Corporate speech can be regulated to some degree under the Firtst Amendment. Political speech has a higher level of scrutiny, so banning robo-calls might not pass SCOTUS muster.
Then again, this Court seems to like to ban political speech, despite the fact that the first amendment that was added to the Constitution was put their chiefly to protect political speech!
Remember people, the First Amendment is their to protect all speech, not just speech you agree with.
The material has been shown to stay stable throughout hundreds of write and erase cycles.
Yeah, well what happens when you are on a starship and get hurt and need a doctor and you run out of polymer?? The devil's always in the details. First Hillarycare, now this!!
I guess if you just don't believe that the Supreme Court actually decides what is, in fact, constitutional - rather, you decide it - then you are right. But if you actually look at Supreme Court cases, Bush hasn't violated the Constitution.
It is well-settled. Every single Supreme Court case on the matter has firmly said: non-citizens not on US soil have never, ever been afforded constitutional rights. Never, ever. Maybe that is contrary to the way you feel things should be, but that is the history of American jurisprudence.
To recap, 1) never in this history of warfare have combatants been given habeas corpus. Military trials have been done since the time of Lincoln as well as FDR (the two highest rated presidents of all time), and the Supreme Court has upheld them; 2) Show me a case that says that the First Amendment bars religious organizations from receiving the same funding as non-religious orgs. IOW, an organization is not banned simply because it carries a religious message. The law simply does not support what you claim. 3) The Fourth Amendment has never been held, by SCOTUS or the FISA court, to require warrants when surveilling those calling from outside the US; 4) Again, when in history have POW's or enemy combatants every gotten trials, in any war? The Nazis? The North Koreans? The Viet Cong? Or are there just different rules for George Bush? 5) Getting redundant here. No Sixth Amendment or any Amendment for non-citizens. And this rule applied long before Bush was president; 6) Again, the Constitution does not apply, and even when it does, the Eight Amendment has only been held, ironically, to apply post-conviction.
The problems with Slashdot is that many people here argue from a perspective of what they want to Constitution to be, not what 200+ years of SCOTUS interpretation have said it is.
BTW, while we are discussing the Constitution, I see references to providing for the common defense (as well as to patent and copyright, which many here like to ignore) but nothing on the government building the Internet. Where does it say that, you constitutional purists?
The USPS is a monopoly (you know, that which most people on/. hate about software companies?) on letter delivery, which they lose money on, BTW. Only through package delivery do they turn a "profit." Of course, unlike their competitors like FedEx who pay hundreds of millions, the USPS does not pay corporate income taxes, which is a huge hidden subsidy. Secondly, all 800,000 USPS employees have their health care under FEHB, under which the feds pay 72% of the premiums. That is in the billions of dollars per month of federal dollars.
Imagine if you will, FedEx paying no income tax and having the taxpayers paying for all of their employees healthcare. Think that would be a huge boost to FedEx's efficiency?
You can say anything you want, so long as it isn't a threat or defamatory to an individual (a false statement of fact that harms one's reputation). Any opinion or ideology, however distasteful or mocking or patronizing, is allowed. In America, we believe more speech, not less is better, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Your analogy is in error. The US Postal Service does not receive any taxpayer money to operate. This link explains how the USPS operates.
The USPS's self-serving and misleading PR page notwithstanding, if you count the fact that the USPS pays no taxes, whereas FedEx and UPS and the like pay hundreds of millions in taxes, and the fact that the ~800,000 USPS employees have their health care paid for by the American taxpayer (which costs like a billion US$ each month!), that is one hugely-subsidized monopoly.
And if the USA passed a law banning the export of drugs to any country with price controls - as it should to protect American workers and investors - those countries would either have to abandon said controls, or do without the drugs. If the price controls were abandoned, American drug prices would go down.
It is hypocritical indeed for a foreign country to let the American capitalist system develop the drugs at American investors' expense, then import those drugs with price controls, causing Americans to pay more for drugs, all the while criticizing the American system! As Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, " I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way." Speaking of which, Canada has a lot more money to spend on health care since the US essentially is subsidizing its lack of a real military.
An example of a large medical product that the US government does efficiently is Medicare.
They have overhead that is about 1/3 that of private insurance...
Medicare is an iceberg that the USA is heading for, along with its smaller yet also dangerous sibling, Social Security. On our current course, in a few decades, all tax revenues taken by the US will be spent on entitlements for a very small percentage of the population. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population does not rely on Medicare and Social Security for health care and retirement, and the sectors that are paying for the latter's private health care and retirement are doing great. Medicare and SS are horribly insolvent, versus a booming private sector. Which one is more efficient?
As Ravenshrike said, Medicare does not have to follow GAAP accounting rules, either in its own internal accounting, or in reimbursement. although the CBO has started keeping track of things that way just for the hell of it, and I can assure you that GAAP accounting does not show any such 1/3 advantage.
See: Real budget deficit: $4 trillion, an article about a problem scarier than the RIAA, the MPAA, Al Qaeda, and the ACLU combined.
But another huge reason Medicare is able to operate at the costs it does (remember, those costs are still going to bankrupt the USA and make US Treasury Bonds into junk bonds if something isn't done) is that the sheer size (and government-vested authority) of the program allows it to negotiate drug prices, and dictate reimbursement costs to doctors, something that can't be done in the private sector due to antitrust laws.
So you can't brag about something Medicare can do that would be illegal in the private sector, which includes accounting principles that would have any private corporation's accountants in supermax prison for a minimum of 20 years under Sarbanes-Oxley. It is ironic, indeed, that you are making the argument that Medicare, which essentially dictates the prices of drugs made by Big Pharma, is more efficient than the private system, in a thread about how capping the profits of Big Pharma is a bad thing - since such price controls would dry up the very investment that gave rise to said drugs - especially when such activities would be illegal if private health insurers tried it!
while the people that are on it rank it far higher than people rank their private insurance companies.
That which robs Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul. But Peter's grandkids are going to be really pissed when the real-world bills come due.
Medicare is a hopelessly doomed ponzi scheme that is going to ruin the US economy. Anyone who would use this program, of all programs, as some paragon of fiscal wisdom simply should stick to open source software debates, or wherever his real expertise may lie.
I think the USPS does a fantastic job. How far can you send something for $0.41 via UPS or FedEx? With USPS I can send a letter all the way to Alaska or Hawaii for the change under my couch cushions. If you compare time & cost for a 1 pound package shipped domestically, USPS comes out ahead there too.
Nonsense! The USPS has a government-sanctioned monopoly and pays no taxes. Still, FedEx and UPS and DHL have taken 90% of overnight and related package shipping, and do it cheaper than USPS does (and with a smile, unlike the surly mail carriers). Logic suggests that they could do the same with first class mail as well. And if FedEx or UPS were going to every home every day, their pricing on packages would drop as well since they would be going there anyway.
I'm not saying the government does eveything well, but the Postal Service is one place where it excels. Many years ago, the USPS received taxpayer subsidies; but today the USPS is funded entirely by revenues from postage. If medical insurance or drug research was run half as efficiently as the USPS, we'd all be better off.
USPS not paying taxes like the hundreds of millions that FedEx does is an enormous subsidy. Not to mention that every mail carrier's health care - all 800,000 of them - is paid by the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program, subsidized enormously by the federal taxpayer.
You should want Pharma's profits to be high so the investor money will flow there, instead of to oil stocks or gold. You do know that it takes 10 years and up to a billion dollars US to bring a drug to market. There has to be a pot at the end of the rainbow or investors won't invest! That's how it works, and while not perfect, it is a hell of a lot more efficient than shaking tax dollars out of people and filtering it through the federal bureaucracy. Compare the US Postal Service to UPS or FedEx and you'll see the same thing. Yep, the government does everything else so well, let's hand over this to them too!
Go ahead, take away their patents or institute price controls, and watch the money dry up. That will help everyone...not! You can't force investors to invest, no matter how much compulsion or Robin Hood economics you want to institute.
I just wish someone would make a list of the top 50 drugs in the last 50 years and who made them and how they were financed. I'm guessing it wasn't from a communist country.
He made a change of just a few syllables, but with an enormous magnitude far beyond his years. He read Jefferson's line, "We hold these truths to be scared and undeniable" and he was worried that the word "scared" might be misused in future generations to justify religious dogmas. (Most people fond of saying that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs look over the fact that most our founding fathers were agnostic.)
You might want to read the rest of the document before making these wide-ranging conclusions:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Natural rights and human rights began during the English Enlightenment of the 18th century, spurred by the English Bill of Rights of 1689
Which only applied through MPs, not individual Britons!
and expanded on by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke etc.
Yes, Locke had enormous influence on Jefferson's Declaration, but Hobbes? Hardly. Yes, the state of nature was bad, but Hobbes did not have the answer for the revolutionaries. If there was one thing the Patriots were against, it was another absolutist ruler.
and pulled together the Declaration and the Constitution mostly from their common-law heritage and Enlightenment philosophers.
Yes and no. The Declaration reads right from Locke; but the Constitution, particularly Madison's Bill of Rights, is a laundry list of things that the colonists despised about the UK's political system. As I tell my law students, the US legal system owes enormous debt to the English common law tradition, but the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is a written political document which has no analogue in the UK.
Portraying them as creating the wave rather than riding it is misleading.
Hardly. Who else delineated the rights of man (as opposed to the ruling elites), including to form his own government, on paper no less? Certainly not the UK, which is to this day a representative monarchy with an official church and no written constitution!
Often US citizens, that I speak with on the internets, apologize for their president. But it's not their president I fear, it's the dense 60% of the population that can hardly write.
Nice flamebait, but in fact, America's worst state vis-a-vis college education (West Virginia, 15%) has a higher percentage of residents who are college graduates than the average European country (We The People, Thomas Patterson, p.16). California and New York have more colleges than any European democracy. More than a third of America's young people enter college, the highest in the world (less than 20% for Western Europe). BTW, speaking of "can hardly write," it's spelled "Internet."
It's time you people start forming an intellectual elite that has some leverage over this critical mass.
The average congressman and senator have much higher education than the average American, who is much higher educated than the average non-American (and how's that "leadership" working out?). Romney was valedictorian of his college, and holds two advanced degrees from Harvard.
And since George Bush graduated from Yale (where he got better grades than his 2004 opponent, John F. Kerry), I'm thinking that your educated elites theory might not hold up in real-world crash testing. Frankly, I'd prefer a little common sense to the "elites" running things. They've been doing that a while.
These are kind of cheap. At first it looked really bright, but I stared into it and after a while, the light is barely visible. I think it's defective.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Greenland are all pretty protective about their citizens privacy. Provided your sites contain only "controversial" (but not illegal) content, you would definitely be in the clear!
Illegal content would be: child pornography, copyrighted material for which you do not have the distribution right, neo-nazi propaganda and holocausts-denial. Pretty much everything else is accepted. Including blasphemies drawings
Uh, yeah, also no criticism of homosexuals is allowed in Sweden and Norway, so Christians and churches need not apply.
The Nation, the National Review of the Left, was used as the primary source in the Slashdot Suppress U article yesterday. I guess fair-and-balanced only matters if it is a conservative-leaning source, not a hard left one.
The difference is, Fox might tilt right, but they do make more of an effort to give both sides than CNN does, the latter titling left and making no such effort.
The hard left's equivalent of National Review gets an article posted as if it is some trusted news source. Meanwhile, people here would cry foul if someone posted a Fox News link.
Really fair, people./. just gets more and more lefty every day. As always, the left body snatchers have to infiltrate and politicize everything. We can't just have a nerd news site, noooooo.
Used to be, mafia guys would have no Social Security card, driver's license, or bank accounts to avoid being traced by law enforcement or the IRS. Now, I feel like having none of those things to avoid the crooks online.
Another money-grubbing group wanting to milk anything creative for any possible dollar it may earn, while making use of and promoting imaginary property. What happened to unions being for the working class person getting stepped on by big business?
So let me get this straight: The "working class person" who is offered a job - to take or leave at his own choice - by the entrepreneur, the guy(s) who raised all the capital and took all the risk and created all the job for people too scared or unskilled or dim-witted to start their own businesses, then demands more money for less work through legal collusion (aka, a union), when big business is not allowed to collude (antitrust), it's the worker that is getting "stepped on." No, not the investor who laid down the money, it's the worker bee who thinks the world owes him a living.
But some internet writers eschew working for someone else and then whining about it, and instead go plant their own flag in the world to try to take care of themselves, they are the money grubbers. Got it.
This is how the libs think: They poo-poo on the very individualism and self-reliance that built America and which pays for all of their ridiculous welfare state programs, while championing the herd of worker bees who decided not to improve their skills or education or take the risk, all the while collectively bargaining them out of their jobs (see: airline industry, auto industry).
So it's perfectly okay for a Creationist to demand that he be allowed to give a speech at a biology department?
Yes, if he were invited by the college governors, as the Pope was, then shouted down by some intolerant jerks. And he didn't "demand" anything. He backed out gracefully, no pun intended.
It's perfectly alright for a Holocaust Denier to give a speech at memorial to Nazi genocide victims?
No, because it is rude. Nor is it OK for one to be invited to Columbia University. But last time I checked, there were not 6 million scientists killed after which the Pope denied it.
"Conservatives are evil, so they have no right to speak. We're liberals, we're good, so we get to play by different rules."
You have thus summed up the hypocrisy of many liberals. They will defend to the death your right to agree with them. Just don't dissent.
Intelligent, secure liberals are supposed to defend free speech, the idea being that more speech is better than less speech, and that "bad" ideas should be vetted publicly and debated. That's what we try to do in America, although our college campuses are just as bad, where Mahmud Ahmadinejad is treated like royalty, but Ann Coulter and other conservatives are assaulted and shouted down.
It's like, how could someone sell an OS that despite billions in R&D and years of patches would never do what it was intended to? What fool would buy such a thing? I feel sorry for anyone who would invest in such a company.
And, of course, any technology with no moving parts is preferable-- mechanical parts have an annoying tendency to freeze up with vacuum thermal cycling.
How are the SSD makers getting around the limited write cycles of flash drives? Flash, even high endurance can actually wear out faster than HDDs with all of Windows' endless writing to the page file. A fluid bearing HDD can last a long time theoretically. One of the problems with those few people who have managed to get Windows (XP, not PE) to boot from a flash drive is that Windows will burn out a flash drive pretty quick with its endless page writes. Yes, you could turn off the page file, but that isn't how XP is supposed to work. Then again, neither is BSOD.
I understand that Linux pages too, but I'd imagine the average Linux nerd would implement a workaround.
Slashdot Mirror
Look who is taking all the money from the entertainment industry:
http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/indus.asp?cycle=2008&CmteID=S17&Cmte=SJUD&CongNo=110&Chamber=S (Senate Judicairy Committee, which makes new criminal laws, $2,675,675 from TV/Movies/Music).
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?CID=N00009918&cycle=2008 PATRICK LEAHY (D-VT) (took $250K from entertainment industry, supports Induce Act, Pirate Act)
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?CID=N00009869&cycle=2008 Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) (has taken $114K from entertainment, sponsored Induce Act, Pirate Act)
There are even pics of the Congresswhores hobnobbing to celebrate the passage of the DMCA.
BTW, the entertainment industry tends to give more to Democrats, even when the GOP is controlling Congress.
Corporate speech can be regulated to some degree under the Firtst Amendment. Political speech has a higher level of scrutiny, so banning robo-calls might not pass SCOTUS muster.
Then again, this Court seems to like to ban political speech, despite the fact that the first amendment that was added to the Constitution was put their chiefly to protect political speech!
Remember people, the First Amendment is their to protect all speech, not just speech you agree with.
The material has been shown to stay stable throughout hundreds of write and erase cycles.
Yeah, well what happens when you are on a starship and get hurt and need a doctor and you run out of polymer?? The devil's always in the details. First Hillarycare, now this!!
I guess if you just don't believe that the Supreme Court actually decides what is, in fact, constitutional - rather, you decide it - then you are right. But if you actually look at Supreme Court cases, Bush hasn't violated the Constitution.
It is well-settled. Every single Supreme Court case on the matter has firmly said: non-citizens not on US soil have never, ever been afforded constitutional rights. Never, ever. Maybe that is contrary to the way you feel things should be, but that is the history of American jurisprudence.
To recap, 1) never in this history of warfare have combatants been given habeas corpus. Military trials have been done since the time of Lincoln as well as FDR (the two highest rated presidents of all time), and the Supreme Court has upheld them; 2) Show me a case that says that the First Amendment bars religious organizations from receiving the same funding as non-religious orgs. IOW, an organization is not banned simply because it carries a religious message. The law simply does not support what you claim. 3) The Fourth Amendment has never been held, by SCOTUS or the FISA court, to require warrants when surveilling those calling from outside the US; 4) Again, when in history have POW's or enemy combatants every gotten trials, in any war? The Nazis? The North Koreans? The Viet Cong? Or are there just different rules for George Bush? 5) Getting redundant here. No Sixth Amendment or any Amendment for non-citizens. And this rule applied long before Bush was president; 6) Again, the Constitution does not apply, and even when it does, the Eight Amendment has only been held, ironically, to apply post-conviction.
The problems with Slashdot is that many people here argue from a perspective of what they want to Constitution to be, not what 200+ years of SCOTUS interpretation have said it is.
BTW, while we are discussing the Constitution, I see references to providing for the common defense (as well as to patent and copyright, which many here like to ignore) but nothing on the government building the Internet. Where does it say that, you constitutional purists?
you get behind some asshole on his cellphone.
The USPS is a monopoly (you know, that which most people on /. hate about software companies?) on letter delivery, which they lose money on, BTW. Only through package delivery do they turn a "profit." Of course, unlike their competitors like FedEx who pay hundreds of millions, the USPS does not pay corporate income taxes, which is a huge hidden subsidy. Secondly, all 800,000 USPS employees have their health care under FEHB, under which the feds pay 72% of the premiums. That is in the billions of dollars per month of federal dollars.
Imagine if you will, FedEx paying no income tax and having the taxpayers paying for all of their employees healthcare. Think that would be a huge boost to FedEx's efficiency?
You can say anything you want, so long as it isn't a threat or defamatory to an individual (a false statement of fact that harms one's reputation). Any opinion or ideology, however distasteful or mocking or patronizing, is allowed. In America, we believe more speech, not less is better, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Another word for it is "freedom."
Your analogy is in error. The US Postal Service does not receive any taxpayer money to operate. This link explains how the USPS operates.
The USPS's self-serving and misleading PR page notwithstanding, if you count the fact that the USPS pays no taxes, whereas FedEx and UPS and the like pay hundreds of millions in taxes, and the fact that the ~800,000 USPS employees have their health care paid for by the American taxpayer (which costs like a billion US$ each month!), that is one hugely-subsidized monopoly.
And if the USA passed a law banning the export of drugs to any country with price controls - as it should to protect American workers and investors - those countries would either have to abandon said controls, or do without the drugs. If the price controls were abandoned, American drug prices would go down.
It is hypocritical indeed for a foreign country to let the American capitalist system develop the drugs at American investors' expense, then import those drugs with price controls, causing Americans to pay more for drugs, all the while criticizing the American system! As Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, " I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way." Speaking of which, Canada has a lot more money to spend on health care since the US essentially is subsidizing its lack of a real military.
An example of a large medical product that the US government does efficiently is Medicare.
They have overhead that is about 1/3 that of private insurance...
Medicare is an iceberg that the USA is heading for, along with its smaller yet also dangerous sibling, Social Security. On our current course, in a few decades, all tax revenues taken by the US will be spent on entitlements for a very small percentage of the population. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population does not rely on Medicare and Social Security for health care and retirement, and the sectors that are paying for the latter's private health care and retirement are doing great. Medicare and SS are horribly insolvent, versus a booming private sector. Which one is more efficient?
As Ravenshrike said, Medicare does not have to follow GAAP accounting rules, either in its own internal accounting, or in reimbursement. although the CBO has started keeping track of things that way just for the hell of it, and I can assure you that GAAP accounting does not show any such 1/3 advantage.
See: Real budget deficit: $4 trillion, an article about a problem scarier than the RIAA, the MPAA, Al Qaeda, and the ACLU combined.
But another huge reason Medicare is able to operate at the costs it does (remember, those costs are still going to bankrupt the USA and make US Treasury Bonds into junk bonds if something isn't done) is that the sheer size (and government-vested authority) of the program allows it to negotiate drug prices, and dictate reimbursement costs to doctors, something that can't be done in the private sector due to antitrust laws.
So you can't brag about something Medicare can do that would be illegal in the private sector, which includes accounting principles that would have any private corporation's accountants in supermax prison for a minimum of 20 years under Sarbanes-Oxley. It is ironic, indeed, that you are making the argument that Medicare, which essentially dictates the prices of drugs made by Big Pharma, is more efficient than the private system, in a thread about how capping the profits of Big Pharma is a bad thing - since such price controls would dry up the very investment that gave rise to said drugs - especially when such activities would be illegal if private health insurers tried it!
while the people that are on it rank it far higher than people rank their private insurance companies.
That which robs Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul. But Peter's grandkids are going to be really pissed when the real-world bills come due.
Medicare is a hopelessly doomed ponzi scheme that is going to ruin the US economy. Anyone who would use this program, of all programs, as some paragon of fiscal wisdom simply should stick to open source software debates, or wherever his real expertise may lie.
I think the USPS does a fantastic job. How far can you send something for $0.41 via UPS or FedEx? With USPS I can send a letter all the way to Alaska or Hawaii for the change under my couch cushions. If you compare time & cost for a 1 pound package shipped domestically, USPS comes out ahead there too.
Nonsense! The USPS has a government-sanctioned monopoly and pays no taxes. Still, FedEx and UPS and DHL have taken 90% of overnight and related package shipping, and do it cheaper than USPS does (and with a smile, unlike the surly mail carriers). Logic suggests that they could do the same with first class mail as well. And if FedEx or UPS were going to every home every day, their pricing on packages would drop as well since they would be going there anyway.
I'm not saying the government does eveything well, but the Postal Service is one place where it excels. Many years ago, the USPS received taxpayer subsidies; but today the USPS is funded entirely by revenues from postage. If medical insurance or drug research was run half as efficiently as the USPS, we'd all be better off.
USPS not paying taxes like the hundreds of millions that FedEx does is an enormous subsidy. Not to mention that every mail carrier's health care - all 800,000 of them - is paid by the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program, subsidized enormously by the federal taxpayer.
You should want Pharma's profits to be high so the investor money will flow there, instead of to oil stocks or gold. You do know that it takes 10 years and up to a billion dollars US to bring a drug to market. There has to be a pot at the end of the rainbow or investors won't invest! That's how it works, and while not perfect, it is a hell of a lot more efficient than shaking tax dollars out of people and filtering it through the federal bureaucracy. Compare the US Postal Service to UPS or FedEx and you'll see the same thing. Yep, the government does everything else so well, let's hand over this to them too!
Go ahead, take away their patents or institute price controls, and watch the money dry up. That will help everyone...not! You can't force investors to invest, no matter how much compulsion or Robin Hood economics you want to institute.
I just wish someone would make a list of the top 50 drugs in the last 50 years and who made them and how they were financed. I'm guessing it wasn't from a communist country.
You might want to read the rest of the document before making these wide-ranging conclusions: Yup, a bunch of Godless commies, them framers.
Natural rights and human rights began during the English Enlightenment of the 18th century, spurred by the English Bill of Rights of 1689
Which only applied through MPs, not individual Britons!
and expanded on by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke etc.
Yes, Locke had enormous influence on Jefferson's Declaration, but Hobbes? Hardly. Yes, the state of nature was bad, but Hobbes did not have the answer for the revolutionaries. If there was one thing the Patriots were against, it was another absolutist ruler.
and pulled together the Declaration and the Constitution mostly from their common-law heritage and Enlightenment philosophers.
Yes and no. The Declaration reads right from Locke; but the Constitution, particularly Madison's Bill of Rights, is a laundry list of things that the colonists despised about the UK's political system. As I tell my law students, the US legal system owes enormous debt to the English common law tradition, but the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is a written political document which has no analogue in the UK.
Portraying them as creating the wave rather than riding it is misleading.
Hardly. Who else delineated the rights of man (as opposed to the ruling elites), including to form his own government, on paper no less? Certainly not the UK, which is to this day a representative monarchy with an official church and no written constitution!
Often US citizens, that I speak with on the internets, apologize for their president. But it's not their president I fear, it's the dense 60% of the population that can hardly write.
Nice flamebait, but in fact, America's worst state vis-a-vis college education (West Virginia, 15%) has a higher percentage of residents who are college graduates than the average European country ( We The People , Thomas Patterson, p.16). California and New York have more colleges than any European democracy. More than a third of America's young people enter college, the highest in the world (less than 20% for Western Europe). BTW, speaking of "can hardly write," it's spelled "Internet."
It's time you people start forming an intellectual elite that has some leverage over this critical mass.
The average congressman and senator have much higher education than the average American, who is much higher educated than the average non-American (and how's that "leadership" working out?). Romney was valedictorian of his college, and holds two advanced degrees from Harvard.
And since George Bush graduated from Yale (where he got better grades than his 2004 opponent, John F. Kerry), I'm thinking that your educated elites theory might not hold up in real-world crash testing. Frankly, I'd prefer a little common sense to the "elites" running things. They've been doing that a while.
These are kind of cheap. At first it looked really bright, but I stared into it and after a while, the light is barely visible. I think it's defective.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Greenland are all pretty protective about their citizens privacy. Provided your sites contain only "controversial" (but not illegal) content, you would definitely be in the clear!
Illegal content would be: child pornography, copyrighted material for which you do not have the distribution right, neo-nazi propaganda and holocausts-denial. Pretty much everything else is accepted. Including blasphemies drawings
Uh, yeah, also no criticism of homosexuals is allowed in Sweden and Norway, so Christians and churches need not apply.
The Nation, the National Review of the Left, was used as the primary source in the Slashdot Suppress U article yesterday. I guess fair-and-balanced only matters if it is a conservative-leaning source, not a hard left one.
The difference is, Fox might tilt right, but they do make more of an effort to give both sides than CNN does, the latter titling left and making no such effort.
The hard left's equivalent of National Review gets an article posted as if it is some trusted news source. Meanwhile, people here would cry foul if someone posted a Fox News link.
/. just gets more and more lefty every day. As always, the left body snatchers have to infiltrate and politicize everything. We can't just have a nerd news site, noooooo.
Really fair, people.
Used to be, mafia guys would have no Social Security card, driver's license, or bank accounts to avoid being traced by law enforcement or the IRS. Now, I feel like having none of those things to avoid the crooks online.
Another money-grubbing group wanting to milk anything creative for any possible dollar it may earn, while making use of and promoting imaginary property. What happened to unions being for the working class person getting stepped on by big business?
So let me get this straight: The "working class person" who is offered a job - to take or leave at his own choice - by the entrepreneur, the guy(s) who raised all the capital and took all the risk and created all the job for people too scared or unskilled or dim-witted to start their own businesses, then demands more money for less work through legal collusion (aka, a union), when big business is not allowed to collude (antitrust), it's the worker that is getting "stepped on." No, not the investor who laid down the money, it's the worker bee who thinks the world owes him a living.
But some internet writers eschew working for someone else and then whining about it, and instead go plant their own flag in the world to try to take care of themselves, they are the money grubbers. Got it.
This is how the libs think: They poo-poo on the very individualism and self-reliance that built America and which pays for all of their ridiculous welfare state programs, while championing the herd of worker bees who decided not to improve their skills or education or take the risk, all the while collectively bargaining them out of their jobs (see: airline industry, auto industry).
So it's perfectly okay for a Creationist to demand that he be allowed to give a speech at a biology department?
Yes, if he were invited by the college governors, as the Pope was, then shouted down by some intolerant jerks. And he didn't "demand" anything. He backed out gracefully, no pun intended.
It's perfectly alright for a Holocaust Denier to give a speech at memorial to Nazi genocide victims?
No, because it is rude. Nor is it OK for one to be invited to Columbia University. But last time I checked, there were not 6 million scientists killed after which the Pope denied it.
"Conservatives are evil, so they have no right to speak. We're liberals, we're good, so we get to play by different rules."
You have thus summed up the hypocrisy of many liberals. They will defend to the death your right to agree with them. Just don't dissent.
Intelligent, secure liberals are supposed to defend free speech, the idea being that more speech is better than less speech, and that "bad" ideas should be vetted publicly and debated. That's what we try to do in America, although our college campuses are just as bad, where Mahmud Ahmadinejad is treated like royalty, but Ann Coulter and other conservatives are assaulted and shouted down.
It's like, how could someone sell an OS that despite billions in R&D and years of patches would never do what it was intended to? What fool would buy such a thing? I feel sorry for anyone who would invest in such a company.
And, of course, any technology with no moving parts is preferable-- mechanical parts have an annoying tendency to freeze up with vacuum thermal cycling.
How are the SSD makers getting around the limited write cycles of flash drives? Flash, even high endurance can actually wear out faster than HDDs with all of Windows' endless writing to the page file. A fluid bearing HDD can last a long time theoretically. One of the problems with those few people who have managed to get Windows (XP, not PE) to boot from a flash drive is that Windows will burn out a flash drive pretty quick with its endless page writes. Yes, you could turn off the page file, but that isn't how XP is supposed to work. Then again, neither is BSOD.
I understand that Linux pages too, but I'd imagine the average Linux nerd would implement a workaround.