle". That is, no party may justly initiate force against another individual.
Wonderful. Now explain how you're going to enforce this principle once everyone, libertarian and non-libertarian alike, are living under the same system. Private police? Who will provide police service to those who can't afford it? Who will compel employers to pay wages that would allow them to afford it?
Guess what: The vast majority of people believe in this Non-Aggression Principle. The only difference is, those outside the kneejerk libertarian circle recognize that the principle needs to be enforced. Libertarians would dismantle public services like police, and put us all on the honor system. Five minutes after any successful libertarian revolution, it all comes down to who has the biggest private army.
Yes, the government cannot exist without the ability to initiate force. I find this to be an acceptable compromise, wholly consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle, because ideally, the government represents our collective will. Yes, it's often arbitrary; yes, it's often beholden to special interests. But the solution is to work to make the government more responsive, more fair to everyone. Not to rip the whole thing down and let the great power grab begin.
I'm not sure why this constitutes "shortsightedness". On the one hand, if the state is hotly contested, then being able to deliver its nine votes as a single block gives Colorado a bit of leverage. On the other hand, if the state is strongly tilted--say 70/30 towards GWB--then there is no reason for John Kerry to suck up to it. Under the new system, both candidates would have to keep some pressure on the state in order to keep the ratio (and hence the number of electoral votes they received) from shifting in the opponent's direction.
I'm no longer persuaded by the old arguments for the electoral college. In fact, I think its best feature is that it kept the insanity of Florida from spreading nationwide back in 2000. But as long as people respect the outcome, I don't see it as being too bad a system.
Wow. Another right-winger who wants to break out the nukes. I'll say this once, because anyone who would murder millions in revenge for an act that murdered thousands deserves it: You are an idiot.
To equate two things is to say P->Q and Q->P. If someone is an Islamic terrorist, he is also a terrorist. But the converse is most certainly not true. All terrorism is a worldwide problem, regardless of the ideology. Terror by militant Islamic groups just happens to be a large component of the problem.
The religion of Islam is no more to blame for Islamic terrorism than Christianity is to blame for abortion clinic shootings. Both have adherents with wildly varying interpretations of the faith. These people aren't terrorists because of Islam, but because they are dirt poor, fed anti-Western propaganda all their lives, and feel that they have nothing to lose.
You're making a huge mistake in declaring one third of the world's population to be your enemy. Did I mention you're an idiot?
The life expectancy of human beings in the wild was about 35 years. The early industrial revolution benefitted those who bought the products of industry, not those who manufactured them. This wasn't because of necessity, but because factory owners didn't think clean, safe working conditions and working employees less than they were physically capable would do anything for their bottom line.
You're deluded if you think public services like roads and public safety could be privatized without serious negative consequences. Pure libertarianism, as you promote it, strikes me as nothing more than veiled contempt for anyone who makes less money than you.
You also fall into a logical trap when you believe that, because a person like Bill Gates owns a multibillion dollar company, that they are necessarily creating value, or that they deserve to be compensated proportionately. It's as though you look at a $300B company like Microsoft, and automatically assume that those $300B would simply not exist were it not for Microsoft.
In fact, it's far more complicated. First, had Bill Gates never been born, computers would still be around, they would still be doubling in power every year and a half, they would still have operating systems, and computer use and intercommunication would still be energizing the economy.
In order to calculate the real value of Microsoft to the economy, you can't just look at its market cap. You have to ask how its anticompetitive practices are hindering the development of the computer industry. You have to ask about the costs of its desktop monopoly. You have to ask about the real value of new versions of Office, which serve primarily to break compatability with older versions.
Admittedly, it's unfair to look only at the negatives. But I sincerely believe that if Microsoft were replaced with a dozen competing software companies, the entire industry would benefit.
To take another example, look at SCO's Darl McBride [boo, hiss]. He's a pretty wealthy guy, but it's not clear that he's actually contributing to the economy in a way that makes his rewards merited. He's turned a company with a failing product into a pure litigation shop, and raking in money as he does so. Had SCO chosen a CEO willing to compete on merit, the company might have retained some value. Instead, the company goes down in flames, while the board of directors loots it from within.
Ownership and wealth creation aren't the same thing. Profit and wealth creation aren't the same thing. If I start a telemarketing firm with the intent of browbeating people into purchasing crap that they didn't want and can't really afford, I might be able to turn it into a multi-million dollar business, employing hundreds of people. But am I, or any of the hundreds of telemarketers in my employ, really creating value? No, we're just disrupting lives and enabling purveyors of crap to find an undeserved market.
Those who find all taxation an insult, as you appear to, are foolish and selfish in a way I cannot even begin to comprehend. Government, at its best, is sort of a cooperative enterprise which promotes the general welfare. Hard-line libertarians would see the entire system replaced by a system that can be summed up in three words: "might makes right".
You think you've made a point with your pedantry, but you haven't. The grandparent post never actually mentioned tax cuts as the mechanism by which the money was "given". If it had, you might have a minor point (which is a simple distraction from the overall point that money spent by poor people does more to improve their quality of life than the same amount of money spent by rich people).
Anyone can give anyone money, for any reason. The grandparent only specified that the rich person and the poor person were both "given" $1000. It doesn't specify that the government gave the money to both people, or that this "giving" was in the form of tax breaks.
To reformulate his point in such a way that sidesteps your distraction, let's say that I am the United States Government. I need $1000 to fund the draping of the naked breasts of a judicial statue. Who is it better for me to take that $1000 from? The rich guy, who would have used it to upgrade from coach to first class on his annual vacation to Bermuda? Or the poor guy, who would have used it to make rent and utilities for two months, and maybe buy a bus pass because his rustmobile finally gave up the ghost?
Assuming the old economic theory that we spend money in such a way as to maximize its benefit to us, who is benefitted more by the having of the $1000? It's simple economics: The first dollar you earn is always the most valuable to you, because it will be put towards the things you need the most.
If our goal is to maximize the happiness of the most people, soak the rich seems like a sensible economic policy.
Read the grandparent again. He was not denying that the Chechnyan separatists were Islamic radicals. He was denying that the Chechnyan separatists are the same Islamic radicals that are fighting in Iraq.
There is nothing wrong with referring to the perpetrators of the Russian school attacks as "Chechnyan separatists," because that's what they are. They're also militant, because they use military-style tactics and training to prepare for and execute their attacks. So I don't see that the "liberal media" is doing us a disservice by using those terms.
Where in the "liberal media" have the attackers in Russia been referred to as "activists" or "freedom fighters?" Doing a quick survey of Google News, I find one story from today referring to them as "captors," one that makes no mention of the attackers (it focuses on the US plans for dealing with similar attacks), one that refers to them as raiders, and a Guardian article laced with words like "extremist", "terrorists", and "child-killers" (quoting Vladmir Putin). The last article also mentions that Chechnya has a Muslim majority, and mentions the possibility that some of the attackers were Arabs with links to al-Qaeda.
Yes, Islamic militants are a major source of terrorism, and to ignore this in dealing with Islamic terrorists is a bad idea. But many of the people and organizations who use violence to achieve political ends have nothing to do with Islam, and it would be a mistake to conflate terrorism with Islamic militants, or Islamic militants with Islam.
I for one am looking forward to November, when Kerry will be elected. I personally think that the hyperconfrontational posture Dubya is taking can only energize terror networks around the globe.
Obviously a comment from someone who hasn't read the book.
The ultimate thesis of the book is that invasion of privacy and erosion of privacy are inevitable, and will continue until there is no real privacy left. That is, anyone will be able to find out anything they desire about you.
So the question Brin takes up is, can we have freedom without privacy? Arguably, yes. But transparency is required; the tools which monitor everyone must be available to everyone. If they become a tool that government and corporate powers can use against their enemies, then monitoring becomes a tool of oppression. But if the powerful are subjected to the same sort of monitoring, then they remain accountable to the rest of us.
Privacy laws have good intentions, but they may ultimately be self-defeating. These tools are too useful to pass up. If the government can't gather and collate vast amounts of data legally, it will do so illegally. If businesses are required to limit the sorts of data they collect about us, those who quietly violate the rules will have a significant advantage over more scrupulous businesses. So instead of kneejerk privacy laws, Brin argues that we should be making these systems legal, but demand that they be built in such a way that the public can figure out how the data is being used.
I thought "The Transparent Society" was an awesome book. The biggest reservation I have is that Brin seems to underestimate the power of monitoring as a way of enforcing conformity. But I hope he's right and I'm wrong in that regard, because I sincerely believe he's right about the inevitability of a total privacy meltdown.
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At this level, I would like to think that ideas matter much more than production quality. Given a $100M budget for a movie, it seems like things like plot and character development can be done away with entirely. But anyone who has seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail knows that great things can be done on a shoestring budget. Give me a camcorder and two halves of a coconut to bang together, and I can move the world.
Sort of the same way the Web was brought down by the sheer volume of crappy home pages made available by free hosting sites?
n fic/index.html.
It wasn't. The reason is, you can broadcast anything you want, but nobody has to listen. Heck, if this took off, I could put up a network consisting entirely of looping footage of my own home videos. Nobody but my own family would tune in, and then but rarely. And because Bittorrent scales supply to meet demand, I'm not wasting much in the way of network resources in doing so.
It will still cost just as much as it ever has to create polished shows. Production cost doesn't go down at all, though the low cost of distributing means that more crappiness will be available. This isn't a problem, because if the stuff being put out is lame, nobody is going to tell you to tune in. It's analogous to everyone knowing about homestarrunner.com, but nobody knowing about http://www.angelfire.com/~eix32bwzr/harrypotterfa
I think this sort of network would remain on the fringes, even if it were made very easy to use. Mostly it would be a test bed for new ideas, and whenever something really cool reared its head, some cable channel will swoop in with a million dollar contract and the promise of a better production budget.
It's too late to matter. Nevertheless:
I did finally find a copy of "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". The photocopied form is indeed a voter registration form from 1994. It does indeed have two relevant boxes, one stating "Republican" and one stating "I do not wish to affiliate with any party." The Republican one is very decisively checked.
Looking for an instance where Bill O'Reilly lied? You just provided it. To wit, "When I registered in Nassau to vote in 1994, there was not a box for an independent. I left all the boxes empty. Somehow, I was assigned Republican status."
I can't wrap my brain around the analogy either. I think this is a case of OSIA arguing with idiots, being dragged down to their level, and being handily trounced by more experienced idiots.
OKCupid is great for finding a bunch of people who are a lot like you. eHarmony sounds to me like a good choice for those who are willing to pay a premium in order to avoid the risk of a bad date. I think both approaches are valid.
The reason I got touchy is because you're trying to convince people that meeting people online isn't viable, a claim with which I strongly disagree. But if you'd rather turn it into a sign that I'm insecure about my relationship, you go right ahead.
My impression is, you want the comfort of meeting someone who shares all your most important values, without the discomfort of actually asking the questions needed to find out those values.
Check the documentation in Franken's book. If I recall correctly (and I'm pretty sure I do), Franken has a photocopy of O'Reilly's voter registration for Nassau back in 1994.
The box for "Republican" was checked.
The box for "Independent" was available but blank.
In an interview with Terry Gross, Gross points out this documentation, and O'Reilly goes nuts.
Now, you could theorize (in a straw-grasping way) that it was checked by some disgruntled civil servant rather than by Bill himself, or maybe he had a Florida moment and checked the wrong box. But if he voted in the 1994, 1996, and 1998 elections, he had ample opportunity to be made aware of his accidental affiliation. And if he were anywhere near as "independent" as he claims, he would probably have gone in and remedied it. Instead, he remained a registered Republican until well after the 2000 election, when the Washington Post was preparing a story about O'Reilly which mentioned his affiliation.
Your parody doesn't work. The conclusion of the GP post wasn't that there was no need for private space initiatives, but that the government programs are doing useful research.
Besides, if we liken NASA to Queen Isabella's exploration program, then Columbus' request was more like going to NASA and asking them to do a new and risky mission. Instead of setting up a private program to compete with the government, Columbus went and requested government funding for his program.
So I'm curious: What was your point?
I have to strenuously disagree with you here.
1) I agree, it's best to meet face to face as soon as practical. However, you can know someone for years and still fill in a lot of their personality with wishful thinking. The best advice is to be extremely honest extremely early, and hit the topics that could cause problems as quickly as possible.
2) <sarcasm$gt;Good thing this only happens over the Internet.</sarcasm$gt; Admittedly, in face to face conversation it's impossible for a 300-lb. guy from Detroit to pretend to be a fifteen year old girl, but the point stands. It's the same as any other forum: watch out for falseness and pretension, and don't take anyone at their word.
3) Was this an online dating service? Or a real life one? I've never tried the latter.
4) Evidence? I don't see a huge advantage to having an online service run by someone with a masters in psychology or family counseling, because it's so difficult to apply anything they've learned in their studies to Internet dating. Those who think too highly of their own knowledge will end up running something like eHarmony.com, which (according to another poster) writes off 20% of their potential customers as hopeless.
5) Screw eHarmony. Try OKCupid. The system is pretty straightforward. You create an account, then answer as many of the hundreds of questions in their database as you like. You can also say how your ideal match would answer, and how important it is that they answer properly. Then it looks for people who match you well. It works pretty well so long as you're honest with yourself and actually know what you want.
It's absolutely free. No "Premium Memberships" crap.
To summarize my post: I met my girlfriend there, and I resent the implication that this automatically means our relationship is "screwed up".
He lied when he told Good Morning America viewers that "if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again."
He said this before the war, and after combat operations ended and the WMD caches kept not pouring in, he started spinning to give himself breathing room. At first he said "in the next few weeks," then continually extended the deadline. Finally, in another interview in February 2004, he gave a half-hearted apology, but still shows no signs of distrust of the Bush administration. [source]
O'Reilly lied when he said he was a political independent. This is another one documented in Franken's book. His own voter registration shows himself registered as a Republican, and he's donated thousands to Republican causes, none to Democratic ones.
O'Reilly lies when he calls his show "The No-Spin Zone." This lie is so manifest, it's hardly worth taking time to document it.
Shut up!
There's a difference between the authors of a free utility covering themselves against lawsuits, and Microsoft's consistent pattern of giving crappy/misleading information about vulnerabilities in the software its customers paid for.
If you reported an important bug in GDIscan, the author would most likely fix it quickly and thank you. That is what it means to take responsibility for your software. Whether the author refuses to plaster a "SUE ME" sign on his own back is not the issue.
Huh?
On what grounds do you claim Kerry is "teh most liberal senator in the history of Earth!"? How is John Kerry more liberal than, say, Barbara Boxer? What about Dennis Kucinich? Technically a representative, not a senator, but still so far to the left of Kerry that it's a wonder they can cohabit the same political party.
Next, on the question of flip-floppery. Why isn't Bush a flip-flopper for vacillating on his reasons for invading Iraq? Before the war, it was, "We have to take Saddam out to make America more secure! He has weapons of mass destruction and he's putting them on boats to the U.S. even as we speak! He'll detonate a nuke in New York by year's end!" Then when all the reasons he told us we had to go to war evaporated, he just starts talking about how wonderful it was that he removed Saddam Hussein from power, and how Iraqis are free from his brutal regime. Anyone who doesn't see the value of the war must have been glad that Hussein was in power.
But it's not like that. Sure, Hussein was a brutal dictator, a cancer on his country that needed to be ripped out. But he's been precisely that since he took power in the '80's. On the basis of human rights being violated by crazed dictators, there are dozens of countries equally worthy of consideration. We're not invading those countries, there's no indication that we're looking to invade anyone else for such reasons, and it's clear that America had little desire to go to war solely to remove Hussein from power. But the alternative is for Bush to admit that he shouldn't have gone to war, so he flip-flops.
Kerry, far from flip-flopping on the war as his critics claim, has been as consistent as we have a right to expect. He didn't vote to go to war, but to give the President the authority he needed to be credible in the U.N. Kerry voted for a process, whose end result might have been a declaration of war, but also included several intermediate steps which Bush ignored in his obsessive drive to remove Hussein from power.
After the war began, Kerry "voted for the $87B before he voted against it." But that lovely, oft-replayed soundbite doesn't fully convey the complexity of the situation. The bill Kerry voted for and the bill Kerry voted against were not the same bill. President Bush threatened to veto the version of the bill that Kerry supported, so if Kerry is a flip-flopper, then so is President Bush.
Stop that. Everyone has their own preferences, and that's fine. But if you're going to be a sexist pig, the least you can do is have the decency to be apologetic about it. Women come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and then our mass media goes in, selects whatever shape/size is de rigueur, and tells every other woman on the planet to work their asses off to look like that.
Apparently, if you ran the media, all that would change is that our SO's would start feeling bad about not looking like Shape B rather than Shape A.
Do half the population a favor, and stop bitching about how women just aren't living up to your expectations. It's tough enough for women to be happy with themselves, without you throwing in your two cents.
I'm not even clear which side of the argument you're weighing in on. But "broadband" doesn't necessarily mean "over the Internet." Technically, "broadband" means that a given medium has multiple frequencies that can be used as separate data paths, and they're all being used (or a large subset of them, anyways). This is opposed to "narrowband" which means that only one frequency is being used.
This would be technically appropriate if the processer were utilizing optical connections between individual grid cells.
However, I think that they're using "broadband" in its incorrect but common usage, to mean "we can move a honkin' lotta data over these here pipes." So my interpretation is that the CELL has numerous identical nodes, each a processor in its own right, with high-capacity pipes between cells.
Sounds fast, but also sounds tricky to program. I've heard from people more experienced than myself that the PS2 was also a game programmer's nightmare. But I'm not in a position to judge.
I kind of liked it. I did a search on myself, and it created several groups, one of which was all about me, and one of which was about my evil, hockey-playing Google-nemesis.
I've been plotting and scheming for years about how to take back the crown from that bastard.
Just because the hostage takers weren't from Chechnya (this is the first I've heard of it, but it sounds plausible) doesn't mean they weren't working to get the Russians to let go of Chechnya.
Nothing I've said so far should indicate any sympathy with these sick bastards or their sick political agenda. I don't want to see Chechnya under the iron rule of a few hyperreligious fruitcakes. But like everyone else I've been arguing with, you're missing my point. Whatever tactics they employ, they do so with the aim of achieving certain political goals. Recognizing that isn't the same as sympathizing with them, much less saying that the aims justify the means.
Let's put aside the fact that it would be impossible to figure out who actually benefits from it, as well as the fact that you've created a world where everyone who thinks they have done me some "service" are now sending me bills. The real problem is, the faintest whim of a rich person is valued as much as the fondest dream of a poor person.
Say I'm a very wealthy individual. I want the statue's boobies draped. How much do I have to want it in order to make it happen? Not much. I'm rich enough that I can simply speak the word, and some hireling will take care of all the details.
Now say I'm a very poor person. Scraping together $1000 would be a huge deal. It might even be impossible. Yet I'm as horrified by the sight of Justice as anyone. Because I'm living in a libertarian system, my opinion matters zero, because I don't have the capital to enforce it.
Under a system where dollars are essentially votes--which is what I feel you are proposing--the opinions of the rich matter, and the opinions of the poor don't.
It isn't? I thought that the reason you were pushing libertarianism was because you thought it the most just, equitable system, and that everyone would be better off living under its precepts.
Now, are you saying that the only reason you're promoting libertarianism is because you believe that you could cash in big time? If so, I'm ignoring any further displays of moral outrage.
To me, your attempt to equate taxation to slavery is simply further indication that you're a libertarian just because you think taxes suck. In reality, there is no comparison. With slavery, the basic rights of a human being are being violated. You would be hard pressed to get more than a few people to agree that taxation is inherently immoral.
If you're a slave, there is nothing you can legally do to end your enslavement. If you're a rich person who thinks he is being charged an unfair share of taxes, all you have to do is quit whatever employment provides you your income, and live like the rest of us shmucks.
You aren't one of those people.
The factory workers worked in the factory because working a person to death takes years and starving them to death takes weeks. You don't dispute my claim that the labor workers performed was slowly killing them. And yet you seem to believe that the employer and employee freely entered into an agreement where the employer retained most of the value of the labor and the employee got to sacrifice his health for the right to keep eating.
There is no free exchange of value there. It's exploitation of the worst sort. Of course, kneejerk libertarians like yourself are so committed to the mantra that the market is always right, you have to accept the idea that subsistence wages are acceptable if that's what "the market will bear." If the market won't support a living wage in exchange for labor, then some people don't deserve to live.
What do you feel for people who make more money than you? Probably a mixture of jealousy and hero worship. You obviously don't flinch at the idea of a single person having enough wealth to significantly improve the lives of a million people.
You missed my point entirely. The point isn't that if a product is selling then somebody must want it. In my telemarketing example, my customers (those who pay me to peddle their wares) are happy that I'm creating a larger market for their wares. But the value I'm creating is more than negated by the value I'm destroying for the people whom I harass. You know, the value that comes from not having dinner interrupted by stupid sales calls, the right not to be strongarmed into buying stuff they don't really need, etc.
There are plenty of ways to get money for myself by being inhumanly obnoxious, and by destroying value elsewhere. Spamming, frivolous lawsuits, exploiting others, all these things can be very profitable. But that doesn't make them right, and that doesn't mean that they should be rewarded.
Wonderful. Now explain how you're going to enforce this principle once everyone, libertarian and non-libertarian alike, are living under the same system. Private police? Who will provide police service to those who can't afford it? Who will compel employers to pay wages that would allow them to afford it?
Guess what: The vast majority of people believe in this Non-Aggression Principle. The only difference is, those outside the kneejerk libertarian circle recognize that the principle needs to be enforced. Libertarians would dismantle public services like police, and put us all on the honor system. Five minutes after any successful libertarian revolution, it all comes down to who has the biggest private army.
Yes, the government cannot exist without the ability to initiate force. I find this to be an acceptable compromise, wholly consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle, because ideally, the government represents our collective will. Yes, it's often arbitrary; yes, it's often beholden to special interests. But the solution is to work to make the government more responsive, more fair to everyone. Not to rip the whole thing down and let the great power grab begin.
I'm not sure why this constitutes "shortsightedness". On the one hand, if the state is hotly contested, then being able to deliver its nine votes as a single block gives Colorado a bit of leverage. On the other hand, if the state is strongly tilted--say 70/30 towards GWB--then there is no reason for John Kerry to suck up to it. Under the new system, both candidates would have to keep some pressure on the state in order to keep the ratio (and hence the number of electoral votes they received) from shifting in the opponent's direction.
I'm no longer persuaded by the old arguments for the electoral college. In fact, I think its best feature is that it kept the insanity of Florida from spreading nationwide back in 2000. But as long as people respect the outcome, I don't see it as being too bad a system.
Wow. Another right-winger who wants to break out the nukes. I'll say this once, because anyone who would murder millions in revenge for an act that murdered thousands deserves it: You are an idiot.
To equate two things is to say P->Q and Q->P. If someone is an Islamic terrorist, he is also a terrorist. But the converse is most certainly not true. All terrorism is a worldwide problem, regardless of the ideology. Terror by militant Islamic groups just happens to be a large component of the problem.
The religion of Islam is no more to blame for Islamic terrorism than Christianity is to blame for abortion clinic shootings. Both have adherents with wildly varying interpretations of the faith. These people aren't terrorists because of Islam, but because they are dirt poor, fed anti-Western propaganda all their lives, and feel that they have nothing to lose.
You're making a huge mistake in declaring one third of the world's population to be your enemy. Did I mention you're an idiot?
The life expectancy of human beings in the wild was about 35 years. The early industrial revolution benefitted those who bought the products of industry, not those who manufactured them. This wasn't because of necessity, but because factory owners didn't think clean, safe working conditions and working employees less than they were physically capable would do anything for their bottom line.
You're deluded if you think public services like roads and public safety could be privatized without serious negative consequences. Pure libertarianism, as you promote it, strikes me as nothing more than veiled contempt for anyone who makes less money than you.
You also fall into a logical trap when you believe that, because a person like Bill Gates owns a multibillion dollar company, that they are necessarily creating value, or that they deserve to be compensated proportionately. It's as though you look at a $300B company like Microsoft, and automatically assume that those $300B would simply not exist were it not for Microsoft.
In fact, it's far more complicated. First, had Bill Gates never been born, computers would still be around, they would still be doubling in power every year and a half, they would still have operating systems, and computer use and intercommunication would still be energizing the economy.
In order to calculate the real value of Microsoft to the economy, you can't just look at its market cap. You have to ask how its anticompetitive practices are hindering the development of the computer industry. You have to ask about the costs of its desktop monopoly. You have to ask about the real value of new versions of Office, which serve primarily to break compatability with older versions.
Admittedly, it's unfair to look only at the negatives. But I sincerely believe that if Microsoft were replaced with a dozen competing software companies, the entire industry would benefit.
To take another example, look at SCO's Darl McBride [boo, hiss]. He's a pretty wealthy guy, but it's not clear that he's actually contributing to the economy in a way that makes his rewards merited. He's turned a company with a failing product into a pure litigation shop, and raking in money as he does so. Had SCO chosen a CEO willing to compete on merit, the company might have retained some value. Instead, the company goes down in flames, while the board of directors loots it from within.
Ownership and wealth creation aren't the same thing. Profit and wealth creation aren't the same thing. If I start a telemarketing firm with the intent of browbeating people into purchasing crap that they didn't want and can't really afford, I might be able to turn it into a multi-million dollar business, employing hundreds of people. But am I, or any of the hundreds of telemarketers in my employ, really creating value? No, we're just disrupting lives and enabling purveyors of crap to find an undeserved market.
Those who find all taxation an insult, as you appear to, are foolish and selfish in a way I cannot even begin to comprehend. Government, at its best, is sort of a cooperative enterprise which promotes the general welfare. Hard-line libertarians would see the entire system replaced by a system that can be summed up in three words: "might makes right".
You think you've made a point with your pedantry, but you haven't. The grandparent post never actually mentioned tax cuts as the mechanism by which the money was "given". If it had, you might have a minor point (which is a simple distraction from the overall point that money spent by poor people does more to improve their quality of life than the same amount of money spent by rich people).
Anyone can give anyone money, for any reason. The grandparent only specified that the rich person and the poor person were both "given" $1000. It doesn't specify that the government gave the money to both people, or that this "giving" was in the form of tax breaks.
To reformulate his point in such a way that sidesteps your distraction, let's say that I am the United States Government. I need $1000 to fund the draping of the naked breasts of a judicial statue. Who is it better for me to take that $1000 from? The rich guy, who would have used it to upgrade from coach to first class on his annual vacation to Bermuda? Or the poor guy, who would have used it to make rent and utilities for two months, and maybe buy a bus pass because his rustmobile finally gave up the ghost?
Assuming the old economic theory that we spend money in such a way as to maximize its benefit to us, who is benefitted more by the having of the $1000? It's simple economics: The first dollar you earn is always the most valuable to you, because it will be put towards the things you need the most.
If our goal is to maximize the happiness of the most people, soak the rich seems like a sensible economic policy.
Read the grandparent again. He was not denying that the Chechnyan separatists were Islamic radicals. He was denying that the Chechnyan separatists are the same Islamic radicals that are fighting in Iraq.
There is nothing wrong with referring to the perpetrators of the Russian school attacks as "Chechnyan separatists," because that's what they are. They're also militant, because they use military-style tactics and training to prepare for and execute their attacks. So I don't see that the "liberal media" is doing us a disservice by using those terms.
Where in the "liberal media" have the attackers in Russia been referred to as "activists" or "freedom fighters?" Doing a quick survey of Google News, I find one story from today referring to them as "captors," one that makes no mention of the attackers (it focuses on the US plans for dealing with similar attacks), one that refers to them as raiders, and a Guardian article laced with words like "extremist", "terrorists", and "child-killers" (quoting Vladmir Putin). The last article also mentions that Chechnya has a Muslim majority, and mentions the possibility that some of the attackers were Arabs with links to al-Qaeda.
Yes, Islamic militants are a major source of terrorism, and to ignore this in dealing with Islamic terrorists is a bad idea. But many of the people and organizations who use violence to achieve political ends have nothing to do with Islam, and it would be a mistake to conflate terrorism with Islamic militants, or Islamic militants with Islam.
I for one am looking forward to November, when Kerry will be elected. I personally think that the hyperconfrontational posture Dubya is taking can only energize terror networks around the globe.
Obviously a comment from someone who hasn't read the book.
The ultimate thesis of the book is that invasion of privacy and erosion of privacy are inevitable, and will continue until there is no real privacy left. That is, anyone will be able to find out anything they desire about you.
So the question Brin takes up is, can we have freedom without privacy? Arguably, yes. But transparency is required; the tools which monitor everyone must be available to everyone. If they become a tool that government and corporate powers can use against their enemies, then monitoring becomes a tool of oppression. But if the powerful are subjected to the same sort of monitoring, then they remain accountable to the rest of us.
Privacy laws have good intentions, but they may ultimately be self-defeating. These tools are too useful to pass up. If the government can't gather and collate vast amounts of data legally, it will do so illegally. If businesses are required to limit the sorts of data they collect about us, those who quietly violate the rules will have a significant advantage over more scrupulous businesses. So instead of kneejerk privacy laws, Brin argues that we should be making these systems legal, but demand that they be built in such a way that the public can figure out how the data is being used.
I thought "The Transparent Society" was an awesome book. The biggest reservation I have is that Brin seems to underestimate the power of monitoring as a way of enforcing conformity. But I hope he's right and I'm wrong in that regard, because I sincerely believe he's right about the inevitability of a total privacy meltdown.