I think the original poster meant neo-conservatives.
I have always considered myself a conservative because I embraced the ideals set forth in the US Constitution of freedom for all. I believe that a person's freedom should only end where it starts to infringe upon anothers freedom (such as your freedom to not have your pencil stolen).
Somehow in the 20th century we started to lose the idea that freedoms are a given. We started down the road to goverment protecting us not from outside threats but from ourselves. Prohibition was considered such a huge curtailment of freedom that it required an amendment to the constitution. After prohibition was repealed and some of the same people decided to set their sites on drugs they had to create a stamp tax for the drug and then not sell the stamp to anyone. The crime was actually tax fraud, because obviously you could not directly legislat what people can put into there own body without an amendment to the constitution.
Fastforward to later in the century and all of a sudden its a okay to tell people what they can and cannot put into their own body. And this idea was not just with those whacked out liberal dems, the supposedly conservative republicans backed it to the hilt. It was even a republican administration that put forth the idea of a "War on Drugs", a logical absurdity.
Since the end of the cold war things have only gotten worse. Since politicians are no longer contrasting themselves against the commie hoards, it is now considered ok to make people present there papers or else go to jail. I'm not even talking about at an airport. The Supreme's have upheald that if the police question you and you refuse to provide id they can arrest you. This means that in the USA the police can now say "Your papers please, comrade," and if you don't pony them up you go to jail.
Okay, that was quite a rant. Sadly there is still more bile screaming to get out about the erosion of civil liberties in this country. I will leave it with this, you can not trust a persons self imposed labels to tell you their true feelings on issues. If you could the Bush admin. would support Oregan's right to allow euthanasia and California's right to legalize pot for medical purposes.
1. You can do just about anything you want inside the walls of your home. My wife is an artist and that is actually quite important to us. We currently have 75+ guinea pigs (and more coming as the breed like rabbits) for my wifes upcoming show in April. Most landlords I have had were picky about a dog, you can forget 75 guinea pigs.
2. It is your's. The joy we felt when we moved in was real and palpable. Its strang, but it feels liberating.
3. Also, as others mentioned, the tax benifits are nice. So is banking away equity. This may not be so apperent to people who bought at the top of the bubble, but it usually averages out better to buy than to rent if you plan on staying still more that 5 years.
That said, there are definitly some downsides to home ownership. I guess another little list is in order.
1. You own it. If it breaks you get the joy of fixing, replacing or having it fixed or replaced. This can add up quickly. We found out our heating unit was leaking carbon monoxide after we bought the house, and since we live in buffalo, we had to replace it immediatly. Stuff like that can get you, especially if you do not have some money saved up to handle it.
2. Yard work sucks. Some people may say its relaxing, but I'm a fat, asmatic geek who hates the sun, so I'm not so thrilled with it.
3. Taxes. Wow taxes can be harch. This varies greatly by area, but where I live taxes are a killer. It is very important to find out what tax subsidies you qualify for and apply for them immediatly. I found out 2 days late and had to pay an extra $1000 in taxes. Its worse in the suburbs.
Well that was excessive. I guess my point is you should definitly purchase a home, unless you shouldn't. Sometimes you are right, renting is the best bet, but owning feels great and if everything else is equal I would recommend it.
I here people say things like this about apple stores a lot. Why do you shop at a store that will kick you out so quickly. I don't think I could bring myself to shop somewhere that I had to worry about saying the wrong thing and upsetting the staff. If a store doesn't want your business, may I suggest shopping elsewher. Amazon will ship it to your house, or you could go to officeMax/Depot/whatever or some other brick and mortar store that actually wants customers. I'm not trying to bash here but what is up with those stores?
Knocking on doors or windows is not grounds for shooting someone. The old lady in your story did the right thing. She was unsure of what was going on and felt frightened, so instead of shooting someone she called the police.
Your story illustrates my point. A balanced response to some perceived threat. If you feel threatened or afraid get out of the situation( if possible), attempt to get help, and defend yourself with reasonable force. Killing someone, and if you shoot at someone you are trying to kill them, is not reasonable force when someone is coming towards you in a cart. Maybe if someone is coming towards you in a cart with a weapon, but that was certainly not the case.
By the way, very few states, if any, would the little old lady have been within her rights to shoot that child. Most states require the person to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. Being outside the house the child was not an imminent threat. If the child had broken into the house that might have been another story.
I agree with you on base jumping. It is a dangerous sport and they made their decion to engage in the activity. My younger brother is a rock climber. He does some very dangerous stuff, if he died doing what he loved I would be very, very sad, but it was his decision.
That is not the same as shooting kids in a supermarket. People runnig should not automaticaly engender fear in a person. People do run, we are made for it. Seeing a group of teenagers running down an asile in a cart is not a threat. It may be a suprise, it may be a shock, but it is not life threatening. If your supposed grandma grabbed one of the kids and gave them a smack I would be totally on your side. The problem I have with your example is the extreme over reaction. When did our society get to the point that the first thing a person thinks when they see kids running in a supermarket is that someone is going to shoot them.
We need to have a balanced response to threats or percieved threats. Maybe instead of shooting the person could get out of the way or yell at the kids to stop or watch out. A gun is not the solution for all your problems. A gun is the very last resort when things have gone so wrong that someone needs to die. I don't see how unarmed teenagers in a public place with lots of people could rise to that level. I'm sure that there may be some bizzare scenario where it could, but the likelyhood of such a thing is very minute.
I am a huge fan of the second amendment and concealed carry permits, but it is important to understand that the right to bear arms comes with a responsibilty to use them wisely. If you cannot do that then don't carry a gun. I know people who feel their temparment is unsuitable for carrying a gun, so they don't. If you choose to take the responsiblity inherent in gun ownership, you have to face the consequences for the misuse of that firearm. It is all about personal responsibility.
Are you really that afraid in your day to day life? Do you think that a few teenagers in a cart are life threatening? How is a cart a deadly weapon? What is wrong with you?
There are genuinly dangerous things out in the world to be scared of, why not be scared of one of those? Maybe you could worry about the dangers of driving on the freeway and work on getting the goverment to improve road safety or maybe increase mass transit. You could fear cancer, a slow and very painful death, and advocate more goverment spending on curing it. You could fear heart disease, the number one killer in the US, and change your diet and exercise.
You could reasonablu fear any of those things, but you choose kids racing carts and a guy making art. I'm not saying it those kids should be racing carts in a supermarket. Its a childish prank and there parents should probably punish them, but it certainly doesn't rise to the level of an armed response.
Kurtz's art is the same sort of thing. I agree that what he was working on could have looked suspicous. The police should indeed have checked it out, but once they found out it was not a threat they needed to let it go. Instead they are continuing to hound this man. Some members of law enforcement actually try to say that he did kill his wife, even though all evidence shows she died of natural causes. Mrs. Kurtz had a documented heart condition for god's sake.
The ACLU working with the Texas NRA has actively been fighting the use of profiling white males in the Houston area. These men are pulled over by the police and searched for a firearm. If a firearm is found it is confiscated and the man is arrested. This is in direct contridiction to state law and rulings by the Texas judiciary on the law. The ACLU and the TNRA are fighting to put a stop to this action.
The worst part is that the local DA and the police know it is illegal to do this and do it anyway.
Personally I think we need both the ACLU and the NRA, and as many other groups that want to fight for our civil liberties.
I definitly don't believe that an ip address is proof of wrong doing as **aa would like people to believe, but for once I find myself siding with the government. It does seem that if you have things going to your account, you may know something about it and it is enough for a warrant. Getting a warrant is not the same thing as finding someone guilty. While the government certainly has little credibility with many people right now( myself included), that is mostly due to not getting warrants in the first place and also the often questionable use of "no knock warrants".
This is more like you had a gun registered in your name and it was used in the commision of a crime. This isn't proof you were involved, but there is a good chance that you may know something about it. The analogy you give is closer to getting a warrant for every person that connected through that isp. The ip address gave the police a starting point since it is likely that the person is involved.
The system can never be perfect, some warrants will be issued against innocent people. We do need to be diligent that our government does not start handing out warrants at the drop of a hat, but if there is a reasonable case to be made that the person targeted by the warrant was involved in the crime then that's what warrants are for. The warrants that are worrying are the ones that the FBI gets after they raid a persons house or after they perform a sneak and peak operation. It is important that all warrants see the light of day. The only way to protect against abuses of the system is to have a transparent system.
But why are you making this switch? If you want stability and security over all else then get Linux. If you want a lot of 3rd party software then choose windows.
If you want to dual boot then why not Windows/Linux? The hardware is cheaper, the enterprise support is definitly better and Linux will hook into a lot of the old Unix legacy stuff.
Apples are real nice and shiny, but if you are justifying a budget I just don't see it.
Then you need to go to the sprint store and get them to fix your bill. I have Sprint Vision and browse with opera and use google maps and all the rest. The only problem I have is that my Treo 650 cannot connect to the high speed network. You need a 700 or 680 and I cannot afford to upgrade.
Sprint is reasonably priced and relatively decent, but, like most cell companies, you really need to watch that bill and raise hell if they hit you with bogus charges. Cell companies are notorious for this.
Have you ever gone through a legal Mexican border crossing? Its a lot tougher than you seem to think. The line for foot traffic is pretty long, but the car traffic line is unbelievable. The Mexican border is only somewhat easy at illegal border crossing. On the Canadian border there are still roads that go between the countries without border stations and you can definitly hike across all over the place.
Canadian crossing is still much easier than Mexican
Re:The rest of the launch lineup can go to hell...
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
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· Score: 2, Informative
Everyone I know had problems with their PS2. Personally, I think the problem is Sony's poor QA Dept. Sony makes a lot of sub par products. I'm not trying to bash them, it just seems like they have let themselves slip.
Are you absolutly insane. Unethical business practices by a software company do not equate to blood money. They may equate to ill gotten gains, but not blood money. By saying they do you trivialize the suffering of people who were killed and/or brutalized for the sake of profits.
Blood money is when Shell hires mercenaries to clear out villages in Africa because they are on top of oil.
Blood money is selling arms for diamonds in order for one group to commit genocide against another.
Blood money is DeBeers using close to slave labor and execute workers that it thinks are stealing in its diamond mines
I am not defending Bill Gate, I do believe MS used unfair and illegal business practices. However, don't compare paying to much for your OS with being murdered or tortured. The difference is huge.
Please explain to me how you equate a repressive regime, that censors and persecutes it own people with software bugs. I'm sorry, but whatever MS has done is nothing compared to the PRC. I'm not saying this to defend MS, I'm saying it because the PRC has a horrible track record on human rights. Torture, imprisonment and murder are much worse than anything a software company might do.
Also, most airlines now have self check in. You walk up to a kiosk use the touch screen to print your luggage tags, put the lugguge on the scale, someone grabs them and off you go. No ID needed.
WTF. I went through Katrina, and there is no way i could have been involved in a trial in another state at the same time. What is wrong with this court that it did not postpone this. This really pisses me off. Its bad enough not being able to go home for months, or ever in some cases, but to have a court rule on your case without you even being there.
It's laughable that the stuffed shirt Wall Street types are saying that Apple needs to provide more infomation, but the "Information wants to be free crowd" here at Slashdot thinks that Apple should hide the information from everyone lest there competitors find out their margin. Apple competitors know that a consumer doesn't really care if you can beat someones margins they care if you can beat their pricing. This is just Apple hiding information because they can.
It drives me up a wall how this company always gets a free pass on this and other sites. Apple is not the greatest computer company ever. They are certianly not Open Source or even close to it. They make pretty boxes for a lot of cash, and now there boxes are just another PC brand.
Atleast they are built better than Dell, I'll give you that.
If the goverment plans or fingerprinting me and doing an iris geometry scan then what is the purpose of this card? Why not instead use the biometric data as my ID?
The reason is that they want to be able to scan people at a distance were they can not use biometric sources. Since they can not use those sources it does not matter that the person impersonating you does not match your biometric features as they will not be checked. This isn't so they can apply for a home loan, this is so that they can illegally enter the US with nefarious purposes. They want to be able to scan a bus as it drives past a checkpoint without stopping.
You ever notice a lot of things don't work with macs. I always wonder why this is. My wife just got a 4 gig usb drive for syncing with the macs at school and the mac only lets you read from it, not write to it. Works fine on the pc at home. The weird thing is that smaller usb drives do work as do ipods(which most of the other art students use as expensive usb drives).
I'm part of the left and i dislike wal-mart for many reasons, but not because they are low brow. I am one of the Americans that has had the joy of being upper middle class, middle class, poor and poverty stricken(though not in that order), and I can tell you that wal-mart sucks because:
1. They have crappy service
2. They have poorly made products
3. The food is often not fresh
4. The working conditions are depressing(yes i have worked there)
On the other hand they are always CHEAP. That can mean a whole lot, especially when you are poor. You can afford to get some food and some clothes(Wow). Being that cheap can seriously help poorer people, especially in the short term. wal-mart's biggest problem is the long term. The constint outsourcing and incredibly low wages make more poor people, which increases those who need wal-mart pricing.
I dont think we should regulate were people buy, but people do need to understand the system they are buying into when they shop at wal-mart and stores like it. Wal-mart sucks, but some of us really need it. I think before trying to use the goverment against wal-mart we should use the goverment to help eliminate poverty.
Who should they buy there pcs from? Almost every PC or laptop is atleast partially built in the PRC. Saying that we wont get any PCs from them is saying we wont get any PCs.
As an American I have to admidt that if my country is fighting a war I want to win it as quickly as possible. In almost every war communications plays a vital role. If the armed forces have the capability to knock out or subvert the enemies communications I think they should. The job of the military is to win quickly and with as little loss of life as possible.
Now the job of ordering the military to make war is sadly in the hands of politicians. The politicians often put the armed forces in comprimising positions when they are merely trying to to their job. The problem isn't that DOD has plans to knock out communications of our enemies. The problem is our political leaders keep making new enemies.
It is still done in this country. Many media outlets get their stories directly from goverment sources and often from goverment "reporters". From most of the examples I have seen it is usually some agency like the FDA, though the Social Security Administration was doing some stuff to push Bush's privatization plan and the Department of Education paid atleast one commentator to publicly support No Child Left Behind.
The media outlet does sort of get a bribe, as the content is free for them to use without attribution and often pretending the reporter is part of their staff.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the original poster meant neo-conservatives.
I have always considered myself a conservative because I embraced the ideals set forth in the US Constitution of freedom for all. I believe that a person's freedom should only end where it starts to infringe upon anothers freedom (such as your freedom to not have your pencil stolen).
Somehow in the 20th century we started to lose the idea that freedoms are a given. We started down the road to goverment protecting us not from outside threats but from ourselves. Prohibition was considered such a huge curtailment of freedom that it required an amendment to the constitution. After prohibition was repealed and some of the same people decided to set their sites on drugs they had to create a stamp tax for the drug and then not sell the stamp to anyone. The crime was actually tax fraud, because obviously you could not directly legislat what people can put into there own body without an amendment to the constitution.
Fastforward to later in the century and all of a sudden its a okay to tell people what they can and cannot put into their own body. And this idea was not just with those whacked out liberal dems, the supposedly conservative republicans backed it to the hilt. It was even a republican administration that put forth the idea of a "War on Drugs", a logical absurdity.
Since the end of the cold war things have only gotten worse. Since politicians are no longer contrasting themselves against the commie hoards, it is now considered ok to make people present there papers or else go to jail. I'm not even talking about at an airport. The Supreme's have upheald that if the police question you and you refuse to provide id they can arrest you. This means that in the USA the police can now say "Your papers please, comrade," and if you don't pony them up you go to jail.
Okay, that was quite a rant. Sadly there is still more bile screaming to get out about the erosion of civil liberties in this country. I will leave it with this, you can not trust a persons self imposed labels to tell you their true feelings on issues. If you could the Bush admin. would support Oregan's right to allow euthanasia and California's right to legalize pot for medical purposes.
1. You can do just about anything you want inside the walls of your home. My wife is an artist and that is actually quite important to us. We currently have 75+ guinea pigs (and more coming as the breed like rabbits) for my wifes upcoming show in April. Most landlords I have had were picky about a dog, you can forget 75 guinea pigs.
2. It is your's. The joy we felt when we moved in was real and palpable. Its strang, but it feels liberating.
3. Also, as others mentioned, the tax benifits are nice. So is banking away equity. This may not be so apperent to people who bought at the top of the bubble, but it usually averages out better to buy than to rent if you plan on staying still more that 5 years.
That said, there are definitly some downsides to home ownership. I guess another little list is in order.
1. You own it. If it breaks you get the joy of fixing, replacing or having it fixed or replaced. This can add up quickly. We found out our heating unit was leaking carbon monoxide after we bought the house, and since we live in buffalo, we had to replace it immediatly. Stuff like that can get you, especially if you do not have some money saved up to handle it.
2. Yard work sucks. Some people may say its relaxing, but I'm a fat, asmatic geek who hates the sun, so I'm not so thrilled with it.
3. Taxes. Wow taxes can be harch. This varies greatly by area, but where I live taxes are a killer. It is very important to find out what tax subsidies you qualify for and apply for them immediatly. I found out 2 days late and had to pay an extra $1000 in taxes. Its worse in the suburbs.
Well that was excessive. I guess my point is you should definitly purchase a home, unless you shouldn't. Sometimes you are right, renting is the best bet, but owning feels great and if everything else is equal I would recommend it.
Seriously though, why do people shop there?
Your story illustrates my point. A balanced response to some perceived threat. If you feel threatened or afraid get out of the situation( if possible), attempt to get help, and defend yourself with reasonable force. Killing someone, and if you shoot at someone you are trying to kill them, is not reasonable force when someone is coming towards you in a cart. Maybe if someone is coming towards you in a cart with a weapon, but that was certainly not the case.
By the way, very few states, if any, would the little old lady have been within her rights to shoot that child. Most states require the person to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. Being outside the house the child was not an imminent threat. If the child had broken into the house that might have been another story.
That is not the same as shooting kids in a supermarket. People runnig should not automaticaly engender fear in a person. People do run, we are made for it. Seeing a group of teenagers running down an asile in a cart is not a threat. It may be a suprise, it may be a shock, but it is not life threatening. If your supposed grandma grabbed one of the kids and gave them a smack I would be totally on your side. The problem I have with your example is the extreme over reaction. When did our society get to the point that the first thing a person thinks when they see kids running in a supermarket is that someone is going to shoot them.
We need to have a balanced response to threats or percieved threats. Maybe instead of shooting the person could get out of the way or yell at the kids to stop or watch out. A gun is not the solution for all your problems. A gun is the very last resort when things have gone so wrong that someone needs to die. I don't see how unarmed teenagers in a public place with lots of people could rise to that level. I'm sure that there may be some bizzare scenario where it could, but the likelyhood of such a thing is very minute.
I am a huge fan of the second amendment and concealed carry permits, but it is important to understand that the right to bear arms comes with a responsibilty to use them wisely. If you cannot do that then don't carry a gun. I know people who feel their temparment is unsuitable for carrying a gun, so they don't. If you choose to take the responsiblity inherent in gun ownership, you have to face the consequences for the misuse of that firearm. It is all about personal responsibility.
Are you really that afraid in your day to day life? Do you think that a few teenagers in a cart are life threatening? How is a cart a deadly weapon? What is wrong with you?
There are genuinly dangerous things out in the world to be scared of, why not be scared of one of those? Maybe you could worry about the dangers of driving on the freeway and work on getting the goverment to improve road safety or maybe increase mass transit. You could fear cancer, a slow and very painful death, and advocate more goverment spending on curing it. You could fear heart disease, the number one killer in the US, and change your diet and exercise.
You could reasonablu fear any of those things, but you choose kids racing carts and a guy making art. I'm not saying it those kids should be racing carts in a supermarket. Its a childish prank and there parents should probably punish them, but it certainly doesn't rise to the level of an armed response.
Kurtz's art is the same sort of thing. I agree that what he was working on could have looked suspicous. The police should indeed have checked it out, but once they found out it was not a threat they needed to let it go. Instead they are continuing to hound this man. Some members of law enforcement actually try to say that he did kill his wife, even though all evidence shows she died of natural causes. Mrs. Kurtz had a documented heart condition for god's sake.
The worst part is that the local DA and the police know it is illegal to do this and do it anyway.
Personally I think we need both the ACLU and the NRA, and as many other groups that want to fight for our civil liberties.
This is more like you had a gun registered in your name and it was used in the commision of a crime. This isn't proof you were involved, but there is a good chance that you may know something about it. The analogy you give is closer to getting a warrant for every person that connected through that isp. The ip address gave the police a starting point since it is likely that the person is involved.
The system can never be perfect, some warrants will be issued against innocent people. We do need to be diligent that our government does not start handing out warrants at the drop of a hat, but if there is a reasonable case to be made that the person targeted by the warrant was involved in the crime then that's what warrants are for. The warrants that are worrying are the ones that the FBI gets after they raid a persons house or after they perform a sneak and peak operation. It is important that all warrants see the light of day. The only way to protect against abuses of the system is to have a transparent system.
If you want to dual boot then why not Windows/Linux? The hardware is cheaper, the enterprise support is definitly better and Linux will hook into a lot of the old Unix legacy stuff.
Apples are real nice and shiny, but if you are justifying a budget I just don't see it.
Sprint is reasonably priced and relatively decent, but, like most cell companies, you really need to watch that bill and raise hell if they hit you with bogus charges. Cell companies are notorious for this.
Canadian crossing is still much easier than Mexican
Everyone I know had problems with their PS2. Personally, I think the problem is Sony's poor QA Dept. Sony makes a lot of sub par products. I'm not trying to bash them, it just seems like they have let themselves slip.
Blood money is when Shell hires mercenaries to clear out villages in Africa because they are on top of oil.
Blood money is selling arms for diamonds in order for one group to commit genocide against another.
Blood money is DeBeers using close to slave labor and execute workers that it thinks are stealing in its diamond mines
I am not defending Bill Gate, I do believe MS used unfair and illegal business practices. However, don't compare paying to much for your OS with being murdered or tortured. The difference is huge.
Please explain to me how you equate a repressive regime, that censors and persecutes it own people with software bugs. I'm sorry, but whatever MS has done is nothing compared to the PRC. I'm not saying this to defend MS, I'm saying it because the PRC has a horrible track record on human rights. Torture, imprisonment and murder are much worse than anything a software company might do.
Also, most airlines now have self check in. You walk up to a kiosk use the touch screen to print your luggage tags, put the lugguge on the scale, someone grabs them and off you go. No ID needed.
Damn this pisses me off.
It drives me up a wall how this company always gets a free pass on this and other sites. Apple is not the greatest computer company ever. They are certianly not Open Source or even close to it. They make pretty boxes for a lot of cash, and now there boxes are just another PC brand.
Atleast they are built better than Dell, I'll give you that.
Good idea. I believe it is fat format, but i could be wrong. I'll check it out next time I'm home.
The reason is that they want to be able to scan people at a distance were they can not use biometric sources. Since they can not use those sources it does not matter that the person impersonating you does not match your biometric features as they will not be checked. This isn't so they can apply for a home loan, this is so that they can illegally enter the US with nefarious purposes. They want to be able to scan a bus as it drives past a checkpoint without stopping.
If anyone knows why please chime in.
1. They have crappy service
2. They have poorly made products
3. The food is often not fresh
4. The working conditions are depressing(yes i have worked there)
On the other hand they are always CHEAP. That can mean a whole lot, especially when you are poor. You can afford to get some food and some clothes(Wow). Being that cheap can seriously help poorer people, especially in the short term. wal-mart's biggest problem is the long term. The constint outsourcing and incredibly low wages make more poor people, which increases those who need wal-mart pricing.
I dont think we should regulate were people buy, but people do need to understand the system they are buying into when they shop at wal-mart and stores like it. Wal-mart sucks, but some of us really need it. I think before trying to use the goverment against wal-mart we should use the goverment to help eliminate poverty.
Who should they buy there pcs from? Almost every PC or laptop is atleast partially built in the PRC. Saying that we wont get any PCs from them is saying we wont get any PCs.
Oh, wait. The US is developing new, better nukes to use on our enemies world wide, strategic and tactical.
Now the job of ordering the military to make war is sadly in the hands of politicians. The politicians often put the armed forces in comprimising positions when they are merely trying to to their job. The problem isn't that DOD has plans to knock out communications of our enemies. The problem is our political leaders keep making new enemies.
The media outlet does sort of get a bribe, as the content is free for them to use without attribution and often pretending the reporter is part of their staff.